Standing Babas

The Standing Babas are ascetic monks whose defining vow forbids sitting or lying down for the rest of their lives. In a hidden temple compound in Byculla, they keep a hashish den where customers must also remain standing. Their community brings together men who arrived at the vow by sharply different paths, while their shared practice gives the den its unusual order: a place of hospitality and commerce organized around continuous physical discipline.

Identity and Vow

The Standing Babas stand day and night, including while they eat, attend to ordinary bodily needs, pray, work, and sing. Even sleep takes place upright: harnesses support them while they are unconscious and prevent them from falling. The vow therefore governs not one ritual moment but the whole pattern of daily life. There is no customary posture of rest to which they can return.

The physical effects unfold over years. During the first five to ten years, their legs swell and their muscles thicken; in later years, the legs become markedly thinner. The account emphasizes the duration and cost of the practice rather than presenting it as a brief trial. The Babas’ constant shifting from one foot to another is a response to pain, but it also becomes a gentle, continuing dance, visible to everyone who enters their space.

Their reasons for taking the vow are not uniform. Some begin at sixteen or seventeen, drawn by a vocation comparable to the religious call that leads others to become priests, rabbis, or imams. Many older men renounce worldly life in preparation for death and another level of incarnation. Others have been businessmen who pursued pleasure, power, and profit, or holy men who took on the vow after other demanding devotions. The group also includes criminals, among them thieves, murderers, mafia figures, and former warlords, seeking expiation or propitiation. The same discipline thus holds youthful religious commitment, preparation for death, and efforts at atonement within one community.

The Temple Compound and the Den

The den occupies a corridor between two brick buildings at the rear of the Babas’ temple. An iron roof covers the passage, whose floor is paved with flat stones. The Babas enter through a door at the back; customers come and go through an iron gate at the street end. Beyond the corridor lie gardens, cloisters, and dormitories hidden within the compound. These inner areas are reserved for those who make and keep the vow, so the public den is both part of the temple and a boundary to its more private life.

Customers stand along the corridor walls because nobody sits in the Babas’ presence. Near the entrance, a tap stands over an open drain, where visitors drink water or spit. The crowd is socially and geographically mixed, and the den does not reserve its threshold for one class. Men from different parts of the country and different levels of society gather there, standing beside one another while the Babas move among them.

The Babas prepare hashish in funnel-shaped clay chillums and smoke with their customers. The hashish is Kashmiri, described in the account as grown and produced in the foothills of the Himalayas; the Babas smoke it throughout the day and night. Conversation, music, and devotional chanting from elsewhere in the compound accompany the activity. The setting consequently combines an ascetic community, religious sound, and a steady exchange with visitors, without erasing the rule that separates vowed residents from the public.

A Visit with Lin, Karla, and Prabaker

Months before the visit, Prabaker had taken Lin to the den during a tour of the city’s darker side. After returning from the village, Lin asked him to promise another visit, this time with Karla. Lin knew she had not been there and was interested in the stories she had heard. Prabaker agreed to take them before helping Lin collect his belongings and move into the slum. The visit thus began as Lin’s attempt to share a place he found remarkable with Karla, as well as part of his changing life in Bombay.

Lin, Karla, and Prabaker stand with their backs to the corridor’s rear wall, near the sealed door used by the Babas. Other visitors look at Lin and Karla, pale-skinned foreigners; some are visibly surprised to see a woman in the den. Yet nobody approaches or addresses them directly. The visitors’ attention remains divided between the Babas and the hashish, while low conversation and devotional sounds continue around them. The scene places Karla within a space whose customs are strict but whose mixed clientele does not openly confront the newcomers.

The Sword Attack and Narrative Significance

The visit is interrupted when a man in northern tribesman’s dress enters by the street gate, shouts, draws a long sword, and advances down the corridor toward Lin. Lin understands the man to be intent on killing him. The customers press themselves against the walls, while the Babas move out of the attacker’s way. The door behind Lin and his companions is locked, leaving no route of escape; Lin raises his fists, drawing on seven years of martial-arts training.

Before Lin has to fight, another man trips the attacker and restrains him. The sword falls near Karla, and Lin picks it up. Men who know the attacker escort him out to the alley. When a man returns with his palms extended for the weapon, Lin hesitates, then gives it to him; the man bows politely in apology. The episode turns the den from a place of observation into a sudden test of danger, but the available account does not identify the attacker’s motive or establish that the Babas organized the intervention.

The Standing Babas matter to the scene both as a community with its own rules and as the still, persistent center of a crowded passage. Their vow governs who may enter the inner compound, how customers behave, and how ordinary activity unfolds around them. Lin’s encounter with one Baba, who prepares and offers him a chillum, briefly draws him toward an understanding of what human will can endure; that moment passes as the smoke fades and the monk returns toward the gate, murmuring prayers. The community’s significance lies in this contrast: severe discipline is not hidden from the world, but practiced in a public corridor where visitors, devotional life, hashish, and sudden violence meet.