Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas

Sondra L. Hausner is an anthropologist of religion, and this Indiana University Press book is her ethnographic study of contemporary ascetic life among Hindu sadhus in the Himalayas, based on fieldwork living alongside practitioners. Its strength is direct ethnographic access to a genuinely difficult population to study, wandering renunciates who by definition resist institutional tracking, which lets Hausner address a practical question rarely covered elsewhere, how ascetics are actually recognized as legitimate in the absence of any single certifying body such as the akharas provide only partially. Its limit is that it describes the specific communities and period of her fieldwork, so a claim about sadhu practice in a different region or era needs a source matched to that context.