Conclusion: Embodying Holiness and Influencing Culture—Exploring the Contexts, Challenges, and Strategies of Female Religious Influencers in Hindu Society

We have reached the end of our journey concerning the study of holy women as “religious influencers” in Hindu culture. As the editors, we conceived this volume based on our joint interests in women’s religious experiences and how, through them, women are recognized as holy (imbued with divinity), gain power and authority, and become “influencers” in Hindu society. We understood the transformative potential of religious experience to change women’s lives and raise their status. It provides the basis of their knowledge, dignity, and respect. What was unclear concerned holy women’s relationships to their influencer status. What did they think, feel, and say about their influence on others’ perceptions and behaviors in the context of being a good Hindu? Were they comfortable or uncomfortable with their status and the responsibility it entailed? Did being an influencer protect holy women from or expose them to greater scrutiny? Did they see the role of their influence as an extension of religiously sanctioned feminine roles such as motherhood? Is being a religious influencer equivalent to being a divine parent? Along parallel lines, we wanted to explore how, by being influencers, holy women experience and navigate greater visibility and representation in a patriarchal society where being a woman can be difficult, as well as their struggles and strategies for succeeding as spiritual authorities.

Thus, while we recognized that holy women have occupied influential roles within Hindu society, we wanted to examine the cultural and gendered categories, meanings, and implications of being an influencer in historical and modern expressions of Hinduism. Hence, this Special Issue was born. Through diverse disciplinary approaches, the volume has engaged the topic of holy women as religious influencers by exploring the relationship between forms of holiness and influence to understand women’s roles and leadership power in more depth and nuance. We contend that the “influencer” lens advances an important theme in the study of women and religion by emphasizing how holy women construct themselves as interpreters of Hindu tradition qualified to teach and inspire others. Seeing them as influencers (re)directs attention to holy women as religious actors and creators of Hindu culture. Female religious influencers shape social values and affect the way others behave. Using the category highlights women’s interpretive priorities and pushes for greater accountability in academic representations of women in Hinduism. Accordingly, this volume considers how and to what extent the categories through which holy women see and interpret themselves shift how we (i.e., scholars of religion) see and represent them to others. We will address these issues in the rest of the Conclusion.

Before we begin, it is important to clarify that none of the holy women are commercial influencers. By definition, a commercial influencer describes a social media personality with expertise in a specific niche or industry that connects people with products or services online and generates profits through prudent brand collaborations (Jacks 2023; Kasumovic 2024). According to the marketing strategist Jessica Worb (2024), an influencer “creates content to build an audience and land brand partnerships”. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines an “influencer” as “a person who has the ability to influence other people’s decisions about the purchase of particular goods or services” and “who has become well-known through the use of the internet and social media, and uses celebrity to endorse, promote, or generate interest in specific products, brands, etc., for payment”.1 These commercialized meanings only appear in the OED’s updated Second Edition. They were added to its official lexicon in 2022, though the term appeared in the more generalized sense of “One who or that which influences” in the 1989 version of the OED’s Second Edition.2 A similar but expanded definition of the term appears in the Cambridge Dictionary, which adds “someone who affects or changes the way that other people behave” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.).

There are not only different types of commercial influencers specializing in a wide range of industries, from health and wellness to food to fashion and lifestyle to pets,3 but there are also different categories of influencers based on the size of their social media followings, such as “nano” (1K–5K followers), “micro” (10K–50K followers), “macro” (100K–500K followers), and “mega” influencers (over 1 million followers). More significant followings, determined by the number of likes on platforms such as Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok, bring higher profits from brand-name consumer companies for commercial influencers (Charleson 2018; Kasumovic 2024). Within the highly competitive, commercialized global influencer culture world, size really does matter.

However, becoming a commercial influencer is more than a numbers game. While increasing followers may tip the scales in favor of greater brand visibility and representation, numbers alone do not explain the meteoric rise in popularity of online influencers. Other attributes that cannot be measured by numbers also promote the status.

In the rapidly changing business and marketing world, influencers gain their influence by embodying interpersonal characteristics that appeal to online audiences and impact people’s purchasing decisions and actions.4 Influencer work constitutes as much an art as a science. Good influencers develop, sustain, and enhance their followings, whereas bad influencers repel, alienate, and lose followers. What differentiates the good influencers from the bad ones is that the former has mastered the skill of relating to others in the digital universe. They know how to make personal connections, and they do so by embodying creativity, relatability, reliability, consistency, credibility or trustworthiness, adaptability, authenticity, passion, empathy, and community engagement/management (handling disputes on/offline). This list reveals attributes linked to successful influencers (online marketers identify a minimum of sixteen characteristics).

These traits are more than merely marketable “soft” skills that, when combined with “hard” skills (data analysis, computer programming, and marketing), lead to better careers and job opportunities.5 They also magnify the virtues through which influencers build their character and their brands. Modern influencer culture would not be the booming industry it is without these intangible elements. People listen to influencers because they embody attributes that attest to their credibility and authenticity, creating the sense that they practice what they preach.

Nevertheless, the predominant and idealistic association of modern influencer culture with neoliberal capitalist consumerist values, microcelebrities, excessive materialism, and solopreneurship (self-driven people who run all aspects of their business)6 belies the religious underpinnings of the term. Although its meaning has changed, traditional literary interpretations of “influencer” underscore the term’s spiritual, ethical, and even mystical sense. Influencers have been around for a while, long before the arrival of social media. Turning once more to the Oxford English Dictionary, it traces the term’s earliest recorded meaning in the English language to 1664 CE, with the writings of the English philosopher, theologian, and poet Henry More.7

Additionally, the OED relates the term’s usages since then (and before the 20th century) to a host of human and other-than-human actors, including planets, cosmic forces, and tutelary spirits.8 In its ample list of definitions, honor is accorded influencer status and moral agency based on historical views about virtue’s potency (Oxford English Dictionary 2023). Other notable words used to represent an “influencer” involve luminary, destiny, occult, force, capacity, decision maker, weight, mojo, clout, sway, muscle, leader, authority, head (of a church or organization), ruler, and power.9

Furthermore, the term’s religio-moral signification is evident in influencers serving as paragons for their followers. Implied in the concept is an aspirational role model whom people turn to for guidance, knowledge, assistance, and support (Odigie-Turley 2024). “Influencer” designates both a status and a role “that brings with it the responsibility to be an exemplar” for the audience one is influencing (Archer and Robb 2024, p. 129). As role models, influencers affirm the value of worldly aims, such as happiness, success, wealth, and health, correlated with the “good life”. They appear to have actualized their inner potential and achieved what remains the stuff of dreams for the masses. They give the impression of being motivated not only by money, fame, status, and power, but also by their concern for and desire to help others achieve their goals and live well. As celebrity studies scholars Alfred Archer and Catherine Robb discuss, the appeal of social media influencers remains largely a function of mainstream perceptions of them as people “who have special duties to serve as role models for their audience” (2024, p. 129).

Thus, followers respect and look up to influencers because they are expected to “model good behavior” (Archer and Robb 2024, p. 131).10 Using the Hindu category of dharma, which connotes “duty”, “responsibility”, and “obligation”, to understand the dynamics of influencer culture, it becomes clear that commercial influencers, like the “religious influencers” discussed in this Special Issue, have a moral dharma to uphold. Exemplary influencers exhibit the transformative power of virtue, and through it shape norms and values and change lives. They lead by example, inspiring how people see and structure their realities. Their appeal, labeled in the marketing literature as “presence”, “charm”, “charisma”, “passion”, “exuberance”, and “magnetism”, and their commitment to excellence make them worthy of emulation and deserving of the privilege to influence others. In this light, moral attributes are as consequential as marketing strategies for those who are considered influencers. Despite being appropriated, repurposed, and commodified by industry marketers, the term “influencer” retains the hallmark of an earlier religious history. The genius of the commercial industry lies in its ability to exploit the virtues that have made religion central to billions of humans across the globe for millennia (Schwadel and Hardy 2021).

Holy women demonstrate in high relief the characteristics and commitments essential to being an influencer in Hindu culture. From gurus to poet-saints to mediums to royals to social media bhaktas, this volume has featured exemplary women who embody holiness in different ways, distinguishing themselves as religious influencers within their communities of practice. They are visionaries, luminaries, and virtuosos (endowed with exceptional spiritual gifts) illuminating various types of religious influencers, from feminists to reformers to traditionalists to warriors. Some of them, such as the ISKCON devotees Claire Robison spotlights or the Shankaracharyas (monastic heads) Antoinette DeNapoli describes, have curated social media profiles, though most do not. Except for the “urban devis” Rukmini Walker and Radhi Devlukia-Shetty, who have attained prominence as leaders and teachers (as siksa gurus) within the transnational ISKCON movement and on the “South Asian American social mediascape” (Robison 2024, p. 16), neither the holy women nor the people who interpret their lives for others use the label “religious influencer”.11 It is anachronistic to their milieux or unfamiliar to Indic languages. Nonetheless, their lives, teachings, poems, rituals, art, and other practices convey the concept’s primacy to Hindu societies, past and present. They show in culturally specific ways what being a religious influencer means and the processes involved in its social production.

In this concluding essay, we will more broadly analyze the cultural work of female religious influencers (i.e., what holy women create and accomplish as religious influencers) in light of the diverse Hindu viewpoints and categories discussed in the volume. Thus, this chapter is organized into three sections: First, we will examine the cultural mechanics of religious influence in Hindu society, discerning how it imbues the women with holiness and qualifies them as spiritual authorities. Second, we will consider their relationship to traditional Hindu religio-gender norms and patriarchal ideologies. In this section, we will explore the challenges the holy women encounter as religious influencers because of their sex and their strategies in (re)shaping societal values and worldviews to unlock opportunities for women’s greater freedom and leadership. Lastly, we will reflect on how applying the “religious influencer” category as an analytical lens to studying women, especially holy women, in the Hindu tradition shifts their representation in religious studies scholarship and reorients attention to the alternative narratives and epistemologies that women’s experiences and interpretations of holiness render possible.

