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The Homeless Ones
Acarya, out of forty-four sadhvis, only one had not been married and three received dikṣa with their husbands.46
The second set of figures is contained in the oldest of the biographies relating to the sadhvis of our own day. It concerns a Kharataragaccha sadhvi, Sadhvi Punya, an intrepid pioneer in an age and social background characterised by obscurantism.47 She lived from 1858 to 1916. From a perusal of this life one can grasp the social conditions prevalent in that period and all the difficulties that she and her disciples had to surmount. The table of statistics resembles a genealogical tree, covering the years 1870 to 1960, where Sadhvi Punya is, as it were, the trunk of the tree and the disciples its numerous branches. Of each sadhvi the name taken at the time of her dikṣā is given, the name before dikṣā, the name of her father, the name of her husband, if any, her status before dikṣā (girl, widow, married), place and date of birth, place and date of dikṣā, the name of her guruni and whether the said sädhvi is alive or deceased (in which case the location of her Great Departure is also supplied).
439
From all this information one gleans the following facts:
- All these young sadhvis belonged, or belong, for some are still alive, to families of Rajasthāna, even if one or another was born elsewhere.
Out of 193 sädhvis recorded, 140 were young widows, 29 unmarried girls, 17 left their husbands to join the sadhvis. In the case of 7, their status before dikṣā proved unverifiable.
The average age of the majority, at the time of dikṣa, was between eighteen and twenty-five years. A small number were between twelve and eighteen years or, in the case of others, between twenty-five and fifty years.
Only from 1952 onwards, and thus fairly recently, does one note that there is a majority of unmarried girls and very few widows and one young woman who broke the marriage-bond. The age of the girls
46 Cf. Muni Navaratnamala, op. cit., cf. P 247 ff.
47 P 575 ff.
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