On September 9, the Chief Minister of Bengal — in a move unheard of for an elected representative who is also a head of government — marched with a crowd of people to Jadavpur University, to remind students reportedly smoking ganja and indulging in free speech that their behaviour was unacceptable in a Centre of Excellence. Here was a warning about the limits of this drug, freedom, but maybe also a riposte to a newspaper terming a previous ugly episode (that culminated with the Nandalal Bose-designed university emblem being seriously damaged) gerua goondami, or “saffron hooliganism”. Noticeable in the Chief Minister’s group were long-haired, bearded men whose only clothing was strips of saffron, recruited to establish gerua samman, or “saffron pride”. A photograph of them standing in front of the university gates began circulating on social media.
When I shared the photo with a few people I know, I was asked by some of them what was wrong with Naga sadhus having gathered at the gates. Weren’t they part of the culture and, consequently, a recurrent sight? Is it not a “secular” narrowness of mind that, despite its self-proclaimed regard for diversity, defines them as ridiculous and outrageous? There’s certainly some truth to this. But who are these Naga sannyasis, and who are their forebears?
The lay view and the historians’ are more or less the same: They’re ascetics, followers of Shiva, who have been around for centuries. Their abstention from all clothing except the barest places them within both the devotional and renunciatory strands of Hinduism. For a long time the asociable unclothedness of holy men of this type has both caused amusement and carried a frisson of the eccentric and experimental. Yogic asceticism has also been vulnerable to charlatans, as this verse from Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, reminds us: If going naked/ Brought liberation,/ The deer of the forest/ Would attain it first.
But charlatan or not, today’s sadhu and the colour saffron itself seem to have been appropriated by what they were historically defined against: Political power; indeed, against worldly pride.
The Naga sadhus’ forebears first appear in the historical record in the time of Alexander’s incursion into India. Among the various people who travelled with Alexander was the philosopher Pyrrho, who, according to his biographer Sextus Empiricus, met, on reaching India, the gymnosophists: The Greek word for “naked (gymnos) philosophers (sophistês)”. We are talking about around 325 BCE. From the gymnosophists Pyrrho, founder of the Sceptics, picked up a philosophical position that is unusual in Western culture until modernism: That calm arises from what we ordinarily call “judgement” being put into abeyance. So Pyrrho: “The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.” This calm, or state of meditative absorption, Pyrrho calls ataraxia.
Before the Romantics and modernists become interested in how such a suspension of judgement leads to the creation of, say, the poem (because the West, through new translations of the Upanishads and Gita in the late 18th century was becoming reacquainted with the naked philosophers), the only European writers who are interested in this particular form of vacancy, that follows the emptying out of judgement and a fixed sense of self, are the essayist and thinker Michel de Montaigne in the 17th century, who is reading Pyrrho; Montaigne’s contemporary Francis Bacon, who must arrive at his notion of the essay as a “dispersed meditation” by engaging with Montaigne; and David Hume, who, according to Alison Gopnik, is probably learning about Buddhism from Jesuit priests, rejecting, as a result, one of the Enlightenment’s foundational notions: The unchanging self. Thus the transformative lineage of the naked philosophers.
If we go back to the time of Alexander, we find it rich with stories about Diogenes of Sinope, the founder of the school of Cynics, who went around the streets of Athens with a lantern in broad daylight saying he was searching for an honest man, and who otherwise lived in a barrel that was also his main outer covering, as he was near-naked. Diogenes’s relationship to power is captured in the story of his meeting with Alexander, who sought out the philosopher and offered to give him whatever he desired; to which Diogenes replied: “Please stand aside: you are blocking the sun.” Diogenes, whose life overlaps with Pyrrho, is Greece’s homegrown gymnosophist.
Naked philosophers were significant not because they were naked, or renunciates, or devotees, but because many of them were practitioners of a form of thought, or intellectual investigation, that Hinduism shares with Buddhism, to do with the replacing of subjectivity with consciousness. To arrive at this “consciousness” and to experience its particular pleasure entails the suspending of what we ordinarily call self, opinion, dogma, and judgement. Descriptions of what it means to be conscious in this way abound in the Upanishads: say, in the Mandukya, where it is said to surpass deep dreamless sleep.
Esoteric and abstruse though they sound to you and me, these concepts are picked up in India both by the elite and the semi-literate and uneducated: That is, they are also to be found in the bhajans of Kabir and the abhangs of Tukaram. Whether or not one “understands” the intervention the gymnosophists made has had nothing to do, historically, with “education”. In fact, they point to the limits of the notion of “understanding” no less than Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “The limits of language are the limits of my world.”
When we see the sadhus at the university gates, we must connect them, then, to a lineage of thought (rather than to Hinduism) that they and we are both largely unaware of and that any of us — literate; illiterate — could lay claim to. What does being naked qualify us for besides proximity to power?
Chaudhuri is an author, poet, essayist, critic, short story writer, and musician
When we see the sadhus at the university gates, we must connect them, then, to a lineage of thought (rather than to Hinduism).(Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
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