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