by Mark Tully
‘Religion in India’, he told me, ‘is not what you in the West understand by religion. We believe that it is dharma, that is to say our duty: how we should conduct ourselves from birth to death. The Kumbh Mela is one of the rituals of dharma. You come here because you have faith in dharma and its rituals, not because you hope to get faith. Without faith you cannot really expect to understand the Mela.’
‘Can I expect to understand Hinduism at all?’ I asked.
‘I don't think so. You in the West have gone too far away from religion. You have suffered from an overdose of individualism. You can't face the simple fact that a man is conditioned by the nature and circumstances of his parents. When your parents conceived you, they bequeathed you some qualities and denied you others. Now of course you can build on those qualities in many different ways, but the fact remains that certain limits are put on you from the moment of your conception.’
Vibhav Bhushan drew deeply on his cigarette. The smoke set off a coughing-fit. His whole body shook. He held up his hand to prevent me interrupting and went on, ‘I know you think that Hinduism is weighed down by fatalism because we put so much emphasis on the family and the caste into which we are born. I think that is just facing up to reality.’
‘Surely you would accept that caste is outdated.’
‘No, I would not, if caste is seen in its proper perspective. The main point of caste today is marriage. I want my son to marry a Brahmin girl. Why shouldn't I? She will share our attitudes and views. Here we have a concept of families, not individuals. There are eighteen to twenty people in my family, messing in one kitchen. You should approve of joint families, because they are socialist units – perhaps even communist,’ Vibhav Bhushan laughed. ‘Supposing I'm earning more and my brother is struggling. In the West I will be better off than him. In a joint family I will have the same standard of living.’
‘But can this system really last?’
‘I am afraid that society at the top levels is breaking up, not at the bottom. Nowadays, Indians – the better-off Indians – don't seem to accept anything unless it has the stamp of the West on it. For instance take yoga, which is entirely Indian. It has now become popular again among the élite because it has been taken up in the West. Western society seems to me to be entirely based on personal or individual achievement That is not the religious view of life.’
The lawyer's wife said, ‘Life has always changed. Things are not the same now as they were in the time when Ram was king or when the Shankaracharya preached. What we have to find is the dharma for today, and it's quite possible that someone like Krishna has been born already to bring about that dharma.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ said Vibhav Bhushan. ‘All you can do with the materialism of today is to keep your cool, keep your philosophy, and do what you have to do to exist in society. Our ways have survived for thousands of years. You are children of today.’
‘Do you think that we are living in the Kalyug, the dark age that Hinduism talks of?’
‘Oh, I don't know about that. We have a saying in our villages: “The bullock that died was always the best.” Look at my son. He's still a student, but he's spent the whole month in the Mela.’
‘I didn't know whether I would enjoy it,’ Vibhav Bhushan's son Anu said, ‘but I have, and I've learnt and thought a lot. When I told my friends I was going to spend the month here, they thought I must be coming to do business, that I must have set up a stall. They couldn't believe I was interested in the religious aspect of the Kumbh Mela. What have I missed by being here? Just a few evenings eating junk food and drinking coffee with them. If you like, I'll take you to some of the people you won't have seen.’
I set off with Vibhav Bhushan's son to see more of the variety of Hinduism on display in this religious bazaar.
We stood in a queue to see Baba Bhutnath, the Lord of the Spirits. Hindus attach great importance to a darshan, or view, of a saint or a holy image. Outside the baba's tent there was a line of gaudy statues, including one of the decapitated goddess Kali holding her own head in her hand. Inside, the baba sat cross-legged on a platform, waving an object which looked like a metal snake over the heads of the devotees filing past him. His hair and beard, dyed red with henna, were the same colour as his robes. When Vibhav Bhushan's son had seen the baba two days before, his hair and beard had been black.
Baba Bhutnath was a Tantric. Tantra is the school of Hinduism which lays stress on action rather than renunciation. Tantrics believe that man can overcome desires and fears only by experiencing them thoroughly. Some practise sexual yoga. Tantrics have a tradition of secrecy which has led to frightening stories about their rituals. Some modern sadhus who claim to have adopted the Tantric way make good use of the mystery and fear surrounding the cult to promote themselves as miracle-workers. During the Kumbh Mela, a battle was going on between Baba Bhutnath and Chandraswamy, a sadhu with high-level political connections. They were rubbishing each other's miracles in the pages of the newspapers.
