Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  There is much to be said for the cathartic effect of an occasional brawl. Controlled mayhem such as slam-dancing or tackle football can purge the soul of much pent-up violence. But the Kala Rama temple (it seemed to me) was not an appropriate place. Even as I savoured the rush of adrenalin that accompanies both giving and taking pain, I felt ashamed to be a part of the scrum. Beating up other people solely to gain entry to the house of God—there could hardly be a greater hypocrisy.

  And yet in a sense the struggle outside the temple was every bit as much a religious rite as the offering of flowers at the altar. A bhakta’s faith is no shallow, safe credo. It is a flame burning deep within the soul. The near-riot on the mandir’s steps in Nasik served to stoke this flame, to rekindle its ardour, to build it into a fervent blaze of holy passion.

  Nasik also boasts the very cave from which Rama’s wife was abducted by the King of Demons. Well, not the cave itself, precisely, but the spot where the cave would have been if Ravana had not scooped up the whole mountainside (in one variant tradition) and carried it off to Lanka. Beneath a two-storey house of brick and yellow plaster is Sita’s Cavern, a tiny chamber deep in the earth, of dubious antiquity but indubitable holiness.

  It is reached by squeezing down a steep tunnel much like those of the pharaonic tombs at Luxor, then crawling through a level passage on hands and knees, then sliding on one’s stomach (unless one is a very tiny person indeed) through a rough-hewn chute with the circumference of a dog-kennel door. Sita’s Cavern demonstrates the ecumenical unity of India’s two rival bhakti cults: the airless den itself holds three black Vaishnavite icons of Rama, Sita and Lakshman, but the room upstairs contains a shrine to the Shaivite god Ganesh, and an antechamber in the twisty rabbit warren sports a lingam holy to Shiva.

  Outside the Sita Gupha, a Hindu heretic showed me a photograph of God. It was a grainy enlargement of what appeared to be a spark of light, and the man assured me that this was an actual snapshot of the Almighty. He did not tell me whether he had taken the picture himself, or how the photographer had persuaded his model to pose for the session. But he did pull out a complex diagram demonstrating that the human soul is actually a small organ in the brain; located midway between the thalamus and the cerebellum.

  He wore a Brahminical janneu-thread and a wide, white grin, and he spoke in a high, squeaky voice. He said he was a cosmetics salesman by trade, and a Shaivite bhakta by faith. I label him a heretic not for his photo and chart—such oddities put him outside the mainstream but not outside the pale. I call him a heretic because, in our theological discussion, he stoutly maintained that Shiva is the Sustainer in the Hindu Trinity and Vishnu the Destroyer.

  ‘How can that be?’ I asked. ‘It is Shiva who will destroy the universe at the end of our era, Shiva who has destroyed it countless times already. It is Shiva who wreaks devastation in the forms of Kali, Rudra and Durga.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘but primarily Shiva grants boons to those who worship him, gives blessings to all who ask. It is Vishnu who comes down to earth to kill: as Rama in the Ramayana, he kills the demon Ravana; as Krishna in the Mahabharata, he kills the entire Kaurava army. He is a great god, but his place is only to destroy evil.’

  I refrained from reminding him that Krishna never kills anybody in the Mahabharata but merely urges others on to their fated slaughters. As an outsider challenging a believer about his own religion, I knew I already sounded quite enough of a smart-aleck.

  ‘What about his incarnation as Vamana?’ I asked instead. According to legend, Vishnu once saved the world in the form of a dwarf. A demon had won possession of all the earth as a boon, possession that was destined never to be wrested from him by force. Various gods blustered and threatened, but they knew they were powerless to overthrow what dharma had ordained. Vishnu assumed the unassuming avatar of Vamana and went to the demon as a harmless, jolly buffoon. He asked a small favour, a trifle really, just a grant of as much land as he could tread in three dwarfish steps. The demon, proud of his own generosity, was happy to agree. So Vishnu-as-Vamana took three paces that spanned the entire world, and sustained the cosmos for another age.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the heretic replied, ‘but what about Vishnu the Maiden?’ I hadn’t heard that story, so he went on. ‘You see, one time a Rakshasa prayed to Shiva for a boon, for the power to turn anything to ash with a touch. Shiva granted the wish—for he is the most generous and most giving of all divinities. It was foolish, but no matter.

