Accepted Panels

While this overture towards the formation and acceptance of a Kinnar Akhara was presented by Laxmi in the contemporary vocabulary of gender-equality, it nevertheless posited a challenge to the historical and dominant practice of asceticism in which gender was not necessarily a determinative factor for either ordination/advancement within monastic economies. Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad has therefore sought to locate their refusal to identify a fourteenth Kinnar Akhara within this historical context, thereby inviting hijras/kinnars— like women— to join any of the existing thirteen akharas. Accounts obtained from contemporary ascetics suggest that a majority of them view asceticism as a largely male obligation and enterprise, thereby pushing women (and possibly third-gendered figures) to the margins of the monastic economy. This,  can be helmed to the assimilation of a restricted colonial view of gender and gender-roles that developed with the formation of the modern nation-state of India, and to the restricted role of monasteries in influencing and/or regulating contemporary political economy of India. This paper therefore locates itself within these tensions invoked by attempts to re-gender the contemporary monastic economy and seeks to explore the strains and trajectories generated within the process of the formation of the Kinnar Akhara, and finally, leading to its assimilation with the extant Juna Akhara in 2019.