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Marie-Thérèse Charpentier offers a detailed and intimate series of portraits of four female gurus (gurvi) living in contemporary India. She marries ethnography and gender studies with William E. Paden's comparative approach to the history of religions (religionswissenschaft) to generate what she calls a macroscopic understanding of the overlooked phenomenon or patterns of female guruhood in India today. She argues that female guruhood as well as female spiritual leadership stands in sharp contrast to the various stereotypes of female subordination that we often see in orthodox Hindu religion, particularly the textual tradition where women are typically expected to be "passive," "submissive," and "worship their husbands as Gods" (p. 14). Furthermore, she points out that as a category of human religiosity, female gurus have been typically neglected or treated asymmetrically vis-à-vis male gurus and draws on the recent work of Karen Pechilis, Lisa Hallstrom, Daniel Gold, Maya Warrier, Meena Khandelwal, and others to frame her discussion.
Charpentier's rather lengthy study is organized into nine chapters beginning with a historical survey...