topics: |  travel | india | ganges

Excerpts

It was not [India's] wide spaces that eluded me, or even her diversity,
but some depth of soul which I could not fathom, though I had
occasional and tantalizing glimpses of it. She was like some ancient
palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been
inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased
what had been written previously.
			- Nehru, Discovery of India, quoted on p. 111

[The main Shiva temple (Vishvanath temple) in Banaras was opened to the
untouchables after the 1955 Untouchability (Offences) Act. ]
Strict Brahmins in the golden temple decided that the presence of
Harijans was polluting, so a New Vishvanath Temple was built to which
Harijans are allowed entry but forbidden to touch the lingam, making
puja impossible. - p. 122

	There is nothing but water at the holy bathing places;
	and I know that they are useless, for I have bathed in them.
	The images are all lifeless, they cannot speak;
	I know, for I have cried aloud to them.
	The Puranas and the Koran are mere words;
	lifting up the curtain, I have seen.
			- Kabir, quoted p.124.

[Berwick refers to Kabir as the guru of Nanak.  Though the Granth Sahib
has a section that is a compilation from Kabir, there is no direct link.
In Sikhism, he is referred to Bhagat Kabir. ]

[On the cow] Mahatma Gandhi is reported to have commented that as soon
as a tractor could do all these jobs and eat only grass he would be
sympathetic to the need for tractors in the villages. - p.147

[Bhagwan, the village president, was popular] No man kept four or
six feet away from us, as they had in other villages when I walked with
someone important. - p.148

Poverty

Their clothes were ragged and grey and they could not hope to buy anything,
but when the bugle of the lollipop man had sounded they had come anyway
and were now standing dry-mouthed with the other children. Perhaps they had
hoped to be given bits of broken lollipops from the bottom of the
wooden box on the bicycle. Perhaps they hoped a stranger also with a dry
throat would buy them each a lollipop. And when the stranger did do this,
then their wide eyes, their enormous grins and eager sucking was the best
damn sight that stranger had seen in months of walking.
	Too often, I had heard people talking loosely of India's noble
poverty, her unconcern with crass material life and her superiority in
matters spiritual. Such people have never stood beside three children
who cannot buy lollipops.  - p.150

	[Is this a tale of poverty, or of relative deprivation?  The
	lollipops appear so trivial to Dennison (and also to us, Indian
	who read English), that the injustice seems appropriate, worthy of
	comment.  But if you look at deprivation as relative, which culture
	does not have it?  What is lollipop in India may be an Ipod in
	another culture.

	What a marxist thinker like John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
	might say is that it is the lollipop man and his bell that is the
	real culprit - if one class of people can't afford the lollipop, is
	it fair of society to permit him ringing the bell?  But carrying this
	argument further, we would be compelled to ban the production of
	lollipops altogether.

	For the western man coming to India, this difference is all the more
	striking because it seems just a matter of a "lollipop" - and it
	seems a much larger tragedy than the unavailability of Ipods in other
	cultures.  To Indians returning from the West as well, the poverty
	seems almost as striking - see Mohsin Hamid's protagonist in
	Reluctant Fundamentalist:
	     how shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its
	     ceilings and dry bubbles of paint flaking off where dampness had
	     entered its walls. ... This was where I came from, this was my
	     provenance...

	This encounter with poverty is, ultimately, an acclimatization
	process.  The later Naipaul is much less concerned with it. ]

...there was an ample variety of accommodation available, but it was
impossible to switch. I asked but encountered that intellectual fog
that obscures so much of the country:
	"You wish other accommodation, you must go to Ramnagar," said the
officer at Dhikala.
	"They say everything is full - which it isn't."
	"You must go to Ramnagar for registration of accommodation."
The argument was circular and futile. - p.181

There was a notice in English and Hindi saying soap and towels were available
from the attendant at a charge of Rs.1-50.
	"It is not possible," the attendant told me.
	"Why not?"
	"It is not possible."
	"The sign says towel and soap - ask you."
	"No, no."
	"Yes, yes. Where is the complaints book."
	He waived his arm vaguely down the platform crowded with people
and suitcases.
	"Which place?" I demanded.
	"Give me one rupee fifty paise for towel and soap."
I did this and he produced the items from a black trunk at his side.
	- p. 190

I saw a man lying face down in the middle of the road. He was marking
a line ahead of himself with a stick, then standing up and pacing to
the line, pausing to pray, then lying down again in the dust. I was
amazed and stood watching at the side of the road as he approached
slowly by body-lengths.
	"Where are you going?" I asked when he stopped and greeted me.
	"Madras," he said.
	"Madras!" I exclaimed. "But that's over a thousand miles away."
	"You are coming from?"
	"Ganga Sagar. Calcutta."
	"Is it so? Very far."
I was so astonished ... that I forgot to ask where he was coming from.
White dust covered his shirt, his knee-length lungi and the fronts of
his dark, brown legs like bizarre make-up. He carried nothing with
him, not even a blanket or a begging bowl.  His eyes were bright, yet
calm with quiet confidence, and he was perhaps 40 years old. - p.207

---
The Ganga is the liquid history of India.
	- p.1, Tariq Ali, The Nehrus and the Gandhis
---

[RIVERS]
Hindu 28/9/97, "History wrapped in myth" by Hugh and Collen Gantzer

At Haridwar, the river enters the great plains and first assumes its
broad-bosomed motherly character.

Gangotri - at 3,200m. Story of Shiva's locks stopping the fury of the
Ganga coming to earth - ecological interpretn - The river, constantly
charged by the snow and rain that falls in the Himalayas, could wreak
havoc on denuded mountains. But when precipitation is tamed by the
forested slopes of Lord Siva's locks, much of the river's primeval fury
is leashed.

"Then they say the Ganga actually originates in the sacred Mansarovar
lake through a long, long tunnel. Which is why it gushes, and does not
trickle like other ice-melt streams. And here, in Gangotri, is where
Parvati meditated for Siva. And there, you see that stream that is the
first tributary of the river, the Kedarganga... though it has some other
names too ... comes from Kedarnath."

[At the legendary ashram of Jahnu] He was so angry with the river, when
it washed away his hermitage, that he swallowed it. After much
persuasion he relented and released the torrent through his ear. In
mountainous areas, rivers do vanish into sink holes, emerging out of
another hole far away. Whatever the basis of the belief, from now
on the river is known as Jahnavi.

We stopped at Gangnani and climbed a flight of steps to a pool fed by a
rill flowing through a small temple. Tendrils of steam rose from the
pool. "This is not the grandmother of the Ganga: it is not Gang-Nani.
... King Parashar said he could not defile the holy
Bhagirathi by bathing in it. Maybe he found it too cold for comfort.
Anyway he prauyed to the gods for better bathing facilities and they
obliged. This is the geyser of the gods. The bathing Ganga - the Ganga
Nahani."

Varun - similar to the Gk god of the sky - Uranus.
Asis - nomadic Scythian tribe who gave their name to Asia and to the Saka era.