The collaborative research project “Gender, Religion, and Agency” looks at the gendered religious and ritual agency in South Asian religious traditions. Traditionally, in most mainstream religious traditions in South Asia, only men are entitled to positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, this situation recently started to change: in an increasing number of contexts, women - as well as transgender or non-binary persons - can and do now undergo monastic and priestly education; they can receive ordination/initiation, and they are accepted as ascetic religious leaders. Many of these processes take place outside of traditional religious institutions. Yet women, transgender, and non-binary persons are successful in establishing new religious trends and currents, attracting many followers, occupying positions of religious leadership on par with men. In some cases, this process takes place in collaboration with male performers, in others against the will of the women’s male counterparts. 

This collaborative project brings together scholars who conduct in-depth studies of culturally, historically, and geographically specific situations. The project participants look at the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and impact of the emergence of new powerful agencies in culturally and politically conservative religious traditions. Together, they work towards developing new methods to analyze intersectionality, and contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics connected to global flows of gender and religion.

Jessica Albrecht’s doctoral project „Theosophy and English language Womens’ Education in colonial Sri Lanka“is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She looks at the history of girls’ education and religion in Sri Lanka. In particular, one of the aims of the project is to illuminate the relationships and connections between European women who came to Sri Lanka at the end of the nineteenth century to found girls schools and Sri Lankan girls and women. The other main interest is to look at the importance of girls’ schools in forming a religious and national gendered identity in Sri Lanka. By looking at previously unconsidered institutions in the history of gender and religion, this project will spread light on the agencies of women in Sri Lanka who have often not been considered „authentically religious“, because their actions take place outside of institutional religion.

Jessica Albrecht is a PhD student at the University of Heidelberg. She holds a Master in Gender History from the University of Glasgow and a Master in South Asian Modern Languages and Literature from the University of Heidelberg. She is founder of the interdisciplinary journal and community En-Gender! and mentor at Fem4Scholar.

In 2015 Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a hijṛā guru and transgender activist, decided, together with others, to establish the Kinnar Akhāṛā (KA), a new religious Hindu group organised on the model of traditional ascetic orders (akhāṛās). Since hijṛās form an ancient, syncretic religious subculture of transwomen which today is in economic and social hardship, the KA aims to unify groups of hijṛās (now labelled kinnars) reclaiming their Hindu religious identity and dignity, to legitimise their presence and that of transgender people among the Indian masses. While doing so, it also challenges the male patriarchal world of the akhāṛās.

The project investigates the KA as a case study of ‘sacred creativity’ whose consequences and aims can be not only socio-religious but also political. The KA, indeed, results from a revision of the hijṛā traditions and an emulation of the akhāṛā tradition which involves a Sanskritisation of the hijṛā tradition. Since hijṛā traditions combines Hindu and Islamic features, their Sanskritization could be analysed in relation to the anti-Muslim turn taken by the actual Indian government. The KA strongly challenges the Indian patriarchy (religious and social) in support of gender equality, and social justice. Therefore, the project aims to verify whether the KA may be also considered as a form of Religious Feminism.

Crossing gender and religious studies, the project explores how gender norms influence the religious field and how local and global dynamics may lead those considered marginal to subvert larger cultural and social structures, thus disentangling the religious, social but also political dynamics behind ‘creative traditions’ in contemporary India.

Performance of death rituals occupies a significant place in the life-course of a Hindu. Making funerary offerings to the deceased ancestors, piṇḍadāna, is surviving from a tradition that is said to date back to the Vedas. The tradition revolves around the idea of ritual transmigration of the deceased to the next world- the world of ancestors (pitṛloka). Domestic ritual manuals also describe piṇḍadāna, and the more elaborate śrāddha rites. Traditionally, the transgenders have been denied death rites like those for Hindu men and women. In 2016, the Kinnar Akhara, a transgender organisation, rejected these prohibitions, and resolved to perform piṇḍadāna and śrāddha rites for all the transgenders who passed away recently. This, for them, was claiming right to a dignified end. The rites were performed on the Pishacha Mochan Kund in Varanasi. The present paper seeks to document the transformation of the death rituals for the transgender and locate this transformation on the plane of the discourse on gender and religious agency. Oral interviews with the members of the transgender community and members of the Kinnar Akhara are being conducted. To find out the response of the wider Hindu community to the ongoing transformation on the religious landscape, Hindu priests, and other people are also being interviewed.

