Women Saints in Gaudiya Vaishnavism (Part II)
Sorry, the internal links for footnotes don't work. III. Women saints in the modern era The primary source of information for women saints of the modern period is O.B.L. Kapoor's Hindi Braj ke bhakta (46) Altogether, there are only twelve woman saints described in Braj ke bhakta , of which only five can be considered Gaudiyas. Though these women are respected for their saintliness, only one (Sadhu Ma) is a leader in the sense of being an initiating guru. It is no coincidence that she was born into one of the great Gaudiya initiating families, that of Advaita Acharya. Otherwise, they were all also born in well-to-do families. Of the three who were Bengali, all were Brahmins. All twelve women whose biographies appear in Kapoor's book are renunciates, showing perhaps more the bias of what that author expected a "saint” to be like, and are thus not necessarily representative of true saintliness. Taken as a whole, the women of Braj ke bhakta show, as might be...