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  Pilgrim’s india

  Pilgrim’s India

  An Anthology

  ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ‘There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita! Thus we have heard. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner … Therefore, wander!

  The feet of the wanderer are like the flower, his soul is growing and reaching the fruit; and all his sins are destroyed by his fatigues in wandering. Therefore, wander!

  The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!’

  —Indra (Protector of Travellers) to a young man named Rohita

  Aitareya Brahmana

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Pandit, do some research

  Kabir (Translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh)

  2. The river

  Jerry Pinto

  3. The Priest

  Arun Kolatkar

  4. Katha upanishad

  (Translated by Eknath Easwaran)

  5. The meaning of Pilgrimage

  Richard Lannoy

  6. Fear no Fall

  A.K. Ramanujan

  7. Akbarnama: Chapter LXXI

  Abu-L-Fazl (Translated by H. Beveridge)

  8. Ajmer and Me

  Anjum Hasan

  9. The pot is a god

  Translated by A.K. Ramanujan

  10. Well of Fate

  Mark Twain

  11. The Alchemy of Places of Pilgrimage

  Osho

  12. Is there some way I can reach you?

  Annamayya (Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman)

  13. A Climatic Condition Called Tukaram

  Ranjit Hoskote

  14. The art of seeking takes different forms

  Tukaram (Translated by Dilip Chitre)

  15. Gridhra-kuta Hill, and Legends. Fa-Hien Passes a Night on It. His Reflections.

  Fa-Hien (Translated by james Legge)

  16. Prayaga

  Hsiuan Tsang (Translated by Samuel Beat)

  17. Travels in India as an Unknown Sannyasin

  Swami Vivekananda

  18. Living in swamps and wandering in jungles

  Sultan Bahu (Translated by Jamal J. Elias)

  19. The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami

  Radhanath Swami

  20. The Sleepless Saint

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  21. Seeking is one thing

  Annamayya (Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman)

  22. Sadhus: Going Beyond the Dreadlocks

  Patrick Levy

  23. The Hill of the Holy Beacon

  Paul Brunton

  24. Charan Chalo Marg Gobind

  Avtar Singh

  25. Ten

  Bulkh Shah (Translated by Kartar Singh Duggal)

  26. The Impassioned Flame

  Bachi Karkaria

  27. Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God

  Jonah Blank

  28. The Stone Bull of Thiruppunkoor

  29. The Only Revolution

  J. Krishnamurti

  30. Sri Guru Dattatreya Baba Budhan Dargah

  Yoginder Sikand

  31. Where the creature is

  Akho (Translated by Gieve Patel)

  32. Antimemoirs

  Andre Malraux

  33. Eating Betel Nut in the House of God

  (Source: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih)

  34. Mahabalipuram (The Seven Pagodas)

  Count Hermann Keyserling

  35. In the Buddha’s Shoes: A Search for Exact Spots and Complete Truths

  Zac O’Yeah

  36. The spring feast of colour

  Meerabai (Translated by Shama Futehally)

  37. The Saint

  Jeet Thayil

  38. Jaipur March 25, 1962—on Morphia—

  Allen Ginsberg

  39. The Mandala in the Clouds

  Deborah Baker

  40. The Godmen’s Flock

  Peter Brent

  41. Goodbye World

  Suketu Mehta

  42. Pandharpur: IV

  Tukaram (Translated by Dilip Chitre)

  43. Sankaracharya of Kanchi

  Arthur Koestler

  44. Hidden Journey

  Andrew Harvey

  45. Piggy-back Rides Do Not Get You Very Far

  Madhu Tandan

  46. Like treasure hiding in the earth

  Akkamahadevi (Translated by H.S. Shiva Prakash)

  47. Crossroads and Stray Shrines

  Rahul Srivastava

  48. Illusions of Nearness

  Amit Chaudhuri

  49. An Old Woman

  Arun Kolatkar

  50. The Dervish of Dwarkamayi

  Arundhathi Subramaniam

  51. The New Mystics

  Aubrey Menen

  52. This is the big fight, King Ram

  Kabir (Translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh)

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  I’m aware that our experience of the sacred cannot exist anywhere outside of us. But I’m also given to travelling intermittently in quest of it. At times I have been a vulgar tourist, ticking off pilgrim destinations and encounters with holy men and women in my head with near-imperial glee.

