The Standing Babas' vow to remain standing for life

The Standing Babas’ vow to remain standing for life is a lifelong commitment never to sit or lie down, transforming a spiritual discipline into an all-encompassing bodily and social practice. It determines how the Babas eat, sleep, work, pray, and receive visitors; over time, its sustained physical demands become visible in their bodies. At the den where Lin encounters them with Karla and Prabaker, the vow governs not only the Babas but also the conduct of everyone who enters: customers remain standing in their presence.

The Vow and Its Daily Practice

The Standing Babas have pledged to remain on their feet for the rest of their lives. Their commitment allows no ordinary exception for sleep or routine bodily needs. They eat, pray, work, sing, and attend to those needs while standing. Even sleep takes place upright: harnesses support them while they are unconscious, helping keep them from falling without allowing them to rest in a seated or lying position. The vow is therefore not confined to prayer or a particular observance. It reorganizes the ordinary hours of a life around the refusal to sit or lie down.

That discipline also has a long physical course. During the first five to ten years, the Babas’ legs swell and their muscles thicken as their bodies adapt to the continuous strain. In later years, their legs become progressively thinner. The account describes these changes as a severe, extended consequence of maintaining the vow, rather than as a brief ordeal that ends when the initial commitment is made. The pain is continuous, and the Babas shift their weight from foot to foot. Their gentle swaying becomes a characteristic movement: even while standing, they are not wholly still.

The vow thus combines formal constancy with constant adjustment. The Babas do not abandon the upright position, but they move between their feet as they endure it. This distinction matters to the practice as it is presented: remaining standing is the lasting rule, while the body’s small movements are part of how that rule is lived. The commitment persists across waking, sleep, labor, worship, and the changing condition of the body over many years.

Different Paths to the Same Commitment

The Babas do not share a single age, history, or stated reason for taking the vow. Some undertake it when they are sixteen or seventeen, drawn by a vocation compared to the call that leads people in other cultures to become priests, rabbis, or imams. For them, the commitment begins early in life and becomes a defining form of religious devotion. The account also includes many older men who have renounced the world as preparation for death and a next level of incarnation.

Other paths to the vow begin in markedly different lives. Some Babas were businessmen who had pursued pleasure, power, and profit without restraint during their working years. Others had already passed through multiple religious devotions and severe sacrifices before undertaking what the narrative presents as their most demanding commitment. The vow consequently gathers together people whose earlier lives and routes toward renunciation are not alike; their shared identity rests on the discipline they now maintain, not on a uniform past.

The Babas also include criminals, among them thieves, murderers, major mafia figures, and former warlords. They seek expiation or propitiation through the continuing hardship of the vow. The account identifies this as one purpose among several, not as the explanation for every Baba’s commitment. The same practice may therefore express vocation, preparation for what follows death, renunciation after a worldly life, or an attempt to answer for past conduct. Its physical demands are shared, while the meanings attached to accepting them differ.

The Den and Its Rules

The den is a narrow, roofed corridor between two brick buildings at the rear of the Babas’ temple. An iron roof covers a stone-paved floor. The Babas enter through a door at the back; other visitors use an iron gate at the street end. Beyond the den, within the temple compound, are gardens, cloisters, and dormitories hidden from ordinary view. The account distinguishes these spaces from the corridor where customers meet the Babas: the vow-holders alone see the compound’s secluded areas.

The visitors come from different regions and levels of society. Men in suits and designer jeans stand alongside workmen in faded lungis and men wearing regional traditional dress; young and old, rich and poor, share the same confined space. No one sits in the Babas’ presence. That rule extends the vow beyond the bodies of those who have taken it: customers, though not themselves bound to stand for life, must stand while they are there. A tap over an open drain near the entrance serves men who drink water or spit, while the visitors line the walls and wait.

The Babas move among the customers, preparing hashish in funnel-shaped clay chillums and smoking with them. They use Kashmiri hashish, described as coming from the foothills of the Himalayas, and consume it throughout the day and night. The den is therefore both a devotional setting and a place where visitors gather to smoke with the vow-holders. Its ordinary procedures—standing, moving between groups, preparing and sharing hashish—take place within the larger temple compound and under the rule that no customer sits in the Babas’ presence.

Encounter and Significance

Lin stands at the back wall with Karla and Prabaker, near the sealed door through which the Babas enter. In front of them, two lines of men extend along the walls toward the street gate. The visitors’ attention repeatedly turns to Lin and Karla, pale-skinned foreigners in a room where men from across the country have gathered. Some are visibly surprised to see a woman in the den, but no one approaches or addresses the pair directly. Most return their attention to the Babas and the hashish. Conversation blends with music and devotional chanting coming from somewhere inside the compound.

This encounter makes the vow legible as a social order as well as an individual discipline. The Babas’ commitment is their own, but its rule shapes the posture of the surrounding crowd; their presence regulates how customers stand and behave. The contrast between their lifetime pledge and the visitors’ temporary attendance is built into the scene: the customers share the upright position for a visit, while the Babas have committed themselves to it without end. Through that arrangement, the vow appears simultaneously as devotion, endurance, and a public practice witnessed by people who have not undertaken it.