1. Embodying Holiness and Exerting Influence through Mystical Insight and Radical Devotion: The Cultural Mechanics of Holy Women’s Influence

Different Indic language terms that approximate the Hindu concept of religious influencer and suggest women’s association with holiness have been discussed in this volume. These terms carry general and specific implications and are shaped by received cultural understandings and the contexts of their use. Female religious influencers in Hindu societies within the Indic subcontinent and elsewhere conduct their lives within a historically stratified social system that incorporates gender- and caste-based hierarchies and notions of ritual purity. Despite divergent Hindu views about what being a female religious influencer means and the constrictions that customary practices typically impose on their identities and lives, all the women portrayed here share a pronounced commonality: They have attained influence, power, and authority through their perceived connection to holiness. It acts as a definitive source of their influencer status. Thus, the questions that we will concern ourselves with in this discussion are: What makes a holy woman “holy” and, as such, capable of influencing others? If holiness grants women religious influence, what constitutes the basis of this holiness, and how does it yield influence?

We have seen that Hindu communities that venerate holy women recognize and affirm the potency and efficacy of their influence (i.e., it is powerful and produces results), using various terms to describe it. These features distinguish the women as credible and authentic, the two most salient attributes qualifying them as holy and solidifying their influencer status. This status, along with the authority it sanctions, is attributed women who demonstrate their connection to holiness through the following mechanisms: mystical sight (darshan) and other sensory experiences of a spiritual nature; and Ddevotion to a guru, god, or goddess (guru-, deva-, or devi-bhakti). These elements often overlap in the women’s lives. Let us examine more closely the critical elements by which holy women emerge as religious influencers in Hindu culture.

1.1. Mystical Sight (Darshan) and Other Sensory Experiences of a Spiritual Nature

Several female influencers acquired holiness from various mystical and religious experiences, involving visions, auditions (hearing divine voices), sensations, and revelations occasioned by communion with or absorption in divinity. For example, the 5th-century bhakti poet-saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar, who composed poems in Tamil, had visions in which she saw herself in the body of a naked pey (ghoul) surrounded by other peys and jackals feeding on corpses in the cremation ground. Despite her ghoulish appearance (the poet portrays her pey self as having a “blazing mouth and teeth”), Karaikkal thrived (her words) in this peculiar environment. Being a pey not only granted her proximity to the dancing Lord Shiva, whom she praised through song and dance and whose divine presence sent Karaikkal into divine ecstasy; it also illuminated the potency of what Pechilis calls Karaikkal’s “devotional subjectivity”, through which she gained soteriological insights and knowledge that she later disclosed in her poems. As Pechilis argues, Karaikkal’s revelations worked differently than the “divine disclosure model” (p. 10). Instead of the god speaking to Karaikkal and influencing her, she attained the power to speak directly to the god and, therefore, influenced him, inverting the conventional relational hierarchies between deity and devotee. Revelation in this sense empowered Karaikkal to “change the power dynamics” and realize her holiness, to know herself as a devotee and, thus, a speaker of truth with the authority to act as a bhakti influencer over the god whom she loved (p. 10).

Another example is Mirra Alfassa, also known as the Mother of Integral Yoga, a movement she led jointly with Aurobindo at the Sri Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry, India, until his death in 1950. Mirra’s visions and impressive psychic abilities (Patrick Beldio mentions she possessed the capacities of clairvoyance, out-of-body travel, ritual healing of the mind and body, and affecting the course of events from afar, p. 5) paved her path toward holiness, securing her reputation as an accomplished spiritual practitioner—indeed, a spiritual virtuoso—and a God-realized woman. In their first meeting in 1914, as Beldio’s article describes, Aurobindo saw Mirra as his spiritual consort, with whom he practiced celibacy, and his spiritual equal. Both were married to other people but left their worldly partners to build a new spiritual partnership that they called Integral Yoga. By 1914, Mirra had secured her influencer status within different spiritual circles by emphasizing that she “independently acquired spiritual power via her relationship to the divine” (p. 5). This mystical connection was so strong that “[f]rom an early age, Mirra knew her mission was to transform the path of God-realization from a prescriptive pattern of social renunciation to adaptable ones lived in ordinary walks of life” (p. 5).

Mirra was a precocious child who preferred to meditate rather than go to the circus (p. 5). Her spiritual life started early, grew more intense with time, and continued throughout her life. From the age of eleven, she had incredible visions and entered high meditative states, claiming to have been taught by ascended masters and the god Krishna. Aurobindo interpreted Mirra through Hindu categories, viewing her as the incarnation of the Mahasakti, the divine Mother of manifest creation, and acknowledging her as such in his writings. Even as Aurobindo envisioned Mirra as the divine feminine, she sought to transcend the gendered implications of the categories her influence encompassed due to her revelatory experiences. As the Mahasakti, Mirra was as much a guru to Aurobindo as he was to her; she exerted a great deal of influence in his life. Beldio clarifies that she shaped Aurobindo’s ideas and altered his spiritual destiny. Mirra’s visions revealed the existence of a new race of human beings with “sexless bodies” (p. 3), transcending all desires and dualities, whose materialization was necessary for the next stage in the evolution of universal consciousness on earth. Aurobindo had similar experiences disclosing the coming of androgynous humans, and thus, he saw Mirra as “the object of his spiritual vision through whom he would transform the human race” (p. 7).

For Aurobindo, Mirra represented the side of Brahman (the supreme absolute) with qualities (saguna), drawing down vital powers and information to be shared within and beyond their community. At the same time, he stood for its nirguna side (without qualities). Years before their partnership, Aurobindo had gained insight into the supermind (vijnana) through “profound spiritual realizations” (p. 4) and visions of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda, who instructed Aurobindo. However, Mirra was no passive observer of Aurobindo’s robust spiritual life. Her revelations, which were simultaneous and nonsimultaneous with his, also made Mirra privy to new information regarding vijnana, extending Aurobindo’s knowledge and radically reorienting inherited ideas about manonasa (“mental annihilation”). Together, Mirra and Aurobindo would instruct their students in the difficult practice of manonasa and turn them into the new human race as witnessed by both gurus in their joint and individual revelations.

Of the two gurus, Mirra showed herself more capable of withstanding the “heavy sacrifices” that came with mediating the supermind in material reality than Aurobindo. Beldio writes, “Her body could endure the transformation better than his, no matter how it unfolded”. (p. 19). In his later years, Aurobindo retreated from public life, turning his focus inward with the singular aspiration to obtain supermind (eradication of all dualities, including those associated with gender, race, and sexuality). In contrast, Mirra continued to receive revelation, teach their disciples, refine her and Aurobindo’s theology, and lead Integral Yoga until she died in 1973, leaving a permanent legacy. She exemplified the consummate influencer, although Aurobindo is remembered as more significant than she was. Thus, religious experience connected Mirra to holiness, imbuing her with authority and power that she shared equally with Aurobindo.

Like Mother Mirra, other influential women in this volume had intense visions and revelations, gaining mystical insight and embodying holiness. Nancy Martin discusses Ma Indira Devi, a modern holy woman who encountered the 16th-century female bhakti poet-saint Mira Bai through visions. These visions bridged the worlds of the two women, uniting them in spirit and allowing Indira Devi to mediate Mira Bai’s influence in the 20th century as a living presence that actively shaped values and changed lives. Indeed, Indira Devi’s visions altered her life, giving her a new sense of purpose while guiding her on a “joint journey of transformation” with her guru, Dilip Kumar Roy. It is noteworthy that Roy studied Ramakrishna’s teachings but regarded Aurobindo as his true guru. More remarkable is that Roy also considered Indira Devi his guru (he believed she surpassed him spiritually), affirming their equality of status and authority. However, Indira, who only reluctantly saw herself as Roy’s guru, regarded him as her “guru, father, and guide” (p. 12). Yet, with his and even Aurobindo’s encouragement, Indira Devi and Roy “[went on] to become partners in leading a vibrant community of aspirants” (p. 1).

According to Martin, Indira Devi began hearing a female’s voice at age twenty-five and later developed psychic capacities, including the ability to know others’ thoughts. Following the end of a seven-year marriage, when she gave birth to a son (Anil), Indira Devi went into extended and spontaneous trances, encountering Mira Bai as an observer of and participant in the saint’s devotional life, who revealed new songs (bhajans) and teachings to Indira Devi. Martin writes, “Hundreds of songs were generated through their encounters” (p. 13). In their joint autobiography, Indira Devi and Roy described Indira Devi’s trances using Indic terms such as bhava (trance state), samadhi (ecstatic absorption state), nirvikalpa samadhi (pure consciousness state), and savikalpa samadhi (enlightened state that retains individual awareness) (p. 7). These revelations, which Roy relished as much as Indira Devi (p. 10), laid the foundation of Indira Devi’s bhakti, theology, and authority, confirming her status as an influencer within the international community that she and Roy cultivated through their collaborative leadership.

In a different vein, the Santal holy women in Bengal with whom June McDaniel worked gained authority as ritual leaders, healers, trance mediums, and priestesses through divine visions and spirit possession, obtaining roles previously denied to women within Adivasi (tribal) communities. Among the holy women discussed in this Special Issue, the Santals are unique. They have experienced what McDaniel terms “supernatural adoption” through visions of Hindu goddesses. This is significant because, in Adivasi culture, as McDaniel explains, “There are generally not ‘high’ gods and goddesses as we see in the pan-Indian brahmanical forms of Hinduism”. Santals recognize local deities (bongas) and other “supernatural entities”, including “ghosts, ancestresses, water and plant essences, guardian spirits, and disaster controllers” (p. 2).

