I had about ten days before my next group arrived in Delhi, so I took a local bus
north to the holy city of Hardwar near where the Ganges leaves the Siwalik
Hills, foothills of the Himalayas. Hardwar was off the tourist route and is one
of the four holy cities that host a kumbh
mela, a huge Hindu pilgrimage of faith, held every four years in one of
four cities - Hardwar, Allahabad, Nasik and Ujjain. Each city hosts the Mela once in 12 years. According to
Hindu mythology, when the gods churned the milk-ocean at the time of creation,
four drops of nectar were splashed to earth each landing by a sacred river.
These are the places where the kumbh mela,
the "world’s largest congregation of
religious pilgrims", are held, and where devotees, now numbering in the
tens of millions, congregate for a dip in the sacred rivers. Each site's
celebration dates are calculated in advance according to a special combination
of zodiacal positions of Sun, Moon, and Jupiter and the festival is held in
Hardwar when the sun is in Aquarius.
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| A bridge over the River Ganges at Hardwar, Uttarakhand |
When
there is no mela, Hardwar is a quiet,
peaceful, rather attractive little town on the Ganges. I wandered through the
town, over the river bridges and onto the Hari-ki-Bari bathing ghat where I
mingled with the sacred cows and the few pilgrims who were immersing themselves
in the river. The town has many associations with the mythological history of
the Ganges. This is evident by the number of religious statues in and beside
the river. A statue of the sage Kapila sits in the river not far from the ghats,
and nearby on the riverbank is a modern statue of the great god Shiva with the
goddess Ganga, the personified river, entangled in his hair.
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| The Hari-ki-Bari Bathing ghat on the Ganges at Hardwar |
In legend
Kapila, a Vedic sage, was deep in meditation when the 60,000 sons of King
Sagara found a missing sacrificial horse next to Kapila’s ashram. Accusing him
of theft, Kapila glared at the brothers with an intensity which reduced them to
ashes. For the 60,000 sons to attain paradise the waters of the Ganges would
have to be brought from heaven to purify their ashes. Several generations later,
after years of ascetic penance, King Bhagiratha persuaded the celestial Ganga
to descend to earth and the god Shiva agreed to catch the waters in his
dreadlocks, as the force of the river’s descent would shatter the world. After spending
some time trapped in Shiva’s matted locks, Ganga was released into the seven
streams ‘that flowed to the far corners of the earth’ thus allowing the sons of
King Sagara to attain Nirvana.
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| The statue of Shiva with Ganga entangled in his hair, Hardwar |
After a
couple of days in Hardwar I caught a bus to nearby Rishikesh, a smaller town of
ashrams and temples. It is here that the Ganges actually leaves the mountains.
I walked to Lakshman Jhula and from the iron suspension bridge I could see the
blue clear waters of the tree-lined Ganges tumbling over the shingle banks as
the river reached the Indian plains. The river has its origins in an ice cave
in a glacier at Gomukh, the cow’s mouth, 13,500 feet up in the Himalayas. I
walked along the bank, seeing very few people, to Swarga Ashram, a large centre
of yoga and meditation where, I was told, the Beatles had practiced
transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late ‘60s. I
walked down to the river bank and sat for a while by the sacred river. As I
looked around I could understand the mystical attraction Swarga Ashram had to
young Western yogis and yoginis. I caught the little open ferry back across the
river to Rishikesh and, ultimately, the bus back to Delhi.
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| The River Ganges where it leaves the Siwalik Hills, Rishikesh
© Neil Rawlins text & photography
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An excerpt from my book On Foot in Front of the Other - Full Stride now available from Amazon Books worldwide.
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