Can a Woman be a True Guru? Female Hindu Gurus’ Grassroots Religious Gender Activism in India, and the Performativity of Saintliness at the Kumbh Mela

,

3 / 19 female gurus are pushing for women's greater freedom within the male-dominated religious hierarchy of the publicly exposed Hindu ascetic orders (akhāṛās) at the Kumbh Mela.
For example, in July 2015, images of a female guru embroiled in a tussle with male religious leaders at the Kumbh Mela (literally, the festival of the 'water pot') flooded the national Hindi and English language news and print media. Celebrated every three years in one of four states on a rotating basis on the banks of a sacred river, this year's melā (Trimbakeshwar Simhastha Kumbh) was held on the Godavari River in Nasik city, Maharashtra. 1 The melā represents the largest fair in India, showcasing a context in which Hinduism, the country's majoritarian religion, manifests in the public sphere in politically polarising and politically gendered ways. As stations covered news of the millions of pilgrims arriving for the event, another melā-related incident captured the regional headline news on channels such as Aaj Tak and Zee News. It involved the guru named Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (hereafter, Mataji, or 'Respected Mother') and the president of the All India Akhara Council (subsequently, 'Akhara Council'), Mahant Gyandas.
For context, the Akhara Council represents the governing body over thirteen established ascetic orders (akhāṛās) from across Hindu and Sikh sects, which, in the Council's view, form the legitimate saint society of India. Consisting of two representatives from each akhāṛā, the Council has twenty-seven leaders, including the president, who serves a four-year term and is elected through a democratic voting system. Only men hold leadership roles in the organisation. The Council also mediates between the akhāṛās and Kumbh Mela administration, handling decisions ranging from scheduling the dates and times of the ritual bathing ceremonies to assigning the bathing order of the akhāṛās to allotting them land, facilities and other resources.
Two days into the melā, Zee 24 Taas, a Marathi language news station in Maharashtra, broadcasted a video of Mataji on a stage holding a microphone as a group of men, one of whom was the chief minister of Maharashtra, surrounded her and tried to take it away. As the scene unfolds, Mahant Gyandas, the Akhara Council leader, faces Mataji, tapping her on the left shoulder and then pointing a finger at her. His behaviour suggests that he and Mataji have a heated confrontation. The rest of the news bulletin describes Mataji's going to the Mela administration office to file a police report (FIR) against the Mahant and others for physically 'abusing' her.
Mataji's interviews on national television depict her visibly distraught by the event. But she seems more upset by the media's questioning the credibility of her account of the experience, as well as her bombshell claim of the Akhara Council's mistreatment of female saints (sādhus). For instance, after Mataji presented her side of the story to a news station, the female anchor invited Mahant Gyandas and another Council spokesperson to respond to her 'allegations' of abuse and sex discrimination (Sarkar 2015). Both gurus denied the claims. Gyandas reframed the issue by emphasising that Mataji had abused him. He argued that he was the real victim, not her. He said that he had noticed that the microphone was turned off and wanted to switch it back on. Then he added that he told Mataji to give him the mic and he'd speak for her. However, he said that she had misread his actions and shouted 'all men are the same.' According to Gyandas, he showed Mataji respect, despite her disrespecting him. At the end of the interview, he clarified that Mataji had 'planned' the stunt for 'publicity,' thereby casting doubt over her being a 'real' guru at all.
While the broadcast aimed to delineate the boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' gurus, for this author, it illuminated a set of issues and problems concerning representations of 'saintliness,' by which I mean the attributes of authenticity and respectability ascribed to holy people, and especially to gurus as a class of religious teachers/leaders within Hindu society. More specifically, the station's privileging the patriarchal views of male gurus within the mainstream over those of a female guru challenging the religious establishment magnified the roles of gender and structural power on shaping the discursive parameters of saintliness in the public sphere.
'Women's speech,' as the feminist gender and cultural studies scholar, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan has said, 'is often confined to the space of the home; their denial of and exclusion from public spaces-platforms, pulpits, courts of law, educational institutions, parliaments-limits the reach and scope of their words ' (1993: 88). What is more, as Sunder Rajan argues, … when women are allowed access to public forums, the very exceptionality of this entry may produce various kinds of linguistic excess. Though such 'speaking' does signify 'truth,' as lies, fantasies, desires and distortion do by other means than referentiality, they stand discredited when judged by the strict standards of veracity-and as a consequence the speakers often invite retribution by being subjected to containment, punishment, and backlash. This discussion connects Sunder Rajan's insights concerning negative representations of women's speech to discourses around saintliness in the public sphere. To spotlight the diversity and gendered politics of these discourses, I analyse the ways that the feminist-leaning female gurus featured in the paper resist attempts at being silenced by the dominant discourse while creating alternative spaces for the inclusion of women's roles in patriarchal akhāṛā culture.
Despite the mainstream leadership's claims to the contrary, sex matters for who gets to control public understandings of 'real' and 'fake' gurus, how those constructions unlock and restrict opportunities for women's leadership, and where those representations are deployed, such as on national television (mainstream channels including commercials). Because the power of controlling representation for public consumption is deeply political, revealing what's at stake for people's lives and identities, it warrants exploring the connections of sex and politics to what I term the 'rhetoric of saintliness.' To that end, I will examine the roles of gender, religion, and politics on the rhetoric of saintliness at the Kumbh Mela. As the opening vignette suggests, multiple institutions collude and compete in shaping public knowledge about 'good' and 'bad' gurus (i.e., saintliness). In addition to the male power elite through the Akhara Council and the national media, the Indian government through the state-controlled melā administration is also decisively instrumental in producing the rhetoric of saintliness. The type of power that the Akhara Council wields over the media and the Indian state suggests its role as the 'vestigial' Hindu state in the public sphere. Developed by feminist legal scholar Naomi Goldenberg (2014: 254), the 'vestigial state' describes religious institutions acting as 'political formations' to plan and control the agenda of public policy and the public interests of the state.