In Santal society, women can join song and dance groups and work as herbal healers, roles commensurate with spiritual ones; they can worship nature goddesses. However, they cannot worship the male bongas, as this would give them knowledge of the gods and increase their power over men. McDaniel discusses variants of a Santal legend that speaks of men who resented being dominated by women and wanted to learn magic to bring them under male control. Marang Buru, the bonga high god, had this knowledge, and he would only teach men. Overhearing the men’s plan to meet the god at night, the women played a trick by making the men think that the women had realized their rightful place in the gender order as men’s servants. They spoke sweetly to the men and made their favorite dishes, which led the men to put off their meeting with the god. But while the men slept, the women snuck away and learned magic to prevent their subordination by entering the ritual space dressed as men and receiving Marang Buru’s teachings. According to McDaniel, this legend portrays Santal women as having greater power than men, making them inherently wicked and dangerous, which men must control to keep the patriarchal order in place. It is the basis for women’s exclusion from official ritual roles in Santal society. Thus, knowledge of the gods is associated with men’s religion, and the women who gain this knowledge are often accused of witchcraft, resulting in their persecution and death.

Some women bypass these restrictions, but not without a struggle, by emphasizing their connection to Hindu goddesses outside the Santal pantheon. An example of this concerns Parvati Soren, who told McDaniel that she was called by the snake goddess Manasa and by Kali and Durga in deep states of trance to serve them as a medium and ritual healer. At first, Parvati refused their desires and suffered several illnesses as punishment. Ultimately, she listened to the goddesses, heeding their wishes and receiving revelations that earned her respect while buoying her influence within the same Santal society that forbids women’s exercise of spiritual authority. About Parvati Soren, McDaniel writes that “She is valued in the neighboring villages for her healing skills with roots and plants” and, therefore, “has been able to avoid the Santal condemnation of famous female religious leaders by following the commands of Hindu goddesses” (p. 4).

Finally, mystical visions emboldened Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (Mataji) and Sadhvi Hemanand Giri (Swamini) to appoint themselves the status of a Shankaracharaya in India and Nepal, respectively, and, by organizing separate orders for women, to rearrange the monastic hierarchies of Hindu culture. These societies provide women with the training, initiations, and support necessary to become a Shankaracharya. This status, as DeNapoli elucidates, represents the highest level of authorized power within a pyramidal structure that Brahmin men primarily hold because the mainstream tradition accords them supreme ritual authority based on their sex and caste, which implies that they have the highest ritual purity of the four main Hindu social classes. This ascribed status grants dominant-caste men eligibility for leadership, therefore giving them access to formal channels, such as Vedic study under a guru, which are otherwise unavailable to subordinate status groups. But even when women obtain the requisite qualifications, usually outside of monastic structures, and are endorsed by male gurus recognized by the system, like Swamini, entrenched sexism and caste discrimination related to customary norms keep them out of the power elite. Thus, in the view of the monastic mainstream, Brahmin men are essentially (pre) qualified to be a Shankaracharya, while everyone else is essentially unqualified for the role.

However, Mataji’s and Swamini’s visions radically reframe prevailing Indic cultural ideas about what qualifies a person for the role and who is qualified to be a Shankaracharya. For these influencers, immediate access to divinity rather than received tradition qualifies them as well as empowers them to challenge and defy the Brahmanical chauvinism and, because of it, the structural inequities pervading monastic institutions as immoral, irreligious, and ruinous. They claim that deities worshipped in their local regions have appeared to them in meditation, dreams, visions, and auditions. DeNapoli describes that Mataji, who comes from a subordinated caste, encountered the warrior goddess Durga and Shiva as the yogi Bholenath, and that Swamini, born into a Brahmin caste, experienced Pashupatinath, Shiva’s ferocious form worshipped in Nepal.

These deities informed the gurus of their displeasure and concern with ascetic women’s maltreatment, among other problems such as the sexual abuse of women, within monastic society. Additionally, they revealed the gurus’ mission and, through the darshan experience, initiated them as Shankaracharyas. These visions in turn activated within the gurus the presence of what they termed prabhav (“majesty”; “excellence”; “brilliance”; “eminence”), a holiness (and authority) that is charismatic (i.e., gained via inner experience) and that, as they emphasize, replaces the traditional authority of the established system. Their being “plugged into the divine switchboard”, an idiom that devotees invoked in their portrayals of the gurus to signify their connection to holiness, allows Mataji and Swamini to construct a “new Hindu identity” as, using DeNapoli’s language, “feminist religious influencers”. In this way, these “dharmic prabhaviks” (religious influencers) are making Hindu society more inclusive of oppressed identities.

For the women profiled, mystical insight rewires them from the inside out. It qualifies them as spiritual leaders endowed with influential power to invert gender and caste hierarchies, form alternative female societies, heal the sick, and authorize new leadership roles.

1.2. Radical Devotion to a God, Goddess, or Guru (Deva-, Devi-, or Guru Bhakti)

Another mechanism by which the holy women demonstrate their embodiment of holiness and construct their influencer status involves their radical devotion (bhakti) to a deity, a guru, or both. All of the holy women in this volume exhibit an intense and unshakeable connection to the divine or to a guru who manifests divinity for them (Hinduism makes a fine distinction between gurus and gods, as gurus can be gods and gods can be gurus), forming the basis of their unique experiences, lives, and legacies. We classify this bhakti as radical not because it requires world renunciation or celibacy in marriage for the householders among the group. However, some holy women, such as the Shankaracharyas, took formal renunciant vows, while others, such as Sarada Devi, remained celibate wives to their husbands. This bhakti is radical because it is all-consuming. It defines who the women are, what they value, and how they live. Like mystical insight, radical bhakti activates their holiness, enlivening their existence on the mundane plane and inspiring others’ respect, admiration, and reverence for their exemplary devotional life.

As a basic Hindu concept, bhakti, which is derived from the Sanskrit verbal root bhaj (“to share”; “to possess”; “to divide”), signifies the personal experience of love, affection, fondness, attachment, dedication, trust, loyalty, worship, and surrender by a devotee (bhakta) for the object of their love: a deity or a guru. Bhakti demands the commitment to make the god and the guru an important part of one’s life through worship, prayer, meditation, recitation, and bhajan singing.

For the holy women, their bhakti is pivotal to their existence. This exceptional devotion is intoxicating, all-absorbing, and uncompromising. The immediacy of the bhakti experience (i.e., it is direct, spontaneous, effervescent) and the profound intimacy created through that encounter are so extraordinary and engaging that they take precedence over everything else. While most of the women are devoted to deities, Archanapuri Ma from McDaniel’s article provides an example of a holy woman (sadhika) devoted to a guru. Her devotion to the guru was so exceptional that, losing her sense of individuality, Archanapuri Ma merged her consciousness with her guru’s, experiencing the fusion of their souls known as ekatmika bhava (p. 16).

Thus, we identify the holy women here as religious influencers based on the all-encompassing role of devotion in their lives. Radical bhakti shows the transformative potency and efficacy of offering oneself to a god or guru for human flourishing. This relationship dramatically transforms their inner and outer worlds, reorientating their consciousness toward a divine horizon of meaning and restructuring their priorities. We can trace the women’s influence in Hindu society to how their exemplary devotion enables them to expose the existential faultlines of the mundane world, confront cultural attitudes that especially disadvantage marginalized identities, and obtain happiness by working for others’ welfare.

Revealing insights witnessed as early as the Upanishads (ca. 6th century BCE), the bhakti poet-saints discussed in Pechilis’s article analogize the manifest world to a dream state, warning of its transience and deluding qualities while entreating others to seek solace in the really real: God. Karaikkal Ammaiyar cries to her god, “When will the afflictions that birth in this world…enables ever end?” (p. 6). Their radical devotion awakened the realization that their relationship with God is the only constant in a fleeting world. Invoking a Hindu religious grammar that conceives material reality as impermanent and illusory, they relinquished their conditioned existence for one untouched by temporal vagaries through eternal (comm)union with deities. Their bhakti nourished their confidence, self-determination, and an unyielding sense of purpose beyond the prescribed gender norms of marriage and motherhood. It further compelled them to cut through the thick veil of ignorance that traps living beings in infinite rebirth and stand in the truth that is God. In the words of the 8th-century Tamil poet-saint Antal, who devoted her life to worshipping the god Vishnu: “Wake up!…O shameless one, O sweet-talking girl. Come now, sing of the one who holds the conch and discus in his broad hands aloft” (p. 7).

Through intense devotion, the poet-saints assert that worldly happiness is temporary and pales compared to the infinite satisfaction of meeting God. Typical mundane concerns with husbands and families and domestic duties fall by the wayside. Recognizing the god Krishna as her true mate and, consequently, eschewing the relationship with her human husband, Mirabai says, “Mother-in-law, sister-in-law both day and night keep on trying to dissuade me. Unsteady and restless, my eyes will not listen to their advice and remain sold in another’s hands”. Likewise, the twelfth-century poet Mahadeviyakka despises relationships with mortal men, refusing to “go near them [or] trust them [or] speak to them confidences” (p. 8). To her, “because they all have thorns in their chest”, Mahadeviyakka “cannot take any man in [her] arms” except her god Shiva, whom she describes as her “Lord White as Jasmine” (p. 8). Pechilis suggests that Mahadeviyakka’s poems “denaturalize the commerce and coupling between women and human men, likening it to being stung by a thorn beneath a smooth leaf” (p. 8). Through bhakti, the poet-saints understood that they belonged to an immortal lover (Shiva, Vishnu, or Krishna), whom they called by many names and to whom they offered their minds, hearts, and bodies, affirming through their writings the trust, stability, and bliss that comes only from loving God.

