Research on Hindu Women’s Renunciation Today: State of the Field

Abstract

Abstract This essay traces the recent development of field‐based research on contemporary women’s renunciation and points to fruitful areas for further work. While women renouncers have probably existed in small numbers since the ancient period in South Asia, there is little concrete information about their lives. Given the importance of marriage in the region, a woman’s rejection of domestic life is likely to arouse opposition from family and society. Given the representation of women as a threat to celibate men, ascetic women cannot assume support from male peers either. Until recently, they have been invisible in both public life and scholarship. Since the 1980s, however, women renouncers and gurus have increased in both number and visibility in the region and worldwide, as has research on the topic. This essay outlines the broader context of renunciation in South Asian religious traditions and then focuses on Hindu asceticism. Starting in the 1980s research on women’s renunciation was published and began to disrupt conventional paradigms for understanding Hindu renunciation. Despite the increase in excellent work on the subject in the last two decades, this survey suggests that future research is needed to address the statistical reality of women’s renunciation, the role of caste and other inequalities, ascetic masculinities, and transnational processes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.