The central role played by ascetic ideals and life styles in the religious traditions of India is so taken as axiomatic by scholars and practitioners alike that the point bears little repetition. There is, however, another equally important strand of Indian religious history that is older than asceticism and without reference to which asceticism cannot be properly understood. I am referring to the society-centered religion of the Vedas and of the later dharma tradition. This paper examines the conflict between asceticism and the established societal religion and the symbolic universe of classical Hinduism that emerged from their interaction.

Louis Dumont (1960) in his seminal work “World Renunciation in Indian Religions” drew our attention to the structural conflict existing within the bosom of Hinduism between the ideology of the renouncer and that of the man-in-the-world. One of his major contributions, as Veena Das (1982, 7) rightly observes, was to point out that concepts and institutions such as renunciation can be adequately studied not on the basis of their intrinsic properties but on the basis of their relationship to other concepts and institutions within the Hindu world. Thanks to structuralism there has been a general shift across many disciplines from internal definitions in terms of intrinsic properties to external definitions in terms of extrinsic relations. The study of world renunciation in India makes this approach imperative, for even the native discourse views it as an antithetical category defined more by its negation of social structures than by any internal structure or property of its own.