Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  Comes the first ripple. Someone approaches me and whispers in my ear, ‘Did you not wish to question the Maharishee?’

  He may have lost patience, this quondam guide of mine. More likely, he imagines that I, a restless European, have reached the limit of my own patience. Alas, my inquisitive friend! Truly I came here to question your master, but now … I, who am at peace with all the world and with myself, why should I trouble my head with questions? I feel that the ship of my soul is beginning to slip its moorings; a wonderful sea waits to be crossed; yet you would draw me back to the noisy port of this world, just when I am about to start the great adventure!

  But the spell is broken. As if this infelicitous intrusion is a signal, figures rise from the floor and begin to move about the hall, voices float up to my hearing, and—wonder of wonders!—the dark brown eyes of the Maharishee flicker once or twice. Then the head turns, the face moves slowly, very slowly, and bends downward at an angle. A few more moments, and it has brought me into the ambit of its vision. For the first time the sage’s mysterious gaze is directed upon me. It is plain that he has now awakened from his long trance.

  The intruder, thinking perhaps that my lack of response is a sign that I have not heard him, repeats his question aloud. But in those lustrous eyes which are gently staring at me, I read another question, albeit unspoken.

  ‘Can it be—is it possible—that you are still tormented with distracting doubts when you have now glimpsed the deep mental peace which you—and all men—may attain?’

  The peace overwhelms me. I turn to the guide and answer:

  ‘No. There is nothing I care to ask now. Another time—’

  _______________________________________

  This extract is from A Search in Secret India.

  24.

  Charan Chalo Marg Gobind

  Avtar Singh

  The Sikh pilgrimage centre—and historical gurdwara Hemkunt Sahib sits next to an icy cold lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains at the top of a rocky unmotorable trail deep in the Garhwal Himalaya, the Chinese-Tibetan border not so very far away. The height is 4,300 metres plus, the weather shifting and even in the short season—June to October—often frigid, and altitude sickness is a real threat. It isn’t easy going. Which is interesting, since I didn’t want to go.

  The hardness of the trail was only one reason for my reluctance to make this trip. You see, there are Sikhs—myself amongst them—who find it hard to accept Hemkunt Sahib as a pilgrimage centre in the first place. There are several reasons for this.

  One reason is that Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, was emphatic about the fact that pilgrimage itself bestows illusory benefits, because the journey that matters to the real pilgrim is an interior one. It is abundantly obvious that plenty of spiritually substandard people make pilgrimages to various places for their own furtive ends, while it is equally apparent that many God-fearing, public-spirited folk never stray from their homes: why, in a world presided over by a just God, would the sight of a river or a temple or even a special tree privilege the former group over the latter? In essence, going to the bathroom and going to Benares amount to the same thing; what matters is your own state of mind, your own goals, your own awareness of yourself and your world and your relationship with God. God is everywhere and within you. You don’t have to go looking.

  It may seem irrelevant for me to belabour this point when we live in a time where what I have stated above seems self-evident. But it wasn’t self-evident at the time of the Sikh Gurus. Indeed, to borrow a term from a different religious tradition, to say as much, then, bordered on heresy. To decry pilgrimage flew in the face of established doctrine: to locate religion within the practitioner was revolutionary. Nanak and others like him set the stage for a revolution in how religion was practised and perceived, at least for the common man. How Nanak and his spiritual descendants viewed pilgrimage is intrinsic to how Sikhs spatialize their own religious spheres, both within and outside of themselves. This isn’t merely received Sikh tradition: it is history.

  So. The concept of pilgrimage is already dodgy in the Sikh tradition, at least in theory, never mind where you are going. But there are other facets to the Hemkunt story that make it even less appealing to the Sikh who is aware of his own history. Now we are entering territory that is as historically murky as the Hemkunt trail after a monsoon shower. Yes, the short Hemkunt season runs concurrently with the monsoon. It isn’t just a cold and tiring walk. It is also wet.

