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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of Hindu women's participation in religious practice. Some notes on the scholarly and historical context of the study are presented. This is followed by an overview of the chapters in this volume.

This chapter addresses the expression of Hindu women's religiosity through music and dance. It is argued that in contemporary Hinduism the performing arts, which are essentially forms of religious performance, may serve as vehicles not only for women's religious expression, but also for dynamic social commentary and reform. Examples include dancers like Mallika Sarabhai and Chandralekha, who use dance to highlight women's issues and to express themes of anguish and strength. As authors, performers, and consumers of the performing arts, women may engage music and dance both to express their own subjectivities and to help effect social change.

This chapter explores the ways that women's religious practices cross boundaries and traverse thresholds, and emphasizes continuity and overlap between private and public domains. The focus is on the relationship between kolams – auspicious designs that women create daily at their domiciles' thresholds, and pottus – the auspicious red dots that adorn Tamil women's foreheads. It is argued that the kolam and the pottu are parallel ritual expressions that embody larger Hindu cultural values, especially auspiciousness and inauspiciousness, purity and pollution. Both kolam and pottu mark thresholds, those of the home and the body, and function to mark spatial and temporal transformations: from auspicious to inauspicious times or pure to impure ones, as in the erasure of the pottu; and the absence of kolam production during menstruation and their reappearance following the period of menses. Pottu and kolam both embody the status of married women as auspicious householders, a status that is rooted in their domestic location, but both send that auspiciousness forth beyond the domestic threshold into the larger communities in which female Hindu householders are situated.

This chapter explores questions of Hindu women's power in connection with goddess possession rituals in the Kangra Valley area of Himachal Pradesh, North India. In Kangra, it is not uncommon for women to become possessed by a goddess, to speak with her voice, and to act as healers and mediums in their communities. Possession grants householder women opportunities to travel beyond their domiciles and form a female community with other women, however temporary. This in turn may provide women access to advice, support, or even material assistance. These ritual spaces are “cracks” in a patriarchal system that cannot be completely controlled by patriarchal norms and that provide outlets for women's creativity and interconnection.

This chapter explores the ways that South Indian Hindu women expand the boundaries of domesticity through a ritual alliance between women and the goddess Gangamma. In many Indian contexts, marriage is understood to be the quintessential domestic institution, serving most often to curtail significantly women's freedom and agency in the public sphere. A form of marriage which is socially liberating for Hindu women is considered — a form of ritual marriage that women may enact with Gangamma. When illness strikes in villages around the pilgrimage town of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh — especially illnesses of poxes, rashes, and high fevers associated with the hot season and particular village goddesses — little girls may be offered to the goddess Gangamma in exchange for the latter's protection and healing. When these girls reach puberty, they exchange talis (wedding necklaces) with the goddess and are considered married to her. Their alliance with the goddess, formalized by the ritualized exchange of talis, affords them protection, freedom of movement, and agency outside the domestic sphere.

The chapter of the book discusses the specific stages of evolution of the Hindu Code Bill and provides the base for understanding the ideological underpinnings of the discourse over the Hindu Code Bill during 1941 to 1946. The chapter traces the process of codification of Hindu laws since the 1920s, immediately after the Montague Chelmsford reforms. It discusses the debate over Hindu legislative reforms in the 1920s and 1930s and also the growing social discontent over the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act of 1937 that led to the constitution of the Hindu Law Committee in 1941. The chapter also discusses the recommendations of the first Hindu Law Committee, the reconstitution of the Committee in 1944 with the mandate to frame a Bill to codify Hindu law.

Western feminist theologians have wondered about how our lives would have been had we been raised to look up to God as an all-loving and all-powerful mother. As such a thought brings about ideas regarding ancient goddess cultures, there have been notions to re-associate ancient goddesses of various traditions with the creation of alternative models of an Ultimate Reality that integrates the female experience. These notions veer away from a patriarchal image of God and move towards a more compassionate female image which would promote a more humane and balanced society that, more importantly, empowers women as well. In India, where goddess worship is considered a tradition, people would see the Goddess as a personification of shakti, despite the seemingly inferior status given to women. This book concentrates on Ānandamayī Mā, whose life defies the generalization about inferior Hindu women and demonstrates rather constrasting themes in Hindu tradition.

Despite all the instances wherein Ānandamayī Mā is described as “the perfect wife” because of her deep obedience and devotion, her devotees would insist the Mā is not to be considered as a woman. This chapter gives attention to associating Mā's life story with the paradigm of an ordinary Hindu woman—being a perfect wife. In the Hindu context, the traditional code of conduct for religious people would include the pursuit of dharma to find a better position within the cycle of birth and death. This chapter introduces the notion of stridharma, which is used to refer to how a Hindu wife employs righteousness in her way of life. The chapter provides a narrative of how Bholanath, Mā's husband, became a disciple and protector, as Mā was able to demonstrate the selfless service of a dutiful and dedicated wife.

