A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (27 page)

In the evening we walked back over the Ganges across the forty spans of the Izzot railway bridge. Upstream to the north long strings of camels and bullock carts were crossing the bridge of boats which carried the Grand Trunk Road in the direction of Allahabad. The river tore down under it, tugging at the caissons. From them small boys were diving into the water and being swept, miraculously, into the shallows where still smaller children who were making unhappy mooing noises were bathing with their mothers. The dust hung heavily over the approaches to the bridge and the smoke rose straight into the air from the fires at the burning ghats, where even at this late hour wood for the cremations was still being weighed out on the scales. Inland a green sea of fields lapped at the wooded banks and stretched away northwards into the distance. When the rains came there would be a forty-foot rise in the level of the Ganges and they would be submerged under twenty feet of water. Downstream the two rivers and the white boats on them were flooded in an intense golden light; beyond the Jumna mist was already forming in the rice fields; swifts swooped about the walls of Akbar’s Fort which threw a dark oblong shadow across the sandbank on which camp fires were now beginning to burgeon. As the sandbank had dried out and its surface had become hard it had cracked. Now it was covered with thousands of deep fissures. By day armies of men were engaged in filling them in. Seen from the height of the bridge it resembled a huge jig-saw.

Under one of the last of the forty spans of the bridge a lunatic was sitting out in the stream on a pillar of silt fifteen feet high. This pillar, which was precariously supported by one of the buttresses of the bridge, was on the point of collapsing into the water. The lunatic was gesticulating violently and singing at the top of his voice. He seemed perfectly happy. How he had got there in the first place was a mystery; how he was to get back alive was equally incomprehensible. No one except ourselves took the slightest notice of him. This was India. He would work out his own salvation. As he sat there a train rumbled overhead and the vibration caused more chunks to fall off his perch, reducing still more his chances of survival.

A peculiar fact which has never been satisfactorily explained is the quick death, in three or five hours, of the cholera vibrio in the waters of Ganges. When one remembers sewage by numerous corpses of natives, often cholera casualties, and by the bathing of thousands of natives, it seems remarkable that the belief of the Hindus, that the water of this river is pure and cannot be defiled and that they can safely drink it and bathe in it, should be confirmed by means of modern bacteriological research.

An unnamed Canadian professor,
said to be of McGill University,
cited in
Mother Ganges

On the afternoon of 13 th January, we drove up the Grand Trunk Road to Allahabad. The journey which had taken us three days and nights in the rowing-boat was now accomplished in as many hours. The road was crowded with pilgrims on their way to the Mela. They travelled in ekkas, clinging to them in half dozens, in tongas, motor buses, cars and on bicycles. They also travelled on foot, men and women and children plodding up the road with their faces wrapped in cloths to avoid being asphyxiated by petrol fumes and choked with the dust that rose from the dry verges of the road. There was a file of camels, each with a man on its back seated on a wooden saddle. There was even an elephant with a painted head, chained, all alone at the side of the road. It was chewing grass and swishing its decorated trunk up and down, curling it delicately so that it looked like the initial letter on a page of illuminated manuscript but one that was constantly changing its shape.

It was a beautiful day. The plain was a sea of sprouting wheat and barley, dotted with groves of trees that were enchanting islands among the lighter green of the crops. It was a day of spring rather than winter in which everything seemed to be burgeoning, all except the man-made objects, villages, tanks, and shrines – which were mostly crumbling into dust. But as the sun sank behind the trees and the shadows lengthened, the fields assumed the same uniform greengage colour as the river did when it flowed in the sunless places close to the high banks; except in one place where a single shaft of sunlight filtering through a gap in the trees illuminated a whitewashed tomb. Then it disappeared. Low in the west the sky became blood-red; higher it was purple; overhead it was deep blue; while low down close to the earth in the fields, the smoke from the village fires hung in swags and trailed away among the trees in woods which were no longer Arcadian but dark and mysterious-looking.