Some influencers’ radical devotion made a different, but no less significant, impact in Hindu society by tackling culturally sanctioned discrimination against ascribed low castes, women, and people experiencing poverty. The mistreatment of these social classes may be attributed to dominant Brahmanical views regarding “pollution”, which link their purported “low birth” to impurities generated by sins (pap) from previous births. One woman who appears to have opposed such beliefs and customs was the eighteenth-century queen of the Ahom dynasty in Assam, Phuleshwari Devi. As Sundari Johansen Hurwitt discusses, born into a non-dominant caste of dancers (devadasis) from an impoverished family, Phuleshwari was a Shakta devotee and honored Durga by flouting orthodox Brahmanical norms related to maintaining purity practiced within Vaishnava religious culture (Shakta culture largely eschews the Brahmanical tradition of purity and pollution). According to Johansen Hurwitt, biographical reports (buranjis) of Phuleshwari’s life recount a controversial instance of her defiance of Brahmanical culture by relating a story about the queen forcing Brahmin priests to wear flower garlands sprinkled with the blood of a buffalo sacrificed to Durga around their necks and smear it on their foreheads.

Phuleshwari Devi seems to have rejected orthodox Brahmanical values. But she also subjected their human representatives, such as Brahmin temple priests and the gurus of neo-Vaishnava reform movements such as the Mayamaras examined in Arunjana Das’s article (more about this later), to forms of cruelty, thus showing her role as, to use McDaniel’s labeling, a “negative female influencer” (see McDaniel’s chapter, p. 6). Apart from sponsoring lavish rituals to Shakta goddesses, Phuleshwari was a royal patron of education, literature, and the arts. She commissioned religious poetry and translations of Sanskrit literature (p. 11) and founded a girls’ school, which, as Johansen Hurwitt says, suggests a progressive attitude for her time (p. 14).

Another less contentious example of radical devotion concerns a woman remembered as a queen in the Hindu imagination. Born into a marginalized caste in a family of modest means in colonial Bengal, the nineteenth-century landowner (zamindar), Rani Rasmani Das, grew up in a Vaishnava family12 but, through her association with Zamindar culture, worshipped the Shakta goddesses, Kali and Durga, as Shaktism flourished in Bengal, particularly Kolkata, due to the zamindars’ influence. As Johansen Hurwitt points out, Rani Rasmani was only eleven years old when her family arranged her marriage to a much older and very wealthy zamindar man, who, based on her biographies, supported Rani Rasmani and with whom she had five children.13

Rani Rasmani was well-educated and devoted to her husband, Rajchandra, and their family. While she did not come from privilege, both she and Rajchandra were “active philanthropists”, using their extreme wealth to build “public facilities to benefit the poor and working class in the performance of daily religious ablutions as well as death rites” (p. 8). Inspired by her devotion, Rani showed herself as a generous, caring, compassionate businesswoman who invested in outreach projects for the public good. She embodied her exceptional bhakti further by establishing the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple, Kolkata’s most famous Kali temple, which continues to define her legacy today. Significantly, Rani was instrumental in bringing Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, known as Gadadhar before he became a legendary saint, to the Dakshineshwar Temple as a Brahmin priest (his brother was head priest).

Her exemplary love of God was forward-facing and extended to those usually overlooked, demeaned, and pitied in Hindu society because of their social identities. Despite both their affluence and influence, Rani and her husband battled virulent discrimination based on their own non-dominant caste status, being snubbed and mistreated by the Bengali Brahmin elite.

However, they did not overtly challenge Brahmanical norms. Johansen Hurwitt writes about Rani Rasmani: “Her apparently savvy deference to caste and gender norms despite being a woman of certain privilege and power in the name of spiritual and social good was likely one of the keys to her success and sometimes grudging acceptance among her contemporaries” (p. 10). Nevertheless, we cannot underestimate the influence of Rani Rasmani’s radical devotion in confronting, even if tacitly, the biases and injustice deeply rooted within the socio-religious contexts in which she lived that gave her reason to serve the so-called outcasts of Hindu society.

Holy Mother Sarada Devi, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa’s extraordinary wife and spiritual companion covered in Jeffery Long’s article, exemplified radical devotion. She affirmed the inherent divinity within all humans and other living beings, treating whomever she met with dignity, compassion, and kindness. Ramakrishna revered Sarada Devi as an incarnation of the Divine Mother, based on a vision in which he saw her as Kali. He ritually established Sarada Devi’s status as the incarnated devi within their spiritual tradition by performing the Sodashi Puja,14 invoking Kali in Sarada Devi as the gracious and forgiving mother through mantras (see also McDaniel 1989).

Described by her biographers as quiet, mild-mannered, and self-effacing, Sarada Devi was born in 1853 in a small village, Jayrambati, in West Bengal, to a poor Brahmin family. Like the queens Rani Rasmani and Phuleshwari profiled earlier, Sarada Devi was also a child bride (the marriage of girls to adult men was not uncommon in rural areas of East India). Her relatives married the girl child named at birth Saradamani Mukhopadhyay in 1889 at the age of six years to Ramakrishna, who was twenty-three years old and employed at the Dakshineshwar Temple.15 According to Long, after Ramakrishna died in 1886 due to complications from throat cancer, Sarada Devi “became a spiritual leader and influencer in her own right” (p. 1). Long emphasizes that between the two gurus, Sarada Devi had the “lion’s share” of disciples (p. 2).

Evident in Long’s sensitive portrayal is that Sarada Devi had tremendous empathy—and not just sympathy—for those most harmed and degraded by the patriarchal, high-caste, purity-centered Brahmanical culture, especially widows, the sick, and the poor. Seeing others’ suffering physical, mental, or spiritual pain anguished her. Long writes: “Her compassionate concern for human suffering would remain a central theme of her life” (p. 3). While she did not explicitly critique or change oppressive structures complicit in human suffering, Sarada Devi refused to allow them to define her identity or interactions with others. She embraced everyone as if she were their mother, though she had no biological children with Ramakrishna. Sarada Devi fed devotees food prepared with her hands and comforted them, particularly the women, whose company she enjoyed, with her gentle presence and loving words. Sarada Devi’s exemplary devotion helped transform Hindu monastic culture, if not caste-conscious Hindu society.

Her emphasis on humanitarian social service (seva) as engaged spiritual practice (sadhana) altered how the monastic disciples, both women and men, whom she and Ramakrishna initiated together or separately viewed renunciation. This bhakti-inspired approach to monastic practice was, at the time, radical for Hindu culture. It entirely reconfigured the idea and role of renunciation by emphasizing selfless action (karma-yoga) on the mundane plane to be as significant as, if not more significant than, religious study (patha), prayer (japa), and meditation (dhyana). As Long explains, “The traditional role of Hindu monks had always been defined in terms of the solitary pursuit of spiritual aims” (p. 8). Thus, Sarada Devi influenced both the Ramakrishna and Sarada Orders (mathas) of monastics to include seva, which represented a role traditionally relegated to lower castes (p. 8), into their monastic discipline and interact with the “broader society of lay householders” in more than just a teaching role. It is fair to say that Sarada Devi’s radical bhakti, directed chiefly toward disadvantaged social classes, epitomized her holiness.

A few influencers have taken their radical devotion to the next level: they have mobilized women’s liberation movements to protect fundamental citizenship and educational rights and the basic right to equality for India’s most minoritized identities. Their leadership advances social justice-centered activism as radical devotion. Their movements are overtly political, and by forming holy armies of women warriors, they confront the patriarchal apparatuses of the government and Hindu orthodoxy they deem responsible for human suffering and oppression.

Furthermore, by bridging the “apparently antagonistic domains” of religion and politics (Sarbadhikary and Roy, p. 2), their bhakti reveals that the political is as personal as the personal is political through their commitments to usher a more equitable future into Hindu society. Thus, intense devotion has enlarged their awareness concerning humanity’s interdependence. Because of its power, these influencers, as women and, more precisely, as mothers, feel an unyielding sense of duty to act and change their worlds by working to eradicate injustice and inequality.

Let us consider the examples of the Shankaracharyas discussed in the previous section. Both religious feminist influencers have organized separate women’s ascetic orders (akharas) that run independently of the established male orders and serve as “religious armies” for holy women. Mataji founded her “army” in 2014, naming it Akhara Pari, translated as “Flight of the Free Birds”, while Swamini formed her army of ascetic women in 2018. These Shankaracharyas associate their armies of female sadhus with the army of divine shaktis (female powers) led by the fierce warrior goddess Durga that Shakta Hinduism reveres as the supreme absolute. They draw connections between their role and Durga’s as the divine female Shankaracharya, which revolves around annihilating evil that the gurus correlate with the male chauvinism, misogyny, and sexism of Hindu monastic society. Thus, empowered by the great goddess, Mataji and Swamini lead ascetic armies with the aim to release women from the patriarchal prison that traps them in the cage of limiting beliefs and quashes their leadership potential and personal freedom.

Another army of ascetic women stylizing themselves in the powerful image of Durga concerns the sadhvis of Hindutva Hinduism discussed by Koushiki Dasgupta. In contrast to the ascetic armies of the Shankaracharyas, the Hindutva sadhvi armies call attention to the harmful and violent side of radical devotion to the goddess Durga16 based on an idealized Hindu nation (rashtra) endorsed by the movement. Like the queen Phuleshwari, these holy women bring to mind the idea of “negative female influencers” in Hindu culture (see McDaniel 1989, p. 6).

