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It is clear reading the poetry of 18th c. devotional poet Vengamamba that she imagined herself as a kind of ascetic. Not only do her compositions reflect a depth of philosophical and yogic training, but she identifies herself as a poet and scholar, a friend of Vishnu. Most Telugu audiences, however, do not know Vengamamba through her textual compositions. They know her through oral life histories and hagiographical texts and films, which present her as a woman who refused marriage and traditional gender roles on the grounds that she was already married to Vishnu. This paper will examine this gap in the nature of the (male hagiographers’) fashioning and self-fashioning of Vengamamba. By contextualizing hagiographical narratives within the historical and cultural moment of the 19th c. this paper argues that the hagiographers and Vengamamba operate on very differing definitions of female asceticism and imagine very contrasting visions of Telugu womanhood.