Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (review)

Warrior Ascetics provides a fascinating study of the military labour market of Northern India from 1500 to 1800 based on diverse published and unpublished sources found in libraries and archives in India and the United Kingdom, complemented by ethnohistorical fieldwork in Bundelkhand. This study extends upon and should be read in conjunction with other efforts at plotting the shifting contours of India's military cultures such as those written by Dirk Kolff, Seema Alavi, and Jos Gommans. But what sets this work apart from the others is that it takes as its point of departure the important role played by armed ascetics, known variously to contemporaries as gosains, nagas, yogis, fakirs, or sanyasis. Warrior ascetics figure prominently both in western accounts of Indian society as well as in contemporary religious-nationalist discourses, for in both cases, their outward appearance (often naked, sometimes smeared in ashes, with matted and uncut hair) and their devotional activities can be used to confirm a particularly Hindu reading of Indian society. However, such readings, whether deployed by British orientalists or Hindu nationalists, are anachronistic, and reflect the persistent tendency to frame Indian history in terms of a simple Hindu/Muslim binary.

Pinch's study demonstrates the impossibility of pigeon-holing the warrior ascetics, and in fact it was the very plasticity of their identities that made them such critical actors in Indian military history. In his words, "Crucial to the transition to wide scale military entrepreneurship in the eighteenth century was the ability of the yogi to be many things at once—to be Muslim and Hindu, emperor and mendicant, ascetic and archer, soldier and spy" (p. 103). This is illustrated through the life of Anupgiri, a Saiva warrior ascetic who at various times in his career allied himself and his followers with a seemingly quixotic cast of local warlords, Maratha kings, Mughal emperors, and governors of Mughal successor states, only to become aligned with the British at the end of his life. Anupgiri was present at the critical Battle of Buxar (1764), wherein the British fought a pitched battle against an alliance forged between the Mughal emperor, the Nawab of Awadh, and the deposed Nawab of Bengal. Anupgiri's force was one of the largest that was thrown against the British and in recognition of his service this saivite warrior was given the nom de guerre of Himmat Bahadur by the Shi'a ruler of Awadh. Yet at the end of his life, Anupgiri chose to throw his support behind the British in their campaigns against Shinde, a Maratha warlord with whom he had previously been associated. Later writers, invoking the anachronistic belief in timeless and inerasable communal boundaries, would either dismiss Anupgiri as a self interested traitor or rewrite the history so as to make him conform to modern day nationalist conventions. A major contribution of this book is to make the actions and motivations of warrior ascetics like Anupgiri legible and comprehensible within a historical context.

Warrior Ascetics also helps to illuminate the challenges faced by the British in consolidating their authority following the capture of Bengal. Unlike most of their Indian rivals, the British were generally loath to look to the warrior ascetics for assistance (Richard Wellesley's alliance with Anupgiri being a notable exception). Officials like Warren Hastings viewed them as a major threat to colonial authority: British understandings of sovereignty hinged on their having a monopoly over the means of coercion and armed ascetics publicly undermined such claims, and consequently the British preferred to try and suppress sanyasis, gosains, and fakirs. The end result was forty years or so of conflict, often approximating what would today be labeled low intensity operations. But as Pinch demonstrates, it would be a mistake to dismiss these bands of ascetics as simply religious zealots, their military effectiveness merely a reflection of their fanaticism. Close scrutiny of their political and military activities demonstrates that Anupgiri and others like him...