  ‘In any event, as soon as the blessing was given, that treacherous demon tried to touch Shiva! What an ungrateful wretch, eh? But Shiva was too clever for him, shrunk down to the size of a flea and hid inside a mango. None of the gods could fight the demon, for he could turn any of them to dust with a fingertip.’

  For a moment his voice was drowned out by the cries of vendors from the market across the street, bazaaris selling peppers and peanuts, lentils and licorice, cloves and coriander, fiery red watermelons and sober red dyes for the robes of Shaivite swamis.

  ‘That is when Vishnu took on the shape of a beautiful maiden,’ the heretic continued. ‘He—or perhaps I should say “she”—danced with the Rakshasa, teased the rascal unmercifully, always sliding up close and then darting away just before the poor fellow could touch her. That is often the way of women, is it not?

  ‘In any case, Vishnu led the demon to imitate every motion she made in the dance. She twirled about, the demon twirled about. She kicked her heel, the demon kicked his heel. She touched her head, the demon touched his head—and immediately turned to ash. So you see, even though it is always for a good cause, Vishnu is the Destroyer after all.’

  The Hindu faith is broad enough to encompass an enormous range of heterodox beliefs. ‘Heresy’ is a term that has little actual meaning in India, because (apart from acceptance of the sanctity of the Vedas) there is nothing even approaching a unified, cohesive Hindu doctrine. The man outside the Sita Gupha held a view outside the tradition of his religion, but he was a heretic only in a Western sense. Most Hindus would see him merely as a devout bhakta, a misguided one perhaps, but still a soul walking steadily down the path that leads to God.

  At dawn Rameshwaram is already alive. The housewives here start the day by tossing water on the dust outside their doorsteps and decorating the damp ground with geometric patterns of sprinkled white powder. Their husbands have already left to set up their stalls of amulets and charms. Most of the people bustling through the darkened streets, however, are not inhabitants but pilgrims. To Vaishnavite and Shaivite bhaktas alike this is perhaps the holiest town outside of Varanasi. This is the piece of Indian soil closest to Lanka, the place where Rama prayed to the Lord of the Ocean, the spot from which he built his fabulous bridge and marched his army of monkeys across the sea to make war on the Demon King. This is also (according to one later tradition) the site where Rama, avatar of Vishnu the Almighty, bowed down and worshipped Shiva.

  Looming over the whole village, a huge black mountain against the fading blackness of the sky, is the Ramanathaswamy Temple. From someplace deep within float the chanted melodies of the day’s first puja. Later that morning I would wander through the mandir’s Thousand-pillared Hall; past idlers sleeping, eating, or gossiping beneath columns carved in the shape of divinities with crocodile eyes and tiger tails; past attendants painting fresh designs on the leathery foreheads of temple elephants, who reach out their trunks to accept donations from bemused worshippers; past altars to Nandi (the very sort of Golden Bull against which the Old Testament and the Qur’an both fulminate), each pair of gilded horns garlanded with flowers whose scent, it is said, can intoxicate a true believer as quickly as strong wine.

  The most interesting part of Ramanathaswamy Temple, however, is a life-sized creche. It shows Rama and Sita praying before a Shiva-lingam by the shore of the ocean while monkeys and demons look on in reverent awe. Later that morning I would watch pilgrims kneel before the shrine to leave banana-leaf baskets filled with coconut husks, pers
immons and red-petalled flowers; I would watch worshippers worshipping Rama worshipping Shiva. But now, at dawn, the sights of the temple remained locked behind great wooden doors, only their sounds drifting eerily through the morning air.

  At dawn the seaside barbers of Rameshwaram give their first shaves of the day. They do not own scissors, only straight razors. Their customers are almost all pilgrims, so there is little demand for a purely cosmetic trim. The dirt floor of the long, frond-roofed hut is thickly littered with black and grey hair. When I entered, two barbers were already at work on a pair of fresh scalps, whose owners chatted together as casually as if they’d been sitting side by side on a bus.