Among the many sadhus performing spectacular feats of tapasya, or penance, were Balyogi Baba, who was reputed to have been standing on one leg for eight years, and Baba Jagu Das, who was lying on a bed of thorns. In sharp contrast to them was Abhilash Das, the mahant of an ashram of devotees of the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir. His was a deliberately low-key operation which had particularly impressed Vibhav Bhushan's son. Abhilash Das had close-cropped greying hair and wore simple white robes. He was quiet-spoken but laughed a great deal. When I asked him about asceticism, he replied, ‘We say it is madness to perform tapasya by standing on one leg, or sitting surrounded by five fires like some sadhus do. Neither do we believe in miracles. There are plenty of religious liars here, and a religious liar is a bigger liar than any lawyer or politician. If a politician says a mouse has turned into a monkey, no one will believe him. If a mahatma says it, people will.’
The pavilion of the Kabirpanthis, as the followers of Kabir were called, was one of the cleanest and best-kept I saw in the Mela. They were the extreme Protestants of Hinduism, rejecting idols and caste. Members of any caste and believers of any religion could become members – I was introduced to a young Indian Christian who had just joined the ashram. The mahant was not even bothered about bathing in the Ganges on the great day. ‘The tap is just as good,’ he told me. The Kabirpanthis had come to the Mela to propagate their faith, not to participate in rituals.
On the morning of 5 February, the day before the great bathe, Sant Bax Singh came into my room flourishing a newspaper and saying, ‘Bach gae’ – ‘You've been saved.’ He proceeded to read out the front-page editorial from the Hindi-language Amrit Prabhat, entitled ‘The Triumph of Faith’. The editorial began, ‘In spite of the fear of imaginary calamities, in spite of all kinds of rumours, people have flocked from the north, the south, the east and the west, by train, bus, taxi, tractor and on foot to the sacred soil of Prayag to take a holy bathe in the Sangam on the occasion of Mauni Amavasya.’ The local press had helped to spread those rumours and fears of imaginary calamities.
I dressed hurriedly and set off to check the editorial. A river of humanity was flowing towards the Sangam. All traffic had been banned. Village women anxiously held each other's saris so that they didn't get separated. Men carried sacks, suitcases and even tin trunks on their heads – they contained pots and pans and everything else needed by the self-sufficient camper. The pilgrims walked in silence, looking straight ahead. There was no panic, no pushing – just a slow, steady progress. A woman bent double with age was being led by her daughter. They both wore their saris tied between their legs, in the fashion of the west coast. There was a group of hawk-nosed men with the bright turbans of the desert state of Rajasthan tied loosely round their heads. There were barefoot girls from the tribes of central India with thick silver anklets. There were pilgrims from the Himalayas too – Nepalis with checked caps, and women from the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, their hair tied in scarves. There were Bengalis from the east, the men
wearing flowing dhotis and embroidered shawls. Only the south of India seemed to be thinly represented. Most of the pilgrims had come in groups from their villages. The occasional girl dressed in jeans or man in terry cotton trousers stood out, even in that crowd.
All the pilgrims had already walked several miles from the bus stands and railway stations. Some were resting before starting on the last stage of their journey, the walk over the embankment into the Mela proper. A wife was massaging the thin, vein-bound legs of her husband. An old man in a torn army jumper was sitting peacefully under a bridge. He had been a soldier with the raj and had taken sannyas thirty-five years before. He couldn't remember the name of his regiment.
There was no question of tents for all these pilgrims – most of them just squatted wherever they could. By evening, the Mela was shrouded in the smoke of thousands of cow-dung cooking-fires, which stung my eyes and brought back memories of many evenings spent in Indian villages.
Commercial and religious activity in the Mela had reached fever pitch. The roads were lined with stalls selling piles of brightly coloured powder for marking foreheads and partings, sacred threads, cassettes of the words of the sadhus and their music too. A man was selling magic rings. The board beside his stall read, ‘Do you have bad health? Is business bad? Has anyone cast a spell on you? Are you worried by court cases? To preserve yourself from all these worries, wear this ring and get the benefit.’ Next door a stall was offering a more orthodox means of warding off evil: strings of brown rudraksha beads offering the protection of Lord Shiva. Empty whisky bottles were on sale for two rupees, to carry away the holy water of the Sangam. For the children there were spirographs and ingenious plastic toys which were catapulted into the air and spun down to earth like helicopters. All sorts of vegetarian food was available, and barbers were doing a brisk business shaving pilgrims' heads.
