The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  An ambulance siren blew. I heard two men discussing where to take me. ‘She’s a bideshi,’ one said. ‘Let’s take her to B and B.’ The ride from the site of my accident to the hospital seemed to take only half a minute – it was incredibly fast, or perhaps I was injected with so many painkillers that I lost my sense of time. A minute later I heard the man say: ‘Didi, here’s your bag.’ That bag, with my cellphones, keys, and papers (and, sadly, some rather lovely silver jewellery), was never found again.

  Later, my father would laugh and tell me with amusement about a cousin traumatized by aftershocks, and her method of sustaining her sense of security: ‘Your cousin is walking around clutching a small bag. She has her citizenship and passport in it, and some other things, like a torch. Everywhere she goes, she takes this small bag.’ And I would reply: ‘Tell her the bag is useless.’

  The only thing that will save you from a situation like this, of course, is the network of family and friends who love you, and who will eventually pull you out of this mire. I had months of painful rehabilitation and surgical operations awaiting me, but I did not know this as I was laid down on the ground by the hospital building, from where I stared up at the giant concrete buildings, wondering if they would collapse on top of me, crushing me into the void after all, despite my rescue. Another aftershock rippled through the ground that afternoon, sending the hospital staff into a state of anxious anticipation, as they had no idea if the building would hold up or collapse. Hundreds of aftershocks followed the earthquake, dozens in the days immediately after the big one. A week or so later, lying in the hospital bed, drugged by a cocktail of painkillers, I felt one go deeply through my being, the sound of tectonic plates clanging deep within the earth, vibrating with the terror of the unfathomable abyss.

  I lay on the ground with hundreds of other injured people and their families. A triage was going on – teams of young medics would swoop down on me, inject me and bandage me. ‘Amputation?’ I heard one of the doctors say, unaware that I could hear them. My drugged eyes flew open, and I rose as if from the dead and said loudly: ‘No! I’m fine!’ They left me alone after that.

  As the afternoon lengthened, a tent was set up and people set up camp, as if we were a field of war-injured.

  My family arrived at the hospital at 6 p.m. They wandered around calling my name, because they couldn’t recognize me lying on the pallet, my face swollen, my hair matted with blood and dust.

  Dr Bibek Baskota of B and B Hospital, serendipitously also my cousin, drove back from the children’s camp he had been attending and came straight to the dressing room at 8 p.m. where he washed my wounds and pushed my bones back in place. Bibek had driven by himself, and described how he’d seen houses rolling down the hillsides as he drove on the highway to get back to Kathmandu. ‘It looked as if a bomb had gone off,’ I overheard him say. As he talked calmly and worked expertly to bandage my feet, he made me feel perhaps my pain wasn’t as excruciating as I felt it to be – only later did he tell me that he’d pushed the bones back into place without anaesthesia and that, if left unattended, I could have died from my injuries.

  A painful year of surgeries and rehabilitation followed. There was a constant stream of friends and family through my house, carrying gifts of flaxseed, stinging nettle soup, massage oils, dried prunes, sanitary napkins and underwear big enough to slip through my metal fixtures. I was smothered in chocolate and love. After sometime it occurred to me a few of my writer friends, including Prawin Adhikari, hadn’t even called me up after my accident. Prawin was a regular at my house parties, where we would cook up pasta in big pots, and crazy writers and film-makers would leave cigarette stubs in my chutney. When one has a lot of time to mull in bed, these grievances start to add up. I was feeling particularly disgruntled about Prawin when Bhusan Tuladhar posted a video of my rescue online. His wife had shot it. There I was being pulled out of the rubble, looking rather peaceful and calm. The next day, on Facebook, another Bhusan (Silpakar) wrote to me that he and Prawin had also been in Patan Durbar Square during the quake, and had been part of the rescue operations. But did I know that Prawin had been the first one to jump into the rubble and start clearing the debris? The little boy I’d imagined, in other words, turned out to be a good friend whom I’d known all along.

