24.
Charan Chalo Marg Gobind
The Sikh pilgrimage centre—and historical gurdwara Hemkunt Sahib sits next to an icy cold lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains at the top of a rocky unmotorable trail deep in the Garhwal Himalaya, the Chinese-Tibetan border not so very far away. The height is 4,300 metres plus, the weather shifting and even in the short season—June to October—often frigid, and altitude sickness is a real threat. It isn’t easy going. Which is interesting, since I didn’t want to go.
The hardness of the trail was only one reason for my reluctance to make this trip. You see, there are Sikhs—myself amongst them—who find it hard to accept Hemkunt Sahib as a pilgrimage centre in the first place. There are several reasons for this.
One reason is that Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, was emphatic about the fact that pilgrimage itself bestows illusory benefits, because the journey that matters to the real pilgrim is an interior one. It is abundantly obvious that plenty of spiritually substandard people make pilgrimages to various places for their own furtive ends, while it is equally apparent that many God-fearing, public-spirited folk never stray from their homes: why, in a world presided over by a just God, would the sight of a river or a temple or even a special tree privilege the former group over the latter? In essence, going to the bathroom and going to Benares amount to the same thing; what matters is your own state of mind, your own goals, your own awareness of yourself and your world and your relationship with God. God is everywhere and within you. You don’t have to go looking.
It may seem irrelevant for me to belabour this point when we live in a time where what I have stated above seems self-evident. But it wasn’t self-evident at the time of the Sikh Gurus. Indeed, to borrow a term from a different religious tradition, to say as much, then, bordered on heresy. To decry pilgrimage flew in the face of established doctrine: to locate religion within the practitioner was revolutionary. Nanak and others like him set the stage for a revolution in how religion was practised and perceived, at least for the common man. How Nanak and his spiritual descendants viewed pilgrimage is intrinsic to how Sikhs spatialize their own religious spheres, both within and outside of themselves. This isn’t merely received Sikh tradition: it is history.
So. The concept of pilgrimage is already dodgy in the Sikh tradition, at least in theory, never mind where you are going. But there are other facets to the Hemkunt story that make it even less appealing to the Sikh who is aware of his own history. Now we are entering territory that is as historically murky as the Hemkunt trail after a monsoon shower. Yes, the short Hemkunt season runs concurrently with the monsoon. It isn’t just a cold and tiring walk. It is also wet.
The devotees who visit Hemkunt Sahib go there because it is considered, at least by them, to be a ‘historical’ gurdwara. Historical gurdwaras are deemed to be so because they mark places where the paths of the Gurus and the events around them crossed those said places. What makes Hemkunt Sahib a historical gurdwara?
The origin of Hemkunt Sahib lies, at least according to the people who have declared it to be so, in a text called the Bachitar (Vichitra) Natak. This long poem is attributed to Guru Gobind Singh himself, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs, the man who constituted the immediately recognizable group, the Khalsa. This incredibly strong sense of identity—and hence, difference from the non-Khalsa mainstream—is central to the way the Khalsa view themselves. The cherished sense of identity that he created and the stirring life he led make Guru Gobind Singh perhaps the most immediate of our Gurus for orthodox Sikhs; it is certainly true that many historical gurdwaras are based around his life.
The Bachitar Natak purports to be the autobiography of Guru Gobind Singh, but its status as having been written by the Guru has been hotly debated. Partly, this is because Guru Gobind Singh, while a talented and prolific poet, simply could not have had the time to write everything that is attributed to him in his forty-odd years on this earth, especially since he was fighting the Mughals and his Hindu hill-chieftain neighbours for a good proportion of that time. It is also a historical fact that the Guru, a lover of poetry, maintained a band of poets in his court, and any one or more of them, acting in collaboration, could have penned this work. There are also claims that this text doesn’t match his other, more easily attributable writings in terms of style.
