An increasingly popular genre of scholarly publication, the edited volume serves two primary functions: first, advancing knowledge by giving authors a venue for selections from their works in progress, and second, making that cutting-edge scholarship accessible to a broad audience. Over the past thirty years, the study of women and religion in India has been enriched by a plethora of such volumes: from Susan Wadley's groundbreaking collection The Powers of Tamil Women (Syracuse, N.Y.: Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 1980) and Julia Leslie's Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991) to Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid's Recasting Women: Essays on Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), to name just a few. Indeed, the abundance of options in this subfield testifies to its health and growing respectability. Years ago, a graduate student interested in the study of women and Hinduism might be advised to...

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