Because of the huge crowds, the bridge of boats at Jhusi on the left bank of the Ganges had been closed to motor cars, and by the time we reached the Curzon Bridge at the big bend of the river north of the city, it was almost dark and only the pools among the sandbanks upstream still shone in the last of the light.

The bridge itself was jammed with bullock-carts and tired pilgrims – men, women and children on their way to the Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges with the Jumna and a third invisible river, the Sarasvati. They were country people and what belongings they had they carried in sacks slung across their shoulders. It was a moving sight.

Eventually, we reached the Fort, and from the ramparts looked out over the sandbank which extended upstream for more than a mile from the confluence of the two rivers as far as the Izzot railway bridge.

It was more like the camp of an army on the eve of a great action than a holy place. The sandbank was hidden from view by a blanket of low-lying fog and smoke which was illuminated by the flickering light of the camp fires, and the glare of kerosene lanterns. The long lines of electric lights on long poles which marked the way to the bathing areas were the only lights actually to rise above the fog; while overhead the stars looked down, pale and remote.

It was eerie, for apart from a few hundred pilgrims who were seeing the night through huddled against the wall of the fort, there was not a human being in sight. Only a muted and continuous roar from the sandbank and the encampments announced the fact that a million people were settling down for the night. A sound that was punctuated by the beating of gongs and drums, the ringing of bells, the rumbling of trains on the railway bridges and the noise of the loud-speakers which blared out injunction to this vast multitude on how it should comport itself the next day, on the morning of Makara Sankranti, when the sun and moon would be of equal degree.

At five o’clock the following morning it was still dark. Down on the sandbank, the road which led from Akbar’s great embankment on the north side of the fort to the landing-place was itself a tributary river of human beings all moving towards the Ganges. Down on the shores of the Jumna by the fort shoals of country boats propelled by sweeps were setting off, deep-loaded, for the Sangam. From the sandbank rose the same deep roaring sound we had heard the night before that was like the sound of a storm at sea.

At a quarter to six the sky beyond the Sangam was tinged with red and the wind-blown clouds were like the wings of a giant grey bird that had been dipped in blood. From the horn of sand where the rivers met, a further isthmus of boats extended far out into the Jumna and their masts and rigging, mooring poles and cordage were like a forest of trees and creepers against the sky.

Little bands of men and women who had travelled here together from their villages, some of them very old with skin like crumpled parchment, the women singing sadly but triumphantly, lurched barefooted across the silt towards the pragwals, evil-looking men who performed their duties with an air of patient cynicism, in contrast with that of the pilgrims themselves who wore expressions of joy. They had all been shaven with varying degrees of severity in the barbers’ quarter: women from the south and widows had had their head completely shaven; the men were left with their chhotis, the small tufts on the backs of their skulls, and those who had moustaches, but whose fathers were still alive, had been allowed to retain them; natives of Allahabad were allowed to keep their hair; Sikhs gave up a ritual lock or two. At one time the hair was buried on the shore of the river; now it was taken away and consigned to a deep part of the Ganges downstream. Like pilgrims everywhere they were not allowed much peace: shifty-looking men offered to guard their clothes while they were bathing; the dreadful loud-speakers exhorted them not to surrender their clothes to these same shifty-looking men and, at the same time, urged them to bathe and go away; boatmen importuned them; policemen and officious young men wearing armbands tried to move them on, but they were in a state bordering on ecstasy, and were oblivious to everything but the river which they had come so far to see, bathe in and perhaps to die by this very morning; for some of them were so decrepit that it seemed impossible that they could survive the sudden shock of the immersion.

The women dressed in saris, the men in loin-cloths, they entered the river, dunking themselves in it, drinking it, taking it in their cupped hands and letting it run three times between their fingers with their faces towards the still invisible sun. Shivering but happy and, if they were fortunate enough to possess them, dressed in clean clothes, they allowed the pragwals to rub their foreheads with ashes or sandalwood and make the tilak mark. They offered flowers and milk to the river, and those who had never been there before bought half-coconuts from the pragwals and launched the shells filled with marigolds on the water, which were afterwards appropriated by the pragwals to be sold again. New or old pilgrims, these clients were his for ever, and so would their descendants be and their names would be inscribed in one of his books, according to their caste, as they had been for centuries.