This chapter describes paramilitary camps in India in which middle-class, urban Hindu women's gender identities are deployed to support interethnic violence and militarization. The instruction and trainings that young women receive at the camps socialize them into a particular Hindu nationalist worldview through the cultivation of a siege mentality that is built on the fear of a sexually violent male, Muslim “other.” Through these camps, anti-Muslim hatred is used as an antidote to the fragmentation of ethno-nationalist allegiances in order “to patch the fractured Hindu polity together.” Hindu nationalist women's elevation to the symbolically powerful position of citizen warriors is nonetheless tempered and circumscribed by an emphasis on feminine duty and sacrifice. Thus, despite the potential for empowerment of women, the dichotomy of women as in need of protection and men as natural protectors remains intact within the militarized, nationalist ideologies promoted at the camps.

This chapter focuses on the specificities of the British Empire, mapping it as a field of gender relations. Metropolitan discourses claimed power across nation and Empire, and the emphasis here is on the ways in which Britons tried to shape their own lives, and those of subject peoples, in varied sites of Empire. The chapter also focuses on the set of related colonial discourses which constructed India as a degraded place in need of civilization, and which utilized the figure of the Indian woman, and particularly the Hindu woman, as the index of Indian society's desperate need for help.

This chapter explores how Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain looked at the abject position of women in society and what their prescriptions for improvement were. Sarala’s mission was to assist women to become aware of their potential and be confident of their power. In tune with current nationalist thought, Sarala valorized select qualities of women from the past, and believed that her contemporaries should emulate their lofty spirit and the worthy moral qualities. Rokeya’s words reflect not just courage but also a mind far ahead of its time. She believed in two principal premises: that women were used by men and were willing collaborators in their own oppression; and that men and women constituted two equal parts of society. If one was weak, the other could not thrive. The author describes how both Sarala and Rokeya believed that, to effect sustainable change, the problem of education needed to be addressed immediately. Yet here too their approaches differed. Sarala’s prescription for women’s education was mediated by nationalist consciousness. On the other hand, Rokeya’s emphasis was on making women self-respecting individuals at home and ideal Muslims in society. If Sarala upheld the home as a central place for educated woman, Rokeya reminded her readers that, in India, a majority of women did not possess a home which they might call their own. She also talked of women’s rights to paid employment, thus making a case for the economic independence of women. In asking for gender equality with men, Rokeya occupies a unique place amongst the women of her generation.

This chapter examines Hindu law reforms aimed at promoting gender justice in India during the post-independence period. It suggests that though the reformed Hindu law is projected as the ideal piece of legislation which liberated Hindu women, the underlying motive of the reform was consolidating the powers of the state and building an integrated nation. It also discusses how several discriminatory aspects of the personal laws came up for judicial scrutiny under the constitutional mandate of equality and non-discrimination.

Chapter 5 examines the third and last major phase of narrative expansion of the Svasthānīvratakathā in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The common thread of these narratives is a sustained focus on women. Specifically, there was an entrenching of the “traditional” pativratā ideal in nineteenth-century Svasthānīvratakathā texts. Concurrently, the pativratā figure became the object of social and religious debates and reforms in British India. The chapter explores the degree to which the emergence of the “women’s question” and the “new patriarchy” in colonial India that gave rise to a vision of a modern, educated Hindu Indian woman influenced a reinvigorated emphasis on the pativratā ideal in Nepal as a signifier of Nepali Hindu identity. The chapter introduces many of the women-focused narratives, which today raise the question of Nepalis’ understanding of the Svasthānīvratakathā as a women’s tradition. Contemporary perspectives are explored through the voices of Nepali women and men.

This chapter examines plays that depict women in domestic and private spaces, which were constructed as ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ spaces that nationalism carved out for women. Inspired by the Progressive Writers' Association's questioning of colonial and reformist ideologies, Rasheed Jahan and Ismat Chughtai relocated Muslim women's relationship to social reform, education, health, nationalist, and colonial politics within the private and secluded spaces of the home to provide readers with glimpses and snapshots of these through the lens of gender relations. Addressing the work of these playwrights when theatre and theatre discourse in India is saturated with assumptions about the normativity of Hindu women is also significant in pointing out the pluralistic tradition of women's theatre in north India and their contributions to the Progressive Writers' movement, All India Radio, and the genre of the one-act play.

Among the most important Hindu reformers in nineteenth-century Bombay, Karsandas Mulji is now mostly remembered for his involvement in the scandalous Maharaj Libel Case of 1862. This chapter looks past that trial, driven largely by the English-language press, to Mulji’s Gujarati essays from the years leading up to it. By rereading Mulji’s earlier writing, it is suggested, we can revise the standard received narrative about the 1862 trial. The Maharaj Libel Case has typically been understood as a contest between a freethinking journalist (Mulji) and a corrupt priest (the Maharaj). Without rejecting this narrative entirely, the chapter argues that it obscures how Mulji’s critique of priestcraft dovetailed with new technologies of subject formation. In Mulji’s case, these emerged through in experiments in print culture, notably translations of Protestant sermons and conduct manuals addressed to bourgeois Hindu women. The mode of worldly asceticis men joined by these essays reshapes the liberal ideal autonomy by figuring society as a system of mutual guidance and constraint.