What is ultimately odd about this text with reference to Hemkunt Sahib is what it contains within itself. There is a passage from the Bachitar Natak that is quoted on all the Sikh websites in general and the ones that deal with Hemkunt Sahib in particular, and this passage is reproduced on a wall up in Hemkunt Sahib itself; this quotation is the justification for Hemkunt Sahib being on the Sikh pilgrim trail. It starts with the line Ab main apni katha bakhano; literally, ‘Now I will tell my own story.’ Immediately, there is legitimacy here, for the Guru—if indeed it is he—is saying that this is what happened, that this is the real deal, that this is my story. On the face of it, it is the telling of the immediately previous life of the Guru. The writer goes on to say that he practised great austerities in a place, Hemkunt, where there are seven peaks (Sapatsring). The father of the Pandavas, Pandu, is mentioned as having been here too at some earlier stage, and the fact that the writer was praying to, or rather meditating on, the great Goddess. In this fashion, duality was erased, and he became one with the Formless (Alakh) One. The writer goes on to say that his father and mother practised yoga too, asking for the boon of a son, and they pleased God as well. Though the writer did not want to come back to this physical world, God made him understand that the couple that had propitiated Him were worthy, and that he was required for a higher purpose. So, the writer came to this world again, this time as a child, born to the said couple. The couple were of course Guru Tegh Bahadur and his wife, and the child was Gobind, who would later go on to institute the Khalsa. The gurdwara at Hemkunt Sahib ‘marks’ the spot where the yogi became one with the Formless One. This is the justification for Hemkunt Sahib being a historical gurdwara.
Well, so what is wrong with that, right?
For me, practically everything.
It may be true that I am reading a work of some symbolic depth too literally. There are nuances to this that I am not alive to, shades of meaning and allusion that I am not qualified to glean. Could it be that the yoga that the writer says his mother and father practised be yog—literally, union—the union that gives birth to a child? Could his reluctance to leave the Formless One be an allusion to the security of the womb that infants are assumed to be reluctant to leave? Is it the case that I am reading poetry as alleged history and metaphor as supposed fact and that in so doing, I am missing the point completely?
Perhaps.
What I do know is that I am a rationalist, and for most of my life, I have had no problem reconciling my rationalist concerns with my Sikh faith. Indeed, I have always felt the project of the Sikh Gurus, insofar as they rejected ritualism and the caste system and idolatry and urged people to be the arbiters of their own spiritual destinies, was a rationalist one, where the only jump that the believer was asked to make was the simple and essential one of belief itself. The Sikh injunction to believe in God is the only problem a hardcore rationalist could have with our tradition, and it isn’t something I have ever found at all problematic. We are not even asked to be pantheistic. God is one, and nobody mediates my relationship with God. No priests, for we don’t have any. No purificatory rituals, for God is with me when I am dirty as well. For me as a Sikh, God just is, and is part of my life in every possible way. I was raised to believe in Sikhism as something that sits easily with rationalism. To swallow a story that involves goddesses and yoga and mountains and reincarnations is hard indeed.
Then, of course, there is the problem of location. What makes people think that the place Guru Gobind Singh supposedly wrote about is here? There are no maps. There is no other scriptural reference to it. A process of quasi-historic accretion and guesswork has led to the acceptance of this place as the spot where Guru Gobind Singh, in an earlier life, practised his ‘austerities’, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that led to the creation of the Khalsa. The final mark of authenticity for the two pious Sikhs who went looking for Hemkunt in the 1930s—and discovered the spot where the gurdwara is today—was the fact that an elderly ascetic of radiant mien met them while they were there—on separate occasions—and told them that yes, this is where the great yogi meditated. Having said this, the ascetic disappeared.
Well, of course.
