One of the least known attributes of Indra, the most celebrated god of the Rig Veda, is as the protector of travellers. In the Aitareya Brahmana, he exhorts a young man named Rohita to take to life on the road: “There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita! Thus we have learnt. 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 reaping the fruit; and all his sins are destroyed by his fatigues in wandering. Therefore, wander! He who is sitting, his fortune too sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!”
Echoes of Indra’s exhortation to travel reverberate in most religious faiths, especially when it relates to the acquisition of knowledge and the accumulation of merit. In the latter case, all accord the highest significance to pilgrimage. The reasons why an individual undertakes it are many and varied. Some are personal in nature: to purify oneself, achieve spiritual plenitude, gain moral strength, attain a place in heaven, fulfil one’s duties to ancestors or simply to experience the thrill of setting one’s sight on the deity.
Other reasons aim at instrumental effects: to help barren women get a male progeny, recover sexual potency, enable kith and kin to pass examinations or get jobs and promotions, allow business to flourish, cure disease, get daughters married, acquire property, win court cases, triumph in competitive sports, win elections.... Occasionally, too, divine intervention is sought to teach rivals a lesson or to settle scores.
But there could be a more mundane reason too. A pilgrimage allows one to escape, if only for a few days, the drudgery of daily existence. One submits oneself to out-of-routine conduct. The Skanda Purana lists the duties of the pilgrim in much detail. He is required to tonsure the head (to destroy the sins resting on the scalp), fast, eat only such food as is devoid of fish, fowl, viands and heavy spices, not consume alcohol or tobacco and practise sexual abstinence. There is this admonition too: “Don’t question a Brahmin!”
How does a place acquire the cachet of a pilgrim spot? Largely on account of its association with the founder of a religion, its saints, its heroes, its propagators and events that marked its mythical or real historical trajectory. That is true of all religions. But it is the very antiquity of the Indic ones—think only of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism—that has generated perhaps the largest amount of scholarly interest in what they say about the significance of a pilgrimage.
The Sanskrit word for it is ‘tirtha’—a meaning that has remained unchanged since Rig-vedic times. It refers to a ‘ghat’, or a bathing place, on the banks of a river and occasionally also of a lake. The rivers that occupy pride of place in the Hindu religious imagination are the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Krishna, Kaveri and a multitude of their tributaries. So do the towns and cities through which the rivers pass. The most prized places of pilgrimage for Shaiva and Vaishnava alike, belonging to all castes, are those that are linked to a deity with a pan-Indian appeal: Kashi, Mathura, Ayodhya, Prayag, Gaya, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Somnath, Vishveshwar, Rameshwar, Puri, Dwaraka, Mansarovar and several others. But places associated with local deities and saints in all parts of the country also beckon pilgrims by the thousands.
Two interesting features of the Hindu pilgrimage are circumambulation (‘pradakshina’ or ‘parikrama’) and the accumulation of more merit (‘punya’) if the pilgrim adds difficulties to his progress. On the first count, the pilgrim needs to go around the idol, temple, sacred hill or a river in a deasil direction; that is, with the sacred object on his right. This can take a few minutes, hours, days, or months and, in the case of the Ganga, as many as six years. The pilgrim starts at the source in Gangotri in the Himalayas, walks along the left bank to its mouth at Gangasagar on the Bay of Bengal, then turns back and proceeds up the right bank to its source.
More merit accrues to the pilgrim if he performs the journey on one foot or crawling or going on his knees or by measuring his length on the ground. This involves the following actions: lying flat, arising and walking only up to the distance covered by his body, then measuring the length again and so on until he reaches his destination. Those who die on a pilgrimage are assured a place in heaven. But to die in Kashi guarantees a prime location up there.
Indeed, no one challenges the pre-eminence of Kashi in the pantheon of places that Hindus regard as holy. Foreign observers down the ages have acknowledged as much. One example, taken from Diana Eck’s brilliantly evocative Banaras—City of Light, would suffice. In the mid-19th century, Reverend M.A. Sherring, a missionary, had this to say about the city: “Twenty-five centuries ago, at the least, it was famous when Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy, when Tyre was planting her colonies, when Athens was growing in strength, before Rome had become known, or Greece had contended with Persia, or Cyprus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy, or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem, and the inhabitants of Judea had been carried into captivity, she had risen to greatness, if not to glory.”
Only the Kumbh Mela rivals Kashi in religious fervour, carnival atmosphere and unmitigated chaos. Both serve to underline the depth of unity of Hindus above and beyond their numerous faultlines—if only for the duration of the pilgrimage. One of the most astute analysts of Hinduism, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, wrote about the teeming millions who flock to the Kumbh Mela, Allahabad or Haridwar with his characteristic panache: “It seems as if an invisible force, not an octopus but a gigantic cephalopod with thousands of tentacles, was dragging people to these places. The spectacle is awe-inspiring, and the disgust which such blind obedience to superstition would otherwise have aroused is inhibited by the mere scale of the obedience.”
None of this, however, must detract attention from the eclectic nature of several places of pilgrimage in India. People of many religions and sects, as Saba Naqvi points out in her fine book In Good faith, have for generations prayed together at the same shrine. They are immune to the virus of the exploitation of religion for political or ideological ends.
That is also true of the ‘flexible Hindu’—as Sudhir Kakkar describes the urban, educated (in the modern idiom) middle-class Hindu. He or she is more eclectic in religious attitudes and beliefs than the traditionalists and is less ideologically committed than self-professed Hindu ‘nationalists’. Hard-pressed for time, the ‘flexible Hindu’ wants shorter rituals, better packaged pilgrimages, gurus who hold forth on spirituality in English, rites performable on Skype, virtual tours of temples, pilgrim sites, and any information, regardless of its religious or sectarian provenance, that would help secure instant spiritual gratification.
But in the real world, as in the virtual world, this craving for spiritual redemption via the pilgrimage route must not cross certain red lines. This is especially true of Kashi. A sin committed elsewhere can be expunged in this holiest of holy cities. But a sin committed in Kashi itself is imperishable. As the Kashi Khanda puts it: “The person who is prone to deprecate others or who lusts after another’s wife should not live in Kashi. Kashi is one thing, hell quite another”.
The most insightful take on pilgrimage is to be found in a psalm of Mirabai, the saint-poet, movingly sung by Pandit Kumar Gandharva. Addressing Lord Krishna, it says in substance: “I won’t go with another. I won’t go to the Ganga or the Jumna. I won’t go to any pilgrimage places because sixty-eight such places reside within me”. This emphasis on the mind and the spirit as the real receptacles of spiritual bliss, as the destination—what an idea, sir-ji!
(The author is a Consulting Editor, The Times of India, and the R.K. Laxman chair professor at the Symbiosis International University)
