ABSTRACT
One of the most important but least recognized religious transformations in modern South Asia has been the ‘fall from grace’ of the holy beggar or faqīr. In pre-colonial India, the faqīr (and, less commonly, his female counterpart, the faqīra) enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy from the norms of religious institutions that was based in large part on the economic independence brought by begging. The viability of such begging as a religious no less than financial strategy was in turn based on the widespread valorization of begging as a dignified and moral pursuit for the godly. Indeed, such was the strength of the semantic connection between spirituality and beggary that the latter often served as sufficient proof of the former. This was particularly the case with regard to the subcategory of faqīrs who displayed signs of madness which, conceived as jazb (‘rapture, divine intoxication’), was in turn read as further proof of a beggar’s spiritual status. Alongside begging and rapture, the third common attribute of the faqīr was drug use, chiefly
preparations of cannabis or opium, which was likewise lent religious value as evidence for renouncing this world and as an instrument for reaching the other world. What is crucial to grasp is the way in which three anti-social states – the rejection of work in favour of begging, the mental incapacity to engage coherently with fellow humans and the deliberate pursuit of drugged states of consciousness – were rendered respectable through the attribution of moral value and epistemological meaning. In pre-colonial India, begging, drugging and madness meant something different than they came to mean in post-colonial India and Pakistan. With its induction of new forms of knowledge and morality, the colonial period marked this transition in the meaning and value of the faqīr’s lifestyle.
