‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines a fundamental premise of Anglo-Hindu law on succession between 1860 and 1940, that kinship was emblematic of secular modes of living, to analyse its implications for the assertion of masculinity within ascetic orders in northern India. Legal discourses engaged with rights to succession within ascetic orders, by functioning on the assumption that the renunciatory life of ascetics was antithetical to sexuality and domesticity. This institutionalization of law, that defined asceticism and fixed ascetic masculinities within a legal frame, occurred with the consent of ascetic orders concerned with the ownership and distribution of property, even though sexuality and gender played a central role in shaping relationships within sacred spaces. Myriad ties embracing the language of kinship shaped ascetic orders. Bonds of sentiment and sexual attachment over-lapped with, sustained, and produced the bonds tying spiritual preceptors to their disciples. Relationships within ascetic families, consisting of men, their female companions, children and relatives, along with their attendant obligations were validated through rights of ownership and inheritance to property. Taking advantage of Anglo-Hindu law by the early twentieth century, ascetic orders sought to ‘purify’ their genealogies through the medium of property disputes fought in colonial courts. By manipulating the legal meanings ascribed to asceticism, masculinity and renunciation, these orders effaced unwanted members from their orders with varying degrees of success, especially women and children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".