Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas

2. The Social Structures of Sādhu Life

« Three women sādhvīs, Allahabad 2 • The Social Structures of Sādhu Life Despite setting themselves apart from normative householder life, Hindu sādhus live in a socialized world. In practice if not in theory, sādhu society is communal, constituted through a set of shared meanings that structure the living, dynamic organizations of social life. The symbolic links, connecting mechanisms, hierarchies, and kinship terms used by renouncers certainly differ from those used by householders, but they exist nonetheless as the functional terms of contemporary Hindu sādhu society. In the last chapter, I considered how breaking apart from householder life was a central aspect of renouncer experience and identity. In this chapter, I describe the organizing principles of the community created by that split, and review the social structures of the contemporary Hindu sādhu community. By their very name, and in any society, renouncers are supposed to leave behind the trappings of daily socialized existence. In real life, however, renouncer life is supported through the communal activities of powerful institutions. Sādhu society demonstrates fully developed social mechanisms—lineages, families, institutions, and rites of maturation—and also the unavoidable social practices of gossip, politics, and rivalry. Being a renouncer in contemporary South Asia means sharing cultural understandings about how space, time, and matter are constituted or stripped away, but it does not generally mean isolation, individuality, or separation from social existence. Despite its explicit purpose—and religious mandate—to strip away society’s influence, renouncing the world remains a social act. 62 • Wandering with Sadhus Certainly monastic orders in traditions other than Hinduism rely on alternative communal structures. But many world renouncer traditions are exclusively based in monasteries, while Hindu renouncers’ home bases are located thousands of square miles apart from one another, across national borders, in vastly differing physical terrains and social contexts. The Hindu renouncer community is unusual in that its structures and practices cut across geographical distance. Networks of space and place precisely constitute community in this instance, and social structures that do not require physical proximity, such as alternative families and lineages, transcend spatial distance. The Image of Isolation Both classical texts in India and modern social science about India have emphasized the anti-social and isolated project of the Indian renouncer, the sannyāsī. The Sannyāsa Upanis .ads, which were written over many centuries as a textual guide to renouncer life, are very explicit that renouncers must break away from society and exist in anti-social isolation : “Wearing a single garment or none at all, his thoughts fixed on the One, let him always wander without desire and completely alone” (Nāradaparivrājaka Upanis .ad 141 in Olivelle 1992:177).1 The solitary quality of renouncer life is clear in every part of the verse: the renouncer must be alone; the renouncer must clothe himself in such a way that his departure from social norms is apparent; the renouncer must be free from worldly desire (and therefore produce neither children nor attachment to any worldly possession); the renouncer must not allow his mind to stray into the realm of the mundane. In the traditional āśrama system that categorizes Indian life stages, sannyāsa is the fourth and last stage, when an adult leaves his home and family and, through the model of isolated renunciation, prepares for death.2 The usual sourcebook for textual injunctions about the appropriateness of life processes is The Laws of Manu, the core treatise of Hindu dharma (translated variously as law, principle, religion, or proper conduct ), written around the beginning of the common era. The text is very clear on the matter of an ascetic’s departure from social life: The Social Structures of Sādhu Life • 63 When a man has departed from his house, taking with him the instruments of purification, he should wander as an ascetic hermit, indifferent to the desirable pleasures that may come his way. He should always go all alone, with no companion, to achieve success; realizing that success is for the man who is alone, he neither deserts nor is deserted. (The Laws of Manu 6.41–42 in Doniger and Smith 1991:121) The ascetic is the person who leaves the social system entirely—“all alone, with no companion”—and who stands in opposition to the Brāhmanical householder, the person who stands at the hierarchical peak of the caste system. The notion that renouncers are socially...