Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia.

• Author: White, David Gordon
• Position: Book review

Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia. By VERONIQUE BOUILLIER. New Delhi: MANOHAR, 2017; London: ROUTLEDGE, 2018. Pp. 351. Rs. 1395, [pounds sterling]105.00; eBook [pounds sterling]35.99

For the past eighty years, the sole comprehensive overview of the religious order variously known as the Nath Yogis, the Nath Siddhas, the Kanphata Yogis, or simply the Naths or the Yogis has been George Weston Briggs's Gorakhnath and the Kanphata Yogis (original ed. 1938). A trove of data on the Naths, Briggs's monograph was a work of colonial ethnography, written in the style of the imperial gazetteers or the "Tribes and Castes of India" series, and containing chapters with titles like "Religion and Superstition." For the past thirty years, Veronique Bouillier has been quietly assembling a body of scholarship that has reprised, updated, and in many respects supplanted Briggs's pioneering work. Trained in the tradition of historical anthropology in which the French so excel, Bouillier's earliest focus was on the centuries-long relationships the Naths have maintained with royal power in Nepal. A series of seminal articles and chapters on their relationships to the royal houses of Gorkha and Dang culminated in a 1997 monograph, Ascites et rois: Un monastere des Kanphata Yogis au Nepal (Paris: CNRS Editions). Following this, Bouillier shifted her focus to India, where a decade of fieldwork and archival research in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Haryana, the Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh issued in hindrance et vie monastique: Les ascites Nath Yogis en Inde contemporaine (Paris: Editions de la FMSH, 2008). Hers has been a participatory anthropology: she has taken part in Nath processions and interacted closely with the Naths in their monastic and householder settings, with the upadesi initiation she received in Nepal giving her inside knowledge of a tantric rite directed to the goddess Yogmaya-Balasundari (pp. 44-45). Because very few of her writings to date have appeared in English, Bouillier's scholarship has been poorly known in the Anglophone world. The present work, a mature reflection on a tradition whose transformations she has observed and documented firsthand for over three decades, is a welcome remedy to that situation.

The book is well structured and its arguments clearly presented, albeit in a somewhat idiomatic form of English expression. Working from Dumont's concept of "monastic community" as "an essential mediating term...