Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women?s participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India?s Sufi shrines and saints by setting her observations against the historical backdrop of colonist-era discourses by British civil servants. Orientalist scholars, and Muslim reformists and the assumptive portrayals of women?s activities in the milieu of Sufi orders and shrines inherent in these accounts. These early narratives, Pemberton holds, are driven by social, economic, intellectual, and political undercurrents of self-interest that shaped Western understanding of Indian Muslims and, in particular, of women?s participation in the institutions of Sufism -