To review briefly, Hindutva Hinduism represents an extremist version of Hindu nationalism in India. It comprises an extensive network of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar, which includes the current political party in power, the Bharatiya Janata Parishad (BJP), and the men’s and women’s wings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It is deliberate in its strategic (mis)representation of India as Hindu and its manipulative othering of Hindu critics of Hindutva and religious and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, constructing them as “supposed enemies of the nation” (p. 1). High-profile sadhvis spearheading Hindutva holy armies, such as Uma Bharati, Sadhvi Rithambara, and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, among many others, have condoned and incited murderous riots and rampages in which thousands of non-Hindus and Hindus lost their lives. Dasgupta writes that these sadhvis have “set out to create a rhetoric of violence by using communal hate speech rampantly and fostering anxiety in the secular culture of the country” (p. 8). While Hindutva sadhvis have increased women’s leadership roles and status within the movement, the impact of their visibility and representation as holy women stands as an inversion of the religious feminism shown by the Shankaracharyas. As Dasgupta says: “These extremist sadhvis selectively used their power only to advance the Hindutva ideology, showing little concern for actual women’s problems” (p. 14).

In Sukanya Sarbadhikary’s and Dishani Roy’s article, we encounter a third type of holy women’s army in the case of the Matri Sena, which was conceived, created, and conducted by Matua women in West Bengal. The authors write that Matua women “posit gender, education, and citizenship as the three most fundamental ideological weapons in their fight against patriarchy, educational disprivilege and caste and territorial inequality” (p. 1). Matuas emerged in the 19th century as a low-caste Hindu sect because of their predominant association with the Namashudras, who were “collectively labeled with the pejorative term ‘Chandala’, implying ritually polluted untouchables” (p. 4). Hence, Namashudras and, by extension, Matuas were treated by upper-caste Hindus as outcasts or “those outside the caste hierarchy of the Hindu social order” (p. 4). Their community’s experience with caste-motivated atrocities has provided Matuas a platform to consolidate their energies and work to reform Hindu society’s oppressive Brahmanical values.

Based on their history of being persecuted for their caste identities, Matua women breathe life into a radical devotion that prioritizes activism and reinterprets the egalitarian religio-social ideals of their neo-Vaishnava faith.17 In this way, they “claim citizenship status for the displaced Matua people” (p. 3) from Bangladesh struggling to stay in their native homeland of India, but who are instead facing deportation, imprisonment, and communal violence due to the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2003. This act “declared all migrants who came to India post-1971 as illegal” (p. 6), and “created significant unrest for the Matuas” (p. 6). It unfairly holds those Matuas who, after India’s Partition in 1947, uprooted their lives in order to migrate to West Bengal but who “had not yet received official rehabilitation” responsible for their displacement (p. 2).

Thus, when the Indian government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, promising “to make all non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan eligible for citizenship” (p. 19), Matua women organized that same year the Matri Sena, translated as the “Army of Holy Women”, and, through it, “motivated Matua women to join roadblock demonstrations for the realization of their citizenship rights” (p. 19). Unlike the armies of ascetic women (sadhus; sadhvis)18 described earlier, the Matri Sena army is entirely composed of householders who amplify their maternal authority to critique the government’s policies on displaced Matuas and assert their legitimacy as Indian citizens for territorial equality.

While the Matri Sena’s fight to free Matuas from the shackles of their political persecution as minoritized ethnic refugees is historically rooted in caste oppression, Matua women also exert authority by exposing gender discrimination within their community. On the one hand, as Sarbadhikary and Roy explain, Matuas preach equality in their doctrine. On the other hand, women have been denied opportunities to be men’s equals in community life. They have achieved spiritual rather than social equality, which is as significant as the latter. Realizing their marginalization as women within a more substantial reform movement that instructs otherwise, the “mother gurus” of the Matri Sena resort to the egalitarian teachings of their tradition’s founder, Harichand Thakur, along with the “twelve commandments” of their shikha-guru (educator-saint) Guruchand Thakur, to reconcile Matua theology and practice.

By comparing themselves to the beneficent mother goddess Lakshmi, Matri Sena members construct gender equality as their female birthright based on a collective self-representation that emphasizes their maternal identities as protectors of the family, community, and nation. These elements constitute overlapping signifiers for a united Hindu constituency in Matri Sena rhetoric. Matua women exploit these significations to influence perceptions of displaced Matuas as “insiders”, combatting their “outsider” (i.e., non-Hindu) status, even as they tap into the exclusivist Hindu nationalist rhetoric that Dasgupta analyzes to accomplish their goals. They further reinforce culturally dominant Hindu associations of the feminine power (sakti) of motherhood, symbolized by their status as “mother gurus” of the women’s army, with divine motherhood, demonstrating their holiness and sealing their influencer role among Matuas. Thus, the Shankaracharya orders, Hindutva Sadhvis, and Matua Matri Sena demonstrate three disparate examples of armies of holy women who, compelled by their radical devotion to a god or a guru, exert influence in Hindu society by reinterpreting values and raising women’s status.

Finally, we turn to the devotee women of Mumbai Chowpatty’s ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Consciousness) movement examined in Claire Robison’s article. These female religious influencers represent moral pillars of the movement and are flourishing in their communities because of their radical devotion to God, revered as Krishna, and the tradition’s lineage of self-realized gurus. They show that real soul happiness, meaning happiness experienced at the soul (atma) level and unconditioned by the churning of infinite worldly desires and the ever-changing social conventions of the modern world, is attainable through intense love for the divine and transforms one’s existence. Similar to the bhakti poet-saints who tethered themselves to a sacred anchor, devotee women such as Nitaisevini Mataji, Dr. Sita Subramanian, and Radharani embody holiness through their connection to God and the guru that, in effect, qualifies them as spiritual authorities and constructs their influencer status.

Devotee women participate in a Hindu tradition grounded in medieval Gaudiya Vaishnavism, interpreted by ISKCON’s founder, Srila Prabhupada Bhaktivedanta (who brought ISKCON to North America in 1966), and his guru Bhaktisiddhanta. In contrast to the neo-Vaishnava traditions followed by the late medieval Mayamara sect and the modern Matuas of West Bengal, which resist caste and gender hierarchies based on upper-caste ideas around purity, Gaudiya Vaishnavism accepts the legitimacy of Brahmanical Hinduism. While ISKCON elevates Brahmins as the ideal Hindu, it assigns this status based on personal dedication and commitment to a life of purity (brahmacharya) by following vegetarianism, sexual abstinence until marriage or chastity within marriage, and abstaining from intoxicants and alcohol. It is not based on birth-ascribed status. Hence, devotees need not be born Brahmin to obtain the Brahmin status, though Prabhupada and his guru were caste Brahmins. From this angle, devotee women’s holiness remains interlinked with their upholding traditional expectations of ritual purity and gender roles, criteria on which ISKCON is unyielding. However, as Robison explains, this holiness is positioned outside of authorized power structures, which, in light of ISKCON’s sanctioning of Brahmanical ideals, only men with renunciant (sannyasi) status occupy.

Thus, within ISKCON, sannyasi men officially lead the tradition and have the highest ritual status as diksha gurus. This status empowers them with authority to receive and transmit ISKCON’s inherited tradition of revelation and initiate disciples within the sannyasi lineage and broader movement. But this role requires strict adherence to and maintenance of ritual purity. Since the tradition considers women essentially incapable of continuous purity due to menstruation (menstrual blood is impure and creates bodily and ritual impurities), ISKCON, like the mainstream Shankaracharya institution described by DeNapoli, restricts eligibility for the role to qualifying (i.e., celibate) men who, by virtue of their purity, ISKCON labels Brahmins. At the same time, devotee women hold subordinate status as siksha gurus, which allows them to instruct others in the tradition’s teachings without receiving revelation or initiating disciples.

Despite operating outside the formal religious establishment that normalizes Brahmin men’s leadership, devotee women have invented new and alternative spaces to radiate holiness and exert influential power. In such contexts, devotee women’s popularity as influencers is emerging; sometimes, it outshines without outranking the influence of the tradition’s official gurus. Although these emergent spaces involve social media platforms, they include ISKCON-specific functions, such as the Chetana Festival Programs and the Counselling System. As Robison describes, in the former context, devotee women endeavor to awaken the consciousness of the young women within the movement by teaching them ISKCON’s values and rituals (“Chetna” means “consciousness”); in the latter, devotee women, alongside their spouses, assist other devotees in implementing a Brahmanical-oriented lifestyle usually at odds with the broader secular-oriented society, which rewards conformity to modern consumerist values and mindless imitation of Western ways. Here, exemplary ISKCON women flex their devotional muscles, exercising an informal style of religious authority and influence that Robison terms “vernacular holiness”. Robison states, “Models for women’s vernacular holiness are not in opposition to Sanskritic or brahmanical orthodoxy but rather often exist in conversation with it” (p. 5).

Through their informal leadership as respected teachers, counselors, mentors, and social media bhaktas, ISKCON’S female influencers strengthen their communities and, by embodying its principles, their community’s faith in ISKCON’s relevance in modern times. Put another way, devotee women make being religious in the mode ISKCON requires attractive, fashionable, and “cool”. Using their status to influence the identity of a global movement that earlier achieved popularity by downplaying its Hindu cultural heritage (Robison 2024), devotee women are reviving ideals perceived as old-fashioned in the contexts in which they live. They show that Hindu identity is compatible with modernity and that devotion to God, the guru, and the community, which signifies the body of God and the guru, leads to a happy and fulfilling life.