This article offers empirical observations based on two months of ethnographic research with Hindu gurus at the 2019 Kumbh Mela held in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Additionally, I provide analyses based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2019 with Mataji and her community in Prayagraj. Although I spent most of my time at the melā with Mataji and her devotees at her camp, I worked with seventeen other gurus, men and women, from all over India. I conducted participant observation with the gurus, interviewing them multiple times at their camps, depending on their schedules, and participating in their camps' festivities. Aside from this, my methods also included semi-structured individual and focus group interviews, video and audio recordings of the gurus' practices, and transcribing and translating the Hindi language data into English. To interpret the materials, I pair a performance studies-centred analysis of the gurus' narratives with a discourse-centred analysis of media representations of them for comparison.
For the following discussion, I have chosen to analyse ethnographic materials drawn from my research with two female gurus, namely Guru Ma Anandmai Puri (henceforth, Anandmai) and Mataji. They have taken initiation as renouncers (sannyāsīs) into the Dashanami tradition, leaving behind the norms of marriage and family while adopting a life of simplicity by dedicating themselves to worshiping the divine and humanitarian service. Their teachings represent different perspectives on the spectrum of the rhetoric of saintliness, and revolve around three themes, namely, exemplary character (sadācār), mother power (mātṛ śakti), and selfless service (sevā). In this analysis I am interested in the ways that the gurus interpret and apply these themes to their activism to forward an alternative rhetoric of saintliness to that of the Hindu mainstream.
While the dominant rhetoric foregrounds transcending gender, the gurus' teachings unravel the fallacy of this idea in two key respects. First, they emphasise the real-world impact of female embodiment on saint's lives in connection with longstanding institutional inequities and ingrained attitudes that obstruct women's realising their full potential. Second, they relate gurus' credibility to gendered ideologies of respectability. However, I will show that the gurus retool feminine ideals to include traits such as self-determination and heroism. Although the gurus speak about transcendence, they view it differently than the mainstream. They want to transcend patriarchal structures of gender discrimination, not gender identity.
I argue that the rhetoric of saintliness is 'performative.' It constructs saintliness based on not only, as one might generally assume, rigorous moral standards, but also, as is less known in scholarly and popular understandings, sexrole stereotypes. I will focus on the latter aspect. I suggest that saintliness 'performs' a contingent and dynamic status ascribed to gurus whose moods and motivations conform to patriarchal norms and who uphold the religious status quo. Violation of norms often leads to the mainstream labelling gurus 'fake' and 'hypocrites.' As significantly, through their rhetoric, the female gurus heighten or reverse sex stereotypes to actively push for substantive gender reform in patriarchal akhāṛā culture.
Determining the saintliness of men and women based on their behaviours fitting religious expectations is not new or unique to Hinduism. We find similar practices in the history of Catholicism (Bynum, 1992). This article illuminates how gender works in the rhetoric of saintliness. It shows that female gurus and male gurus lead with different conceptions of saintliness from each other, and delineates the alternative criteria of the female gurus concerning 'mother power,' which they say is unique to the female sex, to sanction that status for women.

ANANDMAI'S RHETORIC OF SAINTLINESS
Thousands of saints, many with esteemed titles (for example, Acārya Mahāmandeleśwar, Mandeleśwar, etc.), populate the 2019 Kumbh Mela. In this temporary city comprising over 3,200 hectares of land (approximately 7,900 acres), and divided into twenty-one sectors, the incredible number, diversity, and variety of holy people is striking.
Female gurus are not anomalies, however. Their camps, from the Sannyasini Akhara of the Juna Akhara to the Sadhvi Shakti Parishad, dot the melā landscape. One camp in sector 16 catches my eye. Its entrance bears the name 'Women Power Camp' with an image of Anandmai on both sides. Observing my interest, a guard motions for me to come inside. A table packed with Hindi language books written by the guru is placed in front of him. In the main tent of the camp is Anandmai speaking with another female guru who is seated in the lotus posture on the ground. When they emerge from the tent, Anandmai calls me over and informs me that she has just initiated the other guru as a mahant (director) of the Niranjani Akhara. The newly-made mahant travelled to the melā from Aligarh city in central Uttar Pradesh. Anandmai then tells me that she herself is a mahāmandeleśwar (literally, 'great lord of the region') in the same akhāṛā. Her title cues that she has been invested by the akhāṛā's institutional hierarchy with the authority to teach and transmit a sacred tradition of knowledge to others. Her official title as written on her camp's banner reads, 'Ānant Śrī Vibhūśit Śrī Śrī 1008 Mahāmandeleśwar.' This garland of titles means that Anandmai is credentialed as a guru.
