'Leave everything and sing to God': The performance of devotional asceticism by female sadhus of Rajasthan

This dissertation is an ethnographic performative study of female asceticism in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. It offers a new model of Hindu asceticism and renunciation through examination and analysis of what I refer to as female sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation," their song, story (including life story), and textual practices. These practices create and express a form of asceticism that has been underrepresented in religious studies on asceticism in South Asia. One of the purposes of this dissertation is to bring this level of practice and experience---what I have called "devotional asceticism"---to the study of asceticism and to show that devotion and asceticism are neither distinct nor contradictory religious paths for the female sadhus of Rajasthan, but rather are experienced as the same path/phenomenon by these sadhus. Since the Rajasthani female sadhus I worked with think of singing, storytelling, and textual recitation as a form of asceticism, it is important for scholars of religion to expand the boundaries of "what counts" in categorizations of asceticism and to include these expressions of devotional performance. These performances, too, constitute types of religious sources with which to study South Asian traditions, more broadly, and South Asian asceticism(s) in particular. Through performance, narrative, and textual analysis of the female sadhus' rhetorical practices, this dissertation highlights the specificity of female asceticism in Rajasthan; it also illuminates the complex and multiple ways renunciant devotional practice provides a strategic and a constructive means by which female ascetics push beyond dominant, textual representations of asceticism, and thus, distinguish their form of asceticism from the authoritative Bramanical model. Through performance of their practices, the Rajasthani female sadhus model their lives on the devotional traditions of north Indian poet-saints (sants) in the construction of ascetic identity and practice as well as exert agency and negotiate authority as female ascetics in what is often perceived to be a male-dominated tradition of renunciation. In its use of the lens of devotional performance, this dissertation shifts the representation of whose voices are heard in the construction of asceticism as a category that carries power and authority in South Asian religions.