Antoinette E. DeNapoli’s research while affiliated with Texas Christian University and other places

We have reached the end of our journey concerning the study of holy women as “religious influencers” in Hindu culture [...]

Women’s access to leadership as monastic heads (i.e., Śaṅkarācāryas) in India has been restricted by enduring patriarchal structures for twelve centuries. Until the female guru named Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (“Mataji”), who resides in the politically right-leaning northern state of Uttar Pradesh and leads an ascetic women’s order, appointed herself the title in 2008, the status has been subject to the sole control of Brahmin men. Modern contexts, however, present unique opportunities for women to reinterpret conventional religious ideals that restrict feminine virtue to the realm of domesticity. This essay shows that Mataji’s leadership asserts an alternative narrative of women’s monastic authority as institutionally normative. By using her status, she is promoting a new Hindu identity that contests Brahmanical hegemony as a structural outsider. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2014 to 2019, the essay illuminates Mataji’s performance of personal narrative to rectify gender inequities and restructure power hierarchies by affirming the normative status of the female ascetic (sādhu). A key part of this analysis relates to how she elucidates the feminine symbolism portrayed by the heroic goddess Durga to sanction female sadhus’ institutional autonomy as a normative right. Through performance, Mataji engenders her identification with the goddess as she acts in myth and in history, empowering women with a localized conception of autonomy as the emanation of Durga in worldly affairs and the female Shankaracharya as an incarnation of Durga. The essay applies insights drawn from feminist studies, performance studies, and fieldwork observations toward the development of a hermeneutical approach to understanding the roles of religion and gender in Mataji’s process of revising perceptions of autonomy as a threat to respectable womanhood. It argues that Mataji constructs autonomy as an aspect of female virtue by correlating women’s self-asserting capacities with Durga’s agentive power while dismantling the patriarchal right to control women. Thus, the essay extends feminist perspectives on what autonomy can mean to ascetic women in accordance with Mataji’s teachings, and explores Mataji’s practices that enable women’s greater freedom and parity of status in Hindu society.

This article examines the emergent leadership of two female gurus in South Asia who have declared their status as Śaṅkarācāryās (i.e., heads of monastic institutions) based on revelatory experiences. They have done this in order to change patriarchal monastic (akhāṛā) culture and challenge entrenched ideas of women’s inferiority in Hindu society. By combining ethnographic data and a gender studies-centered analysis of their narratives and teachings, I shall investigate the role and impact of gendered charismatic authority on modern women’s monastic lives. Their self-declarations as Śaṅkarācāryās profoundly break the conventional patriarchal mold for the type of guru women can be and the kind of authorized religious power they can have in this male-dominated role; thus, I term these gurus as “religious feminist influencers”. I argue that the gurus invoke charismatic authority by emphasizing the immediacy of the personal realization of the divine, the potency of the female body, and religious emotions, such as radical love, as sources of revelation. By “performing [these] revelation[s],” they construct alternative ways of practicing Hinduism, defined around modernist ideals such as gender equality, inclusion, and women’s rights. Moreover, they promote the normalization of women’s institutional leadership at the pinnacle of the monastic hierarchy.

This article represents a departure from existing scholarship on women’s political activism in Indian Hinduism. Women’s gender activism in Hindu nationalism encompasses a range of approaches, from hard-line to emancipatory, and is motivated by different concerns, from religious xenophobia to religious power. Thus, female religious leaders (gurus) advocating Hindutva Hinduism exercise more than one style of leadership in the public sphere. Based on ethnographic research conducted at the Kumbh Mela , the article illuminates another style of activism, which is termed ‘grassroots religious feminist-leaning activism.’ Analysing the teachings and practices of two female gurus, it argues that one guru believes in a separate but equal approach (men and women have different skills and rights), and the other follows the approach that both genders should have the same rights and abilities to make choices because of their common humanity. Both gurus are unlocking opportunities for women’s greater freedom within the male-dominated religious hierarchies of the Hindu ascetic orders akhāṛās ) at the Kumbh Mela . This article argues that, through performance of the ‘rhetoric of saintliness,’ the gurus heighten or reverse sex-role stereotypes embedded in mainstream representations of ‘good’ gurus in order to mobilise gender reform in patriarchal akhāṛā culture.

This article examines the everyday religious phenomenon of nirguṇa bhakti as it is experienced by Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in North India. As an Indian language concept, nirguṇa bhakti characterizes a type of devotion (bhakti) that is expressed in relation to a divinity who is said to be without (nir) the worldly characteristics and attributes of sex and gender, name and form, race and ethnicity, class and caste. Although bhakti requires a relationship between the devotee and the deity, the nirguṇa kind transcends the boundaries of relational experience, dissolving concepts of “self” and “other”, and, in effect, accentuating the experience of union in the divine absolute. In comparison to saguṇa bhakti (devotion to a deity with attributes), nirguṇa bhakti is considered to be difficult to realize in human birth. Yet, the poetry, songs, and practices of uncommon humans who have not only left behind social norms, but also, devoting their lives to the worship of the divine, achieved forms of divine realization, people like the mystics, saints and sādhus of Hindu traditions, laud the liberating power and insights of nirguṇa bhakti. The Hindu sādhus featured in this article describe their experiences of nirguṇa bhakti through the use of the idiom of a “one-hundred rupee note” to distinguish its superior value and, as significantly, to indicate that humans “earn” God (Brahman) through the practice of nirguṇa devotion. As a “precious” spiritual asset on the path of liberation, nirguṇa bhakti establishes the religious authority and authenticity of sādhus, while setting them apart from other sādhus and holy figures in a vibrant North Indian religious landscape.

This article advances a conceptual shift in the ways that scholars think and teach about the established categories of religion, renunciation, and the modern in religious studies, anthropology, and Asian studies through the use of the concept of “experimental Hinduism.” Drawing on an analytical model of “experimental religion” developed by the anthropologist John Nelson, a contributor to this volume, and based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork with Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in North India, the article examines the sādhus’ views, experiences, and practices of the modern technological as an empirical –and underrepresented– context for reconfiguring Hinduism in the 21st century. It shows that they revision the dominant definitional boundaries of Hinduism by theologizing what is called "the forms of the modern," like communication technologies, in the context of their public teaching events (dharm-kathās). Thus, this article calls attention to the creative—and experimental—thinking taking place in vernacular asceticism (sannyās) among sādhus from different renunciant traditions, and who want to make sense of the vast technological changes shaping their lives and those of the communities whom they serve. The theologizing of technology is seen in their drawing on a synthesis of Hindu ideological frameworks through which the sādhus emphasize by means of storytelling three narrative motifs that articulate the divinity of technology. These are: Sannyās represents the “original technology" and the "original science”; technology manifests the properties of creativity and change that characterize what the sādhus associate with “the nature of Brahman” and “the rule of dharm”; and, finally, the apocalyptic Kalki avatār concept offers a redemptive metaphor for the evolving human-technology interface in the current global milieu.