Monday, February 19 2001
Return To The Source: Part Two
Rasik Shah
Rasik Shah was born in the Indian diaspora in the colonial apartheid type society of Kenya in the early forties. Having grown up in a multi-ligual, multi-racial society, he studied law in the London of the early sixties and went back to Kenya, practising as a criminal lawyer. He migrated with his young family to Canada in 1974 and practised law in Vancouver till 1995. He has been conducting trekking tours to the Garwhal region of India in the last few years and is now retired from law, writing full time. He has short stories at the following sites:
1. "The Ngong Hills" at www.dorsai.org/~tjhubsc/ngong.htm
2. "At the Dentist's" at www.es.co.nz/~treeves/rasik.htm
3. "The Discreet Charm of Nairobbers" at: www.litnet.mweb.co.za
4. An article on magical realism at: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu
5. A story called "The Display Suite" at:
http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet
He has written a novel set in Kenya and is trying to get it published.
The Gangotri trek is one of his favourite treks and he plans to lead a jeep safari to Ladakh in August, 2001. Please click at www.sawf.org/rasik to read his articles and view beautiful travel pictures of the Gangotri-Tapovan trek in the previous issues of Sawf.
Please address any queries to him at: rshah1878@home.com
Please click at www.sawf.org/rasik to read his past travel articles and book reviews on Sawf.
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Swami Sunderananda
<-- Gangotri Temple
I have headed this series of articles "Back to the Source" without adding the words "of the Ganges". For me "back to the source" is a truer metaphor, in that it represents a return to my roots, to my whole cultural matrix. The comment that a Canadian friend made to me once "We have mountains here" in response to my regular visits to the Himalayas is something I have often thought about. What is it that the Indian Himalayas offer to me? Perhaps it becomes easier to consider, first, what other mountains do not offer, in comparison.
I am fond of pointing out to all those who praise trekking in Nepal that many of the Indian trekking routes in the Garwahl Himalayas are pilgrimage routes and are not frequented by backpacking westerners around whom a whole commercial industry has grown, providing beer and apple pie along the trekking route! The hallowed grounds of the Indian Himalayas maintain their sacred quality, so that you are transported to another world when you traverse on the mountains, encountering not just temples but a whole species of people one can only regard as eccentric by the modern secular mind. Representatives of an older culture, the swamis, sadhus, yogis and other assorted hangers-on who spend their lives doing "nothing", in pursuit of some illusory quest for moksha or liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth, or just feeding the birds or being good and considerate to all those who visit -- who are these people? And why does this mountainous land, not hospitable to human habitation but shrouded in a harsh beauty, this particular terrain at the back of beyond, produce these characters?
Swami Sunderananda -->
For an answer, my mind raced to an essay I had read long ago, called "Landscape and Character" by Lawrence Durrell. Durrell argued that character is a function of landscape, that there is something in the nature of place that produces a certain type of character.
So, my simple answer to anyone who says "We have mountains here" is "but you do not have the likes of Swami Sunderananda or Mataji or Shimlababa living there!"
Our group which got to Gangotri to start the trek to the source of the Ganges, consisted of nine persons plus Chilli as cook, Neelu the trek leader and his companion, Dr. Anand, a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine in Surat and an ameteur mountaineer and mountain rescuer who had shown his mettle on the Ladakh journey we had done in 1995, other helpers and porters. Five young men had come from Britain or France, two of them my nephews and the others their friends. Arjunan (call me "Arjun", he says) is perhaps the oldest member of the group. A tax lawyer from Kuala Lampur, he is a colourful character. He has been to Tibet and done the circumambulation of remote Mount Kailas, by Mansarovar, perhaps the most sacred walk anywhere. He is obviously fascinated by the holy and the sacred. He talks a lot about "gurus" all the time. Then there are the two women in our party, Melinda and Emma Chang, both from Vancouver. The four young men from Britain are Manoj and Kaval, both my nephews, and their friends Paul, Chris and Mark Dupla from France, although living in Britain. All the young men are inquisitive and energetic and the group gels well with the goodwill and humour they generate throughout the trip.
I was particularly fascinated by the idea of the young men in the group meeting someone like Swami Sunderananda. My nephews had been brought up in the East African Indian Diaspora but had gone to university in Britain and had lived on there for their as yet young working life. I thought they had been cut off from their roots considerably more than somebody like myself. Ironically, the apartheid type of colonial society I had grown up in allowed for greater exposure to Indian culture, encouraging the teaching of "vernacular" languages in racially divided schools, importing school teachers from the subcontinent, and so on. These young men had not much familiarity with the world of Indian culture that I was absorbed in as I grew up. As a boy, I had heard, for instance, of great Indian figures like Sri Aurobindo and his thought, Radhakrishnan as a major scholar and teacher of Indian philosophy, Raman Maharshi as a great mystic and saint. My young nephews had gone to "international" private schools in Nairobi, steeped in a pro-western bias. I had grown up seeing Bollywood old-time movies like Awaara and Pyaasa -- they had been exposed to Hollywood movies only.
< --Swamiji's Orchard
I was keen that the young men meet Swami Sundrananda, whom I was in awe of myself. Here was a Renaissance figure, representing an older time, the time of rishis and seekers and yogis who took to the wilderness in search of enlightenment, meaning, purpose etc. In the West the outlet for the eccentric outsider was an artistic one, not religious. In fact, Swami Sunderananda, was not an overtly religious figure either; his interests were photography, mountain climbing, collection of rare plants and herbs, abstract painting on rocks. He never talked religion when we had met him before or now, although implicit in what he said and the way he lived was the traditional Hindu world view that a life of renunciation was the way liberation, the life of the wanderer was the life of a seeker. Besides he was known as "Swamiji".
