‘When the Saints Go Marching in’: The Curious Ambivalence of Religious Sadhus in Recent Politics in India

The book examines the political significance of sadhus in a huge and mature democracy like India. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, a flurry of sadhu activism coincided with the dramatic rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It examines nationalism and a particular strain of religious fundamentalism and the commonalities and differences among sadhus themselves as factors that explain both the unity among them in one period, and the splintering of that unity at another time.