by George Black
WHY SHIVA TURNED BLUE
Back in the bazaar, a shopkeeper was berating two men in orange shirts and orange shorts and flip-flops. “These people aren’t pilgrims, they are nothing but goondas!” he was yelling to anyone who would listen. Thugs, bullies. “They make a big problem of law and order. This young man comes up to me and says, ‘Heat my milk!’ I say, ‘Heat your milk? No!’ He asks why not. I say, ‘Because I have other customers waiting!’”
Manto shook his head. “The locals become very bad-tempered when the kanwarias come here,” he said.
Kanwarias?
* * *
There were groups of them lined up all along the edge of the canal, young men dressed all in orange with strange, gaudy contraptions that I’d noticed when we arrived in town the previous day. They were the size and shape of a stretcher or a cremation bier, on a frame of bamboo, curved on top. They were kanwars, and the men who carried them were the kanwarias.
“We have made this pilgrimage eight times before,” said a man named Bittu, who had come here with his best friend, Sanjay, and four companions from a village near Moradabad, about a hundred miles east of Delhi. “We came by train, but we will walk back. We will carry the kanwar on our shoulders. It will take five days.”
The most fervent devotees might do the journey in twenty-four hours, Manto said, running all the way, passing the kanwar from one man to the next in a relay with only brief rest stops.
“It is all for Lord Shiva,” Sanjay said. “But we are not from any special temple. We are all from different castes. We are just neighbors. I am an office worker, Bittu is a driver. Sometimes we run into friends along the way also. People are coming from Delhi, from UP [Uttar Pradesh], from Haryana, from Rajasthan, from Uttarakhand. Some are even going all the way to Gaumukh, actually, more than five hundred kilometers.”
They showed me some of the things they’d used to decorate their kanwar: a postcard-size portrait of Shiva, a small trident, a plastic cobra, a miniature damaru drum, a CD cover showing a Bollywood star with slicked-back hair, strips of gold and silver tinsel, some pink handkerchiefs, an aluminum teaspoon, and two wicker baskets with water pots inside, one at each end. The water pots and the teaspoon were the main point of the exercise, and naturally there was a legend behind it.
“It is a story in the scriptures of an obedient son named Shravan,” Manto said. “A very ancient story from before the time of Lord Ram. It is very popular. You can see it on TV or buy a DVD. Shravan’s parents were old and blind, and they wanted to go on a pilgrimage before they died. But they were too frail to walk, so he made a palanquin that he could carry on his shoulders and a basket on each end for them to sit in. So the baskets that these boys carry on their kanwar are a symbol of this story, and they will use them to take some gangajal back to their homes.”
“Once we have the water, it can never touch the ground until we reach our village,” Sanjay said. “It must be always hanging on our shoulders.”
That accounted for the two baskets, but what about the aluminum teaspoon?
“For this you must know another legend also,” Manto said.
The gods and the demons were at war, each of them wanting to possess the nectar of immortality. To find it, they had to churn one of the seven oceans, the Ocean of Milk. They used Shiva’s cobra, Nag Vasuki, as a rope to do the churning. The gods held his tail, the demons held his head, and they swished the snake around in the milk. But the nectar of immortality was not the only thing that emerged from the struggle.
“A pot of poison also came out,” Manto said. “It was a poison so powerful that it could destroy the universe. Someone had to consume it, but no one could agree on who should do it. Finally, Shiva said, ‘Okay, I will volunteer.’ He kept the poison in his throat, and that is why Shiva turned blue. For this reason, sometimes he is called neelakantha, the one with the blue throat.”
“And the teaspoon?”
“Because the poison made so much heat and energy in Shiva that he had to be cooled down. So in Haridwar twice a day, the kanwarias will sprinkle water on the shivling to cool down the fire in him.”
“When we reach our homes again, we must also pour the water on the shivling,” Sanjay said. “And then we will make a big feast for the girls in our village.”
“What happens to the rest of the kanwar?”
“We are keeping the frame for next year. And we are giving this decoration to the kids.” He pointed to the tinsel.
“And what about the handkerchiefs?”
