Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas

3. Hardwar: The Ground of Space

« Sādhu under a tree 3 • Hardwar The Ground of Space The city of Hardwar, in the Garhwal region of northern India, is the traditional starting point for pilgrimages to the Char Dham, the four holy abodes located in the new Himalayan state of Uttaranchal.1 Soon after Uttaranchal’s independence was granted on November 9, 2000, Hardwar lost its bid to be the site of the new state’s High Court, but the city’s fame as a pilgrimage center was untainted. Hardwar marks the point where the Ganges River emerges from the Himalayan Mountains into the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Pilgrims traveling in the reverse direction—from the plains of India into the Himal—follow the Ganges north to its source high in the Himalayan glacier, in the region locally known as Devbhumi, the land of the gods. One of India’s seven sacred cities, Hardwar is the place, I was told, where a pilgrim must abandon all illusions before starting out on pilgrimage (the name of the ancient city was Mayapur, literally “the city of illusion”). Once pilgrims leave their illusions behind, they may travel to Rishikesh, the “city of saints and seers,” and on up the Ganges River Valley, the “valley of knowledge,” as it was described to me by Nānī Mā, a Western sādhvī who had lived by the Ganges for thirty years. Garhwali terrain is dotted with shrines to mountain deities and sacred confluences which fit into the Hindu cosmography that marks India as an organically connected “living landscape,” as Eck puts it (1996:142). The topology of Himalayan India and Nepal is cast in Hindu religious geography as a model for materiality: mountains and rivers have physical forms and 92 • Wandering with Sadhus manifestations, just like human bodies. “The whole of India [is] a sacred land,” Eck writes, which “adds up to a body-cosmos” (1982:214). This religious imagery has potent meaning for pilgrims from all over India, who come in the thousands to visit Garhwali pilgrimage sites, including family vacationers with children and aging parents, school trips, Boy Scouts outings, and also members of the Hindu nationalist movement, which claims this territory as constitutive of Hindu identity (see McKean 1996).2 The Ganges Valley is stunningly beautiful, and the religious lore that infuses both the Himalayan range and the Ganges River as well as the region’s many individual peaks, streams, caves, and confluences is dense with mythic history. In particular, the Himalayas are famous as a region where devout ascetics retire to meditate, and in autumn 2000, I saw many hermit caves, both inhabited and abandoned. Legends explain that the mountains are the embodied form of Himavat, the father of the goddess Pārvatī, while the Ganges River embodies the widely loved goddess Gaṅgā, the maternal goddess who soothes earthly woes (Eck 1996). North of Hardwar, the river that becomes the Ganges is known as the Bhagīrathi, as are the three mountain peaks that dominate the landscape of the river valley. Once only a trail, the road is now paved for pilgrim automotive traffic up to Gangotri, where a discreet temple marks the source of the Ganges. The river’s glacial source, Gaumukh, is actually two days’ walk further northeast, toward the triple-peaked Bhagīrathi and the equally impressive Śivliṅg Peak. Bhagīrath is the name of the king who, with relentless tapas (ascetic austerities), successfully implored the Ganges to descend to earth in order to cleanse the souls of sixty thousand ancestors who had been burnt to ashes without proper funereal rites. Both the river and the mountains of the region, named in Bhagīrath’s honor, applaud his ascetic entreaties. Asceticism works, the landscape tells us: devotion and meditation produces earthly beauty such as this. And ascetics have returned here for their own tapas since. The ways Hindu ascetics relate to space strike at the very heart of this landscape: should they wander like the river or stay solidly rooted like the mountain?3 I heard both metaphors implied in my discussions with renouncers in the region. The texts that describe how sādhus should live require renouncers to move through space—renunciation means, above Hardwar • 93 all, breaking attachments to sedentary householder communities. To the extent that they fulfill their reputation as wanderers, most contemporary ascetics are frequent pilgrims. Certainly sādhus are on the road more often than lay...