Slowly Down the Ganges

This talk settled me. I took the hint and began to take the bath regularly in the Ganges itself. This habit has invigorated me a good deal and put splendid and clean ideas into my mind and I had a healthy time of it. Here is another instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. It was on 17.8.46 when Swamiji saw that I was using a toothbrush to clean my teeth in the Ganges. After five days when Swamiji and myself were both climbing up the steps leading to the Bhajan Hall, Swamiji began: ‘Om, Swagyan, there is tooth-powder called “Sadhu’s” tooth-powder in our league for sale to the public; it is highly efficacious and when used twice daily will relieve anyone of Pyorreah etc.’ This I took as a hint to me to discard the use of toothpaste which is costly and old-fashioned … Swamiji knows the nature of ignorance.

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Whatever else this old man generated he was an extraordinary figure. It was the fifth of December; winter had set in and the wind was blowing straight off the Himalayas. He was wearing a leather helmet that made him look like the wizened pilot of an early flying-machine, and he carried a pair of bedroom slippers. Everything he had – his helmet, the cloths in which he was wrapped, his quilt, the sack in which he presumably kept his other possessions – were all dyed the uniform dark yellow, bordering on orange, the colour of the sadhus. This dye is made from a special mud which has the unusual property of keeping the wearer warm as well as holy-looking; a property which it shares with cow-dung ash.

‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it!’ he repeated. To tell the truth he was becoming a bit of a bore. He had bathed already, long before first light, and he was too full of beans, like some old man at the Serpentine. The only way to escape from him was to go in ourselves.

It was so cold that it was like stepping into a fire. The water was very clear and remembering that no harm could come of it I drank some and it tasted good, while great speckled fish called mahseer, anything up to thirty pounds in weight, made insolent by over-feeding, nipped me. It was necessary to keep moving. I wondered how G. was getting on. He was standing in the slack water in the lee of the temple of Lakshmi-Ganga, completely immobile, with only his upturned face showing above the surface. A little upstream Wanda, having emerged from the ladies’ bathing establishment, which was a cross between an Edwardian boathouse and a lock-up garage, in the dim recesses of which modest ladies were splashing unseen, was having trouble with her sari. She looked like someone handling a spinnaker in a strong breeze; finally it unwound completely and she was left up to her knees in water ‘the cynosure’, as Milton wrote, ‘of neighbouring eyes’, like a freshly peeled plum. In order to disassociate myself from her, I went on foot up to the top end of the island and dived in there. The water was quite shallow, but the bottom was lined with stone-flags which were slippery with weed. The current lifted me high out of the water, and bore me down in a series of surges past a large smooth rock in mid-stream; past the ladies’ establishment with its admonitory notice in Hindi – ‘Non-violence is the Greatest Duty. Where there is Religion there is Victory’ – to which Wanda was now retreating in disorder; down into the main pool where G. still floated in the shadows of the temple; under the lower of the two bridges, in the shade of which a young Vishnuvite sadhu smeared with cow-dung, his hair a beehive of mud, was sleeping off the effects of a dose of hemp. Here I grabbed one of the chains that hung down from the arch, the bather’s last chance of stopping before being swept into deep water and the headworks of the Upper Ganges Canal several miles downstream.

This bathing ghat has frequently been the scene of heavy losses of life. In 1760 two rival sects of sadhus fought a pitched battle here in which nearly 2,000 perished. In 1795 Sikh pilgrims killed 500 of the religious mendicants called Goshains. Until 1820 it was only 34 feet wide at the top and there were only 39 steps. In that year 430 pilgrims and a number of sepoys were crushed to death on them, after which the ghat was enlarged. In April or May, at the beginning of the Hindu year and on the birthday of Ganga herself, as many as 400,000 persons gathered there at the fair called Dikhanti for the bathing, and as it was considered a good thing to be the first to enter the water as soon as the propitious moment arrived, it is a wonder that there were not more casualties. Every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh) – a particularly auspicious time – the number of pilgrims increases vastly. In 1796 and again in 1808 onlookers supposed to be reliable estimated that two million attended. In 1904 the number had fallen to 150,000; but at the Kumbh Mela of 1962 on April 13th, the principal day, two million people are said to have bathed.