  The devotees who visit Hemkunt Sahib go there because it is considered, at least by them, to be a ‘historical’ gurdwara. Historical gurdwaras are deemed to be so because they mark places where the paths of the Gurus and the events around them crossed those said places. What makes Hemkunt Sahib a historical gurdwara?

  The origin of Hemkunt Sahib lies, at least according to the people who have declared it to be so, in a text called the Bachitar (Vichitra) Natak. This long poem is attributed to Guru Gobind Singh himself, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs, the man who constituted the immediately recognizable group, the Khalsa. This incredibly strong sense of identity—and hence, difference from the non-Khalsa mainstream—is central to the way the Khalsa view themselves. The cherished sense of identity that he created and the stirring life he led make Guru Gobind Singh perhaps the most immediate of our Gurus for orthodox Sikhs; it is certainly true that many historical gurdwaras are based around his life.

  The Bachitar Natak purports to be the autobiography of Guru Gobind Singh, but its status as having been written by the Guru has been hotly debated. Partly, this is because Guru Gobind Singh, while a talented and prolific poet, simply could not have had the time to write everything that is attributed to him in his forty-odd years on this earth, especially since he was fighting the Mughals and his Hindu hill-chieftain neighbours for a good proportion of that time. It is also a historical fact that the Guru, a lover of poetry, maintained a band of poets in his court, and any one or more of them, acting in collaboration, could have penned this work. There are also claims that this text doesn’t match his other, more easily attributable writings in terms of style.

  What is ultimately odd about this text with reference to Hemkunt Sahib is what it contains within itself. There is a passage from the Bachitar Natak that is quoted on all the Sikh websites in general and the ones that deal with Hemkunt Sahib in particular, and this passage is reproduced on a wall up in Hemkunt Sahib itself; this quotation is the justification for Hemkunt Sahib being on the Sikh pilgrim trail. It starts with the line Ab main apni katha bakhano; literally, ‘Now I will tell my own story.’ Immediately, there is legitimacy here, for the Guru—if indeed it is he—is saying that this is what happened, that this is the real deal, that this is my story. On the face of it, it is the telling of the immediately previous life of the Guru. The writer goes on to say that he practised great austerities in a place, Hemkunt, where there are seven peaks (Sapatsring). The father of the Pandavas, Pandu, is mentioned as having been here too at some earlier stage, and the fact that the writer was praying to, or rather meditating on, the great Goddess. In this fashion, duality was erased, and he became one with the Formless (Alakh) One. The writer goes on to say that his father and mother practised yoga too, asking for the boon of a son, and they pleased God as well. Though the writer did not want to come back to this physical world, God made him understand that the couple that had propitiated Him were worthy, and that he was required for a higher purpose. So, the writer came to this world again, this time as a child, born to the said couple. The couple were of course Guru Tegh Bahadur and his wife, and the child was Gobind, who would later go on to institute the Khalsa. The gurdwara at Hemkunt Sahib ‘marks’ the spot where the yogi became one with the Formless One. This is the justification for Hemkunt Sahib being a historical gurdwara.

  Well, so what is wrong with that, right?

  For me, practically everything.

  It may be true that I am reading a work of some symbolic depth too literally. There are nuances to this tha
t I am not alive to, shades of meaning and allusion that I am not qualified to glean. Could it be that the yoga that the writer says his mother and father practised be yog—literally, union—the union that gives birth to a child? Could his reluctance to leave the Formless One be an allusion to the security of the womb that infants are assumed to be reluctant to leave? Is it the case that I am reading poetry as alleged history and metaphor as supposed fact and that in so doing, I am missing the point completely?

  Perhaps.

