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 bow and battle-axe, had a vast mouth that dripped blood and was clothed in the skin of what must have been a very large tiger. When Vira-Bhadra went into action the mountains tottered, the earth trembled, the wind howled and the seas were whipped to foam. What followed was like a Saturday night brawl in a saloon. Indra, the god of the air, was trampled underfoot; Yarna, the god of the dead, had his staff broken; Saraswati, the river goddess and goddess of learning, and the Matris, the divine mothers, had their noses removed; Pushan the nourisher, multiplier and protector of cattle and possessions – also the patron of conjurers—had his teeth rammed down his throat; Mitra, the ruler of the day, had his eyes pulled out; Chandra, the moon, was beaten; the hands of Vahni, the fire god, were cut off; Bhrigu, one of the great sages, had his beard pulled out; the Brahmans were pelted with stones; the sons of Brahma, the Prajapatis, were soundly beaten; innumerable demi-gods were skewered with swords and arrows, and Daksha’s head was cut off and thrown on to the fire. At the same time Sati consumed herself by spontaneous combustion. When these pyrotechnic efforts had subsided and with it Siva’s rage, he restored everyone to life, even Daksha who emerged as good as new except that he had the head of a goat, his own having been burnt up. Only Sati was beyond recall.
It was pleasant by the river at Daksheshwara. In a quiet valley behind the town, in a grove of dusty mango trees there was a small temple with several outbuildings, skeleton structures without walls in which the iron tridents of the sadhus stood, the three prongs of which symbolise bodily, worldly and heavenly suffering, planted in the still warm ashes of the fires of the previous night. It was as if the occupants had just fled.
Higher up the valley, where it narrowed between sandstone cliffs, a small stream came purling down. On one side protruding from the cliff was a wooden construction with walls of wire mesh. Reluctantly, because it seemed a gross infringement of privacy, we crowded at the entrance. Inside there was a sadhu, a youngish man with a brown beard. He was preparing vegetables and putting them into a pot. His only visible possessions were a stone pillow, a pile of sacred books and a drinking vessel made from a huge black sea shell. ‘He is the Moni Babar,’ said our friend. ‘He never speaks.’ The sadhu looked at us for a moment with his great brown eyes before resuming his task and feeling ashamed and flattened we went away.
We spent the nights at Hardwar in a dharmsala on the river front, downstream from the great ghat. It was a rest-house for poor pilgrims, now, with the onset of winter, almost deserted. Originally, we had intended to stay in one of the hotels above the sacred ghat but although we were prepared for discomfort, the place was so repulsive that we all three shrank from it, leaving the proprietor genuinely perplexed. It was a labyrinth whose emptiness only accentuated the all-pervading air of decay. The walls of the corridors were covered with eruptions of dark green lichen, and the sheets on the beds bore the impress of former occupants. To me it was reminiscent of another, similar hotel, seen years before on the shores of the Bosphorus. It seemed to set at nothing all the pious works of purification we had witnessed and the efforts of the municipal authorities to make Hardwar a clean place, which on the whole it is.
Late each night we hammered on the huge carved double-doors, with the words Dharmsala Bhata Bhawan-Der Ismail Khan inscribed above them, the name of a pious family from Der Ismail Khan, a town west of the Indus in the former North-West Frontier Province, who had endowed it originally; until a small, sleepy boy of ten or eleven, who seemed to be in sole charge, opened them up and led us into the main court. The courtyard had cells on three sides of it for the accommodation of pilgrims and at the far end a pink-washed, fretted archway led down to a bathing ghat at the water’s edge. Dark staircases led to other levels with more cells and to a platform which overlooked the river, furnished with rows of lavatories open to the sky. Up these stairs we lurched behind the small boy who, although he had a lantern, was always a flight ahead, bruising ourselves on the sharp angles where the stairs took a turn to the left and right. The two dimly-lit rooms which we occupied were bare except for a pair or charpoys – beds which were nothing more than a couple of wooden frames with a mattress
