The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer’s Religion

Abstract

Rahul Sankrityayan, a twentieth-century Indian polymath, is known for his contributions to Buddhism, Marxism, and Hindi literature. While his writing has been analyzed for its engagement with Buddhism and Tibet, he is also credited with inaugurating Hindi travel-writing. Though his contributions to this genre are well-recognized, one crucial work—ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945; lit. The Treatise of a Wanderer)—has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article investigates the intersection of religion, travel-writing, and satire in two chapters of Sankrityayan’s treatise: athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer) and dharma aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering). It argues that Sankrityayan employs the figure of the Wanderer to critique religions, religious ideals, and religious figures in two key ways. First, by framing his work as a śāstra (treatise) in the classical sense, he appropriates authoritative discourse to contest religious ideas. Second, the Wanderer functions as a transcendental subject who pervades history. Blending satire with polemic, the text subverts traditional religious hermeneutics. Through close analysis, this paper demonstrates how Sankrityayan’s unconventional form—a dialogic interplay between treatise and satire—invites readers to interrogate religious authority, offering a model for engaging with religion beyond doctrinal frameworks.

1. Introduction: Wanderer as the Subject of History

The role of human migration in diversifying religions and religious practices has been widely studied (Hagan and Ebaugh 2003; Lau and Cao 2014; Beckford 2019; Zanfrini 2020; Kulska 2020; Bertossi et al. 2021; Stipišić 2022; Ordin and Otterbeck 2023; Sheringham and Villares-Varela 2024). Communities migrating across borders transmute and continue to negotiate religious ideas, adapting them to new socio-cultural contexts through evolving rituals, myths, and practices (Csordas 2009; Foltz 2010; Malekandathil 2010; Green and Viaene 2012; Sealand 2013; Perkins 2015; Michel et al. 2017; Haynes 2021; Chong 2022; Ordin and Otterbeck 2023). This exchange of religions in South Asia was inseparable from broader cultural and material transfers occurring over land and sea (Cole 1989, 2002; Flood 2009; Pollock 2009; Foltz 2010; Malekandathil 2010; Truschke 2018). The Indian subcontinent—a cradle of major religions and philosophies—exemplifies this dynamic, serving as a historical site of religious import, export, dialogue, cultural transfusion, and tension (Cole 1989; Frykenberg 2008; Flood 2009; Pollock 2009; Truschke 2018; Rangnathan 2022; Pillai 2024). These religious processes not only shaped history and historical narratives but also actively negotiated their own boundaries, ontology, and theological limits through encounters with others. Thus, studying religion—including its modern and contemporary manifestations, continuities, and boundaries—necessitates an examination of human migrations, cultural and material exchanges, and the historical processes that shaped them.

Rahul Sankrityayan (d. 1963), a twentieth-century Indian polymath, traveler, and writer, shaped India’s intellectual landscape during the tumultuous 1940s—a decade defined by national political upheaval—through his prolific writings (Machwe 1978; Mule 1993; Puri 2011; Chudal 2016; Kumar 2017; Rana 2018). Works like From Volga to Ganges (Sankrityayan 1943; orig. Volgā se Gaṅgā) exemplify his experimental style, which scholars have analyzed from diverse theoretical perspectives (Machwe 1978; Mule 1993; Vidyarathi 2000). Sankrityayan’s contributions to and engagement with Buddhism and Marxism, and comparative contrast with other contemporaries like Ambedkar, have also been a subject of inquiry in the literature (Machwe 1978; Mule 1993; Vidyarathi 2000; Puri 2011; Chudal 2016; Joshi 2019; Bray et al. 2020; Bhartiya 2024). A polymath fluent in over 30 languages and having traveled to many countries, Sankrityayan’s works blend Marxism, Buddhism, and travel-writing (Kumar 2017). His other works also explore these various historical, philosophical, and religious ideas with their roots in mobility, migration, and traveling. However, ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945),1 framed as a classical treatise, satirizes religious orthodoxy by positing wandering as the essence of knowledge and history more explicitly than other works.

His ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945) occupies a unique interpretive space: it critically interrogates history and religious ideas through a hermeneutic lens while simultaneously negotiating the formal conventions of a Sanskrit śāstra (treatise) with a critical distance. Existing scholarship on the text remains limited, with Ray (2014), Chudal (2016), and Rana (2018) offering divergent readings and translations. Their varying hermeneutic approaches necessitate critical re-examination, which this paper offers. Ray (2014) reads the term ghummakaṛa as “vagabondage,” framing the text as an act of ‘writing back to the empire’—one that “…eloquently praises what colonial legislature forbids…” yet “…eulogizes vagabonds across cultures while conspicuously erasing Muslim examples… (Ray 2014, p. 163).” Ray (2014) situates Sankrityayan’s work within two interrelated contexts: the criminalization of vagabondage under British colonial rule in the 1940s, and contemporary Hindu-Muslim communal tensions. Ray’s analysis frames ghummakaṛa śāstra as both a response to and negotiation of these sociopolitical forces, articulating Sankrityayan’s own theoretical stance against this fraught backdrop (Ray 2014, pp. 164–67).

This paper diverges from Ray’s (2014) interpretation in two significant ways, though it is not intended as a direct rebuttal. First, the term ghummakaṛa more precisely translates as wanderer in Hindi and Urdu. Vagabond—with its etymological constraints and colonial associations—imposes a subjugated category that fails to capture the agency and intentionality Sankrityayan ascribes to ghummakaṛa. Unlike the circumstantially bound vagabond, the wanderer embodies deliberate mobility and a choice, which can be ascribed to the use of this term with relation to figures like Buddha and Mahavira, the respective historical founders of Buddhism and Jainism. Second, while Ray situates ghummakaṛa śāstra within specific socio-political contexts, travel functions as a fundamental paradigm across Sankrityayan’s diverse writings. This pervasive theme reflects both his personal identity as a traveler and his works’ epistemological grounding in mobile observation of different societies. The translation as wanderer thus preserves the agency that vagabond obscures—a crucial distinction, as Sankrityayan’s central aim is to position the ghummakaṛa as an active shaper of history and historical truth rather than its passive subject. In this article, while prioritizing textual over contextual critique, Sankrityayan’s subversion of authority—including Brahmanical and colonial hierarchies—resonates with broader anti-imperial discourse.

