ABSTRACT
The author doctoral topic, tentatively approved by the research committee of the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, in March 1989, was an ethnographic study of a community of camel and sheep-breeders of Rajasthan, called the 'Raika'. His fieldwork and writing about and on the interactions he was having with the Raika began the moment he landed in Bikaner. The Raika knew that I was a student whose job was to write up an account of their community and then submit it to the university, where I was enrolled, for the award of a degree. Raika hamlets in Pali-Marwar had many school-going boys. In one of the afternoon meetings, the author told Dr Humphrey about the Raika men who had joined the Jain renunciatory orders. On the advice of Dr Humphrey, the author started exploring the non-Brahmanical model of renunciation and the first scholar whose work he read with profit was Richard Burghart.