'I rule in this akhāṛā,' Anandmai says. Her statement comes in response to my fieldwork assistant Raj Kumar, a doctoral-level research scholar from Delhi University's Anthropology Department, explaining that I have journeyed to the melā from the USA to research female gurus. Anandmai mentions that she has left a university position as a lecturer in Sanskrit to serve women through her akhāṛā. Realising that Anandmai will soon lead the ritual coronation of the mahant (director or leader of an akhāṛā) at the camp, I steer the conversation in another direction. I explain that, based on the media reports I had read months before the fair began, the Akhara Council has been coordinating with the melā administration, the state's chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, and the media to block the entry of 'fake' gurus at the melā. So, I ask her, 'What makes a guru "real" or "fake"?'   Anandmai responds candidly, emphasising that 'India is a patriarchal society. Men are born from women's bodies, but they want to dominate women. That's why I made this camp, so women saints get respect.' Her answer hardly surprises me. Six years earlier in 2013, Anandmai established her Women Power camp for the first time at the (Maha) Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj. But she wasn't the only guru creating alternative spaces for women saints to flourish. In 2013, at the same melā, the Juna Akhara, the largest of the akhāṛās, not only established a separate women's akhāṛā for the sādhus of its order, but also a separate camp for them (the Juna akhāṛā heads called it the 'Mai Baḍā' or 'Mother Camp.' It is also known as the 'Sannyasinis' Camp'). Both developments made the headlines, with images of the Juna female sādhus celebrating the decision. By contrast, the media posited controversy occurring between Anandmai and the Niranjani akhāṛā's leadership. I wondered if her forming a separate camp for women and initiating them with big titles, such as the mahant described earlier, were at issue.
Answering my question with more precision, Anandmai speaks at length about the character (sadācār) of 'real' gurus. She teases out aspects of sadācār related to guru behaviour, dispositions, and motivations. To her, sadācār is a fluid term, encompassing meanings such as 'righteous conduct and courteous demeanour,' along with respect for women (McGregor, 1993, 978). Her pressing on the term's latter sense is not extraordinary. Recall that Mahant Gyandas raised this point in his media interview cited earlier. Discourse featuring the motif of 'respecting women' arises often in religious patriarchy's rhetoric of saintliness.
But as Anandmai elucidates her perspective on sadācār as respecting women, the gendered implications of the rhetoric of saintliness become apparent. She says, We believe that more and more women should read scriptures and do meditation. Women should focus on empowering themselves. We have made this camp because we believe that women are the motherpower (mātṛ śakti), and they should come forward in the society. We want more and more women to join the saint tradition. They will get more respect. India is a patriarchal society. See, the real work (vāstik kāryā) of saints is to do more and more for others. Through our trust, we take care of everything for women. Women shouldn't have any problem, whether it involves ritual bathing at the rivers, doing rituals (kalpavās), walking around the grounds, and taking shelter at the melā.
In Anandmai's narrative, the role of gender on the rhetoric of saintliness is salient. It is neither an empty signifier, nor an outer sheath for women to slough off in order to obtain guru credibility. Her narrative hints at what other gurus such as Mataji make explicit: the problem of women's sexual exploitation, harassment, violence, and oppression in patriarchal akhāṛā culture. To Anandmai, these problems are real, serious, and urgent, and become heightened at the melā. In her view, "real" saints work toward making women's lives better by providing them shelter, food, and cash (101 INR) to return home, and a female space away from the male gaze where women can give time to themselves and each other. Her 'work' aims to bring tangible benefits to women's lives, and it illustrates the definitional parameters for what sadācār means to her.
More specifically, sadācār as 'respecting women' involves accepting their embodiment as real, not denying it as illusory or tangential to the human experience. To dismiss the materiality of (any) gender, as I understand Anandmai, undermines the idea of the female sādhu as normative. Likewise, it suggests a profound lack of awareness regarding the institutional power hierarchies that structurally disadvantage women's relationships to the akhāṛā system. Furthermore, Anandmai suggests that the Akhara Council's official statements that 'real' gurus do not see gender, and more to the point, the female sex, conceals its refusal to accept women as 'saints.' Its denial of the relevance of gender appears to be rooted in the understanding that female bodies are intrinsically deficient and inferior to the (high-caste) male body as superior and universal. In the view of the mainstream leaders, then, women have gender, but men do not. Embodying saintliness requires women to renounce being female without renouncing femininity, and men to affirm Herculean masculinity as an element of spiritual transcendence. Accordingly, judging by its statements to the media, insofar as women's behaviour upholds the patriarchal gender order, the Akhara Council accords them respect as mothers, daughters, and devotees. But not as saints. How ironic it is that the Council claims to 'respect' female saints, according them sanctity as mothers, but then chastises them for acting like women. It is a 'catch-22' that no sādhu across the traditions can surmount simply because of her sex.

FEMALE SAINTS' PREROGATIVE
Another aspect of sadācār drawn out by Anandmai concerns having the 'right knowledge' about the quality of 'mother power' that she accords women. But what is mother power? Anandmai mentions this idea in her narrative. For her -and for Mataji -mother power is unique to women because of their sex. Simply put: women have it and men do not. In this context, 'mother power' and 'power' are not synonymous concepts (Humes, 2000: 141;Erndl 8 / 19 © 2023 by Author/s 2000). 2 This means that while both men and women have śakti as the power that is 'life force,' women possess the physiological power to birth life. This power makes women different from men. Therefore, in the gurus' rhetoric and the dominant Hindu religious discourse, 'mother power' cues the procreant capacity associated with the female sex. Women's material bodies through menstruation, childbirth, and lactation connect them to the generative female body of the goddess Shakti, whom many Hindus worship as the divine absolute mother of the world.
In Anandmai's use of the term, mother power specifically refers to the innate socio-biological potential of women for motherhood. She explains her idea of the concept like this: Women have a lot of power (śakti). They are mother power (mātṛ śakti), but they don't know it. Women should know their mother power and work for change. Men are the form of knowledge, and women are the form of devotion. The meaning of the Hindu religion (sanātan dharm) is to work for everyone (sevā); to serve people selflessly and with love. There's no use of being a guru without love. We have made this camp to increase women power. As I've already said, women can do anything, but they have to know themselves.