While Ray (2014) reads ghummakaṛa śāstra primarily as a product of its socio-political milieu, this paper follows Barthes’ (1967) theoretical injunction to let “the text speak itself” by focusing on how religious critique emerges through the work’s internal logic (Barthes 1977). By privileging the text over authorial context—particularly Sankrityayan’s sustained engagement with Buddhism’s challenge to Brahmanical norms—this article uncovers how the śāstra form operates as both satirical device and anti-normative project. This approach, though deliberately decontextualized, reveals the treatise’s subversive coherence: its adoption of classical genre conventions to dismantle religious orthodoxy. The ghummakaṛa thus becomes not merely a biographical proxy but a textual construct that enacts epistemic rebellion, where mobility signifies critique. While this article, in response to other existing scholarships, prioritizes textual analysis, Sankrityayan’s satire gains sharper edge when read against the 1940s Indian milieu—a period marked by various forms of British colonial restrictions on mobility (e.g., the Criminal Tribes Act), escalating Hindu-Muslim tensions, and the demands of two-separate nations. The ghummakaṛa’s antinomianism, though transcendent in the text, subtly mirrors contemporaneous struggles against imposed boundaries, whether enabled by religious orthodoxy or colonial surveillance or contemporary politics of religious strife. This historical backdrop amplifies the polemical force of Sankrityayan’s mockery of static hierarchies, though the text’s critique remains deliberately unmoored from any singular context.

In investigating the intersection of religion, history-making, and satire in two chapters of Sankrityayan’s treatise: athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer) and dharma2 aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering), this paper argues that Sankrityayan employs the figure of the wanderer to critique religions, religious ideals, and religious figures in two key ways. First, by framing his work as a śāstra (treatise) in the classical sense, he appropriates authoritative discourse to contest dominant religious ideas. Second, ghummakaṛa functions as a transcendental subject who pervades history as an active agent like Hegelian Being in the Western continental-philosophical traditions; thus, by blending satire with polemic, the text subverts traditional religious hermeneutics. In this vein, the next section will first briefly discuss Hegel’s theory of Being and Barthes’ idea of decentering author-authority from his la mort de l’auteur (1967) and how they can be used as theoretical interventions to read Sankrityayan’s work closely.

2. Becoming, Author, and the Wanderer: Reading Sankrityayan’s Text Through Hegel and Barthes

Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa or wanderer is a figure that requires critical theoretical intervention to be properly read. In the first reading, the ghummakaṛa appears as a transcendent subject of history that pervades through it with the agency to actively shape it through wandering. In other words, the dialectic of ghummakaṛa and religious orthodoxy synthesizes the historical, scientific, and religious development of humanity in Sankrityayan’s view. Sankrityayan’s view of history as a linear progress resembles Hegel’s triad of Being (Sein), Nothing (Nichts), and their synthesis, Becoming (Werden), where when Being and Nothing interact, their product appears as Becoming, which Hegel defines as “…a movement wherein both are distinct, but by virtue of a distinction which has equally immediately resolved itself (Hegel 1969, p. 105).” In contrast to Becoming, which is a dialectical synthesis of Being and Nothing, the Being is without any determination or fixed meanings and exists as an abstract point. In other words, the Being is “…equal only to itself…” and has “…no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outward (Hegel 1969, p. 82).”

In contrast to Being, which has all meanings inherent in itself without internal distinctions, Hegel defines Nothing as “…the same determination, or rather absence of determination, as being…,” implying that Being and Nothing represent two polarities that are not defined by language but are only knowable through their synthesis—Becoming (Hegel 1969, pp. 83–84). The process of Becoming for Hegel represents the movement of the world through dialectic, where Becoming is fluid and unfixed, in contrast to Being, which is a dominant expression of ideas in the world. However, this dominance does not mean Being has fixed meanings; instead, it is merely an abstract point through which the emergence of all fixed meanings becomes possible. This has immense significance for reading history. For Hegel, it is the Being which transitions into Becoming through a dialectical negation with Nothing. History, in this Hegelian sequence, moves through stages where one form of sociopolitical life generates its own contradictions, leading to the next, higher stage of historical development. There are significant implications of Hegel’s idea of Being on his view of history. Hegel (1969) saw history as “…the progress of the consciousness of freedom…,” where progress is not just the idea of moving forward or developing a particular material or discursive point but something that must be critically evaluated and revisited in relation to Being (Hegel 1956, p. 19).

The role of Being in this historical progress is to meet its negation and produce forms of Becoming, which manifest differently at various historical and civilizational junctures. Time, in this process, appears as a movement—though these manifestations are all borne out of the same Being, which remains an abstract point devoid of fixed meaning. In this vein, Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa or wanderer embodies both historical progress and the evolving consciousness of freedom—not only in its conceptualization of ideas but in its very redefinition of what ‘freedom’ and ‘wandering’ signify. His introductory chapter frames history’s trajectory—from religious to scientific paradigms—as fundamentally contingent on humanity’s restless curiosity to wander. Here, ‘wandering’ itself resists fixed definition; yet when dialectically synthesized with nothingness, à la Hegel, it generates a transformative movement. This mobility, Sankrityayan’s work demonstrates, constitutes the core dynamic of both historical actors and historical processes that collectively propel human development.

In other words, history moves forward with wandering of the wanderers, who share—with all their differences in spatiality and temporality—a curiosity that manifests throughout the history in form of Being or the need to wander, uniting them in the thread of ghummakaṛa. Though Sankrityayan never cites Hegel, the wanderer’s dialectical role mirrors Becoming—a useful lens to unpack the text’s synthesis of mobility and critique. The Hegelian triad (Being-Nothing-Becoming) proves generative for analyzing Sankrityayan’s textual strategy: just as Hegel’s Becoming emerges from contradiction, the wanderer crystallizes from Sankrityayan’s deliberate clash between śāstra’s authoritative form (Being) and its satirical content (Nothing). This tension, embodied in passages like the salt-doll analogy and using phrases like frogs of the well, performs the very historical Becoming it describes. Crucially, Sankrityayan positions wandering as the transcendental determinant of history—a Geist-like force that precedes and surpasses socio-cultural contexts. Without it, he argues, neither religion nor human progress, flawed as both may be, could emerge. The wanderer is pre-historical, an agent that critiques all static categories that emerge in the evolution of human societies—dharma and other ascetic practices that reject openness as dogma, mendicancy as performative stasis—by exposing their disassociation from the procreative act of wandering. Here, Hegel’s framework reveals how Sankrityayan’s satire does not merely mock orthodoxy but stages wandering as the dialectical synthesis of history itself. This transcendence from history, however, does not entirely negate the text’s latent anti-colonial edge: by privileging wandering over fixed hierarchies, whether Brahmanical or colonial, Sankrityayan’s critique destabilizes all imposed authority.

