In the margins of her copy of the Bhagavad-gītā Simone Weil pencilled her French translation by a passage, ‘I am the doer, the agent … and yet I am the changeless one who does not do or act.’ Although this is Krishna speaking, for Weil non-acting action (l'action non-agissante) is an ideal to be achieved. We act as we must through necessity, as Arjuna must fight in the battle of Kurukshetra, but must remain detached from action and its results if we are to achieve wisdom. So, while the ascetic self at one level is characterised by will, agency and resistance, for Weil a higher understanding is that the self is devoid of agency and the ‘I’ (‘le je’) is empty, acting only because driven by necessity. In this chapter I shall begin to develop the performance of this ambiguity of passivity and activity in the South Asian context.

Our journey will begin with Brahmanical conceptualisations of the self, showing how the ambiguity of the self is at the heart of this discourse, and moving on to show how the ascetic self performs the memory of tradition, that is, internalises the tradition (and so looks to the past) and its goals (and so looks to the future).