While, at one point, Anandmai tells me that she encourages women to marry and 'build their houses,' she leaves open the possibility that some women would rather serve the society than the patriarchal family. These latter classes of women are precisely whom Anandmai seeks to draw into her organisation and initiate as sādhus. Either way, she indicates that mother power equips women for both motherhood and saintliness. Likewise, stressing that 'women must come forward' relates her view of their innate capacity for self-assertion and self-determination (i.e., autonomy) as aspects of mother power. Mother power represents the perceived and ascribed source of 'women's power' and the basis for their guru authority, and feminine virtue.
Anandmai's rhetoric constructs women as 'real' saints, amplifying that mother power endows them with the 'right' stuff to be 'good' gurus. Her idea of mother power pushes beyond patriarchal views that hinge on obedience, subservience, and deference to elders, especially husbands and in-laws. Anandmai disconnects the concept from its predominant association and attaches it to a cluster of other traits that have been eclipsed in public discourses concerning feminine virtue. Releasing the ideology of ideal womanhood from the grip of sex-specific roles, she forwards the respectability of women becoming saints to serve the society.
In the late 19 th century, Hindu saints such as Swami Vivekananda, the disciple of the renowned mystic Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, repurposed the boundaries of sainthood by elevating the idea of sevā-selfless service to humanity-to redefine Hinduism in colonial India through a socially engaged lens. Cultural and political pressures and ideological shifts wrought by the encounter of 'multiple modernities' inspired and challenged Indian gurus to redefine saintliness (Eisenstadt, 2000). Since then, guru-centred movements in India and the Diaspora have plugged into some form of Vivekananda's and other gurus' models of socially engaged sainthood to forward public-facing Hindu (or 'Hindu-inspired') worldviews, practices, and organisations addressing diverse issues ranging from women's empowerment, gender equality, caste discrimination, poverty alleviation, ecological stewardship, and rural development. To that extent, guru movements have morphed over time into engaged spiritualities for social change. Concurring on this point, the historian of religion Karen Pechilis (2018) has said that modern and contemporary female guru-centred traditions demonstrate a 'pragmatically engaged spirituality' that strives for 'real-world impact' on the lives of the people and communities whom they lead.
Pechilis's analytical model of the 'pragmatically engaged spirituality' of female gurus provides a useful framework for understanding Anandmai's and Mataji's relationship to the idea of sevā and their encoding it with gendered meanings to increase female saints' status. Anandmai's rhetoric lauds the tangible impact of her organisation on Indian society. She says, We have changed the lives of one lakh people (approximately 1500) who were alcoholics and drug and nicotine addicts. I gave them a prayer and told them to swear on the goddess Ganga that they would not consume these substances anymore. We have paid for the marriages of women from poor village families (referencing dowry). We are changing this society through women power. That's why we want more and more women to join our organisation and adopt the sādhu's way of life.
Anandmai's narrative makes explicit the connection of sevā to women power. Sevā, according to Anandmai, is what women excel at. They were born to serve others, and, to her, they have the gendered constitution to do it. Working for others' benefit externalises women's (mother) power and makes it possible for them to be devotional and loving, focused and steadfast, indefatigable and self-determined. From this angle, Anandmai's rhetoric According to the Hindu tradition, when women become sādhus they have the right to sing bhajans (devotional songs), give kathās (recitation of narrative traditions) and pravachans (religious teaching), lead rituals for others, and they can train other sādhus and make them mahants (leaders of their akhāṛās). Women have more rights than men in the saint society. But female sādhus don't know their rights, and they shouldn't compete with male sādhus for their rights, as it might hurt men's egos. They should complement each other. Women are waking up to their true power because of camps like this.
In promoting the dharmic rights of female sādhus, Anandmai's rhetoric is anchored to an ideology of gender complementarity. While some scholars have argued that religious models of complementarity camouflage embedded sexist values and do not substantively empower women (Humes, 2000: 139), Anandmai uses the concept to acknowledge sexual difference and augment the primacy of female embodiment for saintliness. Without restricting female agency to the domicile, she invokes the ideology to increase sādhus' autonomy within the akhāṛās, and she sanctions their engaging roles that harness their devotional and leadership capacities.
It is noteworthy that Anandmai steers clear from using the language of 'gender equality' in her rhetoric. She never mentioned the term until I addressed it with her. Her understanding that men and women are 'different but complementary' may have made raising that point unnecessary. Importantly, I have found that many of the gurus with whom I worked rejected the notion that men and women are 'equal,' because, to many of them, it articulates the standpoint that men and women are 'essentially' the same. It seems that for the majority of the gurus, 'equality' connotes the Western post-Enlightenment idea of 'natural equality.' An 18 th century political concept derived from the western legal tradition, natural equality posits the view that men and women share the same basic human nature and are essentially 'equal.' This idea would likely strike Anandmai as incredible. To her, 'women power' identifies 'who' and 'what' women 'naturally' are, and distinguishes them from men, ontologically, socially, and so religiously.
Nevertheless, when I ask Anandmai whether she sees political rights such as gender equality enshrined in India's Constitution as a resource for increasing women's dharmic rights in Hindu society, she draws a sharp line between 'religion' and 'politics.' She makes clear that the saint society has its own 'Constitution' that 'gives women all the rights.' Her use of term 'woman power' makes it possible to distance herself from political issues related to women's rights and sexual equality. To that extent, she renders feminism moot for Hindu women.
