ABSTRACT
This ethnographic study of Bengali Vaishnava Sahajiya tradition draws on the unconventional lives and renunciant experiences of Vaishnava Sahajiya female renouncers (sadhuma) to highlight the diversity in the lives and ways to exercise agency of Third-World women. The variety of ways in which female renouncers exercise their agency and their experiences will be used to illustrate that female agency in Vaishnava tradition is not described in terms of resistance to male domination. They do not adhere to the typical perceptions of them (the Third World women), attributed by some feminist scholars who adopt Western progressive views, that those Third-World women are powerless, subordinated and victims of a patriarchal system.1 One way in which Vaishnava female renouncers try to find advantage in their way of life is to align themselves with the conventional Hindu and Vaishnava Sahajiya male-confined tradition. Their agency is about how to be secure by following virtues constructed under the ideal of ‘womanhood’; being a devout wife and a mother of a son. Accordingly, this study argues that the women’s agency in the Vaishnava tradition is pronounced in their language of submissiveness rather than that of subversion.
