Pilgrimage is an ancient practice, common to almost every religion. But within the Indian tradition, its appeal is easy to see. It recognizes no barriers of wealth or caste. At one point in the wandering narrative that makes up the immense length of the Mahabharata, one of the seven great sages of legend, Pulastya, educates the celibate warrior Bhishma, ‘O lord of men, that rite, however, which men without wealth, without allies, singly, without wife and children, and destitute of means, are capable of accomplishing and the merit of which is equal unto the sacred fruits of sacrifices, I will now declare unto thee, thou best of warriors! O thou best of the Bharata race, sojourns in tirthas (holy places, but literally places where one can cross over, from one bank to another or from this world to the next) which are meritorious and which constitute one of the high mysteries of the rishis, are even superior to sacrifices.’
A parikrama — literally a going around - whether it is of a temple, shrine, a mountain or a lake, is the culmination of almost every Indian pilgrimage, and the most sacred part of the journey. The Narmada is the only river in India to merit a parikrama.
In the course of my travels along the river, and in the writing of this book, I did my share of reading about rivers; books on the Mekong, the Nile, the Thames, the Meander, the beautifully named Magdalena in Colombia, Marquez’s river. And it seems to me that even though the relationship between civilizations and rivers has been intimate everywhere, the sense of the sacred that we have inherited down the centuries is unique to us.
The Nadistuti or the river hymn in the Rig Veda sings of ten rivers as they flow westwards from the Ganga. It lists the Yamuna and Saraswati, as well as the Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, and the Indus. Thousands of years later, in our times, the list has changed. The seven sacred rivers are the Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, Narmada, Godavri, Kaveri and since 1947, the Krishna instead of the Indus. In this change lies the history of a civilization, the slow abandonment of its northern moorings, the long intellectual journey southwards in the subcontinent. In this journey, the Narmada would have been the first non—Vedic river to enter the Indo-Aryan awareness of the subcontinent. But its sanctity seems to predate this awareness.
For people who live along these banks, the Narmada is the other magnet of Hinduism, a counterpoint to the Ganga. It cuts through the heart of peninsular India, in a landscape already in place aeons before the Himalayas began their upsurge, long before the Ganga could even be conceived. Fed entirely by rain, it flows through terrain intensely familiar to Kalidasa — Rewa’s streams spread dishevelled at Vindhya’s rocky foothills, like ashen streaks on an elephant’s flank. Of its other fourteen names, Rewa, the leaping one, is the best known, but for most of its course the river is just Narmada, the giver of delight.
The parikrama can commence anywhere along its banks. The pilgrim must keep the sacred shrine, here the river, to the right while walking. A pilgrim on the Narmada parikrama never breaks the journey, stopping only for the four months of the monsoon when flooding makes travel impossible. Barefoot, depending for food and shelter on the hospitality of those who dwell by the river, the pilgrim will go over to the other bank only at the source at Amarkantak or where the river meets the Arabian Sea at Bharuch. By the time the journey ends, at the same place where it began, a pilgrim would have walked 2,700 km.
Today the vast majority of pilgrims cut short the time for the journey, taking buses where possible, but a few persist. Less than a kilometre from the source of the Narmada at Amarkantak, where the river is but a trickle, I met Chhote Lal Thakur.
He and his companions had been on the Narmada parikrama for ten months. Still in his twenties, he had been shaped by the journey — a long flowing beard untouched since the day he set out, a slender frame stripped of spare flesh. His son should now be two, he said, but he had not spoken to his family since he began the parikrama.
He was surprised by the question I put to him.
‘No, no one stopped me. When Narmada Mai calls, who would do so? If you want to write,’ he tells me abruptly, ’you should write about the Shulpan jhadi.’
This is Bhil territory on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, the most feared stretch of the entire parikrama. The Bhils are a tribal people who occupy the lower reaches of the river and are closely related to the Gonds of the upper Narmada. The Gond territory is still heavily forested, and has remained peripheral to what is seen as the mainstream of Indian history. The Bhils have been less lucky. Their territory has served as the crossing point across the Narmada for armies from the north of India headed to the south. It has left them with a long history of brigandage and some part of the tale Chhote Lal related could be the tale of any medieval pilgrim.
