A new-age guru has been establishing a monastic order for women, encouraging them to wear simple clothes, shave their heads, and break all ties with their families, as they seek union with the divine through the guru. This practice has ancient roots, as men and women who wished to renounce the world were often encouraged to shave their heads or even pluck out their hair, as in Jainism, where hair was seen as something erotic; this was a way of desexualising them.

However, the shaven head of a woman has different meanings in the Hindu context. In many elite families, a widow’s head was shaved to signal to the world that she was not available to any man. This was the opposite of the bindi and the sindoor worn in the parting of the hair to celebrate the fertility of the married woman. This was the vidhava (husband dead) and sadhava (husband alive) divide. The courtesan and the devadasi was always sadhava as her husband was god, who was immortal. The nun and the courtesan both approached the divine differently. The latter approach did not appeal to puritanical Indian men who erased her history from Indian textbooks. The former is being resurrected by New Age babas with gumption.