Existing scholarship on Sankrityayan’s works—including translations and secondary analyses—interprets questions of authorship and agency primarily and largely through the lens of his biography (Machwe 1978; Mule 1993; Vidyarathi 2000; Puri 2011; Ray 2014; Chudal 2016; Kumar 2017; Joshi 2019; Bray et al. 2020; Bhartiya 2024). While this approach offers valuable insights, such as tracing the evolution of his thought across his polymathic career and contextualizing his work within broader socio-political movements, it ultimately limits the text’s interpretive possibilities. This article instead adopts Roland Barthes’ essay La mort de l’auteur (1967) as its theoretical framework for reading ghummakaṛa śāstra. For Barthes (1977), a text constitutes “…a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash… (Barthes 1977, p. 146).” Within this space, the writer “…can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original (Barthes 1977, p. 146).” The text thus becomes a site of plural meanings, where readerly interpretation supplants authorial authority. Moreover, any text is “… a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture… (Barthes 1977, p. 146).” Sankrityayan’s text demonstrates remarkable versatility—not merely as a reflection of his polymathic and wandering life, but through its rich and deep engagement with multiple traditions, genres, and their critiques and polemics. These elements can be read intertextually, each operating within their own discursive contexts that do not require access to author’s intentionality or meanings.

This article builds upon, diverges from, and negotiates existing scholarship on ghummakaṛa śāstra by focusing on a fundamental point of contention: the translation of “ghummakaṛa,” the stakes of these translational choices, and their implications for understanding both the text and textuality itself (Ray 2014; Chudal 2016; Rana 2018). Adopting an explicit theoretical position, the article compares the wanderer as a historical subject to Hegel’s concept of Being—not because of Sankrityayan’s Marxist background, but because the wanderer, as depicted in the text, transcends spatial, temporal, and thematic boundaries in a manner that inherently invites this Hegelian reading. Moreover, as this article’s inquiry centers on the relationship between wandering and religion, textual analysis becomes paramount—particularly in uncovering the work’s satirical-polemic dimensions beyond authorial intent. The text’s subversive power emerges not from Sankrityayan’s biography but from its own discursive strategies, where form and content collide to critique religious orthodoxies in the guise of praise for wandering and writing a treatise in classical terms on the subject. Thus, the text’s anterior dimensions construct a complex image of religions—one that simultaneously embodies religious contestation and critiques Indian philosophical traditions, all while adopting the formal structure of a treatise. Through this blending of satire and polemic, the work destabilizes traditional religious hermeneutics, weaponizing its own generic conventions to undermine the orthodoxies it mimics.

3. Ergo, the Need to Wander: Agency, Mobility, and Religious Hermeneutics as Historical Determinants

Rana (2018) frames ghummakaṛa śāstra through Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology (1987), translating the title as The Wanderer’s Manual. He emphasizes Sankrityayan’s celebration of a “free-floating disposition” enabled by nomadic mobility—one that fosters discovery, new alliances, and intellectual transformation (Rana 2018, p. 259). In contrast, Chudal (2016) juxtaposes ghummakaṛī or wandering against modern tourism, treating it as a distinct epistemic practice (Chudal 2016, p. 56). While both scholars contextualize the text within Sankrityayan’s biography, thus maintaining the salience of author’s views and his life, their approaches overlook textual nuances that emerge from the work itself. For instance, Rana’s (2018) translation of śāstra as “manual” dilutes its conceptual weight: Sankrityayan deliberately invokes the śāstra genre—a classical form of prescriptive discourse often tied to governance (Ray 2014, p. 169)—to subvert Brahmanical orthodoxy through satire.

Though Rana’s “nomadic” rightly captures the text’s anti-structural character, it struggles to reconcile with śāstra’s authoritative connotations. Similarly, Ray’s (2014) colonial-legal reading of the “vagabond” as a criminalized category, while historically salient, conflicts with Sankrityayan’s playful yet pointed appropriation of tradition (Ray 2014, pp. 170–72). Moreover, Ray’s (2014) reliance on the Bengali translation bhābaghūre shāstra (2009) introduces a critical interpretive divergence. The Bengali term bhābaghūre carries stronger connotations of vagabondage or aimless wandering compared to the Hindi ghummakaṛa—a term that preserves the intentionality and intellectual curiosity central to Sankrityayan’s project. This translational slippage risks over-determining the text’s engagement with colonial criminality while obscuring its philosophical dimensions. The tensions between these interpretations reveals the text’s irreducible plurality—one that demands a reading attuned to its internal contradictions, produced consciously and satirically.

This tension manifests in the opening lines of athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā—the introductory chapter whose title deliberately echoes the Vedānta Sūtra’s incipit. Sankrityayan justifies this appropriation as tradition-consistent, framing his “curiosity” (lit. jijñāsā) as epistemically foundational, akin to classical śāstra (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 1). Yet this assertion demands layered reading: it oscillates between sincere generic adherence and sly parody of Brahmanical textual authority. The satire crystallizes when he declares, “…even half of the six orthodox seers who composed treatises admitted that the Brahma’s uselessness (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 1)”—a rhetorical gambit that simultaneously mimics and destabilizes śāstra’s doctrinal gravitas.3 Sankrityayan systematically undermines śāstra’s textual authority by elevating wandering as humanity’s supreme epistemic practice. He contrasts this with Brahma’s claimed cosmic responsibilities—creation, preservation, destruction—which he dismisses with empirical skepticism that there exists “…no evidence, not even an assumption, of Brahma’s capacity to exist, let alone to create or to destroy worlds (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 1).”4

This polemic operates beyond theological or philosophical critiques. Sankrityayan substitutes Brahmanical abstraction with the wanderer’s embodied praxis, positioning wandering as the procreative core of human knowledge, not any omnipotent, divine entity. This stance delivers a dual assault on Brahmanical authority: first, through its empirical debunking of theological claims, and second, by displacing static doctrine of Brahma with the wanderer’s mobile curiosity as the site of knowledge. The ghummakaṛa transcends mere substitution to become an epistemological center—one whose praxis of mobility is central to its identity and dismantles the framework of hierarchical knowledge, whether dualist (dvaita) or non-dualist (advaita). In privileging lived experience over received traditions, the wanderer does not simply replace Brahmanical authority but exposes its foundational instability through embodied critique.