Through all this runs the troubling problem of historical context. Guru Gobind Singh, as I mentioned earlier, fought the Mughals and an assortment of his Hindu neighbours for most of his life. In a broader sense, being the tenth Sikh Guru and the keeper of a reformist tradition born in the Punjab plains, he also carried on a fight against superstition and ritual observance and the dominance of the caste hierarchy of the time. Anybody who is conversant with Punjab knows that the word ‘bahman’—the way Punjabis say Brahmin—is almost a pejorative; the inversion of caste amongst the Sikhs is no accident. The concept of a retreat from the world is equally irrelevant in Sikhism, for the Sikh is enjoined to live in the world and accept his responsibilities. This world is the only one the Sikh knows and has any control over; this is the world he has to make his life in. He should not be wasting his time thinking about the lives and worlds to come for he has no control over them. This same aversion to speculation extends backwards as well, to the lives one has already lived. While reincarnation is alluded to in Sikh scripture, the devotee is told in no uncertain terms that deliverance from the wheel of rebirth is not in his hands; rather, it is in the hands of God, and nothing that the devotee can do will influence God one way or another. Thinking about it is a waste of time.
Why would the tenth Guru himself postulate a legend of his own antecedents that was so retrograde in the Sikh context, so steeped in exactly the sort of swords and sorcery that Sikhism was and is supposed to be a reaction against? The mysticism that pervades our scriptures is a gentle, personal one, that talks of an individual and collective union with God. It is the commonsensical mysticism of peasants and workers who live in this world and celebrate its workings, not the recondite speculation of ‘yogis’ who retreat from it.
A consequence of this story, if it is taken at face value, is that the Khalsa owes its existence not to the historical conjunction of a reformist faith with the socio-political compulsions of the time, presided over by a deeply complex and charismatic man; it is instead the outcome of a Hindu ascetic’s covenant with God, arrived at in a conveniently distant place and time.
This is deeply troubling to the Sikh within me.
It strains my credulity. It strains my understanding of my own faith, it strains my sense of history. You could say it strained my brain about as much as the climb to Hemkunt would strain my body.
I really didn’t want to go.
Well, I went though. Partly out of curiosity, partly because my travelling companions forced me to. We were an odd lot, a Bombay Muslim I had been in school with and my American friend, whose interest in Hemkunt had been piqued by her reading about it on the Net. We set off one hot late-July morning from Delhi. The monsoon was hanging about Delhi but not in the mood to actually do anything; up in the mountains, it was an entirely different story. We were woefully ill-prepared. We had laid out jackets but had forgotten to pack them. We had no waterproofs. My hiking boots were sturdy but because I hadn’t used them in a while, the glue had come away and the soles came off while I was climbing, leaving me walking up in my rubber chappals. That many of the other pilgrims were similarly equipped made me no difference. Rain mixed with mule shit pouring over your open toes is a uniquely miserable feeling. We didn’t have sweaters or warm socks, we didn’t even have a road-Atlas. It was boiling hot in the plains, how cold could the mountains be? My old scoutmaster would have been shattered.
The spot where the pilgrim leaves his vehicle behind is Gobind Ghat. Gobind Ghat is on the road from Joshimath to Badrinath, and is about 500 kilometres from Delhi. Getting to Gobind Ghat is quite a trek in itself.
The road north lies through Roorkee and Hardwar and you leave the plains at Rishikesh. During the season, there are various langars set up by the side of the road. Coming around a fast corner, we were stopped by a sardar standing in the middle of the road and gesticulating to one side. His partners and he had set up shop there, providing basic food to the pilgrims. Theoretically free, these roadside langars subsist on the money the grateful pilgrims leave behind. A rotund chap in a white beard kept a sharp lookout on the collection plate while he mumbled prayers and fingered his rosary and occasionally exhorted the passersby to donate generously to the Guru ka langar. I don’t know about the Guru’s flock; our friend’s tummy was testament to the fact that he was living off the fat off the land. Why stop here, when there are authentic gurdwaras with langars attached in Rishikesh itself, and Srinagar, a few hours down the road?
We merely honked at the next few ‘langars’ we saw. I may have clipped the gents they sent out in the middle of the road.
