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 establish a more “respectable” primary field of research and let this be his or her “exotic” sideline. But one could argue that for many of the authors in Tracy Pintchman's edited volume, Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, the study of women and religion in India is their primary area of expertise. One sees on every page evidence of the authors' confidence in their analyses, which are sophisticated, nuanced, and developed in conversation with richly detailed ethnographic and historical data. Having learned well the lessons of feminist scholarship over the last several decades, the authors attend carefully to the myriad ways in which women exercise agency through religious rituals, changing those rituals (the messages they encode, the relationships they structure) and also changing women's lives beyond the ritual arena.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Engaging Domesticity,” consists of five chapters that draw on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's ritual practices that “expand the boundaries of normative domesticity” (p. 8). The five chapters of the second part, “Beyond Domesticity,” examine the involvement of women in mostly nondomestic rituals, as donors to temples, renunciants, ritual specialists, and professional dancers. One of the volume's central ambitions is to critically examine the by now taken for granted association of women's religiosity with the domestic sphere. “Domesticity” can be approached in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is a broadly spatial term, referring to a home or domicile, the practices that take place there, and the kin relationships that both structure and are structured by the home (p. 6). On the other hand, following Susan Sered, it is an orientation that people bring to religion, which stresses the personal and the particular such that “the ultimate concerns of life, suffering and death” are brought down to the level of the well-loved people in one's life (p. 109). In both understandings of the term, a focus on domestic religion has made visible aspects of religion outside formal, public, and male-dominated realms and thus has fostered closer investigation into women's religiosity. Now the pendulum has shifted, and Pintchman wants to show that Hindu women's religiosity is not only about domestic matters (e.g., extending the life of one's husband's life or ensuring the health of one's children), but also about transcendent concerns (salvation, liberation from samsara). Moreover, even when women's rituals are domestic rituals, they do not always affirm the roles and expectations normatively attributed to women. Pintchman's own excellent contribution, on the ritual friendships formed between women in Benares, provides compelling support for this argument by showing how the sakhi bonds that women establish through a ritual exchange of gifts and food endure over time and space, even as female friends marry, have children, and perhaps move to distant towns. Though modeled in many ways on traditional marriage (e.g., by commencing with oaths taken before God and entailing lifelong commitment), the sakhi relationship provides women with an alternative space of intimacy beyond it: Sakhi pairs bound through ritual friendship choose each other freely and are equals, rather than being an unequal male–female pair joined through an arranged marriage.

One of the collection's strongest features is its breadth. The immense diversity of the Hindu tradition is well represented here (which itself is no mean feat), with, for example, Vasudha Narayanan's highly creative analysis of Brahmin women's involvement in the transformation of dasi attam into Bharata Natyam directly alongside June McDaniels's absorbing discussion of the range of possible roles for women in Bengali tantra. This feature will make this book especially useful in the classroom, as these essays could be provocatively combined with readings from classical Hindu scriptures (what a contrast with The Laws of Manu in chapter 9!).

Yet, with few exceptions, the women described in this book use ritual to resist, sidestep, seek shelter from, appropriate for their own uses, complicate, or subvert the conservative elements of patriarchal Hinduism. Given their emphasis on women's agency and resistance against the confining embrace of patriarchy, the authors do not much explore the fulfillment that many Hindu women find in submission to normative domesticity, as Saba Mahmood has done for Muslim women in the Islamist revival in Egypt. Thus, in my view, the one weakness in this otherwise outstanding volume is, ironically, its commitment to a variety of feminist scholarship that does not question the binding together of the intellectual project of feminism (to understand the gendered effects of power) with its progressive politics. Perhaps if we did so, we might be better able to enrich not only our understanding of power but also our politics.