Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires

Many people assume, largely because of Gandhi’s legacy, that Hinduism is a religion of non-violence. William R. Pinch shows just how wrong this assumption is. Using the life of Anupgiri Gosain, a Hindu ascetic who lived at the end of the eighteenth century, to explore that subject he demonstrates that Hindu warrior ascetics were not only pervasive in the medieval and early modern Indian past, but were also an important component of the South Asian military labour market, and crucial to the rise of British imperialism. Today, these warriors occupy a prominent place in modern Indian imaginations, ironically as romantic defendes of a Hindu India against foreign invasion, even though they are almost totally absent from the pages of Indian history. William pinch’s innovative and gloriously composed book sets out to correct this historiographical deficiency and to piece together the story of the rise and demise of warrior asceticism in India from the 1500s to the present. Implicit in his approach is the need to measure modern mythologies of Hindu warrior asceticism against the real-life experiences of powerful, violence-prone ascetics. This is a book which has as much to say to students religion as to historians of empire, and will no doubt be taken up by both.