'Woman power,' as a concept, invites enough ambiguity in its range of signification to allow for the dichotomies of 'religion' and the 'state' to become submerged in the rhetoric of saintliness. Additionally, it deflects potentially pejorative associations with feminism that the gurus I worked with have found it a potent motif around which to organise their religious gender activism, whether or not they align themselves with feminism. However, the mainstream rhetoric around 'woman power' positions it at odds with feminism. As Sunder Rajan has argued, media advertising has deployed 'woman power' to override feminism's impact and nullify the term's usage from public discourse (1993: 138).
Anandmai's rhetoric of saintliness constructs an adversarial connection between 'women power' and feminism, with the former occupying a superior position over the latter, fortifying the dichotomy between religion and politics. In attributing to female sādhus some of the recent movements for gender equality and reform in India, such as women's protests against the bans preventing their (and menstruant women's) entry into the temple sanctums of Sabarimala in Kerala and Shani Shingnapur in Maharashtra, Anandmai overreaches herself. Her rhetoric articulates the mainstream view that concern for the legal and constitutional rights of women and other minoritised identities is 'political,' and therefore, anathema to being a 'real' guru. Anandmai's approach demonstrates one leadership style at the Kumbh Mela. Let us turn to another approach illustrated by Mataji's leadership to get a clearer sense of the different styles.

'BUILD CHARACTER FIRST, THEN READ VED-PURĀN-ŚĀSTRA': MATAJI'S PERFORMING EXEMPLARY CONDUCT AS ANTI-DISCRIMINATION
Mataji's leadership bridges the spheres of religion and politics. Her grassroots religious gender activism combines religion and rights norms to advance the political rights of women in Hindu society. Through her teachings and practices, Mataji positions her leadership as continuous with feminist objectives. She focuses her advocacy around empowering female sādhus by advancing their fundamental rights to equality of opportunity in matters concerning their leadership as monastic heads (i.e., as Śaṅkarācāryās: lineage gurus identified with the teaching tradition of the 9 th century leader Ādi Śaṅkarācārya), institutional autonomy, and economic sustenance. Advocating their right to equality of opportunity in these three overlapping respects, Mataji accomplishes her larger goal of institutionalising equality of status between female sādhus and male sādhus. By taking her gender activism to the legal courts, the media, and the Indian state, Mataji constructs the idea of the female sādhu as normative (Hindustan, 2017).
In Mataji's formulation, 'normative' refers to the belief that the female sex is intrinsically important and is born with the same ontological value and significance as that ascribed to the male sex in Indic society. According to Mataji, the female, as one type of normative human, deserves to have the same rights and privileges (personal autonomy) and opportunities (education) as the male. This understanding of the 'female as normative' that underlies Mataji's religious feminist activism parallels that of western feminist scholars and thinkers such as Adrienne Rich (1986) and Winnifred Tomm (1991). As Rich has elucidated in her classic work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, the view of the female as normative embodies the 'awareness of her intrinsic importance, her depth of meaning, her existence at the very center of what is necessary and sacred' (1986: 93). Mataji's feminist leadership reinforces the gender studies scholar Kamla Bhasin's point that while 'feminism' may be a foreign term, the concept has diverse cultural expressions and trajectories (2019).
At the 2019 Kumbh Mela, Prayag Mataji's camp appears in sector 19 over by the banks of the Jamuna River, roughly eight kilometres from Anandmai's Women Power Camp on the other side of the fair near the Ganges River. There are two main ways to reach Mataji's camp, from the Jamuna side in Naini city through heavily policed entry points, or by crossing the pontoon (floating) bridge accessed from inside the melā proper that connects the Ganga and Jamuna sides of the fairgrounds. While the Ganga-facing side is by far the more crowded and trafficked of the two areas, the Jamuna-facing side also draws heavy crowds and is densely populated.
Signs Inspired by what she has termed a 'divine vision,' in which she claims that the god Śiva and the goddess Śakti called her to the leadership, Mataji announced her status to the media and the melā authorities in 2008. She publicised the news following the 2007 Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj. After receiving the revelation, Mataji put up a signboard at the gate of her camp for the Prayagraj Magh Mela, which is like the Kumbh Mela but on a much smaller scale. Six years later, at the Ardh Kumbh Mela, also in Prayagraj, Mataji announced the creation of India's 'first' Hindu women's akhāṛā. She established the order through her charismatic authority as the female Śaṅkarācāryā, naming it Akhara Pari, 3 which I have translated as the 'Society of the Free Birds Escaping the Prison of Tradition.' Mataji's self-declared status and her founding a women's akhāṛā, which she currently leads, have sent the Akhara Council in an uproar.
In 2017, the leaders of the Akhara Council decided to form an internal peer-review system for India's saints (Hindustan, 2017). Narendra Giri, its (former) president and (former) the secretary of the Niranjani Akhara (the akhāṛā to which Anandmai belongs), 4 who was elected in 2014, and again in 2019, publicly announced through the press that the Akhara Council would operate as the arbiter of saint society (Wion Web Team, 2017;Scroll Staff, 2017;Sharma, 2021). Claiming that role allowed the Akhara Council to fashion its identity as the vestigial Hindu state and leverage its power over the Kumbh Mela publics through the Indian state. Moreover, by investing itself with the political authority of the vestigial state, it could control perceptions of 'good' and 'bad' saints through its rhetoric of saintliness (Press Trust of India, 2017).
