Meena Rani Khandelwal
Associate Professor
Office: 221 Macbride Hall
Phone: (319) 335-2496
Background:
Meena Khandelwal’s book Women in Ochre Robes (SUNY Press 2004) is an ethnography of the everyday lives of women initiated into sannyasa, a particularly radical variety of Hindu asceticism. Sannyasa entails the renunciation of marriage, family ties, wealth, caste, and professional status for a life of celibacy and spiritual discipline. This book explores the complex gendering of a tradition that, on the one hand, was created by and for elite men, and, on the other, claims to transcend gender. Although, historically, women have been excluded from sannyasa, female renunciants (sannyasinis) comprise a substantial minority of contemporary initiates.
Khandelwal’s book reconsiders enduring debates in South Asian studies about the relationship between Hindu family life and religious renunciation, offers a new gender-sensitive view of sannyasa that puts individual actors at the center, addresses feminist debates about women’s agency and ethnographic writing, and brings attention to a blind spot in the growing scholarship on sexuality. Khandelwal’s research suggests that sexuality and celibacy are mutually implicated and that abstinence should be considered within sexuality studies. She has recently co-edited a volume with Sondra Hausner and Ann Grodzins Gold entitled Women’s Renunciation in South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
Khandelwal has become increasingly interested in diaspora and transnational migration. She conducted research in Rishikesh, North India, in 2005 on transnational aspects of sannyasa. Despite its reputation as an archaic institution, renunciation is increasingly visible in nationalist politics and as one of India’s exports. In “Foreign Swamis at Home in India” (Identities, in press), Khandelwal explores the way in which spiritual narratives of non-Indians who have migrated permanently to India to live as Hindu renouncers prompt us to question the centrality of displacement in theories of transnational migration.
Courses Taught: Introduction to the Study of Culture and Society |
Affiliations & Links
Meena is secretary for the Association of Feminist Anthropology |