Sankrityayan asserts that humans were naturally wanderers for most of history, living “…beyond agriculture, gardening, and free from the concerns of a home… free like the birds in the sky on earth, [humans] wandered in winter and summer, changing their places (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 1).”5 He poses a rhetorical challenge: if early humans had remained dormant in warm climates, how could civilization have progressed? Here, wandering emerges not as marginal behavior but as the essential driver of human achievement—both scientific and theological—with the wanderer’s curiosity mirroring the very impulse behind all intellectual breakthroughs. His polemic escalates through pointed critiques of Brahmanical orthodoxy. Sankrityayan’s uses satirical tone against examples from the Hindu and Brahmanical treatises, arguing that

…New Zealand and Australia were about to become the part of grander India, but for the reasons of closedmindedness, the fools started preaching in this country that there is a great enmity between the Hindu religion and the waves of the ocean; upon teaching them, the body which is like a doll of salt, will dissolve in the water.6

(Sankrityayan 1945, p. 4)

These examples serve dual purposes: On the one hand, they trace civilizational decline of India and China-like countries from empires to colonies due to the rejection of wandering ideals. On the other hand, they systematically undermine the translations of ghummakaṛa as mere “vagabond (Ray 2014)” or the śāstra as a “manual (Rana 2018).” The salt-doll analogy, in particular, weaponizes Brahmanical imagery to expose its own fragility. Moreover, Ray (2014) reads this passage critically, suggesting that Sankrityayan is “…evidently delighted at this ‘achievement’ of the ‘western countries’ to the degree that he laments India and China’s failure to have colonized the Americas and Australia… (Ray 2014, p. 170).” Ray (2014) rightly notes that Western colonial encounters and the subjugation of Australia and New Zealand’s native populations should not make us “…lose sight of the fact that it was only at the cost of not so-good consequences for the indigenous cultures (Ray 2014, p. 170).” Yet in making this valid observation, Ray overlooks a critical paradox in Sankrityayan’s text: First, is Sankrityayan equating colonial “adventurers” with vagabonds? If so, what ideological baggage does this association carry? Second, Sankrityayan’s assertion functions primarily as a caustic, satirical jab—a rhetorical provocation aimed at Indians and Chinese rather than a literal historical claim. By neglecting these satirical undertones, Ray’s (2014) analysis becomes more reflective of his own ideological framework than of the text’s deliberate language and subversive intent. This oversight exemplifies the risks of divorcing Sankrityayan’s polemic from its satirical form—a pattern which emerges in Ray’s (2014) scholarship, perhaps due to his interaction with the 2009 published Bangla translation of the text (Ray 2014, p. 174).7 Moreover, in his biographical and contextual reading, Ray (2014) misses that the wanderer’s transgression of borders—literal and ideological—resonates with Sankrityayan’s own defiance of colonial travel restrictions, e.g., to Tibet, yet the text’s satire universalizes this rebellion, targeting all systems that limit curiosity.

These examples also establish the dual-nature of wandering as an act. First, wandering is fundamental for civilizational development and decline, thus, an active force which shapes history. Second, the wanderer is an agent who has displaced the traditional curiosity of Brahma in the inquiries on metaphysics and initiated a critique that identifies the wanderer as the cause of the change in the world. This is further underscored in Sankrityayan’s weaponized critique against Brahmanism and its disavowal of the dharma of ghummakaṛī or wandering. Sankrityayan (1945) argues that whichever ethnicity or nation has placed faith in wandering has prospered, while those who abandoned it, like India, became “…subject to those who came and ruled us for seven centuries, regardless of their merit; we have been kicked around by those who arrived in this time (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 5).”8 This statement demands careful scrutiny to unpack its layered meanings.

Despite translational issues, Ray’s study (2014) correctly identifies elements of anti-Islamic rhetoric in Sankrityayan’s text, noting how it frames Muslims as “…as much ‘outsiders’ as the British” and Islamic rule as “…as much ‘colonization’ as the British (Ray 2014, p. 171).” Ray translates a similar passage but inserts bracketed context suggesting Sankrityayan blamed Buddhism’s decline for Islam’s arrival—an implication absent from the Hindi original, which only references “seven centuries” of foreign rule. This is not to dispute Ray’s reading but to highlight the need to reevaluate whether Buddhism’s disappearance truly catalyzed Islam’s spread. Chudal’s (2016) biography reveals that Sankrityayan’s later views on bhārtīyatā (Indianness) advocated Hindi as a national language and the “Indianization” of Islam, a stance that got him expelled from the Communist Party (Chudal 2016, pp. 86–88). This alienation of Islam clashes with Rana’s (2018) translation of ghummakaṛa as “nomad,” given Islam’s early Bedouin nomadic roots and mobile spread across South Asia. Ray’s (2014) critique also aligns with recent scholarship on Hindu nationalism, which similarly rewrites Islamicate rule as colonization (Truschke 2021).

Ray (2014) interpolates ‘the disappearance of Buddhism’ into Sankrityayan’s claims, which originally cite only “the absence of wandering” as the cause of foreign rule. This is a framework that includes Jaina mendicants, who were active during Islamicate rule, as wanderers. Whether Sankrityayan’s Hindu nationalist-sounding rhetoric reflects his later life (Chudal 2016, pp. 86–88) raises a methodological question: Should ghummakaṛa śāstra, written during his imprisonment amid anti-colonial struggles and progressive works, be read biographically? Or should we follow Barthes’ la mort de l’auteur (1967) and analyze only the textual categories that emerge internally? If the text is to be read internally, its disavowal of Islam—which Ray (2014) correctly identifies—has little connection to Buddhism’s decline in India; a process most recent scholarship traces to the eighth-century ascendance of Tantric traditions (Sanderson 2009). Sankrityayan’s (1945) historical framework, while linking civilizational decay to the suppression of wandering, never explicitly attributes Buddhism’s decline to Islamic rule. Instead, his narrative advances a nationalist (and often neo-nationalist) reading of Islamicate governance as colonial domination—a position thoroughly challenged by postcolonial historiography (Truschke 2018, 2021). Returning to Sankrityayan’s view of wandering, he affirms Buddhism and the Buddha as a wanderer historically, since ghummakaṛa appears to be not just a category of identity but an agent driving the history (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 5). In this vein, Sankrityayan further claims that the Buddhist monks took the Buddha’s teachings to their heart, and therefore:

…Have they not wandered from Macedonia (sic) and Egypt in the West to Japan in the East, from Mongolia in the north to Bali and Banka (sic) islands in the South? For the greater India, for which every Indian is proud, have these wanderers not created that greater India through their feet? Not only the Buddha gave inspiration from his wandering, instead, there was an influence of wanderers a century or so before the Buddha which enabled wanderers like him in the first place in this country. In those times, not just men, but women also wandered around with the branches of jaṁbū-vṛatta (sic), showing their skills, defeating the narrow-minded (lit. kūpamaṅḍhūka: the frogs of the well) and wander freely across Indian subcontinent.9

(Sankrityayan 1945, p. 5)

Sankrityayan’s historical vision—particularly his reframing of the Buddha and Buddhism through the lens of wandering—simultaneously celebrates agency in mobility, a hallmark of monastic life, and is devoid of nomadism or vagrancy’s connotations, and wields satire against ideological opponents. His allegorical use of kūpamaṅḍhūka (lit. frogs of the well) mockingly depicts those who claim knowledge without movement, implicitly referring to the Brahmins. Similarly, his invocation of “Greater India”—a concept appropriated by Hindu nationalists beyond the colonial-era frameworks like the “two-nation theory”—functions as both historical claim and satirical polemic. Sankrityayan’s deployment of “Greater India” operates on two satirical registers: it simultaneously exposes the conceptual hollowness of territorial expansionism (as discussed above) and mocks its nationalist proponents—particularly Brahmins—through implicit rhetorical questions. His juxtaposition of Hindu cultural reach (extending to Bali and Borneo) with its failure to incorporate Australia and New Zealand punctures claims of civilizational inevitability.