Between 2017 and 2018, the Council published four separate lists with the names of the so-called 'bad' gurus of India. Each iteration revealed more and more 'fake' gurus (Hindustan Times, 2018). The Council had no shortage of words for annihilating their credibility or respectability. Since then, the Council has made a concerted effort to provide its finalised list to the melā administration before the start of every Kumbh Mela (though it monitors gurus' behaviour and updates its list accordingly). By publicising the list, the Council sought the intervention and approval of the Indian state to block the entry of the 'fake' saints at the melā. It also demanded that the state prohibit the pronounced fakes from putting up boards with their 'fake' titles at the melā and elsewhere. According to media reports, Yogi Adityanath accepted the Council's request, and for the 2019 Kumbh Mela, ordered the melā administration to have all the signs and logos of 'self-styled' gurus, including Śaṅkarācāryās, removed from the fairgrounds (Jaiswal, 2017;Sikhaula, 2014;Shukla, 2018).
Through its strategic alliance with the state, the Akhara Council in its role as the vestigial state has attempted an all-out government takedown of the saints whom it accused of 'corrupting' Hindu society. In his media interviews and on Twitter, Narendra Giri said that the fake saints, many of whom were blacklisted because of their 'self-styled' status, were not 'authentic' by the Akhara Council's criteria. Giri framed the Council's motives in redemptive terms, emphasising the need for 'saving the saints from disgrace' (Verma, 2017).
Mataji's name appeared on the Akhara Council's second list in December 2017, alongside those of alleged and convicted rapists, murderers, drug and sex traffickers, and a female guru named Radhe Ma scandalised for wearing make-up and mini-skirts. Self-proclaiming the Śaṅkarācāryā status and forming a women's akhāṛā (in 2014) led to Mataji being blacklisted. Her ascribed 'fake' guru status impacted her visibility and treatment at the 2019 fair, for the melā authorities placed her camp as far from melā's centre as possible.
Wherever Mataji's activism lands, her leadership becomes the most public platform for overtly challenging male leadership and reclaiming the reigns of the rhetoric of saintliness from mainstream control. One of the ways that Mataji shifts the discourse is through her teachings on sadācār. She presses on some of the same meanings as Anandmai, such as moral conduct and respecting women because of their embodiment, rather than despite it. But she takes her rhetoric to another level by connecting sadācār to women's equal opportunity to lead as monastic heads.
Mataji understands that the historical exclusion of women from the Śaṅkarācāryā leadership is based on two deeply rooted and intersecting patriarchal streams of thought. The first concerns attributing an ontologically inferior status to the female; the second involves ascribing the female body a ritually impure status due to menstruation. Mataji reasons that uprooting these anti-woman worldviews requires reversing the normative gender/power hierarchies to raise women's status. Her interpretation of sadācār undercuts the ritually-based significance that the mainstream accords to ideas of gender/caste purity by heightening the alternate value of moral purity, achieved through dietary and religious practices, for the leadership. Here, I call attention to Mataji's relating sadācār with forms of moral conduct.
In the public lectures that I have attended, Mataji emphasises that moral purity, rather than the ritual purity associated with being born a Brahmin man, distinguishes the 'real' guru. 'Moral purity' denotes not only 'righteous conduct,' but more precisely, eliminating customary practices that discriminate against others based on their sex and caste. According to Mataji, moral purity is tantamount to embodying anti-discrimination attitudes and behaviours. Sadācār defined in this sense identifies the minimum criteria for being a 'real' guru to Mataji. She says, Sadācār means to follow the path of truth in one's behaviour and mentality. The people who call themselves religious leaders do not have any of these qualities. They have not brought their knowledge of Ved-Purān-Śāstra [she means Vedas, Purānas, and Śāstras, authoritative texts in Hindu orthodox views] into their way of life. They are corrupting the religion by making distinctions between people based on their caste and sex. For them, the truth is knowing Ved-Purān-Śāstra. It has nothing to do with behaviour.
Mataji modernises sadācār in order to speak to contemporary social justice-based issues. By emphasising sadācār as anti-discrimination, she alters perceptions of saintliness to include concern for women's and other minorities' political-legal rights. She crafts her rhetoric of saintliness around the perception of women being morally superior to men and counters views of their second-class status. Moreover, by correlating the culturally ascribed feminine traits of self-control and self-discipline with celibacy (brahmacārya), a practice conceived as masculine in (some) Brahmanical texts (Khandelwal, 2001;Gross, 2001), she refutes the implied orthodox perspective that women are incapable of ritual purity during menstruation. Mataji amplifies the idea of female sādhus as inherently pure, powerful, and auspicious. Neither female embodiment nor an oppressed caste status accounts for the problem of impurity to Mataji. Rather, the problem lies with bad attitudes and behaviours. Hence, sadācār defined by Mataji's standards outweighs knowledge of ancient texts. Her reworking the dominant criteria for saintliness advantages groups whom the mainstream tradition has denied the right to study the Vedas based on their ascribed impure status. Thus, Mataji's emphasis on women's moral/socio-biological superiority to men reverses the status of women and men to claim women's right to equality of leadership.

'I AM BUILDING MY ARMY OF WOMEN!': PERFORMING FEMALE HEROISM AS WOMEN'S RIGHT TO EQUALITY OF STATUS
In nearly every media interview, public lecture or program, and personal meeting that she gives, Mataji accentuates some variation of the pronouncement that 'women are mother power [mātṛ śakti]. The mother is the best creation of God in this whole world.' She holds up the quality of mother power as the gold standard for attributing saintliness to other gurus. But Mataji is not unusual. I have yet to meet a female guru who did not draw on the concept in some way to authorise her role. As we saw earlier, Anandmai also uses it to raise women's status in the saint society. Mataji and Anandmai share similar essentialist views about mother power that idealise women's perceived maternal nature without restricting women to sex-role stereotypes. Both gurus conceive mother power as the potent female source of energy for women's ascribed traits of devotion, love, patience, self-control, selflessness, and endurance to withstand hardship. These traits are said to endow women with maternal instincts and produce female virtue. Additionally, the theologies of the gurus relate the inherent sacrality and purity of female embodiment and bodily processes to the divine materiality of the goddess as the creatrix of the manifest world.
