by George Black
* * *
A thousand priests are affiliated with the temple at Kalighat, and one of them invited me to his brother’s sweetshop, where an elderly lady in a windowless back room was scraping dough off a wooden tray and pressing spongy balls of champakali between her bare palms. They insisted I try some, and it was only polite to accept, though I thought the sweets were probably to blame when I spent most of the night that followed sprawled on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor, gasping over the toilet.
“Kali was dispersed in a hundred and eight pieces, and one of them came to earth here,” my translator said, though others put the number at fifty-one.
I said I’d read about this. The pieces that had fallen on Kalighat were four toes from the right foot that were taken out once a year to be bathed during the summer full-moon festival of Snana Yatra.
The translator disagreed. “No, what fell here was her genital region.”
I wasn’t used to disputing points of Hindu theology, but I said, “Are you sure?”
She conferred with the priest for a while in Bengali.
“Yes, definitely the genitals,” she said at last. “They are in the golden box in the temple, where you just went.”
I double-checked later. Kali’s genitals were in the northeastern state of Assam. Her toes were here in Calcutta. For the first time in all my blundering around in the mysteries of Hinduism, I found myself on the right side of an argument.
THE BOLLYWOOD GODDESS
The calendar of the great pujas is fixed by the movements of the moon. Saraswati is worshipped in January or February, Ganesha in April or May, Durga in September or October, and Kali three weeks after that. The Durga Puja, the biggest of them all, when thousands of clay-and-straw effigies of the goddess are immersed in the Hooghly, is another case of the perils of “since time immemorial,” because British fingerprints were on this one, too.
The first great Durga Puja was organized by a local raja in 1757 to celebrate the British victory at the Battle of Plassey, which gave Britain full military control over Bengal. The guest of honor was Robert Clive, the “conqueror of India,” who had a rich menu of adjectives to convey his low opinion of Bengalis. Depending on their class, these included servile, mean, submissive, venal, effeminate, luxurious, tyrannical, treacherous, and cruel.
“Luxurious” presumably referred to the babus, who took over the Durga Puja in the 1850s, finding it a fine opportunity to show off their new money. At the end of the festival, British officials were invited to join them for an evening of sherry and champagne.
The babus also dived into land speculation and real estate and created a number of caste-based neighborhoods in North Calcutta, which the British called Black Town, populating them with skilled artisans like cobblers, tailors, tanners, and potters. The potters came from towns and villages like Krishnanagar, along the east side of the Hooghly, using clay mud from the river as their working medium. They are still clustered in the neighborhood that the babus created for them, Kumartuli, which lies just north of the Howrah Bridge, and their specialty is to fashion the effigies that are immersed in the river during the Durga Puja and other great festivals.
* * *
All of them were from the same caste—kumhars are potters—and all of them seemed to be named Paul or Pal. The first man I stopped to talk to at one of the innumerable workshops that line the back alleys of Kumartuli was Akhil Paul, and he was from Krishnanagar. The most famous of them all was Gopeshwar Pal, who had traveled to the British Empire Exhibition in London in 1924 and could fashion a convincing horse’s head out of clay in forty-five seconds flat. But what really impressed the royal visitors was the lightning speed with which he could turn out a lifelike statue of the Duke of Connaught. Later, he had gone on to Italy and learned how to sculpt in stone and bronze.
Stacked outside the workshops were purple-pink Ganeshas and blue Krishnas and no end of Shivas in various shapes and sizes and a delicate white Saraswati, symbolizing knowledge and wisdom, seated on her swan and playing a stringed vina. Akhil Paul was working on a small Kali. “Kali Puja is very big here,” he said. “But we work all year round. The gods have to listen to our schedule, not just us to theirs.” He grinned.
One of his crew was finishing off a ten-armed Durga who was still missing her head, and he described the various stages of the process: first, nail together a frame of wood and bamboo, then bind together bundles of straw to create the basic shape of the body, then add successive layers of clay. “There are fishermen who bring us the mud from Uluberia, downriver from the city,” Akhil said. “They drop it here on the riverbank, and then a distributor sells it to us.” The Hooghly was just a few blocks away.