The road rises along the Ganga into the hills. At that time of year, in landslide season, the river is brown and quick. What was interesting to me was the slow rate of ascent. You drive for hours together, passing Devprayag and Rudraprayag and other pilgrim centres, and you think, okay, any moment now, I am going to see the big mountains of the Garhwal Himalaya. But you don’t. The road now flanks the Alaknanda on its path down towards its meeting with the Bhagirathi, a union we all recognize as the holy Ganga herself. Sometimes the river has even had time to meander around little islands that it has built up over the years. Small villages come and go, and the occasional town. Loud pilgrim buses passed us by, some with the yellow and blue banners of the Khalsa, some with the saffron of Hindus. Hardy sardars whizzed by on their two-wheelers, two to a bike or scooter, and I thought it was a long way to come from the Punjab plains whilst straddling a seat.
It is pilgrim season everywhere in the hills. There are fewer plainspeople up here, but still enough that you don’t miss them. And everywhere there are reminders that this is landslide season. In the brown river below, in the wet scars on the hillsides, in the bulldozers of the authentic heroes of the mountains, the Border Roads Organization and General Reserve Engineer Force, scuttling back and forth along the road between this blockage and the next.
We passed the turnoff to Chamoli as night fell. We stopped for the night at Pipalkoti, since the road in these parts is not motorable after dark. Pipalkoti itself is a nice little place to stop. It is a full day’s drive from Delhi, and the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam has a well-run and clean setup here, something that is true of the entire Garhwal region. We stayed with them in Gobind Dham and in Joshimath as well. When you wake up and discover that Joshimath is still a couple of hours away and Gobind Ghat another hour and a bit after that, you will be glad that you weren’t allowed to press on.
For the road from here is beautiful and deadly. From here you see the big mountains, finally, and the road does rise. The chasms are deep and real and the turns quick and sharp, and everywhere you see the signs of landslides; past, present and future. The early morning light turned the mountains into a misty dream as the river raged through the valley a long, long way below. The big dogs of the mountains padded by us on their heavy snow-walking paws. It was wonderful to be back in the mountains, I thought, as I saw the smoky villages slip by.
We arrived at Joshimath while I was still in a photo-taking haze, the pilgrim and market centre sliding by as we made our way to the gate where the line waits to embark on the last drivable section; the road to Badrinath, along which lies Gobind Ghat, the jumping off point to Hemkunt Sahib. We passed a huge hydel project coming up there on the Alaknanda. We saw the quarters of the engineers and their buses and the hardhats on the gents themselves. Entire tree trunks were being carried along on the raging froth below us, the Garhwal Himalaya stark against the sky. It was a surreal conjunction.
And then, after the hydel project, the road disappeared. It was now merely a churned brown mess, upon which our vehicle slid desperately close to a suddenly charmless edge. The gents on their two-wheelers went skidding past, of course, as the mountains pressed in forbiddingly over us. At this height, this isn’t a valley any more. It is a gorge, and an appropriately angry river, tired of being compressed, hammers through it. Then we were at Gobind Ghat itself, engaging a porter, having some lassi, paying our tickets, parking our car. This is where we crossed the Alaknanda on a pedestrian bridge. This is where the walking began.
Gobind Ghat is not an old town. It has no value aside from the fact that it caters to Sikh pilgrims en route to Hemkunt. It is distinguished chiefly by being ugly. In fact, it is fascinatingly ugly, since it is perched on a beautiful spot, hard by the foaming river. Think of the effort required to rob a place such as this of its charm. But I digress.
There is a gurdwara here where pilgrims can stay for free, hotels where the paying public dosses and myriad shops selling religious trinketry. There are Nepali and Bhotia porters waiting to carry your bags up and plainsmen from UP running mules. There are sedan chairs for the infirm. There is noise and bustle and the eager shining faces of the devotees are everywhere.
One hears the pipes and squeaks of Birmingham and Toronto and the bass drones—and occasional tenor chortles and imprecations—of the Punjab plains. I think I see rural types conditioned to a received piety and homesick expats and their progeny driven to devotion and thoughts of pilgrimage by being far away, and I think, yes, this is exactly as I imagined it. But as I am hunkering down behind my cynicism, the complex reality of things as they actually are intrudes. There are sardars from everywhere, city slickers and villagers. There are old open-bearded men with the loose-limbed gait of farmers who have worked their own fields all their lives alongside their own clipped-bearded and sometimes clean-shaven sons, whose farming has been conducted from the tops of tractors and combines. There are women in jeans and shalwars and men in pyjamas and pants. There are nihangs in their blue and saffron uniforms, their archaic weapons clutched in their hands. There are organized jathas, groups of pilgrims coming from a village or gurdwara or social group, both from India and abroad. There are singles and family groups and newly married couples. The occasional tourist, like myself, is wearing shorts and hiking boots. Many of the others are merely in sports shoes, the older element in their juttis and chappals.