The unspoken challenge—if your culture could spread so far, why not further?—stands in thoughtful contrast to his depiction of Brahmins as kūpamaṅḍhūka (frogs of the well): narrow-minded figures who mistake their limited well for the entire ocean. This irony weaponizes geography itself, revealing nationalism’s contradictions through the very spaces it claims to dominate. Against the backdrop of this satire/polemic, the chapter’s overarching thesis is uncompromising: wandering constitutes the central force shaping world history, with Indian history as its paradigmatic example. Yet the text’s critique extends beyond Indic religions. Sankrityayan positions wandering as fundamental to all religious traditions, noting how Jesus Christ “…was a wanderer, and his disciples were also wanderers who spread his message in all corners of the world (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 8).”10 This stands in pointed contrast to his portrayal of Jewish prophets who “…paid the price for it for centuries… the art of wandering was lost to them, forcing them to wander the world, making them rich (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 8).”11 Here, Sankrityayan’s polemic distinguishes between two modes of mobility: one generative, i.e., Christianity’s expansive mission and another punitive, i.e., Jewish diaspora’s migration across Europe.

In this text, the wanderer’s agency is active rather than passive—transcending identity, space, and time to manifest across societies, whether generatively or punitively. The wanderer is not shaped by socio-cultural and political contexts but represents something inherent to humanity itself. The wanderer’s quintessential presence in history extends beyond mere nomadism, contra Rana (2018), while the text’s silence on eschatological and soteriological aspects—whether in Indic or non-Indic religions—marks a deliberate break from traditional views of cyclical and linear existence. This rupture destabilizes conventional frameworks for discussing religion. The wanderer thus emerges as a life-affirming force, pervading worldly life beyond the binaries of active/inactive or personal/impersonal divine entities. It exists as Being: a self-reflexive entity that manifests through history while its pursuit also shapes history. This framework necessitates examining how ghummakaṛa śāstra engages with religion—interrogating its authority while simultaneously contesting and negotiating its boundaries. Moving beyond theological or philosophical assessments of religious descriptions, the following section examines how the ghummakaṛa’s meta-framework itself constructs religion—defining its practices, boundaries, and underlying worldview through the lens of mobility and wandering. Here, religious systems are analyzed not for doctrinal coherence but as expressions of the wanderer’s epistemic revolution.

4. The Wanderer’s Episteme: Religion, Religious Boundaries, and Polemic in Ghummakaṛa Śāstra

The opening chapter of ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945), titled athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer), strategically appropriates the Brahmanical śāstra genre’s authority for two subversive ends. First, it displaces Brahma—the traditional subject of philosophical inquiry—with ghummakaṛī (wandering) as humanity’s central pursuit and the ghummakaṛa (wanderer) as its subject. As established earlier, this wanderer operates as Becoming, a self-referential category transcending spatio-temporal, religio-cultural, and historical limits. Second, and more radically, the text reconstitutes religious authority itself, grounding authenticity not in institutional structures but in the ‘knowing wanderer’s curiosity.’ Here, the quest to understand mobility supplants the traditional pursuit of divinity—a move that simultaneously destabilizes theological orthodoxy and elevates wandering to the status of dharma. This shift carries a subtle but profound consequence: by diverting focus from soteriological endpoints, the text proposes being-in-the-world—with the subject as history’s shaping force—as the new paradigm for religious existence.

This new paradigm of wandering reconfigures religious boundaries and identities—no longer determined by theological content, conceptions of divinity (or its absence), or soteriological aims, but by how religions historically shaped human consciousness through mobility. The wanderer’s epistemic framework renders religion a dynamic product of historical movement rather than static doctrine. Sankrityayan first directs this critique toward Brahmanical traditions, noting that while the six orthodox schools lack consensus on an impersonal deity’s existence, those who claim “…to have received knowledge and powers sitting in a cave or a room would be the most enlightened one…” undermine their own assertions (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 6).12 The text pointedly invokes the Vedantic figure Śaṅkara (c. 8th century CE): if meditative isolation granted omniscience, “…why did Śaṅkara—a Brahman-incarnate himself—wander the subcontinent’s four corners? Nobody made Śaṅkara a Brahma but the religion of wandering (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 6).”13 This irony escalates as Sankrityayan condemns Hindu philosophies that valorize stasis, arguing—

The disciples of Ramanuja, Madhavacharya, and other teachers of Vaishnavism must forgive me if I say that they have contributed warmly to ignorance (lit. kūpamaṅḍhūkatā) in India. Thanks to Ramananda and Caitanya… who re-established the practice of wandering for producing, if not the first-class, then produced many of the second-class wanderers. How could these [i.e., the second-class wanderers] reach Baku, when even reaching to Mansarovar [in Tibet] was difficult for them? Cooking by themselves, to become impure upon touching meat or eggs, washing hands after going to bathroom, and taking a shower after going to toilet each time would be equal to calling the God of death, Yama. Ergo, these poor second-class wanderers could only wander with care.14

(Sankrityayan 1945, pp. 6–7)

This polemic—delivered with deliberate satire—yields critical insights about religious identity. First, by positioning wandering as constitutive of authentic religion, the text recalibrates religious value according to mendicant mobility. It constructs a hierarchy that elevates Śañkara’s tradition above those of Madhava, Ramanuja, and the Vaishnavites, distinguishing “first-class wanderers” from their “second-class” counterparts through their relative commitment to itinerancy. Second, the text frames Brahmanical vegetarianism not as spiritual discipline but as a self-defeating constraint—one that physically and ideologically restricts the tradition’s capacity for expansion, and thus, implicitly highlighting the supremacy of the Buddhist dietary norms which are based on the principles of Vinaya or humility (Upadhyay 2024, p. 270). The implicit argument suggests that dietary orthodoxy impedes the very mobility required for religious dissemination. Third, and most significantly, this classification system deliberately bypasses soteriological or doctrinal criteria. Instead, it evaluates religious vitality through three interlocking measures: the demonstrated capacity to wander beyond one’s origins, the agency to propagate ideals through movement, and the commitment to transform religious geography through persistent mobility. The wanderer thus becomes both metric and metaphor for religious efficacy.

