Are the Concepts of Gender Equality and Autonomy Compatible with Hindu Religious Worldviews?: A Female Hindu Guru’s Perspective from India

Abstract

This paper examines the leadership of a female Hindu guru named Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati ( “Mataji”) who appointed herself the status of a Śaṅkarācāryā (monastic head) in 2008 and organized a women’s monastic order in 2014. She lives in the politically volatile region of northern India in Uttar Pradesh, where the established religious patriarchy operates as a vestigial state in support of a Hindu nation state. Until Mataji, the status has been subject to the sole control of Brahmin men. Her quest for religious gender equality has created a new access point and, thus, reorders the gender/power hierarchies of Hindu monastic society.

A key part of this analysis relates to how Mataji elucidates the feminine religious symbolism portrayed by the heroic goddess Durga to sanction ascetic women’s institutional autonomy as a normative right. Through performance, she 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 Śaṅkarācāryā as an incarnation of Durga.

The paper 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 dominant cultural perceptions of autonomy as a threat to respectable womanhood. It enhances feminist perspectives on what equality and autonomy can mean to ascetic women in accordance with Mataji’s teachings, arguing that Mataji correlates women’s self-asserting capacities with Durga’s agentive power to dismantle the patriarchal right to control women.