  It’s an ancient paradox and one that I haven’t fully sorted out yet. ‘I’ve travelled east,/ I’ve travelled west,/ Back in Seiken,/ I haven’t moved an inch’ goes an old Zen poem. There are equivalents of that nearer home. Bulleh Shah, for instance: ‘They go to Mecca to atone;/ I’ve many a Mecca in my home.’ Or Lal Dedh: ‘Soul, get this! You should have looked in the mirror.’ Or Sultan Bahu: ‘I found Him closer than my jugular vein when I looked inside myself.’

  You can’t get louder or clearer than that. And yet, whenever I’ve been seized by a certain feverishness, I’ve packed my bags, caught the next train to Shirdi—and forgotten that jugular entirely.

  Things are somewhat different now. I’m less feverish. So, though the travel continues, it’s a tad less compulsive. I’m also beginning to suspect that some of those venerable divides—weekend–weekday, maayka–sasuraal, nirvana–samsara—won’t ever be entirely bridged. The world we inhabit clearly isn’t intended to be home. A kind of existential comma, perhaps. Or a laboratory. Or a transit lounge.

  It takes getting used to, though. And the forgetting and remembering, the going away and returning, is an old, old pattern, difficult to erase. But when you begin to make your peace with it, it has its moments. It offers breathing space. It allows you to ease a little more into the present continuous. You start seeing the rewards—however glimmering—of being spiritually hyphenated. You mind the gap, but you resent it less.

  About a decade ago, I felt the need to travel to sacred destinations around the country. There was a churning about those journeys, a fretful, fidgeting anxiety. In 2004, I found my guru. That became the terminus of one kind of journey, and the beginning of another. But that’s another story.

  My point is that the journey itself doesn’t seem to let up. It shape-shifts but endures. And it probably will as long as ‘the abyss that separates us from ourselves’ (in Thomas Merton’s lovely phrase) persists. Yes, the enduring answers are perhaps to be found in a place no further than the jugular—or the heart, or the forehead, or the navel, or the soul (wherever that is). But it’s a hellishly hard journey to that elusive spot in the human spiritual anatomy. And there seem to be no short cuts either.

  Abysses are tricky things. Those who airily claim they’ve never be
en tripped up by them are, I believe, usually too scared to set out on a journey, in the first place. They may quote Vedantin seers and Buddhist masters and claim, like the great mystics before them, to have found their Meccas in their home. But I suspect most of them suffer the abyss unconsciously.

  On the other hand, sacred journeys—those disruptive excursions—are for those who want to cross thresholds. It’s for those who mind the gap terribly. But there’s hope. When you resent the gap consciously it seems often to be the first step towards finding your own drawbridge.

  The world is not kind to wanderers. The rolling stone, the vagrant, the migrant, the fugitive, the tramp, is often an object of scorn. In a utilitarian world, he’s a loser. He represents a living reproach to our choices in favour of fixity and life insurance. Globalization may have ushered in its brand of ‘place polygamy’, but wanderers on sacred journeys aren’t easy cosmopolitans notching up frequent-flyer miles, either. They’re the ones who ask for unfashionable things like personal answers to ultimate questions and still points in turning worlds. They want addresses—even if they don’t trust narrowly provincial or glibly universal ones. They’re greedy. But demanding cosmic real estate means renouncing cosy, ego-fortifying builders’ lobbies, and they know it.

