Kazi Ashraf's new book is a compelling interdisciplinary investigation of the persistent and seemingly paradoxical trope of the hermit's hut in Indian visual and religious traditions. As is argued persuasively from the outset, in ancient India the hermit's hut served as a metonym for sustained deliberations on the nature of asceticism and the philosophical problems emerging from the soteriology and pragmatics of renunciatory existence. The fraught and complex relationship between renouncer and householder has long been of great interest to scholars of Indian history and religion, but it has been addressed far less frequently through visual and architectural histories. Although Ashraf looks primarily at Buddhist sources, he also fruitfully engages early Brahmanical traditions to capture ideas that are less specifically sectarian than broadly Indic.
The book is organized into seven chapters preceded by an elegantly written introduction. The introduction takes a largely theoretical and diachronic approach, moving seamlessly from the...