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Belief Above All

Photos by Roko Belic (www.wadirum1@aol.com)

The Search for Hindu Ascetics in the Himalayas

There are caves in India that lead all the way to China. So said the lanky man with a flowing black beard and a robust handlebar mustache that would have done Stalin proud. He called himself Pushkar Baba, meaning “the Sage from Pushkar,” that charming little desert town in western India known the world over for its mammoth camel festival. We met in the lush Garhwal region of the Himalayas. Pushkar Baba was on a religious pilgrimage to Gangotri, a popular destination for Hindus near the Chinese border.

I was on something of a holy mission myself – as a researcher, guide and interpreter associated with a documentary film on Hindu ascetics, or “sadhus.” There were three of us involved with the project. Our cameraman was Roko Belic, a young San Francisco-based filmmaker whose documentary film, “Genghis Blues” (about throat singers in Mongolia), was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 and won more than 20 awards around the world. The director was Folco Terzani, a Cambridge-educated ethnic Italian who often travels to India. His most recent film was on the life and work of Mother Teresa – the last documentary on the remarkable “Saint of the Gutters” from Calcutta. “That movie was about love,” Terzani likes to tell people. “This one will be about peace.”

There are probably tens of millions of sadhus in India, and they occupy a special place in the country’s culture. Devoid of caste and free to affiliate with any social group, they travel from one sacred site to another, singing hymns and reciting poetry about the unity of mankind. Traditionally, they sever all worldly connections in a quest to achieve moksha, or the liberation of the soul from rebirth.

Yet, it is not properly understood just what these mendicants are, leave alone what a civilization gains or loses by encouraging such large numbers to do no remunerative work whatsoever. It was our hope that a well-researched documentary film would shed new light on the paradox. The film’s title? “Twilight Men” — nomads who meditate in the wilderness but whose mental state lies somewhere between this world and that of the gods. At the very least, we hoped the film would provoke new ways of thinking, especially in the West. As the world’s leading consumers of just about everything, Americans, we felt, could particularly learn a lesson or two from the austerity of sadhus.

When we first met Pushkar Baba in a temple in the Himalayas, he looked every bit the classical sadhu: tranquil and possessed of a quiet dignity. His long matted hair was tied in a neat bun, and around his neck he wore a rosary of 64 beads, the well-known knobby berries of the holy Rudrakshi plant associated with Lord Shiva. He spoke in a courtly, sing-song manner, his words sounding strangely seductive and mysterious. “There are rishis (sages) 200 to 500 years old up in the mountains,” he told us, his soft brown eyes twinkling. “Naked, they live on wild herbs and leaves. I can take you there.”

We were hooked. Terzani and I had heard and read about ascetics meditating in Himalayan caves, blissfully detached from the rest of the world. Some of them are known to practice the most rigorous austerities for salvation. Well-documented examples include holding one arm over the head till it becomes so stiff that it can never be lowered. (Others hold up both arms so that they can’t feed themselves.)

The point of this hideous, unimaginable self-mortification? To prove that ease and comfort aren’t all that count in life. It’s a line of thinking so completely foreign to the West that it can only be understood by realizing that a spirit of renunciation, of which bodily degradation is probably the most extreme form, has always run through the fabric of Indian life. As the great German sociologist Max Weber commented as late as 1958: “Indian religiosity is the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world, theoretically, practically, and to the greatest extent.”

Pushkar Baba announced that the following morning he would take us to the caves leading to China. We were excited but also a bit nervous. Suppose that instead of meeting holy men, we ran into soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army? It was a chilling prospect: Two American citizens accompanied by an Indian face to face with Chinese troops. We would almost certainly be accused of being CIA agents and locked up for the rest of our lives in some horrible Chinese prison, condemned to make footballs or teddy bears for export to the U.S. Yet if we wished to take the message of Indian asceticism to the West, we would have to make sacrifices.

A rude shock awaited us the next morning. Pushkar Baba had disappeared, leaving behind a cryptic hand-written note in Hindi. “Meet me in the evening at Parmahans Ashram, next to Naru Guest House,” it read. We assumed he would meet us in Gangotri, a pilgrim resort where we were all headed. A six-hour taxi ride brought us to the place, a cluster of seedy ashrams overlooking the Ganges, India’s holiest river. As it turned out, we failed to find Pushkar Baba. This made us wonder if he had gone to Gaumukh, the source of the Ganges, 18 kilometers upstream.