  DHARMA IN A CHANGING LANDSCAPE

  Sudhindra Sharma and Kanak Mani Dixit

  In the chill of the evening, by the banks of the Bhagirathi River near Uttarkashi, the stars are beginning to appear as Mahant Shankar Puri raises his voice in high-pitched praise of Shiva, Lord of the Snows. It is time for aarti, to mark the moment of cosmic transition from day to night.

  Three hundred and fifty kilometres to the east, a pilgrim is on his way from the bazaar town of Doti for darshan with an eminent sage who lives in the high and isolated Khaptad plateau of west Nepal. He quickens his pace to get through the dense jungle.

  A further 300 kilometres east of Khaptad Baba’s ashram, Shanta Maya Maharjan, forty-five, is returning home to the Kathmandu suburb of Thankot in a crowded evening bus. She has just been to Nagthan, where she propitiated the serpent deity that, she says, has been responsible for the severe pain in her chest and arms.

  Hira Lai Tamang, twenty-seven, from the village of Khopasi, east of Kathmandu, is engaged in another kind of daily religious ritual. He is assisting his elder brother, a fully initiated jhankri or shaman, to invoke the patron deity Mahadev (another name for Shiva) to exorcise the demons that are causing a young girl to suffer from severe pneumonia.

  Further east still, it is already dark in Tengboche monastery in the heart of Khumbu in north-east Nepal. Just a tint of orange remains at the top of Mount Everest, known to the Sherpa monks here as Chomolongma, Mother Goddess of the World. The abbot of the monastery leads monks through sonorous prayers beneath electric lights, installed only this past year.

  As night falls across the ragged Himalayan landscape and the mind turns, even if momentarily, to the eternal, millions of highlanders in the remote gumbas, bustling towns and sacred precincts are given to their particular variety of religious observance. The sadhu, the pilgrim, the housewife, the jhankri’s helper, all outwardly hold differing beliefs. Depending on locality, caste, ethnicity, upbringing and vocation, the practice ranges from the asceticism of the hermit through the philosophical erudition of the abbot to the unquestioning ritualism of Mrs Maharjan. Perhaps the one thing these diverse practitioners of faith hold in common is that they all inhabit the Himalaya, doubtless the most revered region in the world, regarded by more people as holy than the Alps, the Andes and the Rocky Mountains of North America put together.

  As the world approaches the third millennium, some would ask, why this unchanging belief in mysticism and religion? The holy lunar surface has been ‘defiled’ by the footprints of astronauts and the sacred summits by mountaineers’ crampons, and yet religion continues to rule over the Himalaya. What relevance do religious percepts and practices gathered over thousands of years have for a people who have been asked to sign on to the latest religion, ‘development’, whose very premise is material progress? Can mystic beliefs be exploited for the purposes of social and economic advancement, or are they to be discarded as hangovers from the past? Or should religion and ritual simply be left alone, unchannelled, because they should not be ‘used’ for any purpose?

  These questions elicit as many differing responses as there are sects of sadhus in the subcontinent, for religion is inseparable from daily life in the Himalaya, and every attempt at changing that life affects someone’s spiritual being as well.

  As the closest links between the earth and the heavens, mountains have always attracted awe and reverence. The mysterious ridges and inaccessible summits became religious icons for societies all over the world. The Vikings of Scandinavia regarded the Helgafell Mountain of Iceland with reverence, just as Ik tribesmen of Uganda today revere Mount Morungole. Moses took delivery of the Ten Commandments atop Mount Sinai. The Hopis of North America, the Ma
oris of New Zealand and the people of the Andes all regard mountains as the abode of ancestral spirits. In Japan, members of the Shugendo sect climb sacred peaks as purification exercises. For the Hellenes, Mount Olympus was a realm of divine bliss, inhabited by Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and other gods and goddesses. While the Greek gods have long since been declared dead, the deities in the Himalaya continue to receive the homage of the millions. Shiva, deity of destruction, the original yogi, sits meditating atop Mount Kailash. The gods of the Sherpas reside in Khumbila, a relatively minor peak which nevertheless towers over the Khumbu. The Lepchas of Sikkim trace their mythical origins to a primordial couple born from the glaciers of Kanchenjunga. The pre-Buddhist Bon nature worshippers believed that some of the peaks were abodes of spirits who were in fact worldly beings. It is said that Padmasambhava, or Guru Rinpoche, came to Tibet in AD 749 and converted the mountain deities, who then became the protectors of the Tibetan Buddhists.

