Ascetics in India

Main article: India

Gosain

The monk warrior is a famous figure in the history of medieval Europe and the Middle East. Much less is known about armed Hindu ascetics who played a significant role in the Indian wars of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries.

The role of religious devotees, called sannyasi, fakir, naga or gosain (gosina, gossai, gosavi and goswa), was noted in historical literature in connection with their military and economic activities in North and West India.

The term "gosain" was broadly applied to followers of Shaivism, some of whom were priests, others were wandering poor monks, others served as mercenaries in the army of princes and leaders in the eighteenth century, others lived in maths ("monasteries") in the main cities and combined religious and commercial activities, and the fourth settled in rural areas, where they had extensive land holdings to maintain their maths.

The term "gosain" comes from the Sanskrit "goswamin" (lord of passions) and was originally understood as a person who, for the sake of veneration of God and for the good of his soul, completely curbed his passions and could devote his whole life to devotion and penance.

The eighteenth-century Gosains traced their spiritual origins to religious leader Shankara Acharya, who had four principal disciples (chela), who in turn had a total of ten disciples, each of whom founded a math. All gosains theoretically belonged to one of the corps or groups of these original chelas, who took as their name the name of the student of Shankara Acharya, whom they claim to follow. Ten divisions of Shankara Acharya's followers were collectively named Das ^[1] KOHN.

Apparently, the bulk of the gosains operating in North India in the 18th and early 19th centuries belonged to the Gir or Giri subgroup of gosain.

James Rennel, an early British geographer and employee of the East India Company, encountered a group of Gosain in 1767 near the Bhutanese border as they headed for a pilgrimage to Bengal.

Their movements were often dictated by religious festivities, both local rustic in nature and more widely celebrated, such as Hawley. Since these festivals were also reasons for seasonal markets, the state states could move goods and trade them between districts.

The numbers of such itinerant religious groups may have been large, with likely numbers exceeding 50,000 for communities led by figures such as Umrao Giri and Himmat Bahadur Anup Giri Gosein in the late 1700s. Their numerical composition allowed them to provide self-defense, as well as protect the trade routes they used, regardless of who could wield titular power in a particular region.

At least one of the three separate events, which are grouped into the so-called Sanyasi uprising, involved the state states along with other cases of their frequent clashes with the East India Company army on the northern borders of Bengal.

One of the main causes of the conflict was the collection of taxes by British colonialists from local nobility, which deprived the latter of the opportunity to pay traditional alms to ascetic groups.

Researches

The scientific studies of Professor J.N. Farquhar revealed a lot of interesting information about the militant ascetics of India, and in particular about the armed sannyasi, to reveal the history of which he was specially aimed. It was a subject on which there was little information, and further clarification of which he believed would contribute greatly to understanding the confusion of sects in North India. For Dr Farquhar, like many of his friends, it was a poignant disappointment that he was forced by ill health to leave India before finishing a study that had already begun to produce valuable results. The materials of his research were embodied in two articles published in June 1925: one entitled "Organization of the Sannyasi Vedanta" in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the other entitled "Warring Ascetics of India" in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (vol. 9, No. 2).

The article "Armed Religious Ascetics in North India" by W.G. Orr, a former missionary of the Church of Scotland in Rajputan, was conceived in the 1930s as an addition to these two studies and aimed ​​na combining new ^[2]

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