The text constructs a distinct substratum of “first-class wanderers”15 whose religious significance demands closer examination. This category unites figures as theologically diverse as the Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus Christ and his apostles, and Dayanand Saraswati (founder of Arya Samaj), binding them through their shared epistemic dependence on wandering—both as source of knowledge and means of dissemination (Sankrityayan 1945, pp. 5–8). What unites these figures despite their profound eschatological and soteriological differences is their common rejection of practices that geographically constrain religious mobility, with vegetarianism serving as the text’s primary example of such restrictive orthodoxy. This operates on two polemical levels: superficially, it critiques Brahmanical ritual purity for privileging dietary codes over missionary imperative. More substantially, however, it advocates for the deliberate cultivation of norms and values that actively facilitate mobility rather than anchor practitioners to place. The wanderer’s religiosity thus becomes defined not by adherence to static doctrine but by commitment to transformative circulation.

The text’s radical reframing becomes most explicit in its dual insistence on defining wandering as religion while simultaneously elevating it to religious ideal. By positioning mobility at the center of religious experience, it systematically marginalizes conventional categorical markers—ritual practices, theological distinctions (both internal and external), and communal identity-signifiers—subordinating them to a singular criterion: the practitioner’s commitment to unbounded movement. This constitutes not merely a reordering but an ontological collapse of religious identity into the act of wandering itself. This is explicitly evident in the following passage.

For an individual, there is no better religion than wandering. The future of communities depends on wandering. That is why I would say that each young man and woman must take the oath of wandering. All the evidences given against it must be proved lies and waste. If the parents oppose it, then it is best to understand them as the new version of Prahlad’s parents… If religion and religious teachers give any argument against wandering, then it must be understood that similar hypocrisy and hypocrites never let the world walk on a simpler path. If the State and politicians put barriers, then it is an experience of a thousand times—no barrier in the world could stop the wanderer which has the speed of a great river’s flow. The wanderers have crossed and wandered across the most heavily guarded borders by disobedience (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 9).16

A simplistic and literal reading of this paragraph, e.g., a biographical reading, may point to Sankrityayan’s ‘Marxist’ background. However, upon a closer reading, Sankrityayan’s satire—ranging from labelling the opposing parents as the parents of Prahlad (a viṣṇu-devotee whose parents were asūra-s or demons in traditional Brahmanical mythology, hiraṇyakaśyapa) to willfully breaking the laws which contrasts with Prahlad’s static and immobile devotion—is rooted in crafted use of religious imagery and language, such as oath-taking to be wanderers. At this point, one may ask: why would a vagabond—if that is how ghummakaṛa is intended to be translated—keep the devotion of Prahlad in defying parents and cross international borders? In this way, wandering and the wanderer in the text emerge not just as factors driving changes in human history as active agents, but also acquire the form of a religion itself—a religion that is antinomian, committed to transgressions against the structures of social, political, and religious authority. In this disobedience, the text argues for adhering to the norms of wandering antinomianism, reconstructing the spirit of mobility and freedom. Since freedom in and from the world has been one of the soteriological aims of Indian religions and philosophies (Hedling 2020), the text reframes freedom in similar terms without explicitly conceding ground to any particular religious view. This poses a direct challenge to Rana’s (2018) reading of ghummakaṛa as nomadism. While nomadic cultures may enable mobility, they do not inherently embrace antinomianism; nomadism can generate its own structures, hierarchies, and norms. Moreover, why would a nomad—already at the margins of society and politics—disobey their family to travel? Though these elements may exist within ghummakaṛa, they remain exclusionary—unable to incorporate disparate groups and individuals into their framework of identity.

In the chapter dharma aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering), Sankrityayan rejects any distinction between religion and modern wandering (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 70). He grounds this argument by noting that most founders of major world religions were “first-class wanderers,” while figures like Chinese travelers—who spread religious ideas through mobility—similarly prioritized wandering (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 70). Further, by suggesting that Brahmins of the past were not kūpamañḍhuka (lit. frogs of the well) but actively wandered for knowledge, Sankrityayan makes two interrelated claims. First, he contends that Brahmins later grew narrow-minded, falsely positioning wandering as antithetical to learning and societal-religious norms (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 70). This binary—religion versus modern wandering—is flawed, he argues, since mobility historically enabled the dissemination of religions and knowledge, an ethos shared by all major religious founders, including Brahmins. Second, and more implicitly, he attributes this artificial opposition to modernist paradigms. He illustrates this through examples like Chinese students traveling to premodern India and the scholar Smṛiti Jñānakīrti (c. 1042 CE), alongside premodern transnational networks (Sankrityayan 1945, pp. 70–72). By underscoring the freedom of mobility which the Buddhist monks and others exercised in cultivating Sanskrit and religious knowledge across Southeast and East Asia, Sankrityayan critiques modernity’s constraints—without ever naming or identifying them directly. This aspect of criticism is further developed by Sankrityayan in the chapter, where he argues that one of the crucial features of a wanderer is that he “…crosses the narrow borders of religions, the discrimination is a small thing for a wanderer… (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 74).”17

One of the critical aspects of Sankrityayan’s work has been the textual silence, largely on the question of Islam. In the preface, Sankrityayan largely draws from a wide range of religious examples of wandering but neither includes Prophet Muhammad or any other Islamic figure in his discussion. Prophet’s migration (hijr) from Mecca to Medina might emerge to be a great example of wandering. In this vein, Ray (2014) highlights that in his article that Sankrityayan mentions “…Columbus and Vasco da Gama…” as ‘vagabonds,’ and painstakingly shows how Sankrityayan does not mention a single Muslim medieval traveler, especially, the Muslims who played a major role in charting the history of navigation (Ray 2014, p. 172). Ray (2014) further highlights that Sankrityayan mentions “…a host of religious itinerants, but none of the Sufi wand (Ray 2014, p. 172).” However, contra Ray’s (2014) reading, Sankrityayan does engage with Islam—though his portrayal proves more nuanced. In one passage, he interrogates what religion might best suit a wanderer, asserting a “…Christian wanderer could be more generous than a Brahmin wanderer; a Muslim faqir (mendicant) never does any kind of discrimination, getting drunk in the ecstasy of wandering (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 74).”18 Furthermore, while Sankrityayan’s text does reproduce certain Orientalist critiques of Islam, his overall stance remains ambiguous—as evidenced by his surprising praise of Muslim faqirs. This complexity resists simplistic categorization, particularly given the text’s general silence on Islam elsewhere. The aforementioned quote—where he lauds the Muslim mendicant’s non-discriminatory ecstasy—demonstrates that his position cannot be reduced to blanket condemnation. Further in the chapter, Sankrityayan makes another mention of Islam, suggesting.