  Perhaps the Himalaya is the most revered simply because it is so big. It is the longest and the highest range, and its jagged precipices protrude dramatically from the Indo-Gangetic basin. These highlands would not have been as defined if it had been a slow-rising plateau. Mount Kailash, holiest mountain of the Hindus and the Buddhists, is the archetypical sacred mountain because it stands alone and rises so majestically. It is for the Himalaya what the Himalaya is for the rest of the world.

  The Puranic progenitors of Hindu mythology even created a mythical mountain to be the epicentre of the cosmos – Mount Meru. With such reverence for the mountains, enthusiasm for the Himalaya can be catching. ‘Like the important nerve centres of the body which contain latent energy, the Himalaya mountains are vital geographical energy centres of the globe,’ says Chokyi Nyima, head of the Ka-Nying Shedrup Ling monastery in Baudha, outside Kathmandu.

  In their isolation, the Himalayan people developed and preserved the rich tradition of the past. John K. Locke, who has studied Newar Buddhism for over a decade, says, ‘Across the Himalaya, you have pockets of people who have retained cultures that have disappeared or become blurred elsewhere. For instance, the Newar community of Kathmandu is really the only surviving community practising Indian Buddhism. The same is true of the tantric Hindu cults that have been preserved here.’

  Yoga, though not practised by the populace at large, is an underlying element of Himalayan mysticism. Tibetan Buddhism follows the system of yoga laid down by Naropa, a twelfth-century tantrik. The tradition of tantricism has deep roots in Himalayan Buddhism and Hinduism: ‘Although tantra may conjure up apprehension in the minds of most people because of its association with eroticism and sexual imagery, it is basically a [form of] yoga,’ says Locke. ‘It is a combination of various techniques to achieve the yogic goal, which is the union of Shiva–Shakti (Consciousness– Energy).’ The yogic and tantrik initiation is not reserved to the ascetics; among the few laymen who have reached deep into these traditions is Sridhar Rana, a teacher at a tourism training institute in Kathmandu. He began experimenting with Hindu tantra two decades ago and completed the prescribed series of mantras in eight years. For some of these, he spent nights on end at the cremation grounds. Rana then progressed to what is known as the ‘Witness Exercise’ of the Vedantic school. He devoted the next six years to Zen Buddhism in Kyoto. For the past three years, he has been practising dzogchen, an advanced form of Tibetan tantra.

  While Rana might be the exemplary seeker, there are few like him among his urban peers in the Himalaya, and fewer still among the millions whose chief concern is to get through another day. In the mainstream Hindu tradition, especially among the emerging middle class, few engage in yoga or tantra themselves. Instead, the pundit or the priest, the shaman and the lama step in, officiating for them to a multitude of deities and spirits. Rather than personally practise the deeper rituals, the majority of the population ‘practise religion by proxy’, says a Nepali sociologist.

  Across much of the Himalayan midhills, the Brahmin holds sway. His function is to represent the Hindu pantheon, to direct all ceremonies and celebrations and to collect dakshina. The pundit often plays an important role as an anchor of the community, dispensing advice on secular matters, dealing with governmental authority and reading and writing letters. At the same time he is also the guardian of superstitions and myths, and of the caste system that pervades the Hindu hill society.

  For the mountain peasant, his life bound and often at the mercy of the elements and the environment, religion is a source of inner strength. With negligible cash income, hard work in the fields, inadequate access to health facilities and the constant threat of disease and death, the peasant has little to fall back on in difficult times. The kind of religion practised by the Himalayan peasant has its psychological and sociological roots in his lifestyle, say some social scientists. It is the spiritual equivalent to social security that exists in the Western countries.

  G.S. Nepali, professor of sociology at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, says, ‘Religion as practised by the Himalayan peasant is not other-worldly but this-worldly. Life is hard and he is not so much concerned with salvation, communion with God or life after death as he is with solving the day-to-day problems like hunger, misery and sickness. He therefore worships this god to get rid of certain diseases, one god for timely rain, another god to ensure a bountiful harvest and so on. It is a completely utilitarian concept of God. Religion is a tool for adjusting to the environment.’

