Women in Ochre Robes

Book excerpt: Focuses on the lives of female Hindu ascetics and the significance of gender to the tradition of renunciation. Meena Khandelwal offers an engaging and intimate portrait of extraordinary Hindu women in India who "wear ochre robes, " those who have renounced family and wordly concerns for lives of celibate asceticism and spiritual discipline. Their initiation into the largely male Hindu ascetic tradition of sannyasa renders them "dead" to their previous identities, and although symbolically "dead, " these women struggle with, and Joke about, the tensions and ironies of living in the world while trying not to be of it. Khandelwal juxtaposes the common refrain that "in renunciation there is no male and female" with observations that suggest that gender is indeed relevant. In exploring these apparent contradictions, she brings together wordly and otherwordly values within renunciation and argues that these create tensions that are at once philosophical, social, and emotional. This book reveals the "female voice" in renunciation.