Sanjay and Bittu looked at each other and giggled. “These we are giving to the girls.”
MRS. CHAUREY’S GLASSES
At the cremation ghat of Kankhal, on the southern outskirts of the city, in the direction of Yama, the terrible lord of death, an old woman’s body was laid out on a compact pyre of logs and branches. Two other pyres were burning brightly, and another had been reduced to a pile of cooling ashes. A fourth was set and ready, evidently belonging to a poorer family since much of it was constructed from plywood planking and handfuls of straw.
The old woman’s name was Ambika Chaurey, and she had died that morning, in the hour before dawn. She was eighty-two. After the body was cleaned, her male relatives had loaded it onto a garishly painted flatbed truck that looked more suited to a circus than to a funeral and made the four-hour drive to Haridwar from their hometown of Meerut, north of Delhi, arriving in midafternoon. They shopped at one of the stalls that lined the alleyway leading to the cremation ground, buying the wood they needed and some small blocks of camphor that would be unwrapped like sugar cubes and added to the fire as an accelerant.
Two priests were in attendance, and the family slipped them some money. One was a grizzled older man with several missing teeth. He was wearing a blue striped sweater despite the intense heat from the pyres. The other was no more than thirty. He introduced himself as Hari Om Shastri. He wore a black nylon zippered jacket over his dhoti. He had a bright vermilion tilak on his forehead, his hair was heavily pomaded, and he had a five o’clock shadow that was worthy of a young Richard Nixon.
At the foot of the steps, the river’s edge was a dark ebb of marigolds, plastic bags, food wrappers, cigarette packets, chunks of Styrofoam, half-liquified dung from a couple of cows that were standing nearby, and a couple of uneaten chapatis. The river was braided into channels here, and cormorants were circling over a gravel bar, which might more accurately have been described as a garbage bar. A few yards away, a worker began shoveling cold ashes into the water.
I told the young priest that the plywood pyre bothered me. What if the body was left only half-burned? “The bones will purify the river and make the pollution less,” he answered with the manner of a science teacher at an elementary school. “The individual human being is purified, and the river is purified. The bones will gradually disintegrate and get diluted. The body will be returned to air, water, earth, fire, and ether. Otherwise the river would be full of bones right now.”
Mrs. Chaurey’s body was adorned like that of a bride and garlanded with flowers. A frame of branches formed a kind a canopy above her, and it was hung with yellow, red, and blue plastic ornaments that resembled small balloons. Two of the men removed this now and tossed it into the river, where it drifted away in the lazy current. The eldest son knelt and kissed his mother’s feet. Then he lit a couple of matches and tossed them on the pyre. There was a whomp of orange flame, and I noticed, as the burning branches fell in across the old lady’s face, that they had not removed her glasses.
Greasy particles of black ash began to drift toward us, settling on our skin and clothing. “You’d better go down to the river and wash before you leave,” the young priest said.
THE BEST MEDICINE
The Mahashivaratri had been in February. The next time I went to Haridwar, it was July, and the monsoon had just broken. The streets were awash, shin-deep in floodwater, and it was a fifteen-minute walk to the center from the vast parking area at the edge of town. My hotel had
a large balcony overlooking the river, with a sign that said, “To Avoid Monkey Menace Please Do Not Dry Clothes on the Terrace.” The rain came down like a fist and hammered on the roof all night. But by the next morning, the skies had cleared, and I went out to look for the celebrated Baba Ramdev.
I’d been corresponding with the baba’s office for weeks, hoping to be granted an audience with the most popular TV guru in India, the man who had brought yoga to the masses. His show has eighty million viewers—more when he’s doing a special event, such as a multilingual simulcast when a hundred million people all over India sit at home in front of the tube, doing the same yoga exercises in unison. He’d also hosted rallies with other celebrity gurus to give his blessing to Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist candidate for prime minister. I’d seen film of Ramdev’s mass open-air yoga sessions in Haridwar, which attracted thousands. Sometimes he was wrapped in robes that were the color of a ripe tangerine. Sometimes he was naked to the waist apart from the sacred thread draped over his shoulder, displaying a mat of black chest hair to match his prodigious beard. His teeth could have lit up a darkened room. Yoga had extraordinary powers, he told his followers. It could cure brain tumors, leukemia, swine flu, and homosexuality, a practice that was “unscientific, unnatural, uncivilized, immoral, irreligious, and abnormal.” Breathing exercises could also be helpful in fighting this loathsome disease. So could locking up two people of the same sex in a room for a few days: salvation through aversion therapy.