  Adjusting to his own environment with nary a qualm is Asha Ratna Tuladhar, thirty-two, from Gabahal in the town of Patan. Tuladhar is not quite sure whether he is Buddhist or Hindu but that does not keep him from actively participating in the festival of Rato Macchindranath. The festival is one of the most joyous collective activities in the Himalaya, in which the heavy, ungainly rath of the deity known also to the Newars as Bunga Dya and Karunamaya is hauled through the narrow lanes of Patan. At the end of the festival, Tuladhar and his family light up butter lamps and participate in bhoj, in which everyone eats and drinks to the celebration of life. ‘This is all in the worship of Karunamaya,’ confides Tuladhar. ‘He gives us timely rain and a good harvest.’

  Nepali anthropologist Dipak Raj Pant is among those social scientists who feel that festivals are essential because they renew the life of a community. They believe that festivals, religious ceremonies and rituals do not have a mere mystical function, but fulfil many other practical needs of people within a community. A traditional mela, for example, not only marks some religious event, but also provides opportunity for entertainment, exchange of information, commerce and even match-making.

  This view is not shared by journalist and political analyst Hiranya Lai Shrestha, who professes atheism. ‘A religious outlook is detrimental to modernization; too many resources are being spent on festivals. It has become impossible to disentangle religion from superstition,’ says Shrestha. He is of the opinion that Nepal should be declared a secular state ‘to ensure the involvement of the various ethnic groups in national development.’

  Those who agree with Shrestha say that religion has been one of the millstones around the neck of the nation, lulling the mind of the populace with promises of an afterlife and diffusing productivity by channelling its energies towards sacrifice, ritual and self-denial. They point to religion-related rituals such as ostentatious weddings, which are often carried out by taking out loans, usually with precious land as collateral. Others see religion as playing a subtler and more useful role. ‘This is not the Shangri La that so many Westerners would like to see,’ says a Tribhuvan University professor who asked not to be named. ‘The peasants live harsh lives because of their poverty. But do they have a choice? Absolutely not. So at least grant them their religion, their festivals and their beliefs. Without religion, you would need a hundred thousand barefoot psychiatrists just to keep the nation standing.’

  While defending the role of religious practices in the life of the Himalayan people, anthropologist Pant is concerned about the tendency to
impose a simple generic form of Hinduism on the people: ‘This homogenization is injurious to the traditions of national integration,’ he says, adding that each community must have freedom to practise religion in its own way.

  Lost in all the talk of the social scientists, anthropologists, rationalists and orthodox standard bearers is yet another perspective. Beyond the world of the religious texts, rituals, sermons and analyses – is there something else, intangible, that makes the Himalayan people spiritually unique? What, after all, has attracted the plainsman and the foreigner to these mountains for centuries?

  Abraham Joy, self-professed ‘seeker’ from the United States, says he perceives that uniqueness. ‘I grew up with a vague sense that a higher force that created everything exists and requires respect. Yet, I grew up in a godless world and found this sentiment constantly disproved. Nevertheless, it never went away and in Nepal I was happy to be around people who recognized and lived by it. Next to just about any Nepali villager, Americans seem like egomaniacs, with respect for nothing but power, money and rationality.’

  Yet, the irony of his search is not lost on Joy. He sees the modern man’s search for religion paralleled by the religious man’s search for modernity. ‘Somewhere between the two may lie the answer,’ he says.

  Already, in the pilgrimage spots in Uttarakhand, the roads blasted in the wake of the 1962 Indo–Chinese war have changed the meaning of a pilgrimage. A week’s ticket in a ‘semi-deluxe video coach’ takes the ‘pilgrim’ through all the major sacred spots, leaving him little time to contemplate the grandeur of the hills, the meaning of penance and life itself. On the other hand, pilgrims to Kailash from far west Nepal walk a week to reach the Tibetan border, whence they are whisked within hours to the banks of the Manasarovar.