At 1,800 metres, in blazing sunshine, we cross the river and start walking to Gobind Dham, twelve kilometres away and 1,200 metres higher. Gobind Dham is also known as Ghangharia. It is only open from around the beginning of June to the end of September. Hemkunt is snowbound outside of these months, and the other big attraction here, the Valley of Flowers National Park, is also closed at the same time. The entire area is part of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, and even in the lower reaches of the trek, there are incredible vistas to be had. The trail follows the path of a stream I hear referred to as the Lakshman Ganga: this stream too is in spate. The narrowness of the rocky path and the fact that you are sharing it with mules and parties of pilgrims headed back down means that in places, you have to step with care. At this time of year, if you fall into the river, you will find yourself in Hardwar before you know where you are. But the views are beautiful. Sheer rock faces tower above you, the vegetation changing as you climb. Sometimes the sun is blotted out by a cliff, and then you turn a corner and you see a line of mountains in the distance and birds on the wing and a union of green and blue that you thought existed only in bad postcards. Old yogis take it easy in little caves off the track, smoking what is freely available on the sides of the trail. The well-being extends to everything I see as I trudge happily on.
It is exhilarating to be on this trail with the sun on my back. There are teashops at regular intervals and the path is pretty even, at least to begin with, and the going not too hard. There are even Cokes and chocolates in the teashops and we see little plastic rainslickers for sale—slickers we don’t buy because, of course, the sun is shining, right, and what kind of idiot buys an umbrella in anticipation of rain? Returning parties of pilgrims hail us with the familiar cries of Waheguruji ka Khalsa, Waheguruji ki fateh. Every so often I hear a Boley so nihal. Sat Sri Akaal, I answer. Pretty soon, I have got my travelling companions doing it too. We exchange nods and small talk with other walkers, snigger quietly at the ones going up on their mules. And then the wheels begin to come off.
It begins to rain.
And it rains. And it rains. My shoes come apart, and I am reduced to chappals. The stones that we are walking on are rough-hewn and hard to deal with in boots when the stones are dry; wet, and with me in chappals, they are a real handful. The water sluices down the track. The packs we are carrying become heavier, our breathing shallower. We finally buy the slickers and think we will be dry, but discover that plastic always brings sweat in its wake. As we ascend, the rain gets colder and colder and the sweat against your skin is hard to tell from the water pooling at your neck and wrists and sliding everywhere. The mules continue to go up and down and do their business right in the road and the mixture, at times, seems just a tad too rich and it dawns on us that twelve kilometres in these mountains is not a walk in a city park.
But the inspiration of the people around us is strong. I see an old couple, easily in their seventies, trudging up slowly. They must have started well before us. They know that they will still be walking in the dark, on the hardest section of the trek. They are carrying sacks of produce from their own fields as a gift to the gurdwara, a gift that will find its way to the langar that feeds the travellers. I offer my hand to the man as he sits and catches his breath; his hardy old wife is still walking slowly ahead, her body bent against the angle of the climb and the weight of her cargo. The old man laughs and thanks me, says that he doesn’t need my help. He has God, and that is support enough. You can’t argue with that. There are other old people on the trail and others who have made the long journey from their homes in the villages of Punjab and further afield, people visiting from Goa and Bihar, people who have come here from England and Canada and the US. All trudging their way up to keep an appointment they have made.
With what? With whom? With a yogi? With a Guru? With God?
With themselves, you might say. But that is a trite, easy answer.
