How Becoming a Myth Leads to History: A Modern Embodiment of the Goddess Durga as the Female Shankaracarya in Hindu Society

Women’s access to leadership as monastic heads (i.e., Śaṅkarācāryas) in India has been restricted by enduring patriarchal structures for twelve centuries. Until the female guru named Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (“Mataji”), who resides in the politically right-leaning northern state of Uttar Pradesh and leads an ascetic women’s order, appointed herself the title in 2008, the status has been subject to the sole control of Brahmin men. Modern contexts, however, present unique opportunities for women to reinterpret conventional religious ideals that restrict feminine virtue to the realm of domesticity. This essay shows that Mataji’s leadership asserts an alternative narrative of women’s monastic authority as institutionally normative. By using her status, she is promoting a new Hindu identity that contests Brahmanical hegemony as a structural outsider. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2014 to 2019, the essay illuminates Mataji’s performance of personal narrative to rectify gender inequities and restructure power hierarchies by affirming the normative status of the female ascetic (sādhu). A key part of this analysis relates to how she elucidates the feminine symbolism portrayed by the heroic goddess Durga to sanction female sadhus’ institutional autonomy as a normative right. Through performance, Mataji 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 Shankaracharya as an incarnation of Durga. The essay 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 perceptions of autonomy as a threat to respectable womanhood. It argues that Mataji constructs autonomy as an aspect of female virtue by correlating women’s self-asserting capacities with Durga’s agentive power while dismantling the patriarchal right to control women. Thus, the essay extends feminist perspectives on what autonomy can mean to ascetic women in accordance with Mataji’s teachings, and explores Mataji’s practices that enable women’s greater freedom and parity of status in Hindu society.