Later as we crouched together on the lowest step, dripping and very cold (all three of us had forgotten to bring a towel), a young, evil-looking panda began, unasked, to recite the Ganga-Puja over our heads, having first ascertained our names. ‘Vede Aham Erric Nubi Vona Nubi Pavitre Ganga Mataram … Aradhanam Kalpayami Tharpanam Kalpayami Ganga Mataram Maduyam … Ayurarogya Sampat Samrithim Kuru …’ The-am endings, Mataram Maduyam Aradhanam Tharpanam imparted a mysterious quality to it. This is what it sounded like.

‘Give me what you please,’ he said, unasked when he had finished, lowering his eyes like a bashful girl.

‘Give him 10 naye paise,’ G. said.

‘What, for three of us?’

‘We did not ask for Puja. These pandas are rotten fellows.’

We had already paid an exorbitant amount to a particularly venal old man in order to see the footprint of Vishnu. He had veiled it completely when we approached, and had refused to uncover it until we gave him what he asked. It was a singularly unconvincing carving; one that might have been produced by a monumental mason in South London, rather than the footprint of a being capable of striding through the seven regions of the Hindu Universe in three steps. As an American shoe manufacturer, whom we met later on the waterfront at Banaras, said, when confronted with a similar pair of footprints:

‘If that’s Vishnu’s footprints, then he’s got fallen arches.’

‘What’s this?’ said the panda when I gave him the ten naye paise. ‘Give me ten rupees.’ His voice rose to a shriek.

‘You should be ashamed to be panda,’ said G., severely. ‘A strong young man like you.’

Together with a kinsman of one of the men from Shell, we visited such a large number of temples that eventually it became a test of sheer endurance for all of us, including the guide. He was a man of strikingly handsome appearance and unusual attainments.

‘I am Samudrika,’ he said when we were sitting drinking tea, exhausted. ‘I am, therefore, able to know what you are thinking. I have been watching you and I know many things about you. Think of your favourite flower,’ he said.

I thought of my unfavourite flowers, bronze wallflowers in a municipal bed; decided that this was unsporting and concentrated on roses. He handed me a piece of paper on which he had written the word ‘rose’. The performance of such a feat was more impressive here, at the foot of the Himalayas, than it would have seemed in Wimbledon. ‘Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six you were very poor,’ he said. ‘You are still poor but you would like to be an extravagant man. When you are angry it is not for long, but when your wife is angry she seethes like a pot. You will be always together.’

‘It sounds like a death sentence,’ Wanda said. She was not pleased with the way he used his talents. I asked him if he was a Sivite or a Vishnuvite.

‘I am a worshipper of Sakti – female energy of Siva,’ he said. ‘It is a very intellectual worship.’

That night I looked up Sakti worship in a book called Bhattacharya’s Hindu Castes and Sects. According to Bhattacharya, if he was a Sakti worshipper he must either be a Dakshinachari or a Bamachari, a Sakta of the right or the left hand, or a Kowl, an extreme Sakta. If he was a Dakshinachari, a right-handed one, then his devotions would be comparatively conventional; if he was a Bamachari, a left-handed Sakta, then he might possibly use wine as an offering to the female organ of generation. A Kowl would engage, according to the book, in ceremonies of ‘a beastly character’. The next day when I asked him which of the three he was, he only smiled.

