Sadhu

A sadhu is a renunciant who has left ordinary life for ascetic practice, and the category is broad, covering a great range of Hindu holy men outside the settled order of society.

The renunciant life

The sadhu has abandoned home, family and possessions for a life of austerity, wandering and devotion or discipline aimed at liberation, living by alms and often marked by distinctive dress, ash, matted hair, or the emblems of the deity he follows, so that the sadhu is a visible sign of renunciation set apart from the householder world. The category spans the initiates of the great organised orders, both the followers of Shiva and of Vishnu, and solitary ascetics unattached to any order, and it includes a wide variety of disciplines, from meditation and scholarship to severe bodily austerities.

Entry and standing

One becomes a sadhu by renouncing the world and, usually, by initiation into an order under a guru, receiving a new name and the marks of the order, so that entry is through a formal leaving of ordinary life. The sadhus are supported by the alms of society, which regards the maintenance of renunciants as meritorious, and they gather in great numbers at the pilgrimage festivals, above all the Kumbh Mela. The corresponding renunciant appears across the Indian traditions, and the sadhu holds a recognised and honoured, if marginal, place in Hindu society as one who has stepped outside its ordinary order to pursue the spiritual goal directly.

Some sadhu orders, most famously the Naga sadhus, who go without clothing and cover themselves in ash, developed a martial tradition in the medieval and early modern period, organising into armed akharas that at times fought each other over pilgrimage rights and trade routes and served as mercenaries or armed retainers for regional rulers, a history documented in temple records and colonial-era accounts and still visible today only in ceremonial form, such as the akharas' processions with symbolic weapons.

That akhara structure still governs the most visible modern expression of sadhu life, the great Kumbh Mela gatherings, where the different akharas process to bathe in a fixed order of precedence, the shahi snan or royal bath, that has itself been the subject of dispute and occasional violent confrontation between orders in past centuries, now managed by heavy state coordination of crowds, sanitation and security at gatherings that draw enormous numbers of pilgrims and sadhus over the course of the festival, among the largest peaceful gatherings of human beings anywhere in the world.

Thirteen akharas are formally recognised today under the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad, the umbrella body that negotiates bathing order and represents the akharas in dealings with state Kumbh authorities, and each akhara maintains its own internal hierarchy of mahants and its own specific deity or founder-saint, so that the seemingly unified world of the sadhu orders is, on closer view, a federation of distinct institutions with their own property, discipline and succession rather than a single organised sadhu church.