Tradition says that it’s auspicious to mix in a little mud from the doorway of a prostitute, which seemed easy enough to do, since Kumartuli is right next to the infamous brothels of Sonagachi. But I read about that detail only later, so I didn’t ask him.
“Clay defines the art of Bengal in a way,” Tapati Guha-Thakurta said. “We have so little stone here, and so much clay, because we can get it directly from the river. They use only unfired clay; that is a ritual injunction, they say. The purity of the clay is that which hasn’t passed through fire of any kind. And there’s a huge art in mixing different kinds of clay, which they give different names.”
One of the workers was slapping a thick, sticky layer of clay onto the body of another Kali. On top of that, he would add a firmer, sandier clay, smoothing it out to give the body its final shape, sometimes mixing it with oil to make it glisten. A boy was using a fine-tipped brush to paint in the features on the head of a Durga, which had been made in a separate mold. The pointed nose, the yellow face shaped like a betel leaf, and finally the eyes, slanting and elongated and formed like leaves of bamboo, the moment at which the goddess came to life. With that she was ready for immersion. “The entire thing guiding it is that Durga comes from the river and then returns to it, so she has to be made from its soil,” Tapati said.
On the last day of the festival, women would stroke the effigy with betel leaves, feed her sweets and paan, and beseech her to return the following year. Men would carry her on their shoulders to the river, and in she would go, sent back to Mount Kailash for another year of marital dramas—often tossed into the water quite unceremoniously, to judge from videos I’d seen of the event. “On the main ghats, in the past four or five years, they even have these giant cranes, so you literally just dip the goddess in that way,” Tapati said.
The clay melts away from the effigy and sinks back to the riverbed, and people wade out to retrieve the frames and the straw and strip off the gold foil, the jewelry, and the ornaments—everything that can be saved and recycled. As Tapati described it, there was nothing very reverential about this process. “It’s quite brutal, actually. The goddess is stripped apart. Her limbs fall off. She is literally dismembered.”
It was partly a matter of city politics. The river was so shallow that garbage piled up in no time, and the authorities had come down on pollution like a hammer, insisting that the idol makers use only natural materials and lead-free paint. “But the sentiment of the community has to be maintained,” Tapati said. “This is a practice you cannot stop. You can put an end to animal sacrifices, but you can never ban immersion. The goddess must go to the river.”
* * *
Around the corner, at Sailen Paul’s workshop, there was a notable absence of straw and clay.
“Those ones look like fiberglass,” I said.
He nodded. These effigies might fly in the face of tradition, but they were unbreakable, made for shipping abroad. He said you could do customized “online idol booking,” pay by credit card, and organize your own puja at home.
“I have sent already three shipments to London,” Sailen said.
“NRB Durgas, we call them,” Tapati said. “Nonresident Bengalis.”
As we walked on through Kumartuli, there were many figures that had a distinctly secular look: statues of wome
n with the features of Bollywood stars, men who looked as if they’d been copied from the works of Polyclitus or Praxiteles, others whose heroic chins jutted into the future like soldiers in a Soviet war memorial. And tucked away in a corner, either Batman or Superman; the clothing and features hadn’t been painted on yet.
Tapati sighed. “It has all become very secularized.” The groups that organized the Durga Puja had to bear in mind the competition for corporate sponsorship from the likes of Pepsi and Tata. Before immersion, the effigies would be displayed in extravagant booths, pandals, which more and more were designed with pop culture themes. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts had been a favorite one year, until J. K. Rowling sued for breach of copyright.
Some of the effigies of Durga herself had dispensed with almost all the elements that made her recognizable: the yellow skin, the bamboo-leaf eyes. “She is being made more recognizably human,” Tapati said. “It is what we may call the Bollywoodization of the goddess, with very filmi attire. She has to conform to public ideas of beauty.”