  What I do know is that I am a rationalist, and for most of my life, I have had no problem reconciling my rationalist concerns with my Sikh faith. Indeed, I have always felt the project of the Sikh Gurus, insofar as they rejected ritualism and the caste system and idolatry and urged people to be the arbiters of their own spiritual destinies, was a rationalist one, where the only jump that the believer was asked to make was the simple and essential one of belief itself. The Sikh injunction to believe in God is the only problem a hardcore rationalist could have with our tradition, and it isn’t something I have ever found at all problematic. We are not even asked to be pantheistic. God is one, and nobody mediates my relationship with God. No priests, for we don’t have any. No purificatory rituals, for God is with me when I am dirty as well. For me as a Sikh, God just is, and is part of my life in every possible way. I was raised to believe in Sikhism as something that sits easily with rationalism. To swallow a story that involves goddesses and yoga and mountains and reincarnations is hard indeed.

  Then, of course, there is the problem of location. What makes people think that the place Guru Gobind Singh supposedly wrote about is here? There are no maps. There is no other scriptural reference to it. A process of quasi-historic accretion and guesswork has led to the acceptance of this place as the spot where Guru Gobind Singh, in an earlier life, practised his ‘austerities’, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that led to the creation of the Khalsa. The final mark of authenticity for the two pious Sikhs who went looking for Hemkunt in the 1930s—and discovered the spot where the gurdwara is today—was the fact that an elderly ascetic of radiant mien met them while they were there—on separate occasions—and told them that yes, this is where the great yogi meditated. Having said this, the ascetic disappeared.

  Well, of course.

  Through all this runs the troubling problem of historical context. Guru Gobind Singh, as I mentioned earlier, fought the Mughals and an assortment of his Hindu neighbours for most of his life. In a broader sense, being the tenth Sikh Guru and the keeper of a reformist tradition born in the Punjab plains, he also carried on a fight against superstition and ritual observance and the dominance of the caste hierarchy of the time. Anybody who is conversant with Punjab knows that the word ‘bahman’—the way Punjabis say Brahmin—is almost a pejorative; the inversion of caste amongst the Sikhs is no accident. The concept of a retreat from the world is equally irrelevant in Sikhism, for the Sikh is enjoined to live in the world and accept his responsibilities. This world is the only one the Sikh knows and has any control over; this is the world he has to make his life in. He should not be wasting his time thinking about the lives and worlds to come for he has no control over them. This same aversion to speculation extends backwards as well, to the lives one has already lived. While reincarnation is alluded to in Sikh scripture, the devotee is told in no uncertain terms that deliverance from the wheel of rebirth is not in his hands; rather, it is in the hands of God, and nothing that the devotee can do will influence God one way or another. Thinking about it is a waste of time.

  Why would the tenth Guru himself postulate a legend of his own antecedents that was so retrograde in the Sikh context, so steeped in exactly the sort of swords and sorcery that Sikhism was and is supposed to be a reaction against? The mysticism that pervades our scriptures is a gentle, personal one, that talks of an individual and collective union with God. It is the commonsensical mysticism of peasants and workers who live in this world and celebrate its workings, not the recondite speculation of ‘yogis’ who retreat from it.

  A consequence of this story, if it is taken at face value, is that the Khalsa owes its existence not to the historical conjunction of a reformist faith with the socio-political compulsions of the time, presided over by a deeply complex and charismatic man; it is instead the outcome of a Hindu ascetic’s covenant with God, arrived at in a conveniently distant place and time.

  This is deeply troubling to the Sikh within me.

  It strains my credulity. It strains my understanding of my own faith, it strains my sense of history. You could say it strained my brain about as much as the climb to Hemkunt would strain my body.

  I really didn’t want to go.

  Well, I went though. Partly out of curiosity, partly because my travelling companions forced me to. We were an odd lot, a Bombay Muslim I had been in school with and my American friend, whose interest in Hemkunt had been piqued by her reading about it on the Net. We set off one hot late-July morning from Delhi. The monsoon was hanging about Delhi but not in the mood to actually do anything; up in the mountains, it was an entirely different story. We were woefully ill-prepared. We had laid out jackets but had forgotten to pack them. We had no waterproofs. My hiking boots were sturdy but because I hadn’t used them in a while, the glue had come away and the soles came off while I was climbing, leaving me walking up in my rubber chappals. That many of the other pilgrims were similarly equipped made me no difference. Rain mixed with mule shit pouring over your open toes is a uniquely miserable feeling. We didn’t have sweaters or warm socks, we didn’t even have a road-Atlas. It was boiling hot in the plains, how cold could the mountains be? My old scoutmaster would have been shattered.

