by Mark Tully
Once inside, I was taken down to a bare cellar, where I sat cross-legged on the white sheets that covered the concrete floor. Soon the Mufti came in and sat behind his small low desk, the only piece of furniture in the room. There wasn’t a white hair in his black beard, and his face seemed remarkably unlined for a cleric holding such a senior office. With his thick spectacles, he looked more like a scholarly student than one of the most important Muslim leaders in Varanasi. The Mufti explained that his office was traditionally held by a member of his family and he had inherited it when his cousin died.
I started by asking the Mufti whether he thought that the culture of Varanasi had helped to maintain peace after the explosions. He seemed nervous, uncertain as to how to answer, and asked me to repeat the question. Then he replied, ‘Through Allah’s grace all religions live here in India without discrimination. All share each other’s happiness and sorrows, and this tradition continues. It is still maintained by the peace-loving non-Muslims. But one group wants us to fight. As long as they are not successful it’s fine, but if they are, then there is danger.’
The Muslim cleric had already established relations with Veer Bhadra Mishra, so when he heard about the explosion in the temple he went straight to the Mahant to ‘console and comfort him at his time of pain’. The two men had also visited hospitals together. ‘After all, our loss is common and equal in the bomb blast,’ the Mufti explained. ‘It was a dirty deed. It was terrorism. It had no sanction under Islam. But by God’s grace we have peace.’
One of the Mufti’s neighbours, a businessman by the name of Khaliquzzaman, joined us in the cellar. Older and more experienced than the Mufti, he soon took over most of the talking. The businessman praised the Mahant for issuing a statement that showed ‘great self-restraint, condemning the act but not saying a word which might inflame the majority’.
I wanted to broaden the discussion, so I asked what the two men thought about the controversies in Europe over Muslim women wearing head scarves. The businessman replied, ‘If you say to one person in a community “don’t cover your head”, then that person becomes a symbol, and there is a reaction and it will be prolonged. It is necessary to protect all good religions.’
‘What about Western culture?’ I asked.
Khaliquzzaman replied, ‘Materialism and worldliness are the main characteristics of Western culture, as we understand it. There is a lack of spirituality and no fear of God. We are afraid of it coming to India and becoming so strong that it turns us into consumers, full of greed and with no generosity in us towards others. Then the moral restrictions of our religion will be set aside and there will be an excess of lust, desire, and killing for gain. Instead there should be an equilibrium in society with everyone practising their own religion and maintaining their values.’
At the top of the many steep steps leading from the Ganga to the home of Veer Bhadra Mishra, there is one of the thousands of small temples dotted all over Varanasi. When I reached it, breathless after the climb, I asked an attendant how I could arrange to meet the Mahant. I was told that I should wait on the far side of his house, where he would complete his morning worship. When that was over, I could ask for an interview.
A tall peepal tree spread its branches over a cluster of shrines outside the doorway to his house. Although there was a large ochre-coloured image of the monkey god Hanuman in one of the shrines, the monkeys here were not being shown any respect by an elderly man armed with a big stick. In spite of being lame, he moved with remarkable alacrity from shrine to shrine, waving his stick and shouting at the animals. They scampered away, only to return as soon as their pursuer moved on to another shrine. I admired the old man’s perseverance and his energy, even though his exertions seemed rather pointless. But I was wrong there, for eventually the monkeys got bored with the sport and wandered off down a narrow alleyway.
When the Mahant emerged, he was dressed as always in a white kurta and dhoti. His white hair was neatly cut and his white moustache trimmed. The Mahant is now well into his sixties and smiles often but speaks rather solemnly, with deliberation. After paying his respects to the linga, the symbols of Shiva, in the shrines and to Hanuman, he came over to me and, with his usual immaculate politeness, said in his magnificent, deep voice, ‘How good of you to come to Varanasi.’ After a little more polite chatter, he agreed that we should meet in the afternoon.