Hardwar was swarming with sadhus. The Namadaris, the followers of Vishnu, had mud-packed cones of hair like the young man asleep under the bridge. On their foreheads they wore three vertical stripes, the centre one blood red, the outer ones of white clay. They carried iron rods and little braziers of hot coals for kindling incense, and they wore long Chanel-like necklaces of black nuts. The Sivites also wore long necklaces of rudraksha seeds and their arms and foreheads were smeared with burned cow-dung. Some carried gongs; others carried conch-shells which they blew into, making a disagreeable high-pitched noise. Both sects handled this multiplicity of gear with the same assurance as an experienced party-goer who, equipped with wrap, handbag, cigarette-holder, lighter, vodka and tomato juice, still manages to take the offered canapé.

The female sadhus were less remarkable. They were mostly grey-haired, beardless, stout, and school-marmy. And there were American girls wearing holier-than-thou expressions and an elegant parody of the sadhus’ uniform, made from re-embroidered saffron silk organza, who were down for a day’s shopping from one of the Ashrams at Rishikesh, with their Retina cameras at the ready.

In the temple of Gangadwara three priests were chanting Vedas before a stone lingam. They continued hour after hour, taking it in turns. Siva had been discovered in bed with his wife Durga by Brahma, Vishnu and other gods. He had been so drunk that he had not thought it necessary to stop. The majority, all except Vishnu and a few of the broader-minded, thought them nasty and brutish and said so. Siva and Durga died of shame in the position in which they were discovered; but before they expired Siva expressed the wish that mankind should worship the act manifest in the form which he now took to himself, the lingam. ‘All who worship me,’ he said, ‘in the form of lingam will attain the objects of their desire and a place in Kailasa!’ Kailasa is the paradise of Siva, a 22,000-foot mountain in the Himalayas, north of the Manasa Lake in Tibet. Death for a Tibetan on the shore of the Manasa Sarowar is as meritorious as that on the banks of the Ganges for a Hindu.

‘What is the water for?’

‘Water to cool organ, because it is passionate,’ said one of the men from Shell.

‘Water is in memory of water Siva had poured down his throat after drinking poison that would have destroyed the world,’ said G.

Our friend who had conducted us round the temples and who knew that I liked roses said nothing. Only Siva knew what he was thinking, but I was convinced that if he had chosen to do so he would have been the nearest of the lot to interpreting correctly the significance of the water and the lingam – perhaps there was no significance at all. In Hinduism, as in most other religions, there is a remarkable lack of unanimity amongst the devotees.

The temple of Daksheshwara at Kankhal, into which we were conducted by a boy with no roof to his mouth, was under repair, and the spire was enclosed in bamboo scaffolding. A sadhu sat outside on the river front under an enormous pipal tree and on the bank of what was now, at this season, a backwater of the Ganges, elderly pilgrims were having the Ganga-Puja recited over their shaven heads.

This place was the scene of an ill-conceived sacrifice to Vishnu offered by Daksha, a son of Brahma, to which Siva, Daksha’s son-in-law, was not invited. Uma the mountain goddess, Siva’s wife, was so enraged by this slight that she urged her husband to assert himself, which he did, producing a monster called Vira-Bhadra from his mouth. Vira-Bhadra had a thousand heads, eyes and limbs which swung a thousand clubs. As if this was not enough he carried a fiery bow and battle-axe, had a vast mouth that dripped blood and was clothed in the skin of what must have been a very large tiger. When Vira-Bhadra went into action the mountains tottered, the earth trembled, the wind howled and the seas were whipped to foam. What followed was like a Saturday night brawl in a saloon. Indra, the god of the air, was trampled underfoot; Yarna, the god of the dead, had his staff broken; Saraswati, the river goddess and goddess of learning, and the Matris, the divine mothers, had their noses removed; Pushan the nourisher, multiplier and protector of cattle and possessions – also the patron of conjurers—had his teeth rammed down his throat; Mitra, the ruler of the day, had his eyes pulled out; Chandra, the moon, was beaten; the hands of Vahni, the fire god, were cut off; Bhrigu, one of the great sages, had his beard pulled out; the Brahmans were pelted with stones; the sons of Brahma, the Prajapatis, were soundly beaten; innumerable demi-gods were skewered with swords and arrows, and Daksha’s head was cut off and thrown on to the fire. At the same time Sati consumed herself by spontaneous combustion. When these pyrotechnic efforts had subsided and with it Siva’s rage, he restored everyone to life, even Daksha who emerged as good as new except that he had the head of a goat, his own having been burnt up. Only Sati was beyond recall.