  A signboard gave the price list: ‘For Chin, 5 Rupees. For Head, 8 Rupees.’ I decided to save the extra three rupees. Not knowing the Tamil for ‘Don’t cut all my hair off, don’t even think of it, just a shave, that is all ’, I merely rubbed my half-week cheek bristles with vigour. The barber splashed some cold water on my face and began scraping away with a rusty straight edge of great antiquity that had already depilated countless crania. It was not the most comfortable shave I’ve ever had, but he did not leave so much as a single nick.

  At dawn the bathers in the warm Southern Sea make their first daily ablutions. Whole families shaved bald by the barbers smear their heads with ochre sandalwood paste to keep off the rising sun, then wade into the ocean to pray. Old tribal women with rubbery earlobes stretched down to their chins by the weight of heavy earrings, penitents bearing the marks of their individual sects daubed boldly on their foreheads, children splashing in the gentle waves—all bathe side by side.

  A pandit leads fifteen pilgrims in a series of chants, then takes them knee-deep into the sea. Frail grandfathers who needed no razor and pretty teenage girls blushing at their baldness all scoop up handfuls of salty water to pour over their smooth heads. On the beach, two Brahmins and their wives knot the hems of their robes together, and each pair builds a lingam out of sand. Once they have blessed it with prayers and flowers, each couple picks the holy mound up and dumps it into the ocean.

  After the Ramayana’s final battle, a popular southern legend has it, Rama and Sita performed a puja ceremony to thank Shiva for their victory. Rama sent Hanuman off to the Himalayas to bring back a lingam for the rite, but the monkey could not return by the appointed hour. Sita, unconcerned, built a lingam of her own. She molded the phallic icon out of sand and bowed down beside her husband to offer prayers before it.

  Does this act, as some fundamentalist Shaivites claim, indicate that Vishnu is an inferior deity to Shiva, that Rama is not the Lord of the Universe? I think not. What it says to me (as a layman and a non-Hindu, but as someone with a keen interest in the subject) is that all the deities worshipped by man are different faces of the same One God, and that this One God is a part and parcel of each of us. Maybe that is what the yogis of Upanishadic times meant when they spoke of ‘realizing the godhead’ within each of our souls. If a human incarnation of God can bow to a divine manifestation of God without sacrificing either his humanity or his divinity—if a man like Rama can both pray to God and be God at the very same time—so too, perhaps, can we all.

  _______________________________________

  This extract is from Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India.

  28.

  The Stone Bull of Thiruppunkoor

  A Shaiva Myth Retold

  It was a long journey to Thiruppunkoor.

  Not in terms of distance, it could be argued. But when have pilgrimages been merely a matter of miles? Pilgrimages are about means. They are about the wherewithal to empower a dream, to put muscle behind intent and impel it to action.

  But, of course, that is not the whole truth either. A pilgrimage is eventually about choice. It is about a calling, a low insistent buzz in the head that some call the voice of the divine, but it is also about a listening. That listening implies choice—the choice to actualize a dream. And the choice to entertain a dream in the first place.

  A poor tiller had a dream. As he tilled his landlord’s fields under a blazing sun, the dream grew. It was to visit Lord Shiva in his temple in Thiruppunkoor.

  Thiruppunkoor was not far from his village of Aadhanur. But the tiller knew there were invisible bonds, daunting thresholds. Thresholds that could only be crossed by the grace of Lord Shiva himself.

  The tiller had been fascinated by the Lord as long as he could remember. Though he was not a man of means, he tried to serve Him by providing cattle hide for the drums and veena strings used for His worship by neighbouring temples. But the Lord—one who was easily pleased, they said—had not seemed particularly pleased with the tiller so far. At least, he had done nothing to show it. Shiva seemed, in fact, to have a heart of stone.

