a hindu
rimage pilg
Matthew Crompton joins 10,000 pilgrims on the three-day trek to the Shiva cave at Amarnath in Kashmir. Think dance parties at 6am, divine phallic symbols and an experience like nothing else on Earth
India is larger than the world, opined the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Since I first started visiting in 2007, its a land that has continually captivated me with its enormous human dramas, its colossal landscapes, its extreme degrees of beauty and ugliness. Its a place where religion forms the deep backbone of the culture, so intertwined with daily life that almost everything is invested with a spiritual significance. Hinduism in particular is often religion-as-riot, passionate and unruly, and never more so than on yatra. On these religious
pilgrimages, millions of people will travel thousands of miles for a single moment of darshan the glimpsing of a sacred place or idol in spots as distant as the eastern beaches of Puri or the hilltop temple of Tirumala in the far south. But no pilgrimage in Hinduism is as arduous or as revered as the three-day trek to the holy Shiva cave at Amarnath, deep in a snowchoked valley hidden in the far northern mountains of Kashmir. From the 3,377m plateau at Pissu Top on my first day, I can see an unbroken, three-kilometre-long line of overburdened ponies and footbound pilgrims down below
me, snaking up the muddy, ravaged hillside Ive just ascended. The sky is huge and blue above me, with snowcapped mountains all around, a scene that for its remoteness and beauty should seem peaceful, calm and meditative. Yet what I see before me, in the form of no less than 10,000 human beings teeming like a kicked anthill, is a scene of total madness. It will take me two hard days to reach the Holy Cave, and a further day to trek out to the base camp at the far side, a 44km loop topping elevations of 4,200m; and yet still this wilderness is packed with more people many of them very old, very fat, or manifestly
no pilgrimage in Hinduism is as arduous or as revered as the threeday trek to the holy Shiv a ca ve at Amarnath, deep in a snow-choked v alley in the mountains
langars, huge open kitchens offering free food for pilgrims. Theres a real festival air; inside the tent I see dozens of people, men and women and little girls, all smiling and squatted around low wooden tables, furiously rolling out chapattis as devotional music booms from the loudspeakers overhead: Bom Bholay! Bom Bholay! Bom Bom Bom! The twilight is purple and mauve on the dusty mountains and theres a kind of happy madness in the air, passionate and infectious and wild as only India can be, and as I squat on the rocks with my metal tray of dal and rice balanced on my knees, I feel spontaneously joyful, different from the pilgrims around me but not
Whos writing?
Teacher, writer, photographer and part-time metaphysician, Matthew Crompton has at various times called Cleveland, San Francisco and Seoul home; in 2011 he was abroad in the world at large. Passionately devoted to trivia and the search for a freebase form of caffeine, hell argue at length about the relative merits of squat toilets and the complete validity of rice as a breakfast food. Women, zoo animals and most Marxists find him irresistible.
giddy on oxygen and pain. In all this space, I find myself suddenly saying spontaneous prayers for friends and enemies, forgiving people who wronged me 20 years ago, singing happy songs out loud. I trek