Reviewd By:
TAMARA I. SEARS, Yale University
Kazi Ashraf’s new book is a compelling interdisciplinary investigation of the persis- tent and seemingly paradoxical trope of the hermit’s hut in Indian visual and religious tra- ditions. As is argued persuasively from the outset, in ancient India the hermit’s hut served as a metonym for sustained deliberations on the nature of asceticism and the philosoph- ical problems emerging from the soteriology and pragmatics of renunciatory existence. The fraught and complex relationship between renouncer and householder has long been of great interest to scholars of Indian history and religion, but it has been addressed far less frequently through visual and architectural histories. Although Ashraf looks pri- marily at Buddhist sources, he also fruitfully engages early Brahmanical traditions to capture ideas that are less specifically sectarian than broadly Indic.
The book is organized into seven chapters preceded by an elegantly written introduc- tion. The introduction takes a largely theoretical and diachronic approach, moving seam- lessly from the third century BCE in northern India to the seventh century CE in south India, and from fifteenth-century Japanese tea houses to Gandhi. By contrast, the first two chapters go back in time to provide a careful and historically grounded assessment of the relationships between hermit and hut, and between home and homelessness, that inform the remainder of the book.
In the first chapter, Ashraf takes up the idea of the ascetic and examines the question of how the fundamental conundrum of the hermit’s shelter, as both a pragmatic and a conceptual problem, was addressed through early Buddhist visual and textual sources. Posed in scriptures as a question to the Buddha, the renunciatory dwelling took form initially as a simple structure, such as under a tree or in a natural cave, occupying the heterotopic space of the forests beyond the edges of house-holding society.
The second chapter contrasts the idea of the wilderness abode to the domesticity of householders, represented by the interconnected anthropological notion of “home” as a socially constructed space and the architectural notion of “house” as built residence.
Chapters 3 and 4 work similarly well in their pairing by collectively examining the relationship between house and body. Whereas the third chapter centers on the idealiza- tion of the Buddha’s own house as a mirror of the arch-ascetic’s body, the fourth chapter looks at how the dialectic between house and body metonymically evoked the stages of renunciation, from the initial moment of departure to the final cremation and ritual burial of an aspirant monk. Here, Ashraf presents original interpretations of well-known Bud- dhist reliefs and identifies two distinct yet related visual dynamics that converge around a spatial narrativization of the ascetic’s spiritual path. The first looks at how anthropomor- phic images of the Buddha began to push outwards against their architectural frames, in effect reinforcing the Buddha’s status as a superman (maha ̄purus.a), whose body resisted architectural containment. The second identifies internalizations of the dwelling, repre- sented through the emergence of flames or flowering trees along the vertical axis of the us.n.ı ̄s.a. The continuing importance of the Buddha’s house as an extension of his body is compellingly reinforced through a discussion of the gandhakut.ı ̄, a perfumed chamber that synesthetically evoked the Buddha’s presence, even as it paradoxically acted as a re- minder of his physical absence.
The final three chapters move towards a discussion of the relationship between as- ceticism and primitivism. Although seemingly simple, the hermit’s hut was not a primitive design. Rather, its primitive appearance was carefully constructed as part of the project of performatively producing the ascetic, not unlike the donning of monks’ robes and other aspects of ascetic dress and comportment. Ashraf makes a point of carefully differentiat- ing the two concepts. Unlike the primitivist seeking a long-past moment, the ascetic adopted such habits to distance himself from a present-day society. Ultimately polyse- mous, the hermit’s hut stood at a threshold or junction between home and homelessness (or domestic life and renunciation) and at the symbolic turning point of the ascetic spir- itual journey. Perched at the precipice of nirva ̄ n. a, the hermit’s hut becomes the “last hut” (p. 168), an object whose destination, like that of the ascetic’s own body, metaphorically ends with its own liberating destruction.
Ashraf’s narrative comes together in a satisfyingly full circle. Yet, it is not without its shortcomings. The book is intended as a historicized theoretical inquiry based on sources drawn primarily from well-known archives and scholarly publications rather than on newly translated texts or observations from the field. While this enables Ashraf to think broadly and synthetically, it also leads to an occasional overreliance on secondary sources, and particularly on descriptions and illustrations of sites provided by earlier scholars. This much is particularly evident in the accompanying illustrations, which, al- though well-selected, are frequently reproduced directly from other books and publica- tions. Nonetheless, as a whole the book is intelligent and thought-provoking. It should be of great interest to scholars working in many fields across Asia, including history, art history, archaeology, religion, philosophy, and anthropology.