Word: sadhu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sadhu is the Sanskrit word for "straight," and the straight-living, ascetic sadhus of India were once the bearers of Hindu holiness. Robed in saffron or stark naked, smeared with ashes or painted vermilion, shaven bald or mat-haired, they wandered through the world with their begging bowls, dispensing sacred teaching, sage advice and examples of the unworldly life. Inevitably another breed of sadhu arose that was anything but straight. Trading on the enormous prestige of the holy men, these daubed wanderers move from village to village dispensing magic charms and quack cure-alls and mulcting the credulous peasants. Today...
Blood In the Brain. Purpose of the project is twofold: 1) to issue identity cards to all sadhus and thus drive the crooks out of business by denying them cards; 2) to harness sadhu selflessness for the social betterment of India. The pilot plant at Rishikesh, run by the Indian Association of Sadhus, is a complex of one-story concrete-and-brick buildings equipped with such unascetic features as electric lights, telephones, and outboard motor dinghies to ferry sadhus and supplies across the river. Fifty holy men from all over the country are spending a month there studying political philosophy...
...sadhus," as old-line holy men already contemptuously call them, are expected to return to their own parts of the country equipped to combat such evils as the caste system, official corruption, adulteration of foodstuffs and the disuniting influence of local dialects. They will also try to debunk the sadhu as an object of superstitious awe by presenting themselves simply as do-gooders, rather than miracle men, and interpreting Hindu scripture in terms of social service...
Explained one new-look sadhu at the training center last week: "We will be a double-edged sword, cutting at conservatism on the one hand, and on the other hand checking the ultramodern tendencies that threaten to destroy the Indian way of life and culture...
That night, in jail in Moradabad. the wounded sadhu announced that he would soon go into another trance. "The police were wrong in disturbing the peace," he said. "I am the reincarnation of the Lord Ramachandra, and I am here to create a new way of life." Police records bore no evidence of this one way or another, but they did show that up to three years ago, the self-appointed god of Mokhimpur had been a messenger boy in the Uttar Pradesh Department of Public Works who had been fired for misbehavior...