The rain slopes off the leaves of the trees and catches in my beard and the rock faces disappear in the mist and the sheets of moisture. I am aware of my own body complaining, an old injury in a knee being awakened, my lungs starting to labour. I know I am concentrating on putting one foot in front of another, I am watching the path carefully so that I don’t miss my footing and slip on my worn rubber chappals, I am focusing on my breathing without even being aware of it. My head is beginning to ache insistently and I am teetering on the edge of nausea.
I know there are people on the trail in greater discomfort than me. I know that the Bhotia porters, if they weren’t carrying their loads, could probably run up this trail in a couple of hours. I know faith isn’t supposed to be easy, that physical discomfort is merely the entry-level hardship that you examine your own faith by. The problems of the intellect and the spirit are harder to deal with and anyway, I am not that invested in being here. I am a tourist who happens to be a Sikh, en route to a place I consider to be of marginal spiritual and historical value. And I am in pretty good shape, compared to some of the people on this trail.
But it is hard to walk up there. It is very hard indeed. And I am not even halfway there.
I read the hand-painted exhortations on the stones. Religious injunctions, the greetings I am used to, even an occasional suggestion that you take it easy every now and then and enjoy the view. I see one sign in particular. ‘Charan chalo marg Gobind.’ It is from a hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib. Walk in the path of Gobind, it says. Gobind is one of God’s names, and the shabad tells you to walk in God’s footsteps, to bend your own feet in that direction.
A work of disputed authenticity states that a man named Gobind walked here in a previous life, before he came back and created the Khalsa. I see his descendants around me, the rain slipping off their tired determined faces as they slog their way upwards to where they will spend the night. The next morning, bright and early, they will set off to walk the final six kilometres, rising a further 1,300 metres till they finally see what they have come here for—a gurdwara by a freezing cold lake. Having bowed their heads before the living Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib, and having taken a dip in the lake, they will turn around and come right back down again and resume their lives. They will have walked, at least for a short while, in the footsteps of Gobind.
Am I the only idiot here who thinks he is missing the point, when the point of the pilgrimage is self-evident all around me?
But my questions persist. If the tenets that make us who we are are set aside, even for a moment, then what good does it do us to climb these mountains? It doesn’t help me to think that it is okay, these are only simple peasants, their faith is different from mine; that their faith is unexamined and they can’t be expected to ask themselves these questions.
My faith is a peasant’s faith, a faith meant to be shared between peasants and princes alike. I know from the people I speak with on the path and in the teashops that theirs is not an unexamined faith either. They know the problems with the pilgrimage and they have still come.
But what if they didn’t know about the problems? Of what value is my educated ambivalence when we are all meant to walk the same path anyway? So what if they were to see it as a literal injunction to walk in a man’s footsteps when the hymn means God’s footsteps. Gobind the man founded the Khalsa. The Khalsa believe that by doing so, he brought us closer to God. Is there such a difference?
When I think that my body is in the zone and my mind is ready to shut down, it merely slips another gear and whirrs harder. I can only wait and pray for the rain to stop.
It doesn’t, of course.
We reach Gobind Dham as the sun is setting, our rooms in the GMVN rest house waiting, a restaurant with a Bengali cook conveniently opposite the gate. I get a cobbler to stitch up my soles, and as I am eating and have to take time off between mouthfuls to catch my breath, I realize that I am already in the grip of altitude sickness. We are going up bright and early to Hemkunt Sahib the following morning. I have no time to acclimatize. We go across to a shop that rents jackets by the day, buy extra socks and T-shirts to wear as liners, and fall exhaustedly asleep.
The next day we realize just what a gorgeous setting we are in. Gobind Dham itself is a seasonal village that supports the traffic to Hemkunt Sahib and the Valley of Flowers. When that traffic dries up, Gobind Dham packs up and goes home. There is a gurdwara here, of course, and hotels now, where previously there was nothing. The village itself is nondescript but the surroundings are spectacular. There are meadows with wildflowers around us as we walk out of town and old coniferous groves on either side. There is a moment when we leave Gobind Dham when we can see the trail up over us, stark against the face of the mountain we have to climb; when we look down, into a gap in the mist, we can see the bowl of Gobind Dham and the river snaking its way down to Gobind Ghat. The world we can see looks like an old Japanese print, in perspective but a hostage to mist, the whole an image of cascading beauty caught in time. Other pilgrims have stopped as well, looking down into the suddenly brilliant bowl and valley, thinking of the distance they have already covered. Then the mist closes in again and we turn around and start afresh to where we have to go. And the rain begins again.