The crowds filed slowly past the stalls, stared through the gates of the akharas, and filled the pavilions of the holy men whose fairground lights flashed and loudspeakers bellowed. The Ram and Krishna lilas – musical performances of the lives of Ram and Krishna – were particularly popular. A vast blue clay statue of Shiva dominated one bank of the Ganges. Some pilgrims squatted quietly by the river performing puja with small clay saucers full of burning ghi. They tried to float them down the Ganges, but the river was so low that most got stuck in the mud, shining in the dark water like stars in a night sky. Under one pontoon bridge, night-herons stood silent and still, oblivious of the cacophony and the crowds, their heads jutting forward, waiting to pounce on their prey.
I decided to see how some of those I had met earlier were preparing for the great day. In the camp of the fierce Juna akhara, sadhus were sitting around fires with their disciples. The sadhu I had seen two days ago was still meditating in front of his trident. Another ascetic, this time naked, held his arm in the air. I don't know how long he had been performing this tapasya, but his arm was withered and his fingernails curved round like talons.
In the friendly Niranjani akhara, thrones were being prepared for the mahamandaleshwars, or scholar ascetics. The greatest of them were to sit in magnificent howdahs covered with beaten gold and silver. Elephants had been banned after the stampede of 1954, and the howdahs – seats for mounting on an elephant's back – were now fastened on farm carts and would be pulled by devotees. The thrones of the lesser scholars were still being hammered together. They were made of wood and covered with tin and other decorations.
The secretary recognized me and introduced me to a senior sadhu, Mahant Brij Kumar Puri. He was eighty-nine but was confident that he still had many more years to live. ‘If a sadhu dies before he's reached a hundred then he's not a sadhu,’ the old mahant said. ‘Our age increases because of yoga and because we are at peace. I will be bathing tomorrow in spite of my age.’ Brij Kumar certainly looked as if he had plenty more life in him.
Inside the akhara police station, I found Superintendent Mishra and his colleagues discussing the policing of the processions. ‘One gazetted officer like me has to go at the front of each procession and one at the back,’ he told me. ‘They will have twelve mounted constables and 100 members of the armed police. These akhara-wallahs can't stand anyone going across the path of their processions or getting mixed up with them.’
A smartly dressed man came into the police station and asked the way to the tent of one of India's biggest industrialists. He also asked for a constable to accompany his car, explaining that he was a VIP, a former minister. Mishra said quite politely, ‘I don't care if you are the prime minister – I can't allow any cars into the Mela. I am afraid you will have to walk.’ The VIP realized that for once he couldn't pull rank and walked away without any argument.
Then I moved on to the ghatias and pandas. The joint secretary of the ghatias was a much happier man than when I had last met him. He clasped me round the shoulders and said, ‘In spite of the BBC, the crowds are very good. Before your rumour we had expected to get 10 million people bathing. From the crowds tonight, I think we'll get even more.’
The panda Brijesh Kumar was even more euphoric. ‘Business is in top motion,’ he cried. ‘Ten thousand of my pilgrims have arrived.’
My last call was to be on the Uphadhaya family, but the canvas fence around their tent was closed, so I assumed they were asleep. They had planned to bathe early.
I too had taken a tent that night. It was in the press camp, but the noise of the Mela made it impossible to sleep. I was up before dawn and took my place in the army of pilgrims still moving slowly and steadily into the Mela. On the other side of the road, the first of the bathers were already returning home. I had to take a police sergeant with me to persuade his colleagues that I was allowed to move out of the stream of pilgrims and make my way to the Niranjani akhara.
The procession was lining up inside the akhara, and naked nagas, chattering excitedly, were looking out for gatecrashers. I hurried past them. The disciples of the mahamandaleshwars were manoeuvring their raths, or chariots, into position and unfurling the banners which announced the great scholars’ names. Most of the scholars were already on their thrones. I was surprised to see three women mahamandaleshwars. One, who had adopted the name ‘Mother of the Power of Yoga’, had been a college teacher for thirteen years before she became a sannyasi. She had been declared a mahamandaleshwar fifteen years ago and had since then founded schools of yoga in America as well as India.