The west bank of the Ganga at Varanasi is divided into thirty-six paved areas, or ghats, each with steep steps leading from them up into the city. The ghats vary in importance. Some of them are musts for pilgrims because of their spiritual significance, but the ghat at the top of which Veer Bhadra lives is important for historical reasons. It’s named after the sixteenth-century poet Tulsi Das and is said to be the place where he wrote his retelling of the Ramayana epic. Because Tulsi Das chose to offend the Brahmin elite by writing in the everyday language of Hindi rather than the language of ritual, Sanskrit, his retelling of the Ramayana became immediately popular. To this day it is still immensely influential in north India.
The Mahant has not always lived on Tulsi Ghat. As a child he lived in a village in a district east of Varanasi. Recalling his childhood when we spoke later that day, he remembered that Muslims and Hindus used to attend each other’s festivals and weddings. Their food traditions were different, so separate meals were provided by the hosts for the guest community. He added that Muslims were invited to his own wedding. ‘Hindus and Muslims were living very happily,’ he told me, ‘but that has come under threat for political reasons. If only politicians would stop exploiting people, the tolerance of this society would find a way for us to live together. That is why I was determined that after the explosions took place we should not allow ourselves to be exploited. Politicians exploit because they want us to divide on lines of caste and religion so that they can rule over us. There should be institutions to see that good candidates are selected for elections and we are not ruled by muscle power and money.’
Veer Bhadra put his concerns about the future to me more forcefully than the Mufti had. ‘Can we not see that we are dividing society?’ he asked with anguish, continuing, ‘This is a nation of so many languages, twelve philosophies, as many gods and goddesses as people. It is still being held together by the institutions of the British. We have been independent for sixty years now and we still have not found the way this country should be run.’
In addition to being the Mahant of the temple, Veer Bhadra is a former professor of civil engineering, specialising in hydraulics, at Banaras Hindu University, one of India’s largest universities in India. Now retired, he sees no conflict between his science and his faith. To him, they belong to two different faculties: one to reason and the other is what he calls ‘the heart’. Both are necessary. ‘The interface between them,’ he told me, ‘is the key to a happy life. Science and faith are like two banks of a river. If one crumbles there is a flood and disaster.’
Science and faith come together in his concern about the River Ganga. As a scientist he knows how serious the problem of pollution is. Although he takes a ritual bath in the river everyday, he told me, ‘Every moment I am reminded that this water is not safe.’ For twenty years now the government has unsuccessfully attempted to clean the Ganga. As an expert in hydraulics, Veer Bhadra believes they have failed because they have favoured expensive sewage treatment plants over more traditional and cheaper technology, which passes the sewage through ponds treated with purifying algae. All this matters deeply to him. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘this cleaning of the Ganga is a sacred responsibility given to me by God. We Hindus have a relationship with the Ganga that is unique. We come from all over India to see her, to touch her, to dip our body in her and sip her water. For us the Ganga is a medium of life. Environmentalists are busy trying to save plants and animals, but in Varanasi human beings like us are an endangered species because her water is so polluted.’
I told the Mahant about the boatman who had rowed me down the Ganga on the previous n
ight, the night of Diwali, the festival of lights. Large crowds had gathered on Dasashwamedh Ghat to take part in the evening aarti, at which the Ganga is worshipped. Diyas, small clay saucers with flickering wicks, floated on the surface of the river like stars in the night sky. Bare-chested priests facing the river held brightly burning traditional temple lamps high above their heads and then rotated them in strictly choreographed movements. Bells intended to awaken the gods clanged incessantly in the temples. I asked the boatman which temple he worshipped in and which god or goddess he worshipped. ‘We boatmen live in the lap of the Ganga,’ he replied, ‘so we worship her and no one else. And when I’m finished I will light my Diwali diya in this boat.’
Although Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, was a non-believer, he acknowledged the place the Ganga has in the hearts of Indians by asking that a handful of his ashes should be sprinkled on her waters when he died. In his will he said, ‘The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga.’