It was late morning when I got to the headquarters of Baba Ramdev’s yoga empire, Patanjali Yogpeeth, a five hundred–acre campus a few miles outside Haridwar, on the road to Delhi. Patanjali was a fourth-century sage; Yogpeeth means “seat of yoga.” It was like a small city radiating out from a crescent-shaped administration building. There were neat rows of apartment blocks to house thousands of devotees, an artificial lake, ornamental trees, and neatly groomed lawns. There was the University of Patanjali, the Patanjali Bio Research Institute, a hospital, a hospice, a high-tech facility for the production of Ayurvedic medicines and health foods, and an agricultural research center housed in a building that looked like a stately English home in the Tudor style. You could go online (www.ramdevproducts.com) and buy the baba’s skin- and face-care products, shampoos, herbal remedies, food supplements, and cures for bleeding gums and premature ejaculation.
But Baba Ramdev himself wasn’t at home. His gatekeepers said he was stuck in Gangotri with five hundred followers. After the previous day’s downpour, the roads into the mountains were blocked by dozens of mudslides, maybe hundreds. When would he be back? Shrugs. No idea. Could be days, could be weeks.
* * *
I went down to the canteen, ate a bland lunch of organic dal and chapatis, made without onion or garlic that might have overheated my blood, then headed back upstairs to see who else I might find to talk to in the baba’s absence.
The gatekeepers disappeared behind closed doors, came back, held whispered conferences. But eventually, yes, Baba Ramdev’s closest associate would receive me. His name was Vaidyaraj Acharya Balkrishna. Acharya means “teacher.” He was the cofounder of Patanjali Yogpeeth; but more than that, he held a 97 percent share in its Ayurvedic medicine business, which has ten thousand stores across the country. He was, in fact, number forty-eight on the Forbes list of the wealthiest people in India, with an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion.
If you’d added a stuffed and mounted sailfish and a couple of signed photographs of the occupant shaking hands with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, you might have mistaken Balkrishna’s office for that of a successful businessman in Florida. He was sitting in a high-backed chair behind a huge glass-topped desk with three phones. One or another of them rang constantly. He was a small, trim man, robed in pure white, with short, coal-black hair that looked painted on his head and teeth like tombstones. He was in his midforties, but he might have been a decade younger. A balance of serenity and nervous energy, kept youthful by the wonders of Ayurveda. He gave me a stack of glossy brochures with photos of yoga positions and medicinal herbs and a handout that listed his credentials and accomplishments, which ran to eight pages of very small type.
The handout described him as “a great visionary, highly ascetic, energetic, diligent, and a simple man with multi-dimensional skills who is selflessly engaged in the service of mankind.” There was evidence of serious scholarship: thirty books he’d written or edited; forty coauthored articles, mainly on the health impacts of yoga and Ayurveda, in peer-reviewed journals like Medical Science Monitor, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, and the International Journal of Current Trends in Pharmaceutical Research. The fact sheet also said he had “directly treated more than five million patients suffering from various chronic to complex diseases.”
I had no quarrel with Ayurvedic medicine—a friend had told me that it definitely helped his asthma. But five million? And curing brain tumors with yoga? “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” Balkrishna said. “Definitely.” Other countries, too, had experienced the benefits of Patanjali yoga camps: Japan, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates. The Ayurveda business was now expanding into the United States. “We have online sales through Atlanta, and we just opened a store in Houston, Texas.” Swamiji, Baba Ramdev, had made a personal appearance at the grand opening.
