A few weeks ago, Muslims all over the world celebrated Eid— a festival which follows a 30-day period of fasting from sunrise to sunset. Fasting is defined by the Britannica English Dictionary as an “abstinence from food or drink or both.”
Though usually done for “health, ritualistic, religious, or ethical purposes,” as the dictionary says, what happens when someone keeps a week-long fast to reset the “chaotic universe” in which they find themselves? In the case of John Oakes, publisher of The Evergreen Review and editor of OR Books, what comes out of it is an immense reflection on the act of “doing without”, and also a book.
Originally published in February 2024, The Fast, as promised in the subtitle, takes you through the history, science, and philosophy of abstinence from eating or drinking or both. The book traces the origin of fasting through Hinduism, Buddhism, and Greek traditions, as well as talks about the Abrahamic rituals associated with the act. But that’s not where it stops. It also goes on to discuss what fasting does to our body and learning to live with the absence of sensation.
However, at the core of it all, the author has multiple questions, many of them awaiting answers. What makes people choose a life of abstinence? Why do we eat three meals a day? Is abstinence and piety the same? How did the act of fasting, which is many millennia old, become what it is today?
Oakes, for one, looks at fasting as a “gift of time, a space in the day”. But he also realises that choosing a void or choosing silence is a radical act, that it’s seen as a threat to establishments. He conveys the idea in a very succinct manner—“a ‘moment of silence’ in the day marks a memorial.”
To see fasting as a form of protest and a political tool, he delves on both hunger strikes and force feeding, relying on examples such as Mahatma Gandhi and Irom Sharmila. Why it works, he suggests, is not only because it is nonviolent, but because “it leverages the social and economic impact of people not in power”.
What’s also interesting is seeing the many slants that fasting has in religious frames. Some consider it a form of punishment, self-torture or an endurance test to get closer to god. Others look at it as something that corrupts the soul and needs to be lived without. Writes Oakes, “Christianity has had a tortured relation with food and eating. As the first sin, gluttony is at the origin of all other cardinal sins. Inedia—fasting to the point of death —was valued by the Church and was one of the criteria for canonisation.”
There are still others who consider it a way to detach oneself from everything material, to learn to build a relationship with the world around you in a freeing manner.
For me, reading this book was a challenge—it proved to be one of the texts I’ve taken the longest to finish. And that isn’t because it was boring (well, in some parts, yes!) but because it did not offer a lot of new or interesting perspectives. What it does very well is compile together comprehensive reading material on the different dimensions of fasting, but it forgets to tell the reader why they should care.
All said and done, what did work was Oakes’ attempt to link together fasting and anti-consumerist behaviour, which felt especially relevant to the times we live in. What the author does is cite moralists and philosophers to critique not consumption, but “how things are consumed,” as he writes about a society that could move forward with less—of everything—not in a way that halts progression, but from a restorative stance.
After all, that’s the author’s learning from his own fast too; it’s what reconnects us to everything that makes us humans. Our thinking selves.
Book details:
Title: The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without
Author: John Oakes
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Number of pages: 320
Price: Rs 599