Anyway, after a bit of wandering around in the town of Gagotri, we all got assembled for a visit to Swami Sunderananda at his kutti by the fast-flowing Bhagirathi. A wooden fence enclosed a lush apple and fruit orchard lined with all kinds of plants that the Swami had collected from sorties in the mountains.
We were led to the area where there was a kind of public reception room, an open room with three walls. This room faced the entrance by the river and its walls were full of photographs that the Swami himself had taken in his "clicking" days, photos of himself in, for example, contorted yogic postures, on top of snow-covered peaks, in meetings with prominent figures like Indira Gandhi and so on. Outside there was a bench around the apple trees on which round rocks that had abstract designs etched on them had been placed in position along with drift wood. The Swami explained later that he used to treat the round river rocks with mustard oil that gave them the black shine and then do his art work on them.
The Swami emerged from the building in the back of the garden and greeted us with joined hands. Neelu, our leader, made the gesture of bending and touching his feet. All of us joined hands and said Namaste respectfully. Clearly, there was an aura of awe around him that commanded respect.
The Swami asked us a few questions about the trek we were going to do as we settled down around him at the foot of the open meditation room. We were given a short tour of some of the photographs on the wall and then the Swami showed us through a couple of albums that had views of great mountain vistas and photographs of some special rare plants and flowers. We were also able to see photographs of him performing some unique, impossible looking yoga asanas and positions. Soon the young men of our team started shooting all kinds of questions for the Swami. They spoke in English, the only language they were comfortable with. I translated their questions into Hindi, as did Neelu and Dr. Anand from time to time, but soon realized that the Swami understood English, although his answers were in the purest of Hindi. Because the questions were of a philosophical nature, the answers in the Swami's masterly, high Hindi were not easy to translate back into English for our young men's benefit.
Arjun With Swamiji -->
Manoj, in particular, persisted in asking questions about science versus nature, asking what the Swami thought about the potential of western science. I had often to turn to Dr. Anand and Neelu for help in translation. Generally, the answers suggested that science could never entirely master nature, although the Swami allowed that science could control nature to a considerable degree yet. But he got to the root of the problem soon , by saying that the young men were perplexed because there was a lot of confusion in their thinking which was discursive and analytical and that there were modes of consciousness which could lead the mind to experience the world as a unity, beyond all intellectual and dualistic categories.
We soon learnt that the Swami was in the process of getting a book published. It was going to be a book about his life and ideas and would contain many photographs taken by him. We knew that the Swami had held many photographic exhibitions of his work in India and abroad, and his photographs had been published in many European magazines in the past. I hope to provide, in the next installment of this series, particulars of the publication of the book by Swamiji, and how it might be obtained.
< --Swamiji with R & M
We spent a couple of hours with Swamiji, the boys grilling him with more questions. As we left, the Swami invited us to revisit him before we started for our trek the next morning, when he would give us fresh apples from his orchard for us to take on the trek.
Before we said goodbye, Arjun dug into his little handbag and took out a white, sleeveless jacket that he had told us was a promotion item he had received when he had purchased his Canon camera. It had the Canon insignia marked on it and thought it would be an appropriate gift for the "clicking" Swami. As he gave the jacket, Swamiji beamed a big smile and put it on himself for the photos we said we wanted to take.
Before we parted company with Swamiji, one little gesture by him showed that his mountaineering experience had not yet rusted. He asked Arjun if he intended to carry the little handbag instead of a daypack on the trek. On realizing that indeed that was the case, Swamiji went back to his rooms and produced an old daypack, insisting that Arjun carry that on his back for the trek. Only later after we had trudged through the Gangotri Glacier, did we realize how wise it was for Arjun to carry a proper daypack on his back rather than a handbag as if he was going on a suburban train!
It would not be an exaggeration to say we had met a rare human being. All of us were left elated as the Swami said googbye and retired to the inner sanctum. In fact Chilli was soon practicing a yoga asana on the podium and levitating! I got a shot of him doing that on my cheap camera.
Chilli levitating -->
On reflection, it is difficult to put Swamiji in any special category:
Was he a religious figure? Only in the sense that he lived in a culture and an environment that allowed for him to live the life of a wandering seeker in his younger years, in keeping with the tradition of taking vanaspratha. As far as I knew, he preached no religious doctrine and simply lived the life of a recluse, pursuing a personal regime of daily meditation, maintaining his orchard and garden of rare plants and herbs, perhaps continuing his rock painting. In Europe, he would be some sort of a renegade artist; but only in the Indian Himalayas, was it possible for a figure like this to exist and thrive as he did.
This, indeed, was a landscape that produced "character" as we already had seen in the figure of Mataji and would encounter in the "birdman" Shimlababa up in Tapovan.
Rasik Shah is leading an overland jeep safari of Ladakh in the summer of 2001. See future issues of Sawf Magazine for Rasik Shah's articles on Ladakh and past issues for the articles on Ganges and Tapovan trek.
For further details or inquiries please e-mail him at: rshah132@home.com
In India his trek and tour organizer is:
Neelamber Badoni
Trek Himalaya Tours Pvt. Ltd.
The Upper Mall, Jhulaghar
MUSSOORIE (UP) INDIA
Ph. 011-91-0135-630491
Telefax: 011-91-0135-631302
E-mail: trekhimalaya@vsnl.com
Or:
neelubadoni@rediffmail.com
Credits
- Photographs taken by Rasik Shah.
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