2. Female Religious Influencers Overcoming Challenges and Developing Strategies

As greater visibility and representational power come with the role, being a religious influencer poses challenges and risks to holy women in Hindu society. While some of these influencers lead or have led traditions with global or transnational followings, those without such a presence also face scrutiny and criticism by being in the public eye. Traditional Hindu culture values humility, modesty, adaptability, deference, and obedience to elders, including husbands, in women, associating these qualities with respectable femininity. Married women, particularly mothers of sons, represent the ideal Hindu woman. This class of women is known as the pativrata: she is selfless, auspicious, and nurturing; produces sons to promote the patriarchal lineage in this world and the afterlife; and devotes herself to her husband, children, and in-laws. She serves their needs while suppressing her own (see Das’s, Robison’s, and McDaniel’s articles for detailed discussions on the pativrata concept). Hindu orthodoxy glorifies women’s householder devotion as the exemplary religious life, the most significant source of their happiness, and the ultimate spiritual goal they can achieve as women.19 Brahmanical Hinduism recognizes the power and potential of women’s influence but restricts it to the domicile.

However, the influencers shatter dominant male-defined Brahmanical expectations of what it means to embody virtuous womanhood in a society that favors meek and docile females, and they do so without compromising their feminine virtue. Some claim the spotlight, like Mataji Trikal Bhavanta, or are thrust into it, like Rani Rasmani and Phuleswari Devi. Some voice their views and opinions, like Rukmini Walker and Radharani, and make their feelings explicit, including sexual desire and anger, like Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Sadhvi Hemanand Giri. Some influencers, such as Mira Bai, Mirra Alfassa, Indira Devi, and the Shankaracharyas, leave their husbands and families to follow religion full-time, becoming sadhus, poet-saints, oracles, and storytellers. In contrast, others, such as Parvarti Soren, remain married but redefine the terms of Hindu marriage, allowing for celibacy as a condition of serving the goddess as ritual healers. Others, like the sadhika Archanapuri Ma, avoid marriage/householding, finding it impossible (or disgusting) to love a mortal man, and therefore choosing to love only an immortal god.

For all the holy women, their influence spills beyond the confines of the domicile, the place where women, in the Brahmanical view, remain guarded by the patriarchal family. It pours into the public realm and, like a positive or negative contagion, touches friend and foe, stranger and acquaintance, man and woman, rich and poor, dominant and subordinate castes alike, crossing interpersonal boundaries and interacting with the biomoral properties of others.

Based on the case studies here, what makes influence and, hence, holiness, potent and efficacious in Hindu culture has to do with its diffusive and fluid quality as an affective element of human personality. Influence travels toward or against whomever it affects, permeating the inner being of the recipient and, through its absorption, changing them from the inside and the outside. It is interpenetrating, transmissible, and contagious; thus, influence signifies an agentive trait that sits uncomfortably with religiously ascribed feminine characteristics emphasizing passivity.

From a cultural perspective, as anthropologists have argued, Hindu society views individuals as essentially porous and receptive to immaterial and material influences of the external world, causing their inner states to fluctuate positively or negatively, depending on the circumstance (see Marriott 1990). In this framework, the constituent elements of human beings subtly travel and are exchanged across intrinsically permeable socio-biological boundaries through sight, touch, and sound, affecting human relationships and interactions. Accordingly, in a Hindu world in which an individual’s essential nature is constantly in flux and subject to modification, maintaining boundaries by enforcing gender and caste hierarchies keeps the Brahmanical social order intact. In this light, the cultural implications of being a religious influencer in Hindu society involve affecting others ontologically, raising gender-specific problems for holy women. Just as they touch and change lives through their influence, penetrating others with their power and presence, the women also risk being touched and penetrated by others’ influence. Consequently, holy women who wield influence are subject to moral suspicion because society fears that leaving the supposed protection of the private sphere exposes their inner purity and goodness to defilement by those with whom they come into contact in the public sphere.

Thus, as public figures, the female religious influencers break the barriers usually imposed on women within Hindu culture. They not only operate visibly as women within historically male-dominated arenas of accomplishment, but also inhabit a patriarchal society that suspects unguarded women (women who construct worlds beyond the parameters of the domicile) of being immoral and wicked, casting aspersions on their character and sometimes perpetrating forms of harm upon them. Let us consider some of the challenges that female religious influencers face because of their sex and the public-facing aspect of their roles.

Many of them are mocked and shamed by society. In Sarada Devi’s case, though revered by disciples as the Holy Mother, the people of her village ridiculed Sarada Devi for being in a childless marriage with Ramakrishna, whom they and many others living in Kolkata perceived as crazy and incompetent (his trance states caused him to fall unconscious for long periods). Indira Devi’s reputation as a yoga adept attracted the attention of an unscrupulous male, Tantric sadhu, who, after she rebuked his sexual advances (he wanted to have ritual sex with her and increase his spiritual prowess), physically and psychically stalked her and attempted to poison her. Mataji Trikal Bhavanta and Swamini Hemanand Giri have been subjected to extreme character attacks and ostracized by the mainstream monastic establishment. It has used its influence to skew public perceptions of these self-appointed Shankaracharyas via the news media, labeling them “imposters” and placing their names, along with other so-called fake gurus, including another female guru and influencer named Radhe Maa, on a list distributed to the state governments sponsoring Kumbh Mela festivals to prevent their participation in these events where they build followings and gain support (DeNapoli 2023). Phuleshwari Devi’s biographers villainized her life and her choices in their writings. Female tribal influencers in Bengal encounter widespread suspicion of being evil sorceresses, and the urban devis of ISKCON Mumbai are vigilant in balancing the competing demands of their public personas as bhakti influencers and their private lives as devoted mothers and wives. They strive to earn respect without upsetting the patriarchal gender order based on the Gaudiya Vaishnava ideology of sex-role complementarity.20

If the challenges experienced by female religious influencers have to do with inhabiting non-traditional roles or, as Long argues in connection with Sarada Devi, traditional roles in non-traditional ways, how they construct their connection to respectable womanhood remains vital to understanding their holiness and its influence in Hindu society. This volume shows that the women neither only inhabit patriarchal norms nor always resist or subvert them. Operating from within the categories of their societies, holy women have a complicated relationship with the patriarchal status quo. After all, it is not easy being a woman in any male-dominated culture, much less a holy woman. Some holy women struggle with the attention that their influencer status brings them. Recall Sarada Devi’s preference to influence her and Ramakrishna’s disciples from behind the scenes, sometimes literally. She listened to Ramakrishna instruct his male students from behind a bamboo screen in one of the music towers (nahabat) where she lived during her co-habitation with Ramakrishna. It was a small, dank space which she occasionally shared with other women, including Ramakrishna’s mother. By living in the nahabat, Sarada Devi stayed out of sight, following strict gender segregation codes within Brahmanical Bengali society (p. 7). Indira Devi stated her discomfort with Dilip Roy calling her his guru, seeking to avoid being the center of attention. Such reactions indicate holy women’s heightened awareness of the tension between being an influencer and a respectable woman in Hindu culture. So, how do they reconcile their influencer status with societal expectations of feminine respectability?

Unsurprisingly, female religious influencers have developed strategies that accentuate their embodiment of virtue even as they reimagine the male-defined parameters for what this means. Thus, this volume suggests that the influencers’ holiness is as contingent on their connection to respectable femininity as it is on their connection to divinity. Feminine virtue constitutes a potent source of their holiness, along with mystical insight and intense devotion. Some influencers’ conceptions of womanhood may appear transgressive, especially considering the more radical women of the group, such as Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Mahadeviyakka, and the Shankaracharyas. These influencers pull no punches in lodging stinging critiques against the patriarchal double standards by which female virtue is measured. However, all the women’s teachings and narratives illuminate culturally specific themes that intensify their personification of virtue. Here, we will isolate three motifs, identifying them as gendered feminine strategies for surviving and thriving in a patriarchal society that does not always value exemplary women: identification with the goddess, sanctification of motherhood, and community support.

Identification with the goddess conceived as the almighty creator, ruler, and destroyer of the universe has enabled some influencers to construct heroic womanhood as feminine righteousness. Mirra Alfassa’s identification with the Mahasakti justifies her spiritual partnership with Aurobindo, affirming her leadership of Integral Yoga as indefatigable and on equal footing with Aurobindo’s. By identifying with Durga, a heroic Shakta deity, Hindutva sadhvis temporarily invert feminine ideals and assert their dominance over Hindu men, claiming public space to scold and shame men for failing to protect Hindu women from predation attributed to Muslim men. The Shankaracharyas also identify with Durga, but their relationship to feminine virtue expands the concept rather than inverts it. They understand their monastic headship as an extension of Durga’s divine rulership over the cosmos on the temporal plane. They stress that their leadership signifies the presence and power of the goddess working through them.

Therefore, the Shankaracharyas reconfigure womanhood based on Durga’s attributes, emphasizing strength, courage, assertiveness, fearlessness, and determination to connect themselves to an alternative model of ideal womanhood eclipsed by conventional representations based on the pativrata ideal. Durga’s audaciousness in defeating male demons threatening cosmic well-being (dharma) provides legitimacy for Mataji’s and Swamini’s audacious appropriation of their titles to purge the monastic society of the patriarchal demons that endanger ascetic women’s well-being. Similarly, Durga’s governing the universe as an independent female power, on which all deities depend for their existence, vests the Shankaracharyas with divine authority to form independent female monastic orders that prepare ascetic women for leadership.

