Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas

Notes

Notes Introduction For scholarly work on the textual tenets of renunciation, see especially Denton 1. 2004; Olivelle 1992; Zaehner 1973; Heesterman 1964. See Narayan (1993a) and Abu-Lughod (1991) on fieldwork methodologies 2. by “halfies,” or people who are personally connected to the places where they do research. See Feldhaus (1995) for a thorough exploration of how rivers may stand in 3. for each other in Hindu India, and Slusser (1982) for a comprehensive account of the myth and lore of temples and rivers in the Kathmandu Valley. See Rademacher (2005) for contemporary ethnographic work on the Bagmati. The 4. Gītā, an account of the meeting between the warrior Arjuna and the deity Kr .s .na, is one of the most popular religious texts in India, and one with which every renouncer I spoke with was basically familiar, if only in an oral version. The popular image of renouncers insists on their religious and philosophical authority, and most of my informants duly quoted from or cited the principles of the Gītā as a way to demonstrate a basic credential. See Burghart’s groundbreaking work on ascetic social orders (1983a, 1983b). 5. Early writings on globalization tended to claim that the predicament of dis6 . placed or dispersed communities—how culture is reproduced without a shared experience of place—was a recent phenomenon (Appadurai 1996; Kaplan 1996; Bhabha 1994; Clifford 1992, 1997). The example of the South Asian renouncer community shows us that the communal practices of wandering, travel, and movement across space far precede modernity. Creating cultural links across space is, in this instance, as much a “traditional” enterprise as it is a “modern” or a “postmodern” one. As a discipline, anthropology has grown increasingly sensitive to multi-sited 7. field methods (Clifford and Marcus 1986) so that ethnographers can work with immigrant communities, diasporas (Silliman 2001), pilgrimage groups (Gold 1988; Morinis 1992), and labor populations who move across international or interregional borders (Mills 1999; Ong 1999), for example. In one sense, I followed Taussig’s description of “pilgrimage as method,” 8. although I took it more literally than he may have intended (1997:197). 208 • Notes to pages 16–28 Varied cosmic maps suggest that mythical events occur in different degrees 9. of specificity: the local, the regional, and the subcontinental. Sircar details many śakti pīth . a lists (1973), but popular legend also enumerates the pīth . as differently (Dowman 1981). Certainly in Kathmandu, Guhyeśwarī is seen as the site of the goddess ’s vulva, or the center of creation; on larger, subcontinental lists, it is listed as a pīth . a, or power spot, of the goddess’s anus, since the temple of Kamakhya in Assam represents the vulva. My thanks to Kaja McGowan for this very helpful advice. 10. See Griaule 1965; Crapanzano 1980; Narayan 1989; Behar 1993 for ethnog11 . raphies with similar approaches. See especially Narayan (1989) on the image of renouncer as charlatan. 12. These are my estimates, based in part on discussions with photographer and 13. researcher Dolf Hartsuiker. The numbers of renouncers in South Asia has fluctuated over time: different authors have debated whether the number is decreasing in contemporary India because of alternative social options (Gross 1992; Ghurye 1995[1953]). Population figures for the total renouncer community are very difficult to ascertain and monitor (see Sinha and Saraswati [1978] for good Banaras estimates in the 1970s). Certainly the number is relatively high in absolute terms, but represents only a minute fraction (less than 0.2%, if my estimates are close) of the total South Asian population. See Khandelwal (1997, 2001, 2004) for work on the women renouncer com14 . munity in Hardwar and Khandelwal, Hausner, and Gold (2006) for recent work on women renouncers in South Asia as a region. A knowledgeable Western 15. sādhu told me that a full 90% of women sādhus in his order were either Nepali or of Nepali origin, and this figure was largely borne out by my own research. Caldwell (1999) touches on the sticky methodological quandary of how to 16. learn a tradition that requires both initiation and a scholarly distance. Denton (2004) cogently argues that the difference between Varanasi widows 17. who live in ashrams and renouncers is precisely the ritual of initiation. The need for a ritual of initiation to be classified as a sādhu also points to the importance of having a guru, or someone qualified to perform the rite. My informants’ insistence that knowledge comes in...