  The spot where the pilgrim leaves his vehicle behind is Gobind Ghat. Gobind Ghat is on the road from Joshimath to Badrinath, and is about 500 kilometres from Delhi. Getting to Gobind Ghat is quite a trek in itself.

  The road north lies through Roorkee and Hardwar and you leave the plains at Rishikesh. During the season, there are various langars set up by the side of the road. Coming around a fast corner, we were stopped by a sardar standing in the middle of the road and gesticulating to one side. His partners and he had set up shop there, providing basic food to the pilgrims. Theoretically free, these roadside langars subsist on the money the grateful pilgrims leave behind. A rotund chap in a white beard kept a sharp lookout on the collection plate while he mumbled prayers and fingered his rosary and occasionally exhorted the passersby to donate generously to the Guru ka langar. I don’t know about the Guru’s flock; our friend’s tummy was testament to the fact that he was living off the fat off the land. Why stop here, when there are authentic gurdwaras with langars attached in Rishikesh itself, and Srinagar, a few hours down the road?

  We merely honked at the next few ‘langars’ we saw. I may have clipped the gents they sent out in the middle of the road.

  The road rises along the Ganga into the hills. At that time of year, in landslide season, the river is brown and quick. What was interesting to me was the slow rate of ascent. You drive for hours together, passing Devprayag and Rudraprayag and other pilgrim centres, and you think, okay, any moment now, I am going to see the big mountains of the Garhwal Himalaya. But you don’t. The road now flanks the Alaknanda on its path down towards its meeting with the Bhagirathi, a union we all recognize as the holy Ganga herself. Sometimes the river has even had time to meander around little islands that it has built up over the years. Small villages come and go, and the occasional town. Loud pilgrim buses passed us by, some with the yellow and blue banners of the Khalsa, some with the saffron of Hindus. Hardy sardars whizzed by on their two-wheelers, two to a bike or scooter, and I thought it was a long way to come from the Punjab plains whilst straddling a seat.

  It is pilgrim season everywhere in the hills. There are fewer plainspeople up here, but still enough that you don’t miss them. And everywhere there are reminders that this is landslide season. In the brown river below, in the wet scars on the hillsides
, in the bulldozers of the authentic heroes of the mountains, the Border Roads Organization and General Reserve Engineer Force, scuttling back and forth along the road between this blockage and the next.

  We passed the turnoff to Chamoli as night fell. We stopped for the night at Pipalkoti, since the road in these parts is not motorable after dark. Pipalkoti itself is a nice little place to stop. It is a full day’s drive from Delhi, and the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam has a well-run and clean setup here, something that is true of the entire Garhwal region. We stayed with them in Gobind Dham and in Joshimath as well. When you wake up and discover that Joshimath is still a couple of hours away and Gobind Ghat another hour and a bit after that, you will be glad that you weren’t allowed to press on.

  For the road from here is beautiful and deadly. From here you see the big mountains, finally, and the road does rise. The chasms are deep and real and the turns quick and sharp, and everywhere you see the signs of landslides; past, present and future. The early morning light turned the mountains into a misty dream as the river raged through the valley a long, long way below. The big dogs of the mountains padded by us on their heavy snow-walking paws. It was wonderful to be back in the mountains, I thought, as I saw the smoky villages slip by.

  We arrived at Joshimath while I was still in a photo-taking haze, the pilgrim and market centre sliding by as we made our way to the gate where the line waits to embark on the last drivable section; the road to Badrinath, along which lies Gobind Ghat, the jumping off point to Hemkunt Sahib. We passed a huge hydel project coming up there on the Alaknanda. We saw the quarters of the engineers and their buses and the hardhats on the gents themselves. Entire tree trunks were being carried along on the raging froth below us, the Garhwal Himalaya stark against the sky. It was a surreal conjunction.