Bhakti poet-saints’ identification with the goddess is a muted theme in their writings. Instead of identifying directly as the goddess, influencers such as Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Mahadeviyakka, Antal, and Mira Bai construct themselves as devoted wives or lovers of gods such as Shiva, Vishnu, and Krishna, respectively. While their poetry implies their goddess identities, these influencers explicitly claim all the rights and privileges afforded them as the gods’ wives. They plead for the attention and affection of their “husbands”, reveling in ecstasy from the gods’ presence, and speak defiantly when their mates fall short of meeting their wifely expectations. Thus, their self-representations affirm the pativrata ideal—they never want to be separated from their divine partners and pine for their love—while expanding its semantic range to authorize innovative alternatives to marriage and motherhood through devotional asceticism.21

Urban devis of ISKCON Mumbai align themselves with feminine divinity by embodying the preeminent Vaishnava mythic model of Radha and the gopis. In Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, which ISKCON follows, Radha represents a goddess and the chief consort of the god Krishna, while the gopis symbolize Radha’s manifestations, acting as extensions of her power and divine confidants (sakhis). Urban devis liken themselves to Radha through their radical devotion to Krishna, longing to meet their divine beloved while supporting other devotee women within the movement as Radha would support the gopis, her friends, who also yearn for Krishna.

In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Krishna personifies the ultimate man; all ISKCON devotees, both men and women, stand as females, metaphorically and literally, before the supreme being Krishna. Hence, devotees relate to Krishna by adopting the feminine persona of Radha, Krishna’s favorite gopi, or the other eight gopis, yielding entirely to Krishna’s love. Although emphasizing non-dualism in his theology, Ramakrishna experimented with different devotional styles and is said to have incorporated Vaishnava bhakti into his rituals, becoming Radha to experience different divine moods (bhava) and ecstatic states (mahabhava) known only via communion with a deity (McDaniel 1989). Unlike divine union, which erodes subjectivity and, through it, the concepts of self and other, communion allows such dualities to remain in the encounter, as God’s divine nature is revealed through existential difference.

Thus, ISKCON glorifies Radha and the sakhis because of their feminine difference. That is, from ISKCON’s heteronormative perspective, being a woman allows Radha and the gopis to relate to Krishna intimately as a wife relates to her husband or a lover to her beloved. While Gaudiya Vaishnavism recognizes five different devotional “moods” for approaching Krishna, it elevates the mood of romantic love as the “sweetest” (madhurya) and most pleasurable of them all.22 By virtue of their femininity, the (non-maternal) women in Krishna’s life obtain the supreme privilege of worshipping Krishna through conjugal love, known as madhurya bhava.

In Hindu society, where being a woman can be challenging, ISKCON sees it as a boon. Women can grow close to Krishna in a manner that men cannot unless they become women. Thus, the pativrata role affords devotee women the highest status in their social group. By being devoted wives and mothers, ISKCON women honor Krishna by fulfilling their domestic duties (stridharma), meeting the god in daily life. As Robison shows, everyday life (i.e., the vernacular) holds the potential for revealing Krishna’s power and presence, majesty and royalty, beauty and joy. Vaishnava Hinduism teaches that the world created and sustained by Krishna represents the god’s divine lila or “play”. This concept has a double connotation: the god made the world as a form of play, and he plays within the world he made. Krishna, then, is an immanent god, existing within the world while standing outside its material properties related to death and rebirth. In this view, the entire manifest creation is holy, as Krishna is everywhere enjoying the “fruits” of his lila with Radha and the gopis. This holiness extends to gender roles as well, which signify not only religiously sanctioned social duties to be followed, but also devotional opportunities through which, by embodying Radha’s or the gopis’ persona, women “play” with Krishna. In this way, devotee women cultivate vernacular holiness that empowers them as siksha gurus.

For the bhakti influencers Nitaisevini Mataji, Radharani, and Sita Subramaniam, being pativratas outweighs any desire to be men’s equals, though some siksha gurus, such as Rukmini Walker, advocate for equality, which would render ISKCON women able to obtain the status of diksha guru. On the contrary, equality is a moot point for the devotee women of Mumbai Chowpatty because everyone is subordinate to Krishna. While women and men share equal footing in their relationship, they inhabit different but complementary roles based on their gender differences. Hence, devotee women meet Krishna not by pursuing men’s roles (i.e., doing what men typically do), but by excelling in those roles for which, according to Vaishnava theology, they are designed. Urban devis enlarge the pativrata ideal by embodying a vernacular holiness that straddles the private and public spheres. They show that virtuous womanhood engages all aspects of Krishna’s lila and includes influential roles such as social media bhakta, counselor, friend, and teacher by which to glorify Krishna and achieve the glory of feminine respectability.

Another strategy the influencers use to assert feminine virtue and, through it, affirm their holiness concerns the sanctification of motherhood. This theme surfaces across the case studies and is especially evident in their religious titles, such as Mataji (“holy mother”) and Guru Ma (“mother guru”). Like many religions, Hinduism affords mothers the highest status, viewing motherhood as a socio-biological role and a sacred duty. Hindu dharma texts, such as the Manusmriti, sanctify motherhood by portraying mothers as humanity’s first teachers (guru). Here, mothers occupy a status higher than the father and, sometimes, the spiritual guru because they bring life into the world, which advances civilization, and instill moral values and lessons in their children, contributing to character formation. From a Hindu standpoint, mothers represent the most significant influence in a person’s life, exemplifying moral excellence and, thus, embodying maternal holiness and authority on account of the bio-moral potency associated with their role. As Arunjana Das shows, Hindu sects such as the Mayamaras of Assam characterize this holiness as “mahima”, translated as “supremacy”, “divine agency”, and “mysterious glory”.

Guru Ma Ajali Ai, the mother of the Mayamara’s founder guru, Shankardeva, was revered by the community and regarded as emanating mahima that nurtured, disciplined, and shielded devotees from persecution by the Ahom monarchy. When the lineage gurus were killed, the Mayamaras looked to Ajali Ai and, over time, other mothers of the sect’s gurus for succor, safety, and sustenance. Das writes, “Ajali Ai as Guru Ma offered a sanctum sanctorum and sanctuary for the community through the turbulence of samsara” (p. 11). Hence, the mothers of the gurus, such as Ajali Ai, became the spiritual leaders of the lineage when there were no gurus. Maternal holiness, which manifests as mahima, qualifies women within the community for leadership. Guru mothers show that their maternal authority, while rooted in an essentialized view of gender, should not be restricted to biology. Their example suggests women’s capacity to be influential outside the patriarchal family, widening the scope of respectable femininity to encompass women’s spiritual leadership as holy mothers who see the world as their family.

Other influencers resort to “strategic essentialism” in their sanctification of motherhood, leveraging maternal authority within a patriarchal society by emphasizing women’s moral superiority to advance their spiritual leadership. Celibate influencers such as the Hindutva sadhvis and the Shankaracharyas employ this strategy to motivate devotees and challenge the status quo. While it may seem otherwise, celibacy intensifies rather than confutes their spiritual motherhood. In Hindu culture, celibacy represents a respected austerity and form of penance that purifies people of moral impurities and raises their moral capital. It is a required practice in many ascetic traditions, distinguishing “real” sadhus from “fake” ones (DeNapoli 2014). The holy women’s celibate status suggests their realization of worldly detachment, revealing the purity of their character and intentions. Thus, the combination of celibacy and spiritual motherhood doubles the potency of their holiness, heightening their maternal authority as spiritual leaders.

Mataji Trikal Bhavanta deploys strategic essentialism in statements such as, “If women can give birth to Shankaracharyas, they can become Shankaracharyas”. She and Swamini invoke women’s superior morality based on gender essentialism, correlating women’s motherhood with Durga’s divine motherhood to argue that women make better leaders than men because of their biology. Their emphasis on women’s material connection to the goddess (i.e., biological femaleness links women to the goddess) reverses monastic gender hierarchies to render equality while positioning their female orders within goddess lineages that promote women’s headship. At the same time, their strategic essentialism exposes the hypocrisy of the mainstream tradition that glorifies motherhood (a Shankaracharya said that women must have ten children to become released from female rebirth) but denies women’s maternal authority as monastic leaders.

Matua Matri Sena women similarly deploy this strategy in their leadership. Through it, they unveil the pretense of community leaders who, despite promoting an ideology of gender egalitarianism, remain oblivious to the obstacles Matua women encounter in exercising greater authority. Their label “Matri Sena”, translated literally as “Army of Mothers”, is significant. It reveals the underlying cultural logic that compels their religious activism in the public sphere: Being a mother accords women the moral upper hand to upbraid unfair and harmful socio-political systems and alter them. Thus, while the strategic essentialism of the Hindutva Sadhvis, Shankaracharyas, and Matua women reinforces patriarchal ideals, these influencers reimagine virtuous womanhood to highlight that “mothers know best”. Their maternal authority illuminates an alternative source of holiness that outranks and acts as a corrective to traditional authority.

Finally, nothing attests more to holy women’s feminine virtue than the communities that stand by them. Thus, community support illustrates a third strategy by which holy women amplify their influencer status in Hindu culture. Community support lends holy women an aura of authenticity and credibility, which, as we said earlier, identify the two most salient attributes qualifying a person as an influencer. Through community support, holy women are perceived as the “real deal”, blunting lingering suspicions of their moral character. It encourages them to engage communities through different seva-oriented activities, satisfying the women to serve the public good and, perhaps, neutralizing their discomfort with the attention of being an influencer. Thus, holy women who step out as religious influencers do so using their community’s support.