There are important differences in their perspectives, however. Anandmai constructs her theology of mother power to teach the ideology of gender complementarity (the view that men and women are essentially different and inhabit roles that complement each other's differences), and Mataji crafts her theology to intensify the reversal of gender/power hierarchies. Through that status reversal, she constructs female sādhus' equality with that of male sādhus to push for their equal right to the leadership. Her rhetoric suggests that women's exclusion from the topmost tiers of institutional power is related to perceptions of them being inferior to male sādhus.
In her practices, Mataji associates 'mother power' with an attribute that is muted in Anandmai's rhetoric: female heroism. In Mataji's usage, the concept refers to the gendered feminine power of courage and strength, selfdetermination and self-discipline, and defiance against male domination over women. Mataji's theology constructs female heroism as women's insubordination against the male sex right. 5 Likewise, her theology condones that female insubordination against the patriarchal right to women is virtuous. This is a crucial difference in perspective between the two gurus. Mataji's identifying mother power with/as the righteousness of women's resisting male control over the female sex widens the parameters of respectable womanhood to include traits that are often seen as dangerous to the patriarchal order.
Thus, Mataji's narrative attacks mainstream misogynistic thinking at its root, replacing such discourse with an emancipatory vision of the female as heroic. Her rhetoric of saintliness weakens religious patriarchy's structural monopoly over the leadership by reconfiguring the notion of heroism (that is to say, to women's resistance to forms of male control) as the female birth right. In claiming women's superiority over men based on the perception of their naturally heroic nature, Mataji reverses gender hierarchies to push for the normativity and equality of female sādhus.
Although women's ascribed second-class status is linked to perceptions of their bodily impurity, Mataji's rhetoric suggests that there's more involved than solely concerns with purity. Their perceived inferiority may also stem from widespread understandings, articulated discursively and symbolically in the melā sphere, that promote akhāṛā culture as an exclusively gendered context for heroic masculinity. Historically, akhāṛās were formed as paramilitary societies to protect the monastic heads, Hindu traditions, and Indians against British colonial forces (Gross, 2001). In practice, the akhāṛās place a premium on the male sex for entry into the saint society, in which martial imagery is prominent. Only five of the thirteen established akhāṛās accept women (Hausner, 2007). Even the meaning of 'akhāṛā,' which may be translated as 'wrestling ring,' 'sports,' and, as I learned, 'army' of saints, privileges male virility.
The implication is that mainstream discourse forwards the view that 'real' saints are 'essentially' men because of imputed heroic qualities thought to make male sādhus capable of enduring the difficulties of sādhu life and protecting religion and country against perceived enemies. That the Brahmanical texts elevate ideals such as control over the body, sensory suppression, and vanquishing desires to construct asceticism, suggest the idea of male virility as normative to saintliness. Patriarchal akhāṛā culture positions female sādhus not only as 'anomalies' in the saint society (Khandelwal, 2004), but also as outliers to it. This is based on perceptions of their incapacity for virility, and by implication, their inferiority to male sādhus.
Enlarging the idea of mother power to include and justify heroic femininity, Mataji advances women's monastic leadership. Like the term 'akhāṛā,' the title 'Śaṅkarācāryā' connotes the ascetic ideal of heroic masculinity. Based on fieldwork responses of the gurus, the Śaṅkarācāryā epitomises male virility. Many of them described the Śaṅkarācāryās as the 'leader of the army' comprising all the akhāṛās. Gender was not a factor in their responses. As many female gurus as male gurus made the comment. However, gender became a factor in their responses when discussing the issue of eligibility for the role. With Mataji and another guru (not Anandmai) being the exception, the gurus said that women are ineligible to become Śaṅkarācāryās, citing the criterion of birth as a Brahmin male. But women's ineligibility is also a function of the perception of male virility as the essentially gendered basis for eligibility, which renders women categorically ineligible and ontologically incapable of leadership.

'WOMEN NEED THEIR OWN AKHĀṚĀ!': CONSTRUCTING SELFLESS SERVICE AS WOMEN'S RIGHT TO INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY
Empowering women to see themselves as heroic through her teachings, Mataji unravels deeply ingrained attitudes and practices that condition them to be dependent on others, especially male kin, for their well-being. Some of the religiously-sanctioned gender ideologies featured in orthodox Brahmanical texts prescribe women's and girl's dependence on fathers, husbands, and sons as the condition of ideal womanhood (Shastri, 1990). But such prescriptions, apart from socialising women to be dependent on and obedient to men, send the message that they cannot protect themselves because of the ascribed weakness of the female sex. It instructs them to believe that their protection and happiness come from being dependent on others. However, Mataji disrupts this idea, emphasising women's innate capacity for self-protection. In a women's programme that she organised in 2019, she said, No one ever tells a girl or a woman this knowledge, but she knows when a man is looking at her badly [with sexual intent]. A woman always knows. When they know that the person may harm them, they must protect themselves. Women must take action against sexual terrorism. 6 Mataji backs her words up with activism. She offers women (and men) in the local community martial arts training sessions free-of-charge at her ashram. At the sessions, female and male instructors from around Prayagraj, whom Mataji has contacted, come and teach the women, including the women who live at her ashram, the art of self-defence. Importantly, as she makes clear, female heroism involves protecting oneself against what Mataji labels 'sexual terrorism,' which includes all forms of gender-based violence. A man ogling a woman qualifies as 'sexual terrorism' by Mataji's definition.