And so did the public itself. The Durga Puja was a great street festival, strolling among the flashing lights and fireworks with family and friends, early snacks and blow-out dinners, Ferris wheel rides for the kids. You had to look your best. In the weeks before the Durga Puja, plastic surgeons worked overtime to meet the demand for nose jobs, chin lifts, and liposuction. I saw one doctor’s pricelist: $1,500 for a boob job, $1,200 for a tummy tuck. At just $200, a shot of Botox seemed like a positive steal.
THE COIN COLLECTOR
So many millions of us had come here down through the millennia, pulled in by the magnet of the Ganges.
Xuanzang and Al-Biruni, Withington and Tavernier, to see the river’s mysteries and tell their respective compatriots what they had seen.
A generation of Englishmen to explore it and map it and discover where it was born; other Englishmen to shoot at anything that flew over it or ran along its banks; others still to paint it and celebrate its beauty; the Raja of Harsil to log its cedars and grow his apples.
Men of the East India Company seeking their fortunes; young women looking for husbands; humanitarians shocked by famine; generals crushing rebellion; engineers to build bridges and railways and canals; residents and collectors to run the bureaucracy of empire.
Frenchmen to sell books; Englishmen to sell cakes and open hotels; writers and filmmakers to record and admire; writers and filmmakers to sneer; the Welshman William Jones, with his love of learning; the Welshwoman Fanny Parkes, wandering in search of the picturesque.
Poets searching for the meaning of life among the cremation fires and the naked sadhus; the Beatles seeking enlightenment, writing music, trying to kick drugs; retirees from Air India, drawn by the vibrations.
Mountaineers from New Zealand seeking new conquests of nature; Latvian bungee jumpers and yuppies from Gujarat in search of adventure; Israeli kids to numb their trauma after military service; hippies to learn yoga and the rudiments of the sitar; tourists to gawp at bodies burning.
Bishops and Jesuits who came bringing light to the heathen; soldiers who found a religion better than their own; politicians who used religion to seek votes; nomads who sold their milk to the pilgrims.
And the pilgrims themselves, in numbers beyond counting, flocking to Gangotri, to Haridwar, to Devprayag, to the Triveni Sangam at Allahabad, to the ghats of Varanasi, and finally to Gangasagar, south of Calcutta, where the creation story ended, the goddess met the king, and the river merged with the ocean.
* * *
I stopped halfway at Diamond Harbor, an hour and a half from the city, passing through a neighborhood called Lenin Nagar and parking outside the Stalin-Einstein Library (“AFERS XEXOR SERVICE”). A fisherman paddled himself out in an inner tube to check his nets. A middle-aged woman in a bright green sari jumped into my path and screamed in my face. The owner of a chai stall laughed and twirled a finger at his head.
At the village of Kakdwip, the river split in two around a long, narrow island. The channel to the east of it was called the Muriganga, the Puffed-Rice Ganges. The island might have been there for centuries, or it might have been formed from silt only a few years ago. In these last few miles before we reached Gangasagar, the Ganges had not always been a benign force. Navigation was treacherous; her sandbars were notorious. The captains of the East Indiamen marked their charts with the names and locations of familiar wrecks.
The vehicle that Ma Ganga rode on was a crocodile, and here in the delta it was a mortal threat. The English in Calcutta learned with horror of the local custom of fashioning a baby out of clay and placing it in the river to propitiate the beast. Ships had their prows carved in the shape of a crocodile for the same reason. Sharks, too, infested these waters and were equally fearsome. A writer in the 1920s described a ceremony at Gangasagar where pilgrims would walk into the ocean with the hope of being eaten by a shark, to placate these dark and powerful forces.
* * *
It was two miles from the jetty to Gangasagar. As we waited for the boat, I chatted with four young marine biologists with orange life preservers and aluminum suitcases, which contained the equipment they needed to set up testing stations to assess the health of the benthic life of the river. The pollution was not too bad this close to the ocean, they said.