It was pleasant by the river at Daksheshwara. In a quiet valley behind the town, in a grove of dusty mango trees there was a small temple with several outbuildings, skeleton structures without walls in which the iron tridents of the sadhus stood, the three prongs of which symbolise bodily, worldly and heavenly suffering, planted in the still warm ashes of the fires of the previous night. It was as if the occupants had just fled.

Higher up the valley, where it narrowed between sandstone cliffs, a small stream came purling down. On one side protruding from the cliff was a wooden construction with walls of wire mesh. Reluctantly, because it seemed a gross infringement of privacy, we crowded at the entrance. Inside there was a sadhu, a youngish man with a brown beard. He was preparing vegetables and putting them into a pot. His only visible possessions were a stone pillow, a pile of sacred books and a drinking vessel made from a huge black sea shell. ‘He is the Moni Babar,’ said our friend. ‘He never speaks.’ The sadhu looked at us for a moment with his great brown eyes before resuming his task and feeling ashamed and flattened we went away.

We spent the nights at Hardwar in a dharmsala on the river front, downstream from the great ghat. It was a rest-house for poor pilgrims, now, with the onset of winter, almost deserted. Originally, we had intended to stay in one of the hotels above the sacred ghat but although we were prepared for discomfort, the place was so repulsive that we all three shrank from it, leaving the proprietor genuinely perplexed. It was a labyrinth whose emptiness only accentuated the all-pervading air of decay. The walls of the corridors were covered with eruptions of dark green lichen, and the sheets on the beds bore the impress of former occupants. To me it was reminiscent of another, similar hotel, seen years before on the shores of the Bosphorus. It seemed to set at nothing all the pious works of purification we had witnessed and the efforts of the municipal authorities to make Hardwar a clean place, which on the whole it is.

Late each night we hammered on the huge carved double-doors, with the words Dharmsala Bhata Bhawan-Der Ismail Khan inscribed above them, the name of a pious family from Der Ismail Khan, a town west of the Indus in the former North-West Frontier Province, who had endowed it originally; until a small, sleepy boy of ten or eleven, who seemed to be in sole charge, opened them up and led us into the main court. The courtyard had cells on three sides of it for the accommodation of pilgrims and at the far end a pink-washed, fretted archway led down to a bathing ghat at the water’s edge. Dark staircases led to other levels with more cells and to a platform which overlooked the river, furnished with rows of lavatories open to the sky. Up these stairs we lurched behind the small boy who, although he had a lantern, was always a flight ahead, bruising ourselves on the sharp angles where the stairs took a turn to the left and right. The two dimly-lit rooms which we occupied were bare except for a pair or charpoys – beds which were nothing more than a couple of wooden frames with a mattress of woven string. They were simple but they were clean.

In spite of the simplicity of the arrangements at the dharmsala, we contrived to make a shambles of them with open trunks and unstrapped bedding rolls, their contents half-disgorged, over all of which hung a stench of kerosene which boded ill for life in the more restricted space of a rowing-boat; but to us it seemed like paradise, and we blessed the Bhata Bhawan family of Der Ismail Khan and all their descendants for ever, for their beneficence and the kindness of the warden of the dharmsala who allowed us to stay there – for, although we were not bona fide pilgrims, it was completely without charge.