This part of the climb is murderously hard for me. My head is ringing by now with the sickness, and all I am trying to think about is putting one foot in front of another. Altitude sickness, like its cousin seasickness, is another variable ailment. I see other pilgrims just floating along the path, singing their hymns, telling jokes, eating crackers, the rain sliding off their slickers unnoticed. I see others throwing up by the side of the path too. I don’t throw up, but I am thinking about it. This part of the path is steep and rocky and there are switchbacks with deceptively simple shortcuts. You think you can shorten your agony by going straight up the hill but that isn’t ever the case, is it? Every turn has people sitting and catching their breath. The rain now is icy cold, and your fingers, where they grip your walking stick, feel frozen. Everything is either covered in sweat or cold and mostly you can’t tell them apart.
There is a village jatha walking alongside us. A middle-aged gent in the group runs ahead with a laugh to where one of his younger companions is struggling. He takes him by the hand and literally pulls him up the trail. To the side, I hear the whispered conversations that greet the sight of my American friend. Though overseas visitors do visit Hemkunt Sahib, they usually tend to be American sardars. The women wear turbans as well and dress a certain way. The people walking up beside us don’t know what to make of my friend. A few of them ask me about her. I tell them the truth. She likes hiking. Ah, they nod. I wonder if they snigger when I am not looking.
We finally cross the treeline on the way up. Now there are only wild flowers off to the sides, and even these are only intermittently visible, the mist and the rain are so intense. We cross a finger of snow and ice closer to Hemkunt. Dirty now, at this time of year, but still unquestionably frozen. We pick our way over a freezing stream, and that is when I decide, enough is enough. I am jumping on the back of a mule.
I am too tired even to be humiliated. All I am is happy. Happy, and wet.
And still my head pounds.
Finally, we reach. You come up a final flight of stairs and there is the gurdwara. The nishan sahib—a saffron flagpole topped by a double-edged sword, the khanda, the marker of gurdwaras everywhere in the world—stands by it. The lake sits behind the gurdwara, the langar before it. We make our way to the langar where huge vats of dal and tea are being boiled over wood and kerosene that is brought up, laboriously, by mule, every single day. The tea is delicious and hot and I savour cup after cup of it. Leveraging the fact that my travelling companion is a foreigner and a woman, I get to sit right next to a huge cauldron, my feet cooking by the flame. But even now, after the tea and the rest, every step I take makes my head spin.
My Bombay buddy, friends now with the other tough guys he has hiked up with, elects to jump into the icy lake. Even in my condition, I can see how beautiful this place must be when the sun is up. Now, with the mist and the rain, it is ethereal. Only the sound of the kirtan from inside the gurdwara on the badly distorted sound system breaks the silence. That, and the shrieks of the infants and children pulled into the lake by their pious parents. My American friend disappears into the ladies’ enclosure, there to take her dip in seclusion. Past the enclosure is a small, old Hindu temple. The gurdwara authorities maintain it. Sikh pilgrims, curious and respectful, go there too. I come back to see the Bombay boy gleefully clutching a Polaroid in his hand. Apparently there are photographers for hire at this height as well. It is a lovely photo, and we laugh immoderately at it.
Then, it is time to go inside the gurdwara for the ardas. Pretty soon, the last ardas, the prayer of supplication, will be over, and all these pilgrims will be on their way down the mountainside. There are no overnight halts allowed here. Inside the gurdwara, surrounded by sweating, shivering pilgrims, we file in to bow our heads before the last and living Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib itself. Gobind the man decreed that no man would lead the Khalsa after him; henceforth, the Khalsa would follow the Guru Granth Sahib, a book that contains none of his own writings. At every step Gobind the man said that he was only a man; that the Guru resides in the Khalsa; that after he was gone, there would be only the book—a book full of the simple wisdom of clerks and farmers and weavers and mendicants, Sikh and Hindu and Muslim—and God. Yet people come here at the behest of a story that states that an ascetic sat on a rock in this place many aeons and lives ago and out of that came a conversation with God that led to all this.