The ferry finally arrived, and people piled on to it, pressing it lower and lower into the water. I guessed that the safety limit was no more than a hundred and fifty passengers. I stopped counting at four hundred. Boats capsized here with some frequency, as they did across the border in Bangladesh.
A jolly group of old ladies from Gujarat squeezed in beside me, next to the engine room. As the bungee jumpers in Rishikesh had said, no matter where you went in India, you always met Gujaratis. One of the old ladies had a decorative tattoo on her arm, lettered in Hindi. I asked her what it meant, and she said, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” They had come in a chartered bus with sixty people from their temple in the city of Surendranagar, doing a grand circuit of pilgrimage sites that would take them all the way south to the Ramanathaswamy temple in Tamil Nadu. They didn’t care for the local food, so they had brought their own. They munched on five-rupee bags of roasted chickpeas that were dyed bright green and sucked on canary-yellow popsicles, colors that did not exist in nature. The old ladies tossed handfuls of fish food over the side of the boat, whispering a prayer.
There were tall electricity pylons planted in the shallow brown water of the Muriganga, and flocks of seagulls swooped and dived around us. The shoreline of the mainland was dotted with the slender chimneys of brickworks, and the island of Gangasagar was a flat strip of green. The forest station of Kotka, where I’d ended my travels in Bangladesh at another of the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges, was a hundred miles to the east.
At Kachuberia Ghat, the pierhead, we flagged a minibus for the forty-five-minute drive along a road that ran arrow-straight to the southern tip of the island. The driver was a chatty type. “If you walk along the river here, it is very beautiful,” he said. “You will automatically remember all your memories.” The major economic activity on the island was growing betel leaves and making paan. His vehicle ran on liquified natural gas. He made sure I noticed the solar panels outside a small Shiva temple. The local schools were good; the government had always supported education. As we approached the temple of Kapil Muni, the seer who had reduced the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara to ash, he pointed out a new helipad that provided weekly service for wealthy pilgrims from Calcutta. Near it was a guesthouse that had been built for the use of the chief minister of West Bengal. It was all built with tropical hardwoods, the driver said. It cost nine crores of rupees, about $1.5 million.
Two young priests were in attendance at the temple, which was low, narrow, modern, gaudy, and unprepossessing. Its predecessor had been washed away by the tides. In January each year, the three-day Gangasagar Mela, second only to the great mela at Allahabad, can bring crowds of a million or more to bathe in the chilly ocean wate
rs, make their offerings of coconuts, and wash away the sins of a lifetime. Today there were only a handful of visitors. Near the temple, a few sheds had been built for the sadhus. A hammer-and-sickle flag was fluttering over one of them, printed with the initials CPI (M). Communist Party of India (Marxist), as opposed to the CPI (M-L), which added Lenin. “Those sheds are a haven of misconduct,” Dodo snorted.
On the path to the beach, I bought a ten-rupee bag of rice and dal from one of the sadhus and then gave it back to him as a gift. He repaid me by smearing a fluorescent orange tilak on my forehead.
Some middle-class families were frolicking in the gentle surf, taking selfies on their iPhones. There was no sign of sharks. A pack of more than a dozen feral dogs were fighting over broken chunks of coconut, and a man in a T-shirt advertising Arizona Bagels was trawling a curious device back and forward through the water. It was like a gigantic rake studded with two rows of metal disks. He said his name was Ashok Paik, and he had grown up in Gangasagar. The disks were magnets, and he was collecting coins that had been thrown into the ocean as offerings—not the new rupees, which were made from base metal, but coins from the old days, denominated in annas. I’d seen vendors selling them from stalls along Chowringhee Road.
I asked him whether he was having any success, and he shrugged. “There are good days and there are bad days,” he said. “It all depends. Everything is in the hands of our mother, Ma Ganga.”
The Ganges—still called the Bhagirathi at this point—cuts its way through bedrock close to its source in the Gangotri glacier.