Laughter, Creativity, and Perseverance: Female Agency in Buddhism and Hinduism is a collection of essays diligently curated by Ute Hüsken that speak to the multivalent modes of exercising female agency in Buddhism and Hinduism. Spanning various disciplines, each essay poses engaging yet nuanced academic questions contributing to the text's wider scope. They speak to the manifold ways women assert their agency by carving a space for themselves in roles such as priestesses and as religious and political leaders.
The book is divided into three thematic sections. The first section generally addresses female homosocial spaces in Kalmykia and Kanchipuram. Valeria Gazizova’s case study of Buddhism in Kalmykia speaks to the possibilities of female agency brought forth by political contingencies. She also delineates how the substance of textuality mattered more than its form in the female context. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama’s ethnography from Kanchipuram speaks to innovation and creativity in the gynocentric Kolu festival. Women replicate a temple-like space in their private homes and position themselves as ritual authorities, a privilege denied in traditional temple liturgy exercising female agency and assuming religious leadership. She highlights the nuances of gender and caste in creative performances of domestic rituals.
While the first section addresses the creation of female-only spaces, the second speaks to women appropriating male spaces. Tarini Bedi’s essay is on women’s agency in Hindu nationalist political arenas while Melyn McKay and Iselin Frydenlund speak of nationalism, masculinity, and female agency in the context of Buddhist radicalism in Myanmar. The two essays highlight the intricacies of body politics and the performativity of traditionally masculine roles by women. This section is also in conversation with scholars on gender and nationalism such as Sikata Banerjee (Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India, SUNY Press, 2005). While Bedi highlights the political performance of gender, Shefali More explores legal nuances in two contentious court decisions on women’s right to enter and pray in temple spaces where access had been denied to them. The essay brings forth subtleties of how female agency is affected by the intervention of the nation-state, adjudicating authorities, and the many social movements and counter-movements by women pertaining to their right to access temple spaces. The author effectively brings out the contrasts between her two case studies (Śabarimala and Śani Siṅganāpur). Amy Langenberg’s analysis of a female-only Buddhist school in Nepal highlights “aesthetic agency” in semi-monastic spaces exercised through actions and attributes perceived to be traditionally feminine such as expressiveness and charismatic physique.
The third section, on public performance of religion, focuses on carving a female niche in spheres that were erstwhile male bastions. Through her sensitive ethnographic work, Priyanka Ramlakhan narrates the lives of two female religious priests in Trinidad, who operate in two different realms of Hinduism, one Sanskritic and the other rooted in local, indigenous traditions. Hüsken’s chapter discusses another homosocial school for women in Banaras, who receive training in subjects that have been reserved traditionally for men. She shows the school’s connections with Hindu nationalist organizations and how paradoxically these outfits, which seek to enforce gendered social paradigms, enable women to exercise their agency in the religious sphere. Antoinette Elizbeth DeNapoli’s chapter about a self-proclaimed female śaṅkarācārya (a renunciate pontifical religious authority, traditionally reserved for Brahmin men), apart from providing a detailed account of change in gendered monastic religious authority in north Indian Hinduism, addresses the pertinent question of what “feminism” is to these Hindu women of religious innovation and agency. Instead of imposing theoretical frames such as Mahmood’s on her subjects, much like the other authors in the volume, DeNapoli lets her interlocuters’ voice speak for itself. She nuances the idea of feminism in the non-Western context.
Hüsken's decision to include a separate chapter to reflect on the methodologies and positionality of the authors is thoughtful. Instead of adding the methodological frames and positionality to the introduction, a detailed reflection by Caroline Starkey in the ultimate chapter of the book stands apart, allowing the reader to go beyond the specificities of the case studies to reflect on broader terms. This is especially useful for graduate students who seek to do ethnographic work on gender and lived religion in non-western geographies.
The volume, engaging with two major religions of South Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism, does not limit itself to the geographical boundaries of South Asia, but rather treats these religions as world religions, thus including vital perspectives from Kalmykia and Trinidad, in addition to Myanmar, Nepal, India, and other regions. In considering Buddhism in Kalmykia (Gazizova) and Hinduism in Trinidad (Ramlakhan), the volume addresses two streams of how South Asian religions have become global—througheffective proselytization in ancient/medieval times by the Buddhists and migration of Hindu people from India.
The contributions are theoretically grounded as much as they are nuanced and detailed. They ask relevant questions about the meaning of “feminism” in a non-western context and the myriad sentiments that the word evokes in those contexts. They highlight how erstwhile marginalization enables the assertion of female agency in multiple spheres such as textuality, ritual performance, nationalism, and monasticism,.
This anthology situates itself in a milieu of change in religious practices of the 20th and 21st centuries CE. As we meditate on this theme, it is important to recognize that women using their position to exercise agency in creative ways is not a new social enomenon. They have historically exercised their agency in multiple ways to occupy leadership positions in many spheres of religiosity Laughter, Creativity, and Perseverance invites scholars to articulate how the technologies of exerting female agency have continued, adapted, and changed through the timeline of these traditions.
Prathik Murali is a PhD student in religion at the University of Florida.
Prathik Murali
Date Of Review:
October 11, 2024