  And yet, the world needs its nomads. It needs the feral light in their eyes, the quickening in their blood. It recognizes, however grudgingly, the integrity of their homing-instinct that never allows them to settle for a counterfeit alternative. Which is why the Indian tradition (like so many others) made room for its sacred travellers—its parivrajakas and shramanas, its sadhus and fakirs. It is why, in its deeper wisdom, it offered them tried-and-tested paths and circuits, maps and provisional templates, clues and signposts on what can so often seem like a journey to nowhere. It is also why the Aitareya Brahmana offers a repeated piece of advice to the young man Rohita: Wander.

  But the dodgy part is that the journey comes without guarantees. Wanderers can go through the motions, going round in circles endlessly (though there is a hidden wisdom in circles, the Indian pradakshina reminds us). Somewhere along the way, they often start wondering if the destination really exists—or if it isn’t what Tom Stoppard once called ‘a conspiracy of cartographers’. None of them know when (or if ) the moment will happen—when repetition will yield to rasa, and mechanical effort morph into ecstasy; when inheritance will intersect with inspiration and the much-trodden path explode into the road not taken.

  It’s not as heroic as it sounds. Not every mariner is a spiritual Columbus. Many are drifters, digressors, side-trackers. Many feel an unreasonable urge to turn off the highway to take detours. Many lose their way, lose the plot, sometimes lose themselves—which is also when they find more than they bargained for. They often return from seemingly pointless journeys weary and humbled (and with more than a touch of amoebic dysentery).

  But they still seem to prefer the hazards of the voyage to a staid and girdled domesticity. They still choose the tripping and falling over socially sanctioned sleepwalking. They still prefer seasickness to homesickness.

  And that’s why this urgent, unreasonable sojourn into uncertainty has been given a self-respecting name: the pilgrimage.

  This is a book about journeys impelled by that feverishness. It is about the need to explore outer geographies that resonate with some primal cry of the inner wilderness; the need to follow other footprints, retrace earlier paths, reclaim older discoveries. It is about the need to ask the questions that have been asked before and to revisit some age-old answers. Each time the questions are asked, however, they reinvent themselves. And that makes every pilgrim, in her own small, anonymous way, a pioneer as well.

  This is a book for existential backpackers—past, present, and future. There is a deep sense of kinship among this tribe. Pilgrimages are legendary equalizers. They’re intended that way. Their dream destinations may be varied, but pilgrims invariably recognize each other. And it’s not just by an air of pervasive griminess. There’s also a capacity for wonder, and a gut-level discomfort with bigotry—all of which are born of knowing that whatever life is about, it isn’t about blueprints, recipes or grand narratives.

  There can be nothing comprehensive about such an enterprise. This collection doesn’t attempt the impossible. Trying to map every site of pilgrimage in a country where each step encroaches upon someone’s Sacred Floor Space Index is a no-win proposition. Like every anthology, this one only claims to offer a take—an idiosyncratic one—on pilgrims and pilgrim trails in India.

  There has been some effort to acknowledge, though not represent, the plurality of spiritual persuasions in the country. There are also diverse and sometimes contrary tones, temperaments and points of view. This is an unabashedly baggy anthology. And the zigzagging across sensibilities and registers is deliberate: from the scholarly to the stream-of-consciousness; from the analytical to the mystical.

  You’ll find the lurching, restless prose of a contemporary Sikh pilgrim on his way to Hemkunt Sahib here, as well as the watchful reserve of a British journalist’s first encounter with Ramana Maharishi. You’ll find the hypnotic drug-induced life audit of an American seeker, as well as a Khasi pilgrim recalling the time he munched betel nut with God. There’s a paean on the voluntary idleness of the sadhu and an equally persuasive defence of hard physical work in an ashram. There are uncomfortable questions about journeys to the Kumbh Mela, the Francis Xavier exposition and modern Buddhist Bihar; and there are sumptuous mystical accounts about great masters, Himalayan adventures and astral odysseys. You’ll meet ardent devotees and disbelieving sceptics in these pages, as you will measured commentators, probing academics, stalwart sanyasis and exultant mystics.