Thus, Mataji inculcates among diverse female audiences that independent female power is not only virtuous. It is also heroic, exemplifying Mataji's vision of respectable femininity. Recall Mataji's retrieving the microphone from Gyandas discussed earlier. It enacts her right to resist the patriarchal right to dominate women and speak for them. She teaches that women and girls deserve to live without 'sexual terrorism.' It is their human birth right. By the term 'independent,' I understand Mataji to mean the idea of women and girls empowered through knowledge 15 / 19 of their self-worth to take control of their lives and actively change their worlds. Her view is based on deeply valuing the female as normative and equal to the male.
While Mataji travels around the country altering perceptions of the boundaries of respectable womanhood to include the heroic elements of feminine identity as laid out above, she focuses her efforts on spreading the message of the virtue of independent female power to the female sādhus whom she meets at the melās. She speaks to sādhus who belong to an akhāṛā and to those who do not belong to any akhāṛā. In either case, through the rhetoric of saintliness, Mataji asserts their constitutional right to organise and lead akhāṛās of their own as they see fit.
Her activism combines Hindu teachings on selfless service (sevā) with rights-based discourses related to gender equality to advance women's equal right for institutional autonomy in Hindu society. To sanction that right, Mataji applies the concept of sevā retooled as working toward the universal female good through leadership, advocacy, and support for or collaboration with other organisations committed to changing lives. She says, My sevā is to work for the women of this country and in the saint society. Sevā means doing good work for women. That's why I formed my akhāṛā. It's a women's akhāṛā because it gives priority to women. In my akhāṛā, every woman is equal (barābar) to every man. Through this akhāṛā, I can teach women about their rights. When I told some religious leaders that I wanted to make an akhāṛā for women, they all said, 'Why don't you start an NGO? Why do you need to start an akhāṛā? Don't make a separate akhāṛā for women.' So, I said, Wow! The women can work but only a man can sit on the throne? This is why I started my akhāṛā. So that women, too, can sit on the throne. This is my sevā. To make women sit on the throne and serve the society. 7 Significantly, Mataji's and Anandmai's views of sevā illuminate the ideological fault lines in the rhetoric of saintliness. Although Anandmai pushes the boundaries of feminine virtue and alludes to heroic feminine traits such as self-determination and courage in her application of sevā, she discourages women's taking the initiative to form their own separate akhāṛās. Acting independently of male authority seems to go against her idea of heroic femininity. In her words, it might 'hurt men's egos.' Fighting for women's institutional autonomy amounts to 'competing with men' and is neither feminine nor virtuous. Thus, Anandmai does not openly challenge maledominated power structures, but rather encourages women to work within the hierarchy.
By contrast, Mataji accentuates the beneficence of women's independent leadership as a form of selfless service. Female sādhus can lead as the 'heads' of an akhāṛā. Or, they can work as its 'hands' in service to objectives conducive to women. Her rhetoric resists attributing saintliness based on sex-specific roles. In this way, Mataji creates an alternative way of conceiving sevā by emphasising women's institutional autonomy as an aspect of it. From her standpoint, female religious institutional autonomy is good for the society and models the full range of women's potential. Her rhetoric joins theology and gender advocacy to reverse the structural hierarchies that bring women under male control in akhāṛā culture. By reworking sevā, Mataji interrupts the gendered tropes woven into the rhetoric of saintliness that perpetuate essentialist perceptions of sex roles and protect high-caste male privilege.
Mataji is unyielding in her emphasis on the right to institutional autonomy for female sādhus. Although over the last nine years other akhāṛās, such as Juna and Niranjani, have organised separate women's organisations or camps, Mataji remains largely unsatisfied with these efforts. Based on what she has told me, such akhāṛās represent semiautonomous institutions. That is, the women's akhāṛās may be separate from the male akhāṛās, but they are not independent from them. This means that female leaders of the women's akhāṛās are subject to the institutional authority of the parent akhāṛā, and by implication, subordinate to the male leaders of those akhāṛās. Similarly, the women's akhāṛās' decision-making powers are limited by the predominant interests of the male-run akhāṛās, which wield the power to decide on the agenda of public policy (such as making lists of 'fake' gurus) that impact others in the saint society. Structurally, then, the practice of forming women's akhāṛās within the established (male-run) akhāṛā system, which some of the Akhara Council leaders seem to condone, confirms Mataji's suspicion that, despite Anandmai's statement ('I rule in this akhāṛā'), women do not substantively 'rule' in organisations that have been folded into the larger male power structure.
Creating an akhāṛā purposefully for the female saints, Mataji imparts the idea of the female sādhu as normative by emphasising women's right to institutional autonomy. Through Akhara Pari, she is transforming previously blocked access points for women's leadership and dismantling inequities that keep them from moving up the power structure. Her leadership is creating substantive change for underserved identities. By Mataji's definition, sevā endeavours to make women's and girl's lives better by protecting their interests and their constitutional rights in a society in which they are slowly eroding under a government powered by Hindu nationalist politics. The retooled ideas of sevā, sadācār and mother power illuminate the alternative standards by which Mataji constructs her rhetoric of saintliness in the public sphere. accompany empowering women in India. Mataji is not alone. More and more gurus, both men and women, are echoing her sentiment. Whether Mataji's protecting the fundamental rights of India's most underserved identities by organising alternative traditions for them to flourish is enough to transform the internal power structures of institutions that have historically excluded them from the monastic leadership remains to be seen. However, both Mataji and Anandmai demonstrate through their feminist-leaning religious gender activism that real, gender-based change is not only possible. It is also imperative to creating hopeful futures for women.