Slowly Down the Ganges. Eric Newby
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and other unidentifiable odours. Everything was bathed in a brilliant, eleven o’clock light. It was an exciting, pleasant scene.
Reluctantly, because it seemed unlikely that we would ever see them again, we gave up our sandals to an attendant at the entrance to the bathing-place, who filed them away out of sight in what resembled the cloakroom of a decrepit opera house, and went down the steps to the sacred pools past touts and well-fed custodians who were squatting on platforms under huge umbrellas which were straining in the wind, and which threatened to lift them and their platforms into the air and dump them in the river. All three of us were wearing the costume of the country; Wanda and myself in the fond hope of diminishing the interest of the inhabitants in us. For G., there was no need of such subterfuge; he was one of them already.
These men were called Pandas. Pandas are debased Brahmans, and other Brahmans consider them to be of low status. Most of them are rich; many are almost illiterate. They perform various functions. Male bathers usually deposit their belongings with them while they bathe, a necessary precaution for anyone who wishes to leave the ghat with any clothes at all. They supply anointing oils, powdered sandalwood and a kind of clay of a pale yellow colour, said to be obtainable only from a tank at Somnath in Gujarat in which some of the 16,000 wives of Krishna drowned themselves after his death. This they grind on damp stones to make a paste with which they make the tilak, the mark on the forehead which is reputed to cool the bather’s brain, if it has not already been frozen solid.
Pandas also inscribe the vital statistics of their clients’ lives in great books: the date of birth, the day of the week, the star under which they were born; the sign of the Zodiac, the hour, and if it is known, the precise second, so that, when the need arises, an accurate horoscope can be cast without delay. For a consideration, which is always exorbitant, they perform the ceremonial worship called the Ganga-Puja. Some of them were engaged in it now; droning on in Sanskrit while the celebrant shivered on the steps: ‘Jambu-Dwipe Bharate Varshe Uttarakhande Pavitra-Ganga-Teera …’ (‘In Jambu-Dwipe,5 in the northern part of Bharata-Varsha,6 by the side of Holy Ganges …’ and so on.)
There were two temples at the water’s edge. Both had the curious, pyramidical towers characteristic of Hindu temple architecture. They looked like shaggy caps, the edible fungi that one finds on waste land in England.
The temple on the bank was dedicated to Vishnu and his wife; the other, which stood in the water, to the river. Here the bathers offered small, green, boat-shaped baskets made from stitched leaves, filled with marigolds, rose petals and white sweets which tasted like Edinburgh Rock, placing them carefully in the water. The Ganges whirled them round for a bit in the lee of the temple until one by one they upset and their contents were carried swiftly away.
We dabbled our feet in the water; it was dreadfully cold.
‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it,’ croaked an elderly holy man. He told us that until the previous year he had been a guard on the Metre Gauge Railway. Now having discharged his commitments to his family he had left them and the world to pursue his own salvation. Unlike His Holiness Sri Swami Sivananda who, according to G., had attained Union with the Godhead on 14th July 1963 and is buried upstream at Rishikesh, his salvation will come later after a succession of rebirths.
‘I am going to die by Ganga,’ he said.
There are thousands of old men like him in India. The majority generate no great spiritual force, but they at least receive a little respect. It is a pity that the climate is against such a scheme in Britain. It is better than waiting for the end on a street corner.
The Swami Sivananda at Rishikesh was a remarkable man who could have made his mark in other fields. He was not only interested in his own salvation as his biography shows:
On the 17.2.47 Swamiji saw some printed pamphlets of the society (The Divine Life Society) being thrown in the Ganges by some inmate of the Ashram.
Swamiji: ‘Om Nijabodhaji, I saw the printed pamphlets being thrown into the Ganges. We are sending several parcels daily of books and medicines to several people, why can’t you see that each packet from here carries at least one pamphlet?’
Secretary: ‘Yes, Swamiji, I shall see to it.’
Here is one more instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. In December ’46 the winter in Rishikesh was very severe. On 11.12.46 Swamiji saw me taking a hot-water bath in the bathroom attached to the Ashram. After two or three days, when I happened to be in the League-hall, Swamiji began thus and spoke to a by-stander.
Swamiji: ‘People from far and wide come to Rishikesh to have Ganges bath but the Ashramites here who live on the very brink of the Ganges have recourse to hot-water baths and thus lose a fine opportunity given them by God.’
This talk settled me. I took the hint and began to take the bath regularly in the Ganges itself. This habit has invigorated me a good deal and put splendid and clean ideas into my mind and I had a healthy time of it. Here is another instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. It was on 17.8.46 when Swamiji saw that I was using a toothbrush to clean my teeth in the Ganges. After five days when Swamiji and myself were both climbing up the steps leading to the Bhajan Hall, Swamiji began: ‘Om, Swagyan, there is tooth-powder called “Sadhu’s” tooth-powder in our league for sale to the public; it is highly efficacious and when used twice daily will relieve anyone of Pyorreah etc.’ This I took as a hint to me to discard the use of toothpaste which is costly and old-fashioned … Swamiji knows the nature of ignorance.7
Whatever else this old man generated he was an extraordinary figure. It was the fifth of December; winter had set in and the wind was blowing straight off the Himalayas. He was wearing a leather helmet that made him look like the wizened pilot of an early flying-machine, and he carried a pair of bedroom slippers. Everything he had – his helmet, the cloths in which he was wrapped, his quilt, the sack in which he presumably kept his other possessions – were all dyed the uniform dark yellow, bordering on orange, the colour of the sadhus. This dye is made from a special mud which has the unusual property of keeping the wearer warm as well as holy-looking; a property which it shares with cow-dung ash.
‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it!’ he repeated. To tell the truth he was becoming a bit of a bore. He had bathed already, long before first light, and he was too full of beans, like some old man at the Serpentine. The only way to escape from him was to go in ourselves.
It was so cold that it was like stepping into a fire. The water was very clear and remembering that no harm could come of it I drank some and it tasted good, while great speckled fish called mahseer, anything up to thirty pounds in weight, made insolent by over-feeding, nipped me. It was necessary to keep moving. I wondered how G. was getting on. He was standing in the slack water in the lee of the temple of Lakshmi-Ganga, completely immobile, with only his upturned face showing above the surface. A little upstream Wanda, having emerged from the ladies’ bathing establishment, which was a cross between an Edwardian boathouse and a lock-up garage, in the dim recesses of which modest ladies were splashing unseen, was having trouble with her sari. She looked like someone handling a spinnaker in a strong breeze; finally it unwound completely and she was left up to her knees in water ‘the cynosure’, as Milton wrote, ‘of neighbouring eyes’, like a freshly peeled plum. In order to disassociate myself from her, I went on foot up to the top end of the island and dived in there. The water was quite shallow, but the bottom was lined with stone-flags which were slippery with weed. The current lifted me high out of the water, and bore me down in a series of surges past a large smooth rock in mid-stream; past the ladies’ establishment with its admonitory notice in Hindi – ‘Non-violence is the Greatest Duty. Where there is Religion there is Victory’ – to which Wanda was now retreating in disorder; down into the main pool where G. still floated in the shadows of the temple; under the lower of the two bridges, in the shade of which a young Vishnuvite sadhu smeared with cow-dung, his hair a beehive of mud, was sleeping off the effects of a dose of hemp. Here I grabbed one of the