What about Swamiji’s involvement in the swamps of secular politics? I asked. He’d always been revered by the militant right-wing Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. I’d read about one rally where he had called for an army of youth to be trained in shaastra-shastra—the study of weapons. The police had broken it up; the baba had made a B-movie escape dressed in women’s clothes.
“When we started Patanjali Yogpeeth twenty years ago, it was not business for us,” Balkrishna said. “It was not politics for us. It was for people to have more faith in their own culture and their system of health. But we realized after some point of time that there are also problems with the political system, like so much corruption. So we aspired toward changing that. But if the government works on these things, we can focus again on the work we were doing before.”
He lit up when I said that the idea of bringing people to God through mass rallies was very different from having a one-on-one relationship with your guru, or going to the temple, or doing your own private puja at home before you left for work. It reminded me of American megachurches and televangelists, and he didn’t take issue with the comparison.
“This is an important question!” he exclaimed. “This is my field. My brain will turn the other way around! Hinduism is about the unity of God. If you go back to the original texts, the Vedas and the Upanishads, it is only one God that Hindus believe in. It’s like I may be husband, I may be father, I may be son, but I am still one individual. God is one, but people give different forms to God. God is also worshipped in the form of shakti, in the form of energy. But the most important thing, if you go back to history, is behavior. Worshipping is not just going to the temple. If you are not improving your behavior, it is just becoming a ritual. If religion becomes a ritual, it becomes a task. It is not the path to self-improvement. Meditation also will not lead to self-improvement, because it is not a group activity. In a group activity, you learn, you get information. Worshipping is about self-progress. How I can endure my sorrows, how I can increase my happiness, how I can remove my doubts?”
But the mass worship side of Patanjali Yogpeeth was less his role than Baba Ramdev’s; his energies were devoted mainly to Ayurveda. Much of his time was taken up these days with compiling a monumental encyclopedia of all the known herbs in the world and their medicinal properties. “This has not been done till date,” he said. “We have done the collection. One hundred scientists are working with us. Not only this local area, entire world. Forty thousand plants! If you see in the scriptures and historical books related to herbs, there are only eight hundred. So forty thousand is a big number!”
As I was leaving, he rememb
ered one more thing. “The gaushala, the cowshed! You must go there also. It is three, four kilometers only. You will see the interesting things we are doing with cow urine. They will feed you organic mangoes also, which are coming down naturally from the trees!” He burst out in peals of laughter. For some reason, the idea of mangoes plummeting to earth seemed to tickle a funny bone that hadn’t been evident before.
FIZZY WHIZZY
It was Baba Ramdev who had come up with the idea of selling gaujal, or cow water. It would affirm the spiritual identity of Hindus. It would have miraculous curative properties. It could be bottled and marketed as a healthy and patriotic alternative to Pepsi and Coke. I wondered if they made it at the gaushala.
A boy was assigned to show me around the shed. The cows were lined up on either side, and a man was collecting the precious liquid in a reeking bucket. It was a pungent brownish yellow. When his bucket was full, he carried it over to a large metal tank to be distilled and turned into concentrate. It was also purchased from nearby villages, where farmers left it for pickup by the roadside in big blue plastic barrels. They got twenty rupees a liter, about thirty cents, which was a nice income supplement if you were living on two or three dollars a day.
The boy took me upstairs to meet the manager, Mr. Jain. “From six cows at the beginning, we now have four hundred,” he said. They were from four native Indian breeds, which were considered more desirable than Jerseys and Holsteins in a kind of bovine caste system. One breed was famous for being resistant to disease, another for its aggressive personality. Some people believed that urine from a pregnant cow had special properties, though others said it was better if the cow had never calved.
There were so many beneficial uses, Mr. Jain said: washing soap, turpentine, and floor cleaner; biofertilizers, biopesticides, biogas. Toothpaste, eye drops. You could add it to food: porridge, for example. You could add cow feces, too, for that matter. But medicine was the main thing. Homosexuality was not on the list of diseases it could cure—yoga was better for that. But it worked for everything else, from acne and constipation to cancer and AIDS. It was a natural antioxidant. It was loaded with minerals and vitamins. One drug had even been granted a patent in the United States.