In the last 25 years, significant conceptual and interpretive shifts have occurred in the scholarship on asceticism in South Asia that broaden not only ‘what counts’ as asceticism, but also ‘who counts’ as an ascetic. Moreover, the recent surge of anthropological and ethnographic studies, particularly those focusing on female asceticism, has contributed innovative and alternative models of asceticism to the more dominant, Sanskritic literary model(s). This essay is an introductory survey of the literature on Hindu asceticism and has the following objectives: to discuss the text‐based structural studies on asceticism that have helped to shape the field and to present the recent and emerging scholarship on female Hindu asceticism that challenges and/or supplements the dominant Brahmanical textual model by illuminating the role of female‐centered social values and practices and of bhakti traditions in the constitution of gendered traditions of asceticism. This essay is intended as a preliminary research tool for scholars and students with which to navigate the topography of Hindu asceticism and to understand the crucial developments in the field that have changed the ways that scholars theorize both the category and phenomenon of asceticism in South Asia. Finally, it suggests some fruitful avenues for future research through consideration of ascetics’ performative practices as a strategy for creating non‐orthodox asceticism(s) as an alternative to the dominant and orthodox model.
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 21 st 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."Technology means no one lives in sadness. A sādhu's life is one big technology. We bring people out of sadness." -Baba Balak Das, 2013 "We have entered into the expanding universe that is Brahman. Brahman's technology is the best technology." -Bhuvneshwari Puri, 2014
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This article examines the practices through which a female religious leader (guru) in India by the name of Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (in shorthand, “Mataji”) constructs women’s alternative authority in a high powered lineage of male Hindu gurus called Shankaracharyas. Mataji’s appropriation of the Shankaracharya leadership demonstrates an Indic example of “dharmic feminism,” by virtue of which she advocates the female as normative and, through that radical notion, advances a dharmic platform for gender equality in institutions in which women rarely figure among the power elite. Through narrative performance, Mataji reshapes the boundaries of religious leadership to affirm new possibilities for female authority in a lineage that has denied women’s agency. Exploring her personal experience narratives and the themes they illuminate can shed light on why her leadership intervenes in an orthodox lineage of male authority to exercise alternative authority and exact transformation of contemporary Hinduism.
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