To me, the Ganga’s place at the heart of this ancient culture is a mark of India’s traditional respect for nature – her understanding that we are all a part of nature and dependent upon it. The pollution of the Ganga is a reminder of what happens when, in our rush to develop, we abuse nature, for that is what pouring sewage and industrial waste into her is. Scientists might argue with some justification that if India had implemented either the government’s expensive plans or the Mahant’s more traditional methods effectively, the Ganga would be much cleaner. That may be so, but this shouldn’t be taken to mean that we can abuse nature freely in the misguided belief that technology can be relied upon to repair all the damage later. The more we believe that, the more we will be inclined to ignore the need to lead our lives in balance with nature.
I stayed in a hotel on the southernmost ghat, where the Asi river forms the boundary of the sacred city. The Ganges View is a very special hotel in a very special location. There is no bar, and no television set in the small rooms, which are beautifully decorated and furnished. The food is strictly vegetarian, which means in this instance that there are not even any onions or other root vegetables. It is the custom for guests to take off their shoes as they enter and walk around the hotel barefoot. The proprietor, Shashank Singh, is an authority on Varanasi and a connoisseur of art. The hotel was his family house, and Shashank has preserved its atmosphere, together with many of his family customs, including worshiping Hanuman every day in a small temple at the top of the steps leading to the hotel. There are always interesting guests. This time I met a young British theatre director who was going to stage the Ramayana in London and a writer who was researching a book about the sun.
The only disadvantage of the Ganges View is that it’s not very easy to have a lie-in. Even before sunrise there is a lot happening on the ghat and it’s rather noisy. Men and women come down to bathe early so that they can worship the sun as it rises. The priests, known as ghatias, sit under their straw umbrellas for protection from the sun and minister to the pilgrims’ needs. They look after the bathers’ clothes while they bob up and down in the Ganga. When the bathers come out, the ghatias put a red mark on their foreheads and provide a comb and a mirror for them. Groups of women chant as they make offerings to a linga, and little children scamper over the steps of the ghat, trying to extract money from tourists.
During the festival of Diwali, the ghat by the Ganges View Hotel was noisy throughout the night too. The machine-gun-like stutter of firecrackers and the explosions of even louder fireworks, known appropriately as bombs, accompanied by choruses of ‘Hara Hara Mahadev!’ made sleep impossible. The next night there was another festival, and an image of the black-faced goddess of destruction Kali arrived to be immersed in the Ganga to the accompaniment of raucous recordings of hymns set to film music, with the volume turned up to maximum. They say there is a festival every day in Varanasi, and some even say there are seven days in a week in the sacred city but eight festivals.
This succession of festivals brought to mind what I believe to be a sad loss in British life – the punctuation mark that used to be provided every seventh day by Sunday, and the festivals that marked the seasons of the year. In Britain, we still have Sundays but they have become shopping sprees. So many activities now go on for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We still have festivals, but deprived of their religious significance they also seem to have lost their seasonal flavour. When I recently interviewed the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, he told me he tried to keep a Sabbath every week so that he could be with his family on Friday evening and Saturday. ‘I think it’s crucial to maintain the rhythm of the day, the week and the year,’ he said, adding, ‘The ecological crisis is a reflection of the loss of that rhythm. It’s really a crisis of an impaired awareness of order, and unless you begin to re-engage with and respect the deep rhythms and deep structures of life you will not solve it.’ Varanasi, with its daily round of worship in both temples and mosques and its year punctuated by perhaps more than 365 festivals, is in no danger of forgetting that rhythm.
For all its long history of being a city of God, or perhaps I should say gods, Mammon has not been ignored in Varanasi. When the Buddha came to preach here, he found a prosperous business centre, and the city remained so because it was at the crossroads of important trade routes. One traditional description of Varanasi is ‘the Forest of Artha’. Along with kama, the principle of pleasure and love, artha is, as I have explained in Chapter 7, one of the four aims of a traditional Hindu life. Artha is the goal of material prosperity. However, as Julius Lipner notes in his book Hindus, ‘The pursuit of artha and kama were set in an ethical context very early on. They were never recommended as goals to be sought for their own sake irrespective of an ethical code of practice.’ So traditional Varanasi would not approve of the prevailing business practices, which appear to have no ethical or moral motives and promote the pursuit of goals entirely for business’s own benefit.
