Female Ascetics in Hinduism

Foreword

Lynn Shirley Teskey Denton was born on January 7 1949 in Vernon, British Columbia, and grew up in Ontario on a farm in Prince Edward County, the eldest of seven children. She completed a BA in Religious Studies (1972) and an MA in Anthropology (1973) at McMaster University. At the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, she was awarded a BLitt (1974) and an MLitt (1975), and completed all requirements for a DPhil except the dissertation . Between 1976 and 1981 she spent over two years in India, mainly in Benares, conducting fieldwork on female ascetics. During this time she also taught several sessions at McMaster University. She was Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, Concordia University, from 1984 to 1989, when she resigned for reasons of health. She married Frank Denton in 1986 and in 1990 gave birth to Emily Lynn Denton. After many years of struggling with ill health, she died of leukemia in 1995. During her life she published only one article, (Denton 1991). After her death Frank Denton and a number of scholars who knew her work wanted to see as much of it published as could be salvaged from the papers she left. It has taken an unfortunately long time to see this project through to fruition. In late 1997 the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago kindly agreed to provide funds to proceed with the task. Sandra K. Mulholland did most of the typing, working from computer disks, manuscripts, and typescripts. She was able to use her own fieldwork knowledge of Nåth ascetics in North India, and of the Hindi language , to do so. The format of the book is my responsibility. It was the understandable feeling at State University of New York Press Foreword vii viii Foreword that the remaining materials contained too much overlap to be made immediately into a publishable book, and so I have had to do more rewriting than was foreseen or wanted. I have tried to represent Lynn’s ideas as faithfully as I am able. Nothing in this book is, intentionally, my own. Since we cannot know what the final drafts of Lynn’s work would have looked like, we cannot know whether she would have approved of their being published in this form. There is, however, a clear consistency in a number of themes running through this book which suggests that the main ideas are presented here in something like the way she might have wanted them. The Introduction, chapter 1, and much of chapter 2 seem to have been in fairly final form for presentation as the DPhil thesis: they were revised in 1992. Chapters 2 and 3 combine a computer disk version dated 1987 with a handwritten revision of 1992. Chapter 4 seems much the same as chapter 4 of the thesis was intended to be; this version was prepared as a separate typewritten paper for a conference on “Ascetics and Asceticism in India” at the Department of Religion, University of Florida, in 1988. Chapter 5 was probably given in Oxford in 1987, although this is not certain. The appendix to this chapter is taken from a paper delivered in 1987 to the Department of Religion, Concordia University. Chapter 6 was also delivered to that department, in 1984. What is missing is much of the empirical data (some of which exists in manuscript and/or typescript form, but which is not comprehensible to anyone who did not gather it), and the life histories of individual female ascetics to which the book refers, but which Lynn was not granted the time to write. It is also to be regretted that the large number of slides she took, the importance of which is discussed in the Introduction, has proved impossible to reproduce here. Meena Khandelwal has generously compiled an annotated bibliography of relevant work that has appeared since Lynn’s illness and death. Given the nature of Lynn’s work as she left it, there is perforce a certain amount of repetition across the chapters of this book. But given the originality of her research, its extraordinary sense of nuance and attention to detail, it is useful to be reminded now and again of the main outlines of her analytical model. Although the fieldwork was done some twenty years ago, aside from Meena Khandelwal’s recent (2003) book, there is still nothing comparable to Lynn’s work in the empirical study of female ascetics in Hinduism , nor indeed in the...