So the following morning we set out for Gaumukh (literally, “cow’s mouth”) on foot – the only way to get there. Bogged down by camera equipment at an altitude approaching 4,000 meters, our breathing was slow and labored. After eight hours of huffing and puffing, we finally reached our destination, a rocky wind-swept wasteland of a valley that might have been a site on Mars. At one end, from the base of a muddy glacier, spouted the Ganges, its waters sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight.

It was a glimpse of the Himalaya’s famed splendour, a magical sight to behold. But disappointment soon got the better of us – there was still no trace of Puskhar Baba. By now, we were convinced that he was an impostor who had fooled us with his fantastic stories. And for the first time since we began our journey, it dawned on us that India’s famed spirituality might be a bit of a sham. I was tempted to let my indignation loose on the nearest sadhu I could find, but a cold night was rapidly approaching. As we had neither camping equipment nor food, the only option was to shack up with one of the three sadhus living in the area in canvas tents.Unabashedly, we ducked into the nearest one.

A short, frail man was seated cross-legged on the floor, pumping a gas stove. He offered us cups of steaming hot tea and then proceeded to tell us the legend of the Ganges. “This is not a river,” he said somberly, “but the great goddess Ganga.” We heard how she came down in the form of water to bring salvation to 60,000 princes who had been reduced to ashes by a sage’s curse.

Our hospitable host, Vyas Giri, was a native of the Himalayas. I asked him if he knew of any yogis in the vicinity. He smiled and shook his head. Meeting such realized beings is not easy, he said, echoing the well-worn spiritual axiom that only when the pupil is ready does the master appear. I asked Vyas why he wasn’t living in a cave, searching for life’s higher truths. “If you give me a million rupees,” he replied deadpan, “I’ll live in a cave. That’s what I really want to do.” Then, pointing to the boiling kettle by his feet, he added wryly: “This is not the life of a sadhu.”

We were stunned. What did money have to do with retiring to a cave? Vyas clarified his point: As long as he had to cook and worry about the constant flow of rations in such inhospitable terrain, he could hardly pursue spiritual matters. Even prehistoric sages, he told us, enjoyed the patronage of kings who took care of their needs. We were impressed by the man’s candidness. Though dressed in a holy garb, he had no pretensions of being a monk. On the contrary, Vyas admitted, he and his neighboring sadhus were nothing but businessmen who put up pilgrims for a fee.

We bid Vyas farewell two days later, struck by our failure to find even a single genuine sadhu in one of the holiest spots of the country. The closest thing to an ascetic in the area was a young Brahmin who had been living for the past four years in a flimsy shack – it wasn’t even a tent – at the foot of a glacier. But he was no sage.

Midway through our hike down the mountains, to our utter amazement, we ran into Pushkar Baba. He was trekking up to meet the goddess Ganga, full of gusto. He greeted us heartily with an impish smile and, as if nothing was amiss, launched into one of his spellbinding stories, this time about wild plants and miraculous cures. At this point we understood how inextricably linked myth and reality can be in the Indian mind.

For Puskhar Baba, it wasn’t important in the least whether or not those caves leading to China actually existed. What mattered was his belief in their existence, which was similar to his faith in Hindu gods who are said to be beyond the concepts of time, space and matter. To our great surprise, this insight proved to be strangely if fleetingly liberating. For several moments, as we listened to Pushkar Baba, it didn’t matter to us that his tales were entirely fanciful.

(This journey occurred at the turn of the last millennium. Twilight Men, surely one of the world’s most difficult films, remains a work in progress.)

About the Author

Ajay Singh is a writer, former tea planter and chicken farmer who began his career in journalism at the New Delhi bureau of the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1988. Since then, he has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, Time Inc.’s Hong Kong-based newsweekly Asiaweek, and India’s leading newsweekly India Today. Singh is also the author of “Give ’Em Hell, Hari,” a postcolonial East-West comedy that was Waterstone Book of the Month in Britain in March 1996 and on the bestseller lists in Hong Kong, Ireland and Scotland.