‘On the very first day that we entered the Shulpan jhadi,’ he said, ’the Bhils took away everything we had. We had already donned the sadhu’s garb, knowing what awaited us. We told them, whatever we had, they were free to take. They took away our clothes, shawls, the vessel of holy water, they only left behind the image of the Mai.
However, once we crossed Shulpan jhadi, more was given to us than they took away.
‘For eleven nights we walked naked through the wilderness, fire our only solace in the cold. It may have been a brush forest once, now it is desiccated, nothing grows there; the poverty of the people is there for us to see. Yet, each day the Bhils would give us one roti among the six of us. Mai ki kripa thi (It was the Narmada’s blessing), we did not feel hungry.
‘Walking in this fashion, we reached the edge of the sagar (literally sea, the term that every pilgrim now uses for the immense reservoir created by the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river). It is not possible to walk along the banks. It took us four hours in a motorboat to cross the sagar.’
In a few moments he had spanned several centuries. Time after time, pilgrims spoke to me of the canals that have sprung up as a result of the dam. A pilgrim is not supposed to ford the waters of the Narmada, but the argument goes that in the same way that the waters of a tributary are not the waters of the Narmada, the water in the canal is not the water of the Narmada. Tradition may have settled the argument, but the builders of these canals have not seen fit to plan for the pilgrims. Thousands have to walk tens of kilometres to cross the canals at the nearest bridge.
The dam is only one of many being constructed along the river, and has resulted in a new set of displaced people, not willing ones such as the pilgrims but those known simply as PAPs (Project Affected Persons). Over the years, I had reported my fair share of such stories; the exodus from Harsud - a town sentenced to drown; the mock city of vast tin sheds near Barwani - constructed by farmers who believed compensation would be awarded in proportion to the size of their dwellings; the sixty-two pilgrims washed away on a full moon night because auspicious occasions are not the concern of the engineers who monitor the discharge from the dams.
These thoughts floated through my mind as Thakur spoke, while his companions proceeded to bathe in a small tank by the stream. My thoughts and his words were rudely interrupted by an inmate from a nearby ashram. ‘Everyone bathes in the stream, tum saale gandu especial ho (are you fuckers special), stop dirtying the tank.’
A day later I went to meet the mahant who ran the ashram. He sat cross-legged on a sofa, his arms folded over an enormous pot belly, watching the day's cricket being summed up on the private news channel Aaj Tak which had just started beaming to a large part of the country till then only used to Doordarshan. At the end of the programme, after chiding his disciples for their overenthusiastic support for the Indian team, he turned to me.
He had come here, he told me, a pilgrim on the parikrama. He had taken up residence at this place. By her grace, he said, as he meditated in the shade of a tree that still stands in the ashram compound, disciples sought him out, contributing their land and wealth to the service of the Mai. First he set up this ashram for pilgrims to the town, then came the school and hostel for tribal children, followed by the hospital that stands at the edge of the town.
The man who had taken me to meet the mahant worked with the local municipality. He had sat silently through the audience and as we emerged outside the ashram, he asked me to follow him. At the edge of the ashram, he turned along an open sewer that flowed past the hostel. We followed it to the banks of the river where, separated by a thin mud embankment from the flowing water, the effluvia of the sadhus bubbled in a cesspool, ready to overflow into the river. Unknown to the pilgrims, barely a few hundred metres from the source, the river was as much shit as it was sacred.
I didn't have to ask the question. As we walked away, my companion offered an explanation of his own.
A sadhu, he began, accompanied by two disciples reached a town late at night. The townspeople greeted him and his disciples in the prescribed manner, providing them with the best they could offer. As he left the town in the morning, he blessed them, ’Ujjodo’ (be uprooted) much to the shock and surprise of his disciples.
The next night they reached another town where they were greeted by taunts. Children hurled stones at them, they slept in the open and went hungry. Leaving town in the morning, he turned and blessed the denizens, ‘Baso’ (settle and prosper). The astonished disciples could no longer keep silent and asked him why?
The sadhu smiled and said, ‘If those who know right conduct are uprooted, they will travel the world, taking along with them the manners we so require. The others, who do not know how to behave, let them stay in one place and suffer each other.’
It was a story that also applied to the pilgrims and those displaced by the dam, but the conclusion it suggested was not something I had any faith in.
~~Waters Close Over Us : A Journey Along The Narmada -by- Hartosh Singh Bal
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