I was too tired and too excited to sleep much. Both nights I went out on to the platform above the river. It was very cold and clear and the moon was in the last quarter. It shone down on the waters which poured down past the ghat, like molten metal on an inclined plane. On either side of the dharmsala, so close that I felt that I could almost touch them, spires and pyramids of shrines and temples rose gleaming in the moonlight. On the other side of the gorge through which the river flowed, the continuation of the Siwalik Hills rose in a dark wall. The only sounds apart from the rushing noise of the river, were those made by the night-watchmen in the narrow streets far below, alternately groaning, and blowing their whistles, as if to prove to themselves that they still existed, for no one else was about. In one cell of the dharmsala, behind a window of red glass, a light still burned. I, too, wondered whether I existed, standing here on a roof-top on the banks of the Ganges, as incongruous as a Hindu on a pier on the south coast of England in the dead season, to which the dharmsala bore a remarkable resemblance.

On the first night before he went to bed, G. said that he must have a ritual bathe the next morning.

‘We can bathe, here from dharmsala,’ he said. ‘If you wish to come I am bathing at five-thirty.’

It was impossible to sleep after five a.m. anyway because of the sounds made by the other guests who already, at this early hour, were clearing their throats and wringing their noses out in preparation for another day. There were not many of them, but they made up for their weakness in numbers by an incredible volume of sounds that resembled massed bands of double bass and trombones with an occasional terrifying eruption of noise that obliterated all the others, the sort of noise small boys make when pretending to cut one another’s throats.

When I went to his room at five-thirty, G. had finished clearing his passages. He was doing his Yogic exercises, alternately sucking in huge gouts of air and then releasing them with a hissing noise like a gaggle of angry geese. Together we went down the staircase, across the court and under the archway to the ghat. The moon was down and it was very dark. All one could hear, standing on the steps, was the deep sighing of the river rushing past. It was bitterly cold. For some moments neither of us spoke.

‘I think,’ G. said at last, ‘that at this moment I am not bathing. In such circumstances there can be danger to health.’

Silently we crept up the stairs and back to bed.

When we rose again at seven, it was still very cold and we peeped round the front gate as apprehensively as mice. Wanda had decided to come with us. The sun had risen some ten minutes earlier but the streets were still in shadow and the wind whistled down them, raising little eddies of dust on the cobble-stones. The only other people who were up were two cha-wallahs, sitting by their smoking tea-engines on either side of the gateway, and we each drank a cup. It was hot, weak and milky and tasted of nutmegs. Then we set off up the road. It was a street of dharmsalas. Some of the more ancient ones with eyeless windows, protected by rusty iron gratings and doors bolted and barred and locked with corroded padlocks, seemed as if they were closed for ever, and one could imagine the interiors with room after shuttered room in which skeleton pilgrims slept for ever on charpoys of worm-eaten wood and rotting string; others dating back to the twenties were painted in faded blues. With their elephantine pilasters and heavy lintels they resembled the exhibition buildings at Wembley which I remembered as a child; while some, more modern still, were painted an indigestible sang de boeuf.

We groped our way through the bazaar, at this hour as dark as the grave. Most of the shops were still bolted and barred. Only the food merchants were preparing for opening time, heaping up great mounds of sugar and rice which glowed luminously through the murk. Then, suddenly, we emerged from the darkness on to the waterfront and into the light of the sun that was shooting up across the river, blinding the Sivite sadhus who squatted, coated in ashes, in the alcoves below the temple of Gangadwara, still warming themselves before the smouldering tree-trunks with which they had seen the night through. Here we turned inland, away from the river, and began to climb a steep path at the back of the town which led to the temple of Manasa-Devi.

At the temple, nearly 2,000 feet up, the air was gelid. G. asked the priest to recite the Lalita-sahasra-nama, the thousand names of Vishnu.

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‘I do not know the Lalita-sahasra-nama’, the priest said, equably and went back to his own protracted devotions.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ G. said. ‘He ought to know it. It’s like priest in Church of England not knowing the Lord’s Prayer.’

CHAPTER FOUR Down the Ganges (#ulink_45e7e920-0420-5433-97b1-b3dae6e2fec7)

From the hills to Sookerthal on the Ganges, the navigation is restricted entirely to rafts of timber and to the passage of boats which, being built in the valley of Deyra, are with some difficulty and great danger floated, empty down the rapids.