  But the tiller was not dejected. He understood stone better than he understood people at any rate. He knew rocky earth could turn to green sapling, and water to air, and heartless blue skies—if one prayed long and hard enough—to torrential rain. But people were something else altogether. The laws of nature did not seem quite as unyielding as the laws of man.

  Little did the tiller realize this, but he had crossed the first threshold already. He had dared to dream. But if you told him this, he would probably have scratched his head and said that the dream seized him and he had nothing to do with it.

  And that dream emboldened him to approach his master for probably the hundredth time in a decade.

  ‘Master, may I … ?’ It took gumption. But more than that, it took skill and a fine barometric understanding of human weather. And in this case, the weather was more whimsical than the northwestern monsoon (which at least sometimes, could be placated). But with the landlord, the tiller had to be careful, very careful.

  The man had to be nailed at the right moment. Well victualled, watered, with his betel nut having reached the right cud-like consistency, and seated in the shade of a hospitable tree.

  But it did not work this time either. ‘Thiruppunkoor? For a whole day? You have some nerve. I told you last month. And the month before. And last year. And the year before. Are you crazy? First, show me you are worth employing in the first place. Always begging, whining about your wife’s health, your sister’s marriage, your grandmother’s death—she’s been dead three times already, you think I don’t remember? Now, a pilgrimage! You’re joking.’

  The tiller held his ground. ‘But you said that this time … and it won’t take long … it’s only to the temple …’

  More spluttering. More ranting about dead grandmothers and superstitious peasants. And then, in a sudden, utterly unexpected, heart-stopping moment: ‘Oh well, all right, if you insist, go. Go tomorrow, if you like …’

  Had the moment actually arrived? Did the universe have ears, after all? Was this, finally, grace?

  Then the casual moment of pure spite. ‘But make sure all forty acres of land are tilled by sunrise.’

  It was insane. This was clearly the time for more cringing, more wheedling, more hand-wringing. But in a moment of mysterious dignity, the tiller found himself standing very still. There was a long pause. ‘Very well, master.’ He turned on his heel and walked away.

  He went to bed early that night. There was no point attempting the impossible. But that night he added something more in his prayer. It wasn’t more supplication. A lifetime of that hadn’t yielded results in any case. Now that mysterious touch of dignity—a dignity born of the complete rinsing out of hope—infused his prayer as well: ‘I’ve tried a thousand times. No more. Now if you want it, you’ve got to make it happen.’

  The next morning, the land was tilled. All forty acres of it. The landlord gawped. The tiller gawped even harder.

  He walked around the land in a daze. He was vaguely aware of the landlord’s fearful stare in his direction. He heard his master’s voice in the distance calling urgently to his wife and children. He was dimly aware of his master’s entire household falling at his feet. He heard shouts of ‘mirac
le’ and ‘the Lord’s chosen one’ all around him. And before he knew it, silver coins were pressed into his palm, a hamper of food pushed into one hand and a stick for the journey in another.

  He was on the road before he realized what had happened. While he had been in bed dreaming, a deeper dream had been coming true.

  It was not a particularly nice town. There were cows and flowersellers and vendors of incense and haughty priests. What was worse, they seemed to be everywhere. But there was also a temple, the long-awaited shrine of the Lord.

  As he approached the temple street, the tiller’s heartbeat gathered momentum. With each step ahead, it grew, like the thud of a temple drum. His footfall quickened. The gopuram drew near. He could hear the clang of temple bells. The smell of incense and sacred ash and noon-heated stone grew more intense. And suddenly it was upon him.

  Here it was: the abode of the Lord who had tormented and eluded him for as long as he could remember. The Lord so fearsome that his entire entourage seemed peopled by the darkest, the most disfigured members of the human race. The Lord so powerful that he could consume the most poisonous griefs and injustices of the entire world and hold them in eternal abeyance in his throat. The Lord so insidious that He could enter one’s life when one wasn’t looking and tear it apart with a wracking, breathless, uncontainable thirst.

  The tiller had known that thirst. It had parched his lungs, dried his veins, shrivelled his innards, but fuelled his dream, even as he tilled his field for long years under a raging sun.