RISHIKESH—We woke up this morning to a spectacular view of the shining light blue water of the Ganges and the silhouettes of the Himalayas.
After breakfast at our hotel, the Ganga Kinare, we got back on our bus for the drive to a neighboring city on the Ganges, Haridwar, to visit Pantanjali Yogpeeth, a medical complex that combines Western medicine with Ayurveda and yoga. The huge complex was founded by Baba Ramdev, a major guru and promoter of yoga in India and a popular cult figure who we were scheduled to see later in the day. Ayurveda medicine understands the body as an interdependent system, where physical well-being is intrinsically linked to mental and spiritual peace. The whole complex is therefore organized to balance its utilitarian functions with esthetic pleasure. The buildings of the hospital are separated by wide grassy lawns and colorful flowerbeds where we found people napping under the sun, chatting in small groups or taking a yoga class. A fountain representing the spring of the Ganges in the mountains rises from one of the lawns. The hospital complex demonstrated how intimately interwoven the sacred and the profane are, in terms of practice and space.
Our next stop was Baba Ramdev’s ashram where we had a lunch of rice, black eyed pea daal, roti, cauliflower and potatoes and gulab jamun – a desert of fried dough covered in sugary syrup with a hint of cardamum. Signs upon the walls ask us to remain quiet and to “kindly be calm.”
We soon arrived at the guru’s private residence for our promised meeting. In front the tall wooden gates, we all lined up to be body searched by the security forces who guard the residence. The heavy security, we were told, was in place because of an attempt several years ago on Baba Ramdev’s life.
We were told to wait in a humble hut-like house, in a room bare except for a couple of armchairs, a coffee table and some yoga mats that we scattered across as we settled on the floor to wait. We set our equipment (cameras and recorders) up, chatted or rehearsed some questions. One hour in some had laid down, closing their eyes for a bit, some stretched hoping that the guru would show us a few yoga moves and others went for a smoke outside–we were starting to lose track. Then louder voices came from outside. The guru had been spotted running from one house to the other, his orange robe and black shiny hair flowing behind. But then nothing. After another hour passed, we were were jittery, and no one really understood why we had been waiting so long. Was it a power play? Had he forgotten? Was he doing yoga? Entertaining more important visitors?
Then finally, we decided to head back towards the bus, both annoyed and disappointed, when someone ran after us: Baba Ramdev was ready to meet with us.
Our encounter with the guru finally began. “I don’t believe in religion,” he said as an opening statement. “Religion is based on symbols, rituals and a belief system. I believe in spirituality, yoga and a way of living,” he explained. The guru good-naturedly answered our questions on a wide range of subjects, from mental health to the environment to the use of technology in spiritual teaching. Some wondered whether the mediation of technology changed the way people related to his teachings. He answered by quoting the mythic Hindu soldier Arjuna after receiving help from Krishna in the Mahabharata – one of India’s major Sankrit epic texts: “What I could have done in a hundred births, I was able to do in one.”
Spiritual leader Baba Ramdev speaks with India Yatra reporters, addressing the role of yoga, Vedic tradition and the media. Photo by Arielle Dreher.
Back on the bus, when we discussed our meeting with Baba Ramdev, the class was intrigued by the distinction he drew between religion and spirituality. To what extent was he genuine in using this distinction? His influence grew in the 1980s and 1990s, when New Age spiritual movements were creating religious communities outside of the traditional, established religions. This distinction is clearly part of his branding. As Aarti commented during our discussion, “The religious market was saturated so he went for spirituality.” It seemed like the guru had reconciled religion and capitalism. “The whole world is my market,” he said when we asked him who his audience was. Rutwij summarized the general feeling of the class by quoting Jay-Z. “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
Yet, Baba Ramdev remains a very religious man—praying in temples, prescribing to the Vedas as well as profusely quoting them—and is also a very consensual figure in the Indian spiritual scene. It seemed odd to us that he should explicitly refuse symbols and rituals, yet wore a saffron robe, decided to remain celibate and practiced yoga as a form of prayer. We questioned the meaning of ritual and argued that all could be understood as part of the “way of life” he was advocating for. Then again, it seemed that we had to let go of our Western standpoint: in India, profane and sacred are constantly embedded with one another. “Non-duality” or “oneness with God” as Baba Ramdev explained, is at the core of his belief system and what his philosophy strives to achieve.
We then headed back to Rishikesh to attend the evening aarti ceremony by the Ganges. Yasmine went her own way to film the aarti ceremony in Haridwar with the help of a fixer. In Rishikesh, we arrived in a large crowd of about 300 people sitting around a fire on a platform along the banks of the Ganges. The people were overwhelmingly Western tourists: some young backpackers, some older tourists in their late fifties or sixties, perhaps revisiting the places where they had found their inner voices as young adults? Hippies of all kinds. Through the loudspeakers came a prayer accompanied by the sound of drums and a flute. Hands clapped and bodies swayed to the rhythm of the music. The Indians present at the ceremony sang along.
About 30 minutes in, the guru Pujya Swamiji came down the steps toward the fire and performed a series of offerings. To his right was California-born Sadhvi Bhagawatiji Saraswati, a woman in her forties who is an assistant to and spokeswoman for the guru. She too wore a saffron garment and sung along with her eyes closed. In remarks at the ceremony, she welcomed our group as well as a group of students from Princeton with an eerie and ecstatic voice amplified by the echo created by the sound system. She explained what the aarti was: a purifying ritual where sins and bad thoughts, all that keeps us from living in full awareness, are offered to the fire. She spoke in a slow voice, enunciating each of her words. She said that God should be at the center of our lives, not another human being. Next to her, the guru sat in the middle of the crowd, his regal presence emphasized by the dramatic spotlight that fell onto him. She explained that “Mother Ganga, was not only molecules of H2O” but “a giver of life, purity and liberation.” The river was “a divine source of inspiration with whom we connect at this sacred time.” The ceremony ended with the lighting of the bronze aarti candelabras , which were passed around. Several people grabbed the handle and, while facing the river, first created three semi-circles with the chandelier, much like the movement of a pendulum, and then completing a full circle from right to left.
Pujya Swamiji (third from right, in saffron robes), the guru from Parmarth Niketan, performs the sunset aarti. Photo by Han Zhang.
After the ceremony, we followed Pujya Swamiji and his assistant to a time of darshan in Swamiji’s garden. Sadhvi Bhagawatiji Saraswati explained that we were invited to ask questions to get answers which hopefully “would help [us] come close to an understanding of capital-T truth.” It was the woman, not the guru who answered most of the questions—a fact that intrigued many of us. She spoke of the nature of the soul and of experiencing the divine through love. The guru answered one question where he insisted on the act of devotion and surrender to God.
We then came back to the hotel where we had a quiet dinner in the garden next to the bank of the Ganges while listening to a blind musician, with dark glasses and a pure white gown, playing the flute. After dinner, we sat together on a terrace overlooking the holy river and took in the events of the day. Professor Trivedi, Professor Goldman as well as some other students sang traditional songs of prayer for the class. Professor Trivedi sang some songs in Sanskrit. Professor Goldman sang one in Hebrew and then tried to get everyone to join a more familiar song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Nadim quipped: “We’re leaving on a rickshaw.”