Apart from pilgrimage and tourism, the best known business in Varanasi is traditional handloom weaving. The city is particularly renowned for its beautiful silk brocade saris. Suhail Bhai, a Muslim whose family has been in the industry for generations, unpacked some of his prize examples to show me the skill of Varanasi weavers. He carefully unfolded a hundred-year-old blouse woven with gold thread and a collection of mauve, maroon, scarlet, golden and lemon-green saris with motifs of vines, flowers and the Indian mango pattern known in the West as paisley. There was even his wife’s blue and gold wedding outfit.
Suhail Bhai explained that one of his best saris would take one and a half months to weave, but the real trouble now was finding the weavers to do the work. According to him, many of the weavers had been tempted away from traditional methods to work on power-looms, because the emphasis nowadays was not on quality but on quantity. That wasn’t the only problem he faced. ‘Our dyers, who are renowned for their skills, are now dying synthetic cloth,’ he complained. ‘And there is too much competition from cheap Chinese cloth.’
Harshpal Kapoor, a Hindu merchant who deals in silk yarn, told me that traditional weaving was also being hit by changes in the clothes that modern Indian women are wearing. ‘There is a decrease in the demand for saris, which were what Varanasi was famous for. In my young days only Punjabi women wore shalwar kameez, but now you see them everywhere. And of course there are all those jeans the younger women are wearing too. But,’ he added hurriedly, ‘still no wedding can be performed without a sari.’
To my mind, one of the strangest modern indicators of economic well-being is threatening the Varanasi tourist and pilgrimage businesses. While economists struggle to control inflation, and businessmen never cease their cost-cutting and price-slashing, we are told the economy is doing well
when the property market is inflating. Economists maintain that it is good for us if it costs more and more to buy a house. Property prices are now soaring in Varanasi, with speculators buying land on the far bank of the Ganga. The land on the opposite bank to the ghats is still relatively undeveloped, having only one or two small buildings on it. If the speculators are eventually allowed to build there it will be architectural barbarity. It will be as sacrilegious as destroying the view of the Taj Mahal by allowing construction on the opposite bank of the river Yamuna. It will be commerce run riot, a total surrender to the property market, as was the surrender to the developers when the high-rise buildings that diminish St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London were built.
I have written in Chapter 7 about the myth of Shiva’s wedding to Parvati. After their marriage, Parvati persuaded Shiva to come down from the mountain top and live in a city. That city was Varanasi. So it’s not surprising that Shiva’s linga is to be seen everywhere – on street corners, under trees, in houses and in temples. These emblems may be inches high or feet tall and set in the grandest or most humble surroundings, but they always stand in the circle representing Shiva’s union with Parvati, who represents the female power without which he can do nothing. There are said to be thousands of linga in Varanasi, but it might be better to say that there are countless numbers of them, because I can’t imagine anyone ever counting them. If they did, they would be bound to come across one they had missed when they completed the task, or hear of yet another that appeared while they were counting.
The linga that attracts the most worshippers is in the principal shrine of Varanasi, the golden temple dedicated to Vishvanatha, Shiva as ‘Lord of the world’. It is approached down a long, dark alley where daylight only occasionally breaks through. The alley is lined by shops that cater to artha rather than moksha, the ‘liberation from earthly desires’ that should be the ultimate aim of Shiva worshippers. Jewellers are particularly prominent here, and there are also plenty of garment shops with life-size plastic models dressed in clothes that demonstrate only too clearly the decline of the sari. But pilgrims are reminded of their ultimate destination by the many small temples and shrines along the way.