The sun rose as a ball of fire, but was almost immediately enveloped in cloud. A cool wind rose and the dust with it, enveloping the long, dun-coloured columns which were moving towards the Sangam and those whiter ones which were moving away from it. The camps of the pragwals were labyrinths of thatched huts and tent-like constructions in which saris and dhotis and loin-cloths hung on thickets of bamboo poles drying in the wind and the smoke of dung fires. Over them, on longer poles flew their banners, the rallying places of their clients who squatted cheek by jowl below them in a dense mass, cooking, waiting for their clothes to dry, or merely waiting. There were banners with European soldiers on them in uniforms dating from the time of the East India Company and there were banners decorated with gods. Some poles had baskets and other homely objects lashed to the top of them instead of flags. One had an umbrella.

Further north, towards the Banaras bridge, the encampment of the sadhus was like a sea of saffron. There the Mahanta Krishna Mahatna from the ashram at Paribragikachary, seated on cushions in a tent, was discoursing to his followers, using a microphone. On the other side of the river, on the sands at Jhusi a famous saint, the Beoraha Babu, who is said to have walked across the Ganges on the water, was installed on a tower ten feet high. On the day after we had left Allahabad for Mirzapur, he had crossed the river by more conventional means to attend a meeting of pandits and sadhus at the foot of the living banyan tree inside the Fort; the one which is not accessible to the laity because it is in a military area.

The way from the Sangam to Akbar’s embankment was a Via Dolorosa lined with beggars. To traverse it was to be transported into the Dark Ages. They were dressed in rags the colour of the silt on which they lay or crouched, and they were almost indistinguishable from it. The air was filled with the sound of their moanings. There were lepers and dwarfs and men, women and children so terribly mutilated – without limbs, eyes, faces, some with none of these adjuncts – that they bore scarcely any resemblance to humanity at all. Some lay contorted in little carts with broken wheels. Each had his or her begging bowl and a piece of sacking with a little rice spread on it, put there in much the same way as a cloakroom attendant at Claridge’s leaves a few shillings in a plate to show that he is not averse to being tipped. The lepers were the most terrible of all, with fingers like black knots and with white crusts for eyes, or else a ghastly jelly where the eyes should have been. And to each of them the returning bathers, rich or poor, threw a few grains of rice and a few paise, confident that by so doing they were at least ensuring themselves merit in this world and perhaps even a little in the next.

‘Why are you taking photographs of these people?’ said a highly civilized Brahman. ‘What will people think of India if you show pictures such as these?’ He was genuinely angry.

He delicately sprinkled a handful of rice on the sacking of the beggar in front of him, looked at me with disdain, and went on his way.

There were mendicant sadhus, men lying on beds of thorns with a carefully concealed cushion to take their weight but still uncomfortable enough, and there were others with iron skewers through their tongues. These were the side-shows, together with the children six or seven years old, who had been skilfully made up as sadhus by their proprietors in little lean-to sheds which had been set up against the wall of the Fort for this purpose. They sat, cross-legged, plastered with mud and ashes, eyes downcast, garlanded with flowers, sadly ringing their little silver bells. This was a world with its strange constructions, barrels on the end of long poles, tented encampments and limbless creatures such as both Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch knew, and one that they would have understood.

But the ghats and the city above it, however many temples it contained, were nothing but a backdrop to the enactment of a ritual, incessantly performed, that was as natural and as necessary as the air they breathed and the water itself to the participants, but in which one could have no real part. However well-intentioned he might be, and however anxious to participate, for a European to bathe in the Ganges at Banaras was simply for him to have a bath. It was as if a Hindu, having attended a Mass out of curiosity, decided to take Communion; and although it undoubtedly had the capacity to engulf sin, the river did not here have the icy clarity that it had at Hardwar or the sheer volume that it had at the Sangam at Allahabad, or that rare beauty that it had on the lonely reaches of the river that had made it irresistible even to the uninitiated.