Now I am before the Guru Granth Sahib. This is what I have come to do. To touch my aching head to the ground here as I have done in other places such as this, all over the world. The company changes, true. But the prayers remain the same, the book remains and so do I. I stand with the rest of the congregation as the ardas begins. A shivering girl beside me keeps time with her chattering teeth, but makes no attempt to dry herself off. Her eyes are tightly shut, her hands clasped together, her lips moving in time to the ardas that we all know. I feel my own eyes starting to water. I don’t know if it is the altitude or the words that I know so well, the words that I am mouthing too. I don’t know if it is the fact that all these people standing here, wet and shivering, are doing the same as I.
I feel as if it is tangible, the thread that binds me to the men and women around me, men and women raised to acknowledge no other authority but God and taught to bow their heads to nothing but the Guru. I feel what makes us different from the rest and I know that what makes us different connects us to each other. I have nodded to passing sardars in every part of the world I have ever been in, heard Sat Sri Akaals in places I never dreamt I would see a Sikh. I kneel and touch my head to the floor at the conclusion of the ardas like everyone else and then, when we stand up, I follow the shivering girl as she shouts out Boley so nihal. Sat Sri Akaal resounds around the hall, again and again and again.
We are separate from each other and when we go down to where we came from we will resume our lives. We are different and we will remain so in Punjab and Delhi, in Goa and Bihar, in England and Canada and the US. But in the presence of the Guru, surrounded by the words we know, we too are one.
Gobind the man made us so.
If it pleases a good Khalsa to make his or her plodding way up here, again and again, to reaffirm a commitment to that extraordinary man and his creation: if that good Khalsa follows a myth rather than fact; do the feet of that Khalsa wander off the path of God?
It is time to go down to Gobind Dham again. As I am leaving Hemkunt Sahib, an old nihang comes up the stone steps. He is very late indeed. He will have to come down in pitch darkness. I tell him that he is all right, that he is very close now. It won’t take him much longer. He throws back his head and laughs. Let it take as long as it likes, he shouts. God has called me here. He is in no hurry, is he?
The last thing I see is the nishan sahib before the mist envelopes Hemkunt Sahib again.
(25 March 2005)
Endnote: I am indebted to Heather Michaud’s anthropological treatise on aspects of the pilgrimage to Hemkunt Sahib for this discussion, and indeed her intelligence and sensitivity in her thesis and our further email correspondence made my thought process clearer. Her treatment is comprehensive and made my research that much easier. This article would not have taken its present form without her input.
She treats the ‘controversial’ aspect of the pilgrimage to Hemkunt Sahib only in passing, but I append this to illustrate how complete her understanding of the issues is:
While studying the field notes which recorded my interviews at Hemkunt Sahib, I noticed a curious absence. When they were on pilgrimage, Sikhs seldom raised the subject of controversy. Yet Sikhs often raised the subject in interviews conducted when they were not on pilgrimage, even if they had been to Hemkunt Sahib in the past or planned to go in the future. Several areas of controversy centre around whether or not Hemkunt Sahib is a legitimate historical gurdwara. The authenticity of Bachitar Natak as an actual composition of Guru Gobind Singh is called into question, as is the selection of the geographical location of Hemkunt Sapatsring. The doctrinal relevance of transmigration, asceticism, and pilgrimage for Sikhs is also questioned.
Note to Chapter 5, Walking in the Footsteps of the Guru: Sikhs and Seekers in the Indian Himalayas. Heather Michaud, University of Calgary, Faculty of Graduate Studies, 1998. The full text of her thesis is available on Sikhnet.com.
As you will note, the problems she isolates are substantially the ones that I had in my own mind before I went up to Hemkunt Sahib.