Introduction: Hindu female Gurus in Historical & Philosophical Context: Karen Pechilis :- With thousands of followers, leadership of translocal organizations, & power that is constituted by both authority & spirituality, Hindu female gurus have a noticeable & meaningful presence in religious life today. For many people, the topic of Hindu female gurus is intrinsically interesting especially as it relates to women’s religious leadership, globalization, spirituality, & cultural contact between India & the West. For these same reasons, the topic is also of interest to scholars, who have recently begun to publish detailed analyses of Hindu female gurus, especially from the twentieth century. In this volume, all of the contributors are specialists in the study of Hinduism who have been studying Hindu female gurus for several years. The focus of the volume is on one category of leadership within Hinduism, and a diversity of women in this leadership role is represented. These factors distinguish the approach of this volume from recent books on women in new religions, and so on- and modes of women participation in terms are covered. This volume is also distinguish from book-length studies of a single female guru. In addition, the academically critical stance of the articles sets this volume apart from studies that profile female in an adulatory tone. The public visibility of current Hindu female gurus, through web site, world tours, ashrams and devotional groups across the globe, and the devotional publications and videos is a significant development in a tradition that historically defined the public role of gurus as exclusive to men. There is historical evidence of women gurus in the esoteric traditions of tantra, and there are tradional stories of women who acted as gurus to their husbands, but these examples locate women’s guruhood in private domains.women have held public religious positions in Hindu tradition: women saints are well represented in scholarly studies,and recent have illuminated female practitioners of vedic rituals, philosophers, and religious reformers. The variety of roles for women in Hindu tradition is influential in the emergence of women as gurus. In terms of their status as public gurus, the female gurus of today are participating in a very established category of Hindu religious leader; however, their assumption of this leadership role also stands in contrast to that same established category. As gurus,they complicate the facile equivalence between women and tradition promoted by some nationalists and fundamentalists of yesterday and today. Katheryn Hansen identifies and refutes this equivalence: “ ‘traditional’ in reference to women is widely employed to translate ‘normative’. It is my aim to show that non-normative as well as normative models of gendered conduct have ‘traditionas.’…These paradigms are continuously being redefined as the representation of women is contested anew in each historical period.” The title of this volume, The graceful guru, signals the participation of women in the modalities of continuity and change in Hindu tradition. “grace” has both aesthetic and theological connotations. Aesthetically, it is feminized term that is used to evaluate a woman’s perceived embodiment of, or distance form, an ideal standard of beauty. This feminization of the term is perhapslinked to the greek mythology of the Three Graces; the Greek term is charis,and it is also notable that a primary mode of women’s religious leadership in history is through charismatic, or noninstitutional, avenues. Theologically, the term carries the connotation that one embodies the favor of the divine. This Volume explores how Hindu female gurus respond to social expectations of femininity and how they are understood to embody the divine; how these two modes intersect in the personae of the gurus; and how their leadership is constituted by the negotiation of the two in distinctive ways. “Gurus” is a category of religious leadership in many traditions of Indian origin, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. In Hindu tradition, there are several characteristics that preeminently define a guru. The first is that a guru is understood to experience the real continuously. Most often, the real is defined as Brahman, which, among many possible meanings, denotes the subtle, sacred essence that pervades the universe. Hindu philosophical tradition tends to characterize ordinary consciouseness as pervaded by duality; in contrast, the experience of Brahman is a pure, unmediated unity. The experience of the real is expressed in diverse ways in biographical stories of gurus, although it is always represented as contrasting with ordinary experience. For example, the contemporary female guru Anandi ma is said to have experienced such a high concentration of energy that “she wasn’t functional at all on our level, so [her guru] had to work with her, bringing down the energy constantly so that gradually it would be more in her control.” As a young woman, the internationally famous female guru Anandamayi ma, then known as Nirmala, was able to experience various modes of consciousness from her grounding in the experience of the real, which she described as follows; “Who I am I have always been, even from my infancy. . . . Nevertheless, different stages of sadhana [spiritual practice] manifested through this body.