Initiation and Asceticism in India: Insight into the Viewpoint of Renouncers

The institution of wandering ascetics constitutes an important part of India’s intangible cultural heritage, which has a long tradition. Motivated by a belief in the superiority of Oriental spiritu-ality, some historical representatives of Western discourse have maintained an essentialist image of Indian ascetics as profound religious figures who completely abandon all worldly concerns to liberate their soul. Today, after centuries-long stereotyping of Indian traditions and several contributions on the topic, there can be no doubt that the essentializing image, built upon illusion-ary concepts of a homogeneous and unified nature, significantly confines our understanding of the phenomenon of asceticism in its cultural complexity. By adopting a classical ethnographic ap-proach, this article focuses on particular aspects of initiation into ascetic orders in the Daśanāmī Samṇyāsa and Rāmānanda Samprāday (the two most dominant present-day ascetic orders). Based on fieldwork data, the study concludes that every insight into the nature of the social organiza-tion of renunciation must go beyond a static category of hierarchical relationships, seeing the phenomenon instead as a multidimensional strategy of departure from social life and transcending social identity.