A myth which till date has been circulated among various communities linked to the center of Narasiṃha worship in Ahobilam (current Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh) concerns an affair of Narasiṃha and a huntress coming from a local hunting-gathering Chenchu tribe. As in the case of other myths which deal with the motif of a recognized god’s second wife, here as well its potency arises from the capability to express reconcilement of various domains which have been sharing the space at the site: Brahmanical, evoked by a male recognized god, and local/tribal evoked by a local girl. Depending on a medium of the Narasiṃha-Chenchata myth’s transmission and circumstances of its origin – ancient oral legends of tribal communities and their Sanskrit version encapsulated in the drama entitled Vāsantikāpariṇaya attributed to the 7th pontiff of Ahobilamaṭha (ca.16th cent.) – this is either Narasiṃha or Chenchata the huntress who has to adjust to the norms of the spouse’s community to live life on her/his side. The project attempts at looking into the scenarios of Ahobilam temple rituals which are popularly interpreted as referring to Narasiṃha and Chenchata romance (e.g. hunting festival, festival of quarrels), with a focus on the role of gender in terms of agency; chiefly in reference to strategies of framing Chenchata into the patriarchal Brahmanic system, but also to areas where her agency might have been maintained.

The registration of Buddhist nuns’ educational institutions in 2019 was a milestone in the field of monastic education in recent years. The Ministry of Education appointed a coordinating instructor Buddhist nun to oversee the activities of these registered educational institutions for the first time. I studied how two nun communities, bhikkhuni-s and silmata-s dealt with these two recent occurrences, taking into consideration the diversity in their levels of agency. In order to better comprehend these responses, I spoke with senior bhikkhuni-s, silmata-s, and government officials. Both Buddhist nun groups considered registration of educational institutions as vital to their continuing existence. Bhikkhuni-s who lacked state support deliberately secured the position of coordinating instructor, even via assisting silmata educational facilities. When the position of coordinating instructor was assigned to a bhikkhuni, some senior silmata-s demonstrated gender traditionalism. Despite the obstacles, the coordinating instructor bhikkhuni was appointed as the assistant director of these educational institutions, as she had a long-term strategy in place to increase the education levels of Buddhist nuns. This article presents a multifaceted picture of contemporary female renunciation that goes beyond the simple identification of agency as resistance and can take several shapes depending on the circumstance.

Michal Erlich research explores the vernacular meanings of well-being in India’s specific and dynamic contexts as well as how individuals and communities in religious frameworks conceive and pursue well-being. Her current research is about the phenomenon of Guru-led Hindu communities in the peripheries of Delhi. These communities formed of few-hundred devotees belonging to the geographical and socio-cultural margins are pervasive yet under-researched in the academic literature that tends to focus on the dominant culture of Delhi’s middle and upper classes. The peripheral communities are a unique case study because of their hybrid nature. Community members, mostly internal migrants, carry different cultural backgrounds, castes and mother tongues and still they make one community sharing the common hardships of the lower socio-economic classes. Erlich conducted two years (2015-17) of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork within two such communities that were founded by female gurus. Based upon the fieldwork, she aims to uncover, explicate and analyse the hitherto unacknowledged associations existing between the devotees’ membership in a guru-community and their effort to improve their lives and achieve earthly and religious-spiritual wellbeing.

The emerging order of nuns in Theravāda Buddhism in the USA and Germany

The historical Buddha is believed to have instituted the nuns' community not long after the monks' community. However, it seems that in only one Buddhist Vinaya tradition surviving today (the tradition using the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya prevalent mainly in China and Taiwan) the ordination of women continued uninterruptedly until today. In the other two traditions (Mahāvihāra and Mūlasarvāstivāda, prevalent in South-East Asia resp. Tibet) the order of nuns either never was established or ceased to exist many centuries ago. Today there are a number of local Buddhist communities and transregional traditions that respond to the increasing demand of women to revive "full ordination" (upasampadā) and to live as nuns in a formally established Saṃgha. At the same time, Buddhist women live in totally different worlds, embedded in fundamentally different contexts, and Buddhist women “renounce the world” for very different reasons. Clearly, becoming a Buddhist renunciant (with or without ordination) is received differently in predominantly Buddhist settings (where support systems exist, where cultural value is attached to renouncing, etc.) and in settings where this is perceived as an “exotic” action. While all these issues are clearly interconnected, the story unfolds differently for different people. While the texts suggest uniformity, in practice there are many ways to become a nun, and importantly the general acceptance of a nun among laypeople and among monastics actually never hinges on the textually prescribed procedure of her ordination. Yet the globally dominant discourse is entrenched in a language of monastic law, rights, and egalitarianism, and the ideal picture of a nun is mainly guided by textual descriptions as found in the Vinaya, which however can translate very differently into practice. This project takes a close look especially at the recently established Theravāda nuns’ Sanghas in the San Francisco Bay area and in Germany.