A distinctive aspect of Hindu devotion is the veneration of a human guru, who is not only an exemplar and a teacher, but is often worshipped as an embodiment of the divine. In the past these gurus have almost always been men. Today, however, female gurus are a noticeable presence, especially in the United States. This collection of nine all new essays looks at the phenomenon of the female guru both in its original Indian context, where Hindu women leaders have been unusual but not unknown, and as it has evolved on the American scene. Each chapter is devoted to a particular female guru, ranging from the fifth-century Tamil saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar to Gurumayi, who today presides over the worldwide movement of Siddha Yoga, headquartered in the Catskill resort town of South Fallsburg, New York. The biographies of these special women are both fascinating in their own right and shed important new light on issues of gender and religious authority.

The Gaudiya Vaisnava movement is one of the most vibrant religious groups in all of South Asia. Unlike most devotional communities that flourished in 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Bengal, however, the group had no formal founder. Today its devotees are uniform in their devotion to the historical figure of Krishna Caitanya (1486-1533), whom they believe to be not just Krishna incarnate, but Radha and Krishna fused into a single androgynous form. But Caitanya neither founded the community that coalesced around him nor named a successor. Tony Stewart seeks to discover how, with no central leadership, no institutional authority, and no geographic center, a religious community nevertheless comes to successfully define itself, fix its canon and flourish. He finds the answer in the brilliant hagiographical exercise in Sanskrit and Bengali titled the Caitanya Caritamrita (CC) of Krishnadasa Kaviraja. Written about 75 years after Caitanya's passing, the CC became the proof text of the community. The reason it was so powerful, says Stewart, lies in its deployment of a series of sophisticated rhetorical strategies to persuade its readers without appearing to do so, seeming to defer the arrogated authority to Caitanya himself. Although the CC started as a hagiography like any other, an index to what was proper and good in ritual and belief, it became a sign pointing the way to salvation, and then an icon, a metonym of the tradition itself, so much so that manuscripts dating from the earliest times can now be found physically worshiped on altars in temples in Bengal.