ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the articulation of itinerancy in ‘premodern’ South Asia ranges considerably across the span of contempt and encouragement, marginalization and veneration: the Vedic scriptures concerning itinerancy were at best contradictory; the Buddhists idealized itinerancy; the itinerant Bhakti-Sufi figures in the medieval literary repertoire were perceived as the Holy Other. This chapter discusses how the fervent obsession to distinguish the ‘good’ wanderer from the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ surfaced with the religio-political feud between the Buddhists and the Vedic practitioners. Hereafter, the trope of itinerancy would accrue a cultural significance: an ethos of political dissidence, to be evoked in medieval literatures.