About a thousand or a thousand and hundred years ago, the orthodox religion like Islam reached Central Asia. Instead of espousing understanding, it sought to work by sword. There are many examples in Central Asia when Buddhist, Mani, and Nestorian monks have lived their life under one roof and have lost their necks to the Islamic sword under that roof… Further in time when the seed of wandering started to sprout in them, then, the tolerance with all religions started to make space in their mendicants (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 75).19

Sankrityayan’s portrayal of Islam in this passage proves problematic by reinforcing Orientalist historiography that frames Islam as a religion spread through force (Pruss 2023; Basu 2023). Beyond this trope, he presents Islam as a transformed force precisely because of its association with “wandering”—thereby advancing his core argument. However, his analysis emerges from a religiously motivated perspective that privileges Buddhism (his adopted faith) as the ideal wanderer’s religion. He champions Buddhism for neither prohibiting varied meats nor imposing rituals—unlike Brahmanism or Islam in his polemic portrayal. This aligns with broader patterns in religious polemics in pre-modern India, particularly within the genre of the Hindu śāstra tradition, where texts systematically diminish rival traditions to assert the superiority of their chosen worldview (Hettema and Kooi 2005; Freiberger 2010). Sankrityayan’s approach thus operates on two levels: superficially engaging with Islamic practices while fundamentally weaponizing them to bolster his Buddhist ideal of wandering. Moreover, in the text, Sankrityayan sees Buddhism in a specific way: a manifestation of the wanderer being, and thus, more suitable than other religions for the purposes of wandering. He writes that the first-class wanderer is one of the best men because “…he does not like the differences between humans. All the religions have invaluably served humanity in various capacities, he values them, although he cannot forgive those blind by their religion (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 75).”20

Sankrityayan’s perspective on religions in this text resists simplistic categorization. While his treatment of Islam remains either silent or critically Orientalist, he ultimately views religions as phenomenological—that is, grounded in subjective perception. In the chapter on religion and wandering, he argues that religions’ significance cannot be reduced to “…divinity and rituals and shams…” alone (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 76). Rather, he acknowledges their contributions to “…great literature, great art, assisted in raising the mental status of the people and their economic development (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 76).”21 Thus, isolating specific passages risks more than just overlooking the text’s symbolic layers—including its problematic biases and simplifications. Such selective reading also forecloses alternative interpretations of religion, religiosity, and Sankrityayan’s nuanced, even if inconsistent, engagements with specific religious and textual traditions. This text demands a holistic and intertextual reading that confronts both its polemical edges and its phenomenological insights. While throughout the text, Sankrityayan poses the religious nature of wandering—and even positing wandering as a religion itself that is integral to human development—his views on atheism and absence of religions contest these readings meaningfully. In the ending passages of the chapter, Sankrityayan argues that the number of wanderers who are outside the grasp of religion and religiosity is increasing, and such wanderers must not be a subject of scrutiny but have emerged to be the best of wanderers. This category of travelers, Sankrityayan argues “…does not hesitate from expressing their views on atheism but they do not verbally hurt the hearts of their fellow religious wanderers (Sankrityayan 1945, p. 76).”22

One of the most crucial aspects of the wanderer is their antinomian tendency. The wanderer’s antinomianism negates fixed religious norms, mirroring Hegel’s idea of Becoming—a synthesis of the traditional locus of religious authority as Being and its dissolution as Nothing. Similarly, the text’s satirical form, mixed with polemic and religious analysis, makes it a Barthesian “multidimensional space” that fractures the authorities it mimics, such as Brahmanical authority and the generic conventions of writing a śāstra. This invites readers to engage in religious criticism from a new perspective. With these two theoretical frameworks intertwined, Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa śāstra offers a new lens for reading history and religions, where wanderers and their actions become both a source of contestation against conventional religious authority and the driving force of historical and religious transformation. In this work, the ghummakaṛa is not merely at the intersection of history and religion but emerges as an agential subject—a civilizational quest akin to Hegel’s historical process of unveiling Being. Sankrityayan’s elevation of wandering to the status of religion requires deeper examination, particularly for what it reveals about his view of religion. By defining wandering as the ideal religion, he advances a two-fold argument: first, the antinomianism of wandering as negation, and second, mobility as synthesis.

The wanderer’s antinomianism—rejecting socio-cultural and religious norms like Brahmanical vegetarianism and territorial fixity—destabilizes existing authorities, functioning like Hegel’s Nothing. Sankrityayan’s mockery of Brahmins as kūpamaṅḍhūka (lit. frogs of the well) and his critique of Ramanuja, Madhavacharya, and other Vaishnavite teachers (Sankrityayan 1945, pp. 6–7, 70) attack their adherence to purity norms and refusal to wander, equating stasis with intellectual death. This theological critique serves as negation, a necessary element for historical and religious progress. Conversely, mobility operates as synthesis. Sankrityayan’s wanderer embodies historical movement through free physical travel driven by epistemic curiosity, ultimately transcending binaries like sacred/profane and colonizer/colonized. While Sankrityayan’s wanderer superficially evokes classical renouncer (saṃnyāsīs) tropes, its pre-historical agency—positioned as a civilizational determinant through Hegelian Becoming—transcends the historically contingent model of asceticism that emerged later. Unlike the saṃnyāsī’s ritual funeral, which marks individual rebirth, the wanderer’s perpetual mobility performs a collective ‘funeral’ for static identities. This formulation deliberately engages with the core tension in Brahmanical thought between varnāśrama dharma and renunciation: where traditional saṃnyāsīs ritually sever personal ties only to reinscribe sectarian boundaries. Sankrityayan’s polemic, while seemingly reductive, makes two strategic interventions: First, he exposes how renunciant traditions paradoxically fetishize detachment while enforcing mobility-inhibiting taboos, e.g., Vaishnavite purity norms, exemplified in his polemic contrast between Madhava’s disciples’ limits due to purity norms and the transcontinental reach of Buddhist mendicants—whom he reframes not as proselytizers but as prototypes of boundary-less critique. Second, his deliberate anachronism could be read as satirical hyperbole, targeting any orthodoxy that territorializes religious practice or material accumulation. Here, Sankrityayan’s wanderer embodies a Hegelian Geist: it dismantles boundaries through the epistemic violence of encountering alien norms, producing a radical cosmopolitanism that renders the kūpamaṇḍūka religiosity obsolete.

For Sankrityayan—who frames curiosity about the wanderer’s intent as the treatise’s central subject—religion is best defined by acts that challenge social and familial hierarchies and replace them with the freedom which has characterized humans through history. He replaces mainstream religions with wandering as the true religion, drawing on the shared characteristics of all religious founders and positioning mobility as the engine of history. In this way—contra Ray (2014), Chudal (2016), and Rana (2018)—reading Sankrityayan’s text without privileging authorial intent reveals how its satirical adoption of the treatise form, the deliberate contradictions it generates, and its cohesive synthesis of Indian and Western thought collectively redefine interpretive possibilities.

