Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia.

• Author: Pauwels, Heidi

Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia. By VERONIQUE BOUILLIER. New Delhi: MANOHAR, 2017 (distrib. by Routledge, Abingdon, UK). Pp. xiv + 351, 16 pls. $160.

Anyone interested in the traditions of Yoga and Bhakti in South Asia will be delighted with this book. It fills out the living background behind the often opaque texts attributed to Nath Panth Yogis, also known as Kanpa?as or "pierced-ear" Yogis since they are recognizable foremost by the huge earrings worn by the initiated. They are best known for the influential manuals of yoga attributed to them, but also for their songs, the earliest attested texts in north Indian vernaculars, which have influenced bhaktas such as Kabir through the centuries to the present day.

Véronique Bouillier, social anthropologist at CNRS Paris, has studied ascetic wanderers since the 1970s. She has published extensively particularly on the Nath Yogis and their role in politics over the past centuries. Her work is deeply interdisciplinary, based as it is on documentary evidence (land endowments, dynastic foundation acts, and judicial records), visual sources (architectural, archeological, wall paintings, inscriptions, statues), and popular printed pamphlets, as well as anthropological fieldwork. Her reach crosses many borders, from Nepal (Gorkha, Kathmandu, and Dang Valley) to India, north (Haridwar, Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Gwalior) and south (Mangalore in Karnataka). She has published articles and coedited volumes that tackle fascinating issues as diverse as ascetic children, women's celebrations, and the unification of Nepal (downloadable from her Academia page, several in English), but her important monographs on this topic are Ascètes et rois: Un monastère de Kanphata Yogis au Nepal central (1998) and Itinérance et vie monastique: Les ascètes Nâth Yogîs en Inde contemporaine (2008). Since most of her work is in French, it has remained below the radar of many students in Anglo-Saxon academia who may be more familiar with the work of Ann and David Gold, Adrian Muños, David White, and more recently the team of James Mallinson at SOAS in London. This very welcome volume makes Bouillier's insights of a lifetime available in English, but it is not a translation: it goes beyond her previous publications in providing a state-of-the-art summation crowning her work. This is a long overdue update of the colonial work by George Weston Briggs (1938) that many scholars have...