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No notepad
of reason can cover the voyeur's shame when faith undresses for a pre-dawn
bath. I was the voyeur on the riverbank, feasting on divinity's naked
delirium in water. As they, the karma-crazy and the nirvana-hungry, the
sinned and the sinner, men and women, young and old, gave themselves to
the Ganga, a river barricaded to control the kinetic energy of religion,
but laminated by the full moon, I was the outsider, a witness to the hydraulic
power of faith.
It was the first Kumbha Mela of this sinner. And he remained one as
the moon gave way to the sun and the sun set over the river and the raw,
hara-hara hysteria of religion multiplied on the Ganga. It was the rite
of purification, and in its size and diversity it was bigger than the
passion play at Oberammergau in Germany. It was Religion, VSOP. I was
there to make sense of it, reduce the antique memory of the Hindu to a
few hundred words. Ah, the arrogance and pretence of journalism, and your
subjects, all citizens fallen from the karmic eclipse into the Mother
River, didn't care. As if they were privy to a higher knowledge, the scriptures
of which were so distant in style and time from the riverbank copy of
the voyeur.
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| EMPEROR OF AIR: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar |
I had the chance, and I could have washed away the sins, so incongruously
protected from the subzero temperature of the wintry January by wool,
in the Ganga. I could have done so many things to make this life on earth
heavenly. But I could only be a bystander as the Nagas, the naked ascetics
smeared in ashes, marched on in phallic glory, only the flashy wrist watches
they wore declared these unbound Shiva editions belonged to this time
and day. I could have discarded my ITC-made cigarettes and smoked from
the chillum (mud pipe) offered by the ascetic on eternal tapasya, or,
I could have held on to the matted hair of the naked, potbellied sanyasi,
as Marianne from France kept on doing ... well, I could have applied for
a citizenship in the Republic of Faith, religion's staged Ruritania that
challenged every entry from the glossary of reason for a fortnight on
the Ganga in Prayag, also known as Allahabad.
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| DIVINITY SEARCH: Nirvana-seekers at the festival
of faith |
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I could have washed away the sins. I could have smoked from
a chillum.
I could have held on to the matted hair of a sanyasi...
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For Kumbha Mela is faith's biggest festival on earth, where saints and
sinners are united by three rivers-the Ganga, the Yamuna and the subterranean
Saraswati-and one religion. Where the karmic traveller from the West could
do a Naga number, a Shiv tandav to be precise, on the riverbank-until
the decency police covered her muddy nakedness with dirty blankets and
banished her from the Ganga, all chronologically captured by the camera
of my colleague Pramod Pushkarna, for whom it was an accidental tryst
with true divinity. The horseback morality that denied the young woman
her moments of bliss was out of place, for Kumbha Mela is all about freedom,
freedom uncorrupted by the grammar of the digital language, even if the
costume drama of the sadhus is so media friendly.
Kumbh Mela: The rite of immortality in water.
And, 10 months later, I resurfaced in Kolkata, and found myself in the
company of the emperor of air. This elemental passage from water to air
was a brief study in the infinite possibilities of faith, even if you
assume that air is the logical successor to water. As I breathed in and
out with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the fastest growing guru in the benediction
bazaar, along with the happiness seekers who in their costume and manners
were rivers away from the population of Prayag, as I sat still amidst
the chant 'n' roll of the flower children of faith, I realised: The spirit
of India is as ancient as the Ganga, as recent as Sri Sri, and as familiar
as water and air.
 
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ISSUE DEC 31, 2001
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