In this book, Meena Khandelwal delivers an empirically satisfying and theoretically interesting account of female Hindu world renouncers in Haridwar (also known as Hardwar), an important North Indian temple town and pilgrimage center. Known as sannyasinis, these women renounce the world and symbolically die to the social order and their former social identities to devote their lives to spiritual pursuits. They are few. This is because Hindu traditions construct renunciation primarily as an option for males, and misogyny is an entrenched feature of the subculture of male renouncers. As a result, women renouncers face special problems of discouragement, disapprobation, and physical hazard.

Khandelwal bases her study on interviews with and observations of 19 sannyasinis (and an equal number of male renouncers) taking place over a period of 18 months. She concentrates on two sannyasinis with whom she obviously developed exceptionally close relationships. They are quite different from each other: one relatively withdrawn and committed to a contemplative and devotional spiritual mode, the other busily engaged in social service and the management of a flourishing ashram. Khandelwal's prolonged participant-observation with these two women is the book's main empirical foundation, and the result is a satisfying portrait of their day-to-day activities: their routines, clothing, food, rituals, spiritual disciplines, interactions with others, and much else. By highlighting their distinctiveness as individuals, Khandelwal conveys a sense of the extraordinary variations of personality and lifestyle permitted within the framework of the renouncer's vows.

In theory, to renounce the world is to depart the social order completely, but Khandelwal shows how social identities follow renouncers into renunciation. In actuality, the tension between social engagement and withdrawal exists within renunciation, not simply between worldliness and otherworldliness. Her sannyasinis see renunciation as a journey, a pilgrimage of sorts, with twists and turns in and out of the social order, and the appropriateness of withdrawal from the social world depends on where one is on one's own path to liberation. World renunciation is a difficult path for Indian women, a “transgressive act” that carries penalties, which is why the sannyasinis do not urge their choice on other women. But it also offers special opportunities, for it opens a “site of undetermination" (p. 43), offering women the chance, within limits, to defy convention and determine their own lives.

Anyone can call herself a renouncer. The truth of such a claim depends on the claimant's inner state of mind, and because even surface fraudulence can be a mask for deeper authenticity, the question of who is or is not the genuine article is no easy issue in India. In one of her most interesting chapters (one equally relevant to male and female renouncers), Khandelwal describes how Hindus use behavioral and other clues to make such judgments. In tutelary relationships, the authenticity of the renouncer–guru is especially subjective and rests on a subtle, almost ineffable, psychic concord between renouncer and individual disciples.

Despite the common orthodox assertion that there “is no male or female” in renunciation, Khandelwal shows that gender is the most important identity that accompanies renouncers into renunciation. Not only do sannyasinis strongly identify themselves as women but they also see themselves as exemplifying feminine traits of nonrenouncer women; indeed, they identify with householder women as much as they do with male renouncers. The sannyasinis believe that certain qualities they attribute to women—having less ego or pride than men, or more easily (as they believe) adapting to celibacy—actually make the disciplines of renunciation easier for women. The symbolic key to renunciation in its feminine mode is the concept of the selfless love of motherhood, and female renouncers tend to be imaged as maternal figures. One quite striking manifestation of this is the emphasis sannyasinis place on feeding their devotees, in contrast to the male renouncers' expectation of receiving food donations from others.

This book is admittedly narrow in scope—a study of a small sample of a rare species. But what Khandelwal loses in breadth she regains in the depth of her treatment of individual cases. Special cases can in fact be illuminating. The richness of the materials she reports enables her successfully to challenge procrustean dichotomies (such as the supposed radical opposition between the life of renunciation and life in the world) that litter the field of South Asian studies. And, although her book deals with a small subgroup of renouncers, Khandelwal extends and deepens anthropological outsiders’ understanding of world renunciation as a core feature of Hindu civilization.