Upvas

Upvas, or upavasa, is the Hindu practice of religious fasting, a voluntary abstention from food, whole or partial, undertaken as an act of devotion, self-discipline and purification. The Sanskrit term carries a meaning deeper than mere abstinence: it denotes a "dwelling near" the divine, so that the fast is understood not simply as going without food but as drawing close to God by turning the appetites and attention away from the body and toward the sacred. Fasting is woven throughout Hindu religious life, attached to particular days of the week sacred to particular deities, to the fortnightly Ekadashi, to festivals, to vows undertaken for a specific end, and to acts of penance, and its forms range from a complete fast to the taking of a single meal, the avoidance of grains, or a diet of fruit and milk.

The tradition understands the fast to work on several levels at once. It disciplines the body and trains the will against the pull of desire; it is held to purify and to generate spiritual merit; and it concentrates the mind, freed for a time from the demands of eating, upon worship and devotion. Fasting is very often bound up with the keeping of a vow, the vrata, in which the abstention is offered to a deity in petition or thanksgiving, and it is broken at a prescribed time with prayer. As in many traditions, the outward act of going without food is treated as valuable only insofar as it serves this inner turning, and the texts warn against a fasting that is merely of the body while the mind remains fixed on food and on the world.

Upvas extended to its furthest and most consequential form, a fast continued voluntarily until death, is called sallekhana or santhara, and it is the point at which the tradition's ordinary fasting practice ran directly into modern Indian law. The Rajasthan High Court ruled in 2015 that santhara amounted to suicide under Indian law and directed authorities to treat those who undertook or assisted it accordingly, a ruling the Jain community across India reacted to with immediate and widespread protest, arguing that the court had misunderstood a practice its own tradition insists is categorically distinct from suicide: sallekhana is undertaken openly, gradually, with a teacher's knowledge and typically only in advanced age or terminal illness, framed as the shedding of an already-dying body in a state of equanimity rather than an act of despair, whereas Jain teaching itself explicitly condemns suicide arising from passion, fear or attachment as spiritually harmful in exactly the way sallekhana is held not to be.

The Supreme Court of India stayed the Rajasthan ruling within days, allowing the practice to continue while the underlying legal question remained unresolved, and the case has not been finally decided since, leaving sallekhana in a position rare for a long-established religious practice: publicly performed, openly discussed by the community that keeps it, and still formally unsettled in the law of the country where the great majority of its practitioners live. The dispute illustrates precisely the distinction ordinary upvas observance draws in principle, between an ascetic act undertaken in equanimity and a termination sought out of despair, tested here not in doctrine but in a national court.