  There is no attempt to impose a chronological sequence on the reader’s journey. The idea is to follow a meandering trail—from Fa-hien’s fifth-century visit to the Vulture Peak to a modern-day Zoroastrian’s reflections on Udvada; from an early seeker’s fevered questions about death in the Katha Upanishad to a twenty-first-century woman’s reflections on what it means to be Muslim in India. Also intentional is the mosaic of forms and modes—from the toxic-shock clarity of poetry to atmospheric prose, from classic sacred literature to folklore. And so the reader is invited to leap and stumble across time and tradition, genre and geography, in a manner surely familiar to every seasoned Indian traveller.

  While there are dedicated spiritual practitioners in here, the majority are witnesses and wanderers. These witnesses aren’t necessarily believers (an inaccurate word, anyway, in several Indian spiritual contexts). And the few that are, would probably regard themselves as believers of the thrashing-and-flailing variety. However, most of these writers wouldn’t be squeamish about describing themselves as seekers—albeit of varying levels of desperation and commitment.

  What are they seeking? A nowness, an in-betweenness, an elsewhereness. An axis that connects the fleeting to the imperishable. A glimpse of a less fractured religious inheritance. A poetic moment rescued from an exhausted liturgy. A respite from chronic unease. A reminder of the possibility of symmetry in otherwise incidental, hastily sutured lives. Sometimes, they’re not quite sure what they’re seeking, but they retain a sense of compulsion. Sometimes they begin to discover that they have a quest only once the journey is underway. Even those who write merely as travellers or ethnographers find themselves more implicated than they had anticipated.

  Almost all approach notions of faith, spirituality and that much-eroded ‘G’ word with a large dollop of caution. Many doubt that they’ll discover anything profound or transformational in the frantic hubs of organized devotion that they visit in these pages. (Interestingly, the poet-saints of medieval India are far more dismissive of the pilgrimage than the contemporary essayists. You only have to read a twelfth-century Basavanna, a fifteenth-century Kabir or a seventeenth-century Akho to realize that crass religious tourism isn’t a modern phenomenon!)

  But if the faith of today’s seekers isn’t facile, neither i
s the irreverence. For even the dyed-in-the-wool agnostics are not without sympathy or nuance. Their stances are varied—anguished, reluctant, wary, intrigued, reflective, sardonic, elegiac—but seldom dispassionate. All of them would own up to some fascination with the idea of the sacred. There is a willingness, however guarded, to be surprised.

  The essays here are about the varied aspects of the pilgrimage. The contributors write about destinations—shrines, ashrams, gurus, events. They write about seekers—often implicitly and, at least in two cases, overtly. They write about journeys through jagged physical, psychological and political terrain, punctuated frequently by doubt and corrosive doubt. They write of impasses and bottlenecks, of false starts and blind alleys, of despair and bafflement, humour and unbridled rage.

  But they also write at times about insights, wavering flashes of clarity. There are moments, even, of epiphany. As Arun Kolatkar’s ‘Old Woman’ poem reminds us, darshan can come in many guises. These are guises that blur the boundaries between the mundane and the miraculous, the commonplace and the profound, the prosaic and the poetic. And that’s because there’s nothing like the Indian pilgrimage to plunge you into a bruising engagement with the messy business of life itself.

  It’s often difficult to find anything recognizably ‘holy’ about it. It’s usually hospitable enough, however, to include terror, fury and a generous dose of the unpredictable.

  Revelations do happen. But the key, it seems, is to be able to recognize them when they do. And to take heart from the fact that they often creep up, like Carl Sandburg’s fog, ‘on little cat feet’. From the strangest places.

  And always when least expected.

  Arundhathi Subramaniam

  1.

  Pandit, do some research

  Kabir (15 century ce)

  Translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh

  Pandit, do some research

  and let me know

  how to destroy transiency.

  Money, religion, pleasure, salvation—

  which way do they stay, brother?

  North, South, East or West?