Homeless in Gujarat and India: On the Curious Love of lndulal Yagnik

Indulal Yagnik (1892-1972) was an independence activist, a writer, and a film-maker. He renounced his family and vowed to live like a fakir (mendicant). His six-volume autobiography heavily draws on the trope of homelessness, a state often associated with fakirs. In this chapter, I argue that Yagnik’s is a distinctive kind of homelessness - it is accompanied by the love of having a home. If we begin - and, as historians, we surely should - with the assumption that homelessness does not mean the same thing in all times and places, and that metaphors, too, have history, then the question follows: how was Yagnik’s homelessness produced? Within what conceptual field, more precisely, were Yagnik’s simultaneous love of home and homelessness conceived? Here, I would like to situate Yagnik’s simultaneous love of home and homelessness in relation to two other sets of practices of home and homelessness - those involved in the logic of transcendence and the politics of neighborliness, within the coordinates of Indian nationalism.