For example, community support motivated Mataji and Swamini to declare the Shankaracharya status in 2008 and 2018. This support comes in different forms (i.e., financial, material, and emotional), allowing them to mobilize armies of holy women and confront the second-class status imposed on women within monastic society. Archanapuri Ma obtained influencer status through the support of her guru, Satyananda. He confronted disciples who doubted her abilities and spread rumors about her integrity because they were dissatisfied with the amount of attention the guru gave her. Satyananda defended Archanapuri Ma by enlisting the help of experts who conducted scientific experiments that confirmed her spiritual gifts, such as ekatmika bhava (“fusion with the guru”). Archanapuri Ma became the head of their ashram because Satyananda influenced the community. As McDaniel points out, Archanapuri Ma led women and men, which is unusual in Bengal. She inspires devotees through her extensive involvement in charitable works, such as building dwellings for people without housing, orphanages and schools for children, and a college, enhancing community support of her status.

Aurobindo and Dilip Roy supported Indira Devi by validating her spiritual experiences during which she encountered Mira Bai. As female mentors were scarce, Indira Devi, who lost her mother at a young age, relied on Mira Bai’s encouragement, which came through mystical visions and helped the “reluctant guru” move “through a world that was both spiritually and socially dominated by men” (Martin, p. 10). Indira’s experience with Mira Bai resonates with Parvati Soren’s in that the goddess stepped forward to assist this tribal holy woman when community support was not forthcoming. Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s chief disciple, looked after Sarada Devi and encouraged her to play an active role in the community originally centered around her husband by initiating disciples after Ramakrishna’s death. Ironically, while the community support of powerful monastic men sanctioned Sarada Devi’s status as a diksha guru, this authority does not currently extend to female monastic leaders within the tradition.

Thus, community and divine support can positively impact holy women’s lives. However, it is not always favorable and can negatively affect perceptions of their virtue and influencer status. Recall the queens from Johansen Hurwitt’s article. On the one hand, community support reinforced Rani Rasmani’s status as a “good” queen in colonial Bengal, which persists today. On the other hand, community antagonism led to Phuleshwari Devi’s defamation as the “bad” queen. Phuleshwari’s biographers do not have the last word. Her portrayal is undergoing revision within contemporary Assam, foregrounding interpretive issues around representation and intercultural translation in the study of women and religion, a topic to which we now turn.

3. How Does the “Influencer” Category Advance the Study of Women and Religion?

As academic interpreters of the religious influencers in this volume, we define and shape the course (and field) of knowledge production in studying women and religion. We exercise influence as credentialed scholars through the interpretive authority of our representations. Hence, we aim to inform and enhance others’ perceptions and understandings of holy women and their influence in Hindu cultures in ways that are constructive and empathetic, yet critical (i.e., impartial) and consequential. Thus, we hold a form of positional power that we do not take lightly. Let us now reflect on the influencer concept as an analytical category by asking: What has the use of the label by the volume’s contributors accomplished for religious studies?

By applying the influencer label, this volume has brought to light the importance of centering what we call the “Big Six” questions of “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, and “how”, in representing influential holy women in Hindu cultures. It has shown that “who” constructs knowledge concerning holy women, which is as significant as “what” becomes known about them. (Inter)cultural translations are not created in a vacuum. They are (re)produced by scholars, devotees, insiders, and outsiders who hold diverse and divergent interpretive priorities and inhabit different subjectivities congruent with the particularity of their human embodiments.

Posing the Big Six questions—not simply post facto but throughout the analytical process—has rendered greater self-awareness of what scholars bring to their representations. It has shifted the interpretive gaze by which we “make the strange familiar”, as religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith said, back onto ourselves to “make the familiar strange”. Religious communities are also productively involved in critical self-reflection. As Johansen Hurwitt shows, modern Assamese critics are re-examining Phuleshwari Devi’s representation as a “bad” queen, rewriting her narrative to emphasize feminist interpretations of this royal influencer.

Furthermore, cultivating self-awareness has stimulated greater accountability from the authors for the intercultural translations we produce for others via our scholarship. It has challenged us to confront the epistemological frameworks we take for granted or assume are culturally normative. In this volume, we have intentionally and critically reflected on the question, “How do we know what we know about holy women?” This was intended to make sense of the academic and other influences orienting how we conceive and translate holy women’s worlds to our readers, colleagues, students, and others.

Thus, this volume has demonstrated that approaching the study of holy women in Hindu society through the influencer category renders them interpretive subjects of religious culture and not merely cultural artifacts rendered intelligible by religious studies observers. The authors have made explicit that holy women have been regarded as interpretive objects or marginal to the tradition. Treating them as cultural artifacts, biographers, devotees, and academics has translated holy women through the familiar lens of implicit patriarchal biases to construct their lives and legacies for mass consumption. Thus, intercultural translators have interpreted holy women in their image (the observer’s image) rather than the women’s images of themselves.

As Pechilis shows with the bhakti poet-saints, male biographers inflected gender into the women’s ideas and teachings, even when the poets themselves, such as Karaikkal Ammaiyar, indicated the irrelevance of gender categories in their self-representations. As Beldio makes explicit, the scholarly and hagiographical representations of Mirra Alfassa have repeatedly undercut and dismissed her authority and impact on Integral Yoga, which she and Aurobindo created and sustained together and which she led long after his death. Yet, she is remembered as peripheral rather than integral (pun intended) in the literature about her. Especially frustrating is that Mirra Alfassa produced a magisterial amount of work about her visionary experiences and shared her mystical insights about human flourishing, suggesting her awareness of the importance of her leadership in her community. Mirra Alfassa, like the poet-saints, constructed herself as an interpretive subject through her writing. But she is not seen as such.

Alternatively, let us take Sarada Devi’s example. As Long elucidates, devotees and academics recognize her more as Ramakrishna’s wife than as a lineage guru and founder. This representation strikes us as odd, considering that Sarada Devi had more disciples than Ramakrishna. But here is the irony: Long’s seeing Sarada Devi’s life through the influencer category helped him draw out the novel elements of her leadership. By considering her an influencer, Long could more clearly see the assumptions inherent in conventional approaches to studying women and religion.

Therefore, we must ask why we continue to accept and reinforce dominant constructions of women in Hindu culture when, as the influencers in this volume suggest, women interpret themselves through different epistemic categories. Similarly, if holy women such as Mirra Alfassa imagine themselves as awakened emanations of a sexless supreme power, why do we label them subordinate to a male guru? Representations that diminish the impact and influence of holy women reveal the cultural blind spots embedded in our interpretive lenses and framings while further peripheralizing women’s views and roles.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that women’s self-representations are readily self-evident, especially in data that are historically removed by centuries or millennia. Pechilis’s and Johansen Hurwitt’s essays underscore this point well, and we need not rehash it here. Instead, we make two observations based on the case studies: First, the conventional categories and the epistemologies they purport may not be serving religious studies, as scholars tend to assume. We can exercise epistemic humility by asking how our disciplinary approaches perpetuate women’s marginalization and mute their interpretive authority. Second, we must think more critically about the “Big Six” questions in discursive constructions of women and religion. To do so would balance the asymmetrical power dynamics between translators and “translated women.”

For the volume’s authors, representing holy women as religious influencers has clarified their role and agency as, to use the commercial meaning, “content creators” of Hindu culture. It has shown that they struggle with greater visibility of their roles while promoting opportunities for women’s representation in male-dominated religious spheres. Use of the category has yielded more accurate and nuanced intercultural translations, revealing the alternative theologies, philosophies, narratives, and sources of holiness to describe and explain how holy women know what they know in constructing and actualizing meaningful worlds.

As this volume has indicated, female religious influencers reveal paramount socio-cultural shifts and transformations in Hindu society. We can extend this observation across genders and religious cultures. In changing times, societies confront the breakdown of traditional ideals and the creation of new ideals. Religious and secular influencers emerge during these critical temporal junctures, clarifying the role of change while offering hope for brighter futures. Societal change motivates influencers to step forward and point the way to wholeness, happiness, and the good life. Influencers may also give the gift of freedom from difficult situations, giving a way out, like the Shankaracharyas and Matri Sena do for abused women and migrants in India. Influencers’ confidence and vulnerability move people deeply, showing what it means to be authentically human; their fearlessness in the face of life’s precarity inspires others to look to them for answers. As religious influencers, holy women take on parental roles and relationships with those who follow them, guiding and teaching but also disciplining their spiritual “families”.

There is still more to learn and understand about female religious influencers. Possible avenues for future research could explore the affective and psycho-linguistic elements involved in the religio-social production of influencers. These approaches would be generative for religious studies, which still privilege textual and philological models over vernacular realities and lived practice. Using the insights proposed by the volume, scholars could explore what happens to influencers and their followers when they have transformative—and, yes, mystical—experiences on- and offline and approach life from a new axis of being. We leave this vital work to others, anticipating promising interdisciplinary, intercultural translations that bring women’s interpretive authority to the center of their analyses rather than eclipse their perspectives.

Representational sidelining is neither unique to the holy women in this volume nor reflects a hermeneutical issue of the historical past. It persists in scholarly and popular literature despite the paradigm shifts accomplished by transnational and decolonizing feminist scholarship, critical race and ethnic studies, and social justice-centered education. These fields offer fresh and alternative epistemologies, clarifying the personal and professional orientations informing interpretive practices. However, they have repeatedly been criticized by conventional disciplines dominated by white, upper-class, heterosexual men for producing biased scholarship.

This volume has shown that no representation is exempt from bias. Responsible intercultural translation requires excavating biases to produce more balanced and, ideally, impartial scholarship. Culturally specific androcentric assumptions are buried deep in the discourse about religion and women, holy or otherwise. To take our disciplines and knowledge further, we must reflect critically on the lenses we use—sometimes implicitly—and why we use them to translate women’s worlds. Doing so means approaching our interpretive scaffoldings as strange and holy women’s as normative. We hope the essays here have moved religious studies closer in this direction.