5. Conclusions: Wanderer/Wandering, Religions, and Intertextual Criticism

This article critically engages with Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa śāstra, specifically its two chapters—athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer) and dharma aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering)—due to their focus on religions and innovative engagement with religious hermeneutics. Departing from the existing scarce scholarship on ghummakaṛa śāstra, this analysis reads Sankrityayan’s text without privileging authorial intent or biographical context, treating it instead as a “multidimensional space” where textual contradictions and interpretations freely emerge. This article challenges prevailing interpretations and translations of key terms like ghummakaṛa in existing scholarship. Through direct engagement with the original Hindi text, it addresses significant gaps in current research. The term ghummakaṛa—translated here as “wanderer”—must retain its essential connotations of qualified freedom: the liberty to move while observing certain self-determined norms, embodying both mobility and autonomous agency.

This article’s intervention extends beyond rectifying translational or biographical misreadings of ghummakaṛa śāstra. By applying Hegel’s dialectic and Barthes’ intertextuality, this paper uncovers how Sankrityayan’s wanderer operates as both a historical agent (Becoming) and a destabilizing textual construct beyond its immediate context (Death of the Author). Where Ray (2014) reduces the text to colonial resistance and Rana (2018) conflates it with Nomadology, this article’s framework reveals the wanderer as a meta-religious and transcendent force—simultaneously synthesizing and negating authority. This approach not only resolves the contradictions in Sankrityayan’s satire but also models a new hermeneutic for studying Indian religious traditions as dynamic movements with their contradictions and challenges faced with the rise in modernity.

The earlier discussion demonstrates that Sankrityayan employs the wanderer figure to critique religions, religious ideals, and religious figures through two key strategies. First, by adopting the classical śāstra (lit. treatise) form, he appropriates generic and religious authority to subvert dominant religious ideas. While this reading privileges textual over contextual critique, Sankrityayan’s antinomianism manifestly engages colonial hierarchies—not as its primary focus, but as part of its broader subversion of authority. The wanderer, though transcendent in the text, emerges from a world where mobility was policed, making its satire all the more potent. The wanderer’s inherent transcendence and antinomianism, best represented in the transgression of boundaries—whether Brahmanical or colonial—exposes Sankrityayan’s implicit critique of all hierarchical authority, including imperial frameworks that policed mobility.

To read his critique solely through his Buddhist-Marxist identity or to look at his treatment of Islam, defined mostly by silence and omission, obscures the deliberate contradictions within the text. Sankrityayan weaponizes Brahmanical genre conventions to interrogate Hinduism (particularly Vaishnavism), Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, and Islam—reframing their religious figures through the lens of wandering. Central to this project is Sankrityayan’s challenge to orthodox interpretations: he asserts that all religions embody the wanderer’s spirit, the same impulse that drove humanity’s migration from Africa and fueled civilizational curiosity and discovery. As this article demonstrates, his hermeneutic approach blends satire and polemic to position wandering itself as a religion—one distilled from the shared essence of all faiths. In this way, the figure of ghummakaṛa functions as a transcendental subject pervading history as an active agent like the Hegelian Being in the Western continental-philosophical traditions. Thus, blending satire with polemic, the text subverts traditional religious hermeneutics. In the philosophical sense, the wanderer functions like Hegel’s Becoming which when posited against the antinomianism as Nothing, produces and synthesizes Being. The wanderer’s positionality as Being and Becoming, at different points highlight the contradictions within Sankrityayan’s approach to history and religions. However, interpreting these contradictions through Barthes’ framework of the text as a “multidimensional space” allows us to treat them as productive sites of plural interpretation rather than problems to be resolved. This approach prioritizes examining how contradictions function within the text’s inherent satirical and polemical tone, rather than attempting to determine which interpretation is “correct.” By fusing Hegelian historical dialectics with Barthesian intertextuality, Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa śāstra offers a model for reading religion as movement and critique, where the wanderer’s rebellion becomes the engine of history.

Moreover, these contradictions demand intertextual—not just biographical—analysis. By reading them intertextually, we can interrogate whether they originate from the very Brahmanical worldview Sankrityayan critiques, or whether they signal other interpretive possibilities. This method reveals how the text’s internal tensions operate hermeneutically, independent and beyond constraints of reading authorial intent. A close reading of these two chapters yields significant insights about religions. First, Sankrityayan positions “wandering” as a perennially viable religion—yet one constructed through a deliberate contradiction and frequent contrarianism. This religion simultaneously synthesizes the essential qualities of all faiths at the locus of mobility while using the wanderer’s antinomianism to negate religions’ anti-mobility tendencies. Second, his critique implicitly acknowledges religions as dynamic rather than static entities, emphasizing their inherent spatial and temporal mobility. Crucially, this mobility should be read not as undermining religions but as validating their adaptive capacity. While this perspective challenges fundamentalism, it risks its own form of essentialization by positing the wanderer as religions’ transhistorical core—the unchanging essence persisting through civilizational changes.

Sankrityayan’s conceptualization of wandering as dharma carries profound ethical implications. He demands religious individuals cultivate ethical flexibility akin to travelers who absorb and synthesize diverse cultural teachings, directly opposing rigid moral systems. This ethical contrarianism manifests through his work’s satirical texture, which emerges from intertextual play with genres like śāstra, polemic, and travelogue. Such textual hybridity creates what Barthes termed a “…tissue of quotations,” displacing authorial control and subverting religious authority. The wanderer here operates as Hegelian Becoming—synthesizing abstract religious authority (Being) with the negation of fixed norms (Nothing) to emerge as history’s transformative force. This framework explains Sankrityayan’s classification of figures like the Buddha and Mahavira as “first-class” wanderers—a move that aims to recalibrate civilizational discourse. By recasting these founders through the lens of mobility and wandering, he advocates for religious identities rooted in flux rather than stasis, crystallized in his concept of ghummakaṛa dharma. Contemporary scholarship often reduces Sankrityayan’s complexity by framing him through reductive categories, e.g., Buddhist/Marxist/cultural nationalist, thereby, neutralizing the very contrarianism that fuels his polemic and satire. Future studies and scholarship should grapple with his intentional multivalence, reading his textual strategies—tonal shifts, criticisms, and satirical devices—against the grain of simplistic biographical or ideological containment. Future scholarship might explore how Sankrityayan’s ghummakaṛa dharma prefigures contemporary discourses on formations of diaspora and diasporic religious communities, religious transnationalism, secular pilgrimage, or even how it manifests in more contemporary forms of movement across borders, such as, digital nomadism. By treating the text as a ‘multidimensional space’ rather than a biographical artifact, this article invites readings that transcend its 1940s origins, affirming the wanderer’s enduring relevance as a symbolic for critique and transformation.