A sadhu was distributing ceremonial flywhisks to the disciples who were standing behind the scholars' thrones. A naked sadhu was running hither and thither trying to find a marigold garland. The finishing touches were being put to a richly caparisoned horse which was covered with a deep-red blanket embroidered with silver and mirrorwork depicting two giant peacocks. Last-minute instructions were given to the kotwals, or policemen, of the akhara. They were wrapped in scarlet shawls and carried silver staves. Their orders were not to allow any strangers into the akhara and to ensure that nothing was stolen from the sadhus' tents when the procession moved out. The gold image of Subramaniam, the six-headed son of Shiva who was the akhara's deity, was carried out of the temple on a palanquin. He was followed by a palanquin carrying the Sun God, the deity of the Niranjani's sister akhara. Mahant Rama Krishna was striding up and down the procession moving everyone into line and sorting out disputes about orders of precedence. An elderly sadhu, apparently unmoved by all the excitement, was warming his hands over a fire and mumbling mantras. Eventually the police officer in charge of our procession received clearance on his walkie-talkie for us to move out, and we started on the march to the Sangam with the sadhus and the lay supporters of the Niranjani akhara chanting ‘Hara Hara Mahadev’, names of Shiva.
I kept close to Mahant Rama Krishna, in case the naked nagas objected to me. He was the sergeant-major of this parade of the saints, ensuring that it moved on at a brisk pace. A party of laymen dressed in white robes were marching in two neat lines; Rama Krishna ordered them to bunch up. The disciples pulling
one of the raths were told to move at the double. Rama Krishna was very proud of his procession. He said, ‘You've only seen half of it. There's a lot still inside the akhara.’
Suddenly the procession came to a halt. Rama Krishna ran up to the front to find naked sadhus arguing with the police. Even the police horses had been unable to hold back the crowds who had burst through the barriers on to the procession route. The sadhus shouted, ‘Get the public out of the way.’ A young robed ascetic turned on a photographer and asked, ‘Who told you to join our procession?’ The photographer replied insolently, ‘No one.’ The young ascetic shouted, ‘Break his camera! Break his camera!’ An older colleague restrained him – ‘No. Let him go. Don't let's have any bad blood.’ Fortunately the photographer managed to duck under the crowd-control barriers before the naked sadhus could vent their wrath on him. Police reinforcements were brought up and managed to clear the route. An elderly sadhu carrying two flags like a railway guard waved the green one and the procession moved off again. A naked sadhu mounted on a pony, beating a frenetic tattoo on kettledrums led the akhara to the Ganges. Two other naked sadhus danced with abandon, twirling wooden staves like demented drum majors. The trumpets, trombones, euphoniums and sousaphones of the bands blared martial music. It should have been ‘When the Saints Go Marching in’, but it wasn't. The crowds folded their hands and bowed their heads as the raths of the mahamandaleshwars rolled past. Bengali pilgrims welcomed the saints with their own special ululations; others shouted ‘Victory to the eternal dharma, long live the sadhus!’
When the road started to slope down towards the Ganges, the naked nagas broke ranks and ran shrieking with joy into the Sangam. They splashed each other like children playing and rubbed the sacred water into their bodies, but they didn't stay in long. Their robed colleagues followed, many of them wearing just the shorts which serve as underpants. The crowds again broke through the barriers, and it was soon impossible to see who were sadhus and who were not. One of the naked drum majors danced ferociously – it was a miracle that no one was hit by his stave. A young sadhu forced his way through the crowd, leading my 89-year-old friend Mahant Brij Kumar. This venerable old man stood up to his waist in the muddy river and poured water over his chest, smiling beatifically. A man and his wife pleaded with my police sergeant to look after their son so that they could bathe. ‘He's ill, he's ill,’ they implored. ‘We want to take a bathe to make him better.’ But the sergeant refused to take charge of the boy. In that crowd there was no knowing when or where the parents would emerge, and the sergeant could well have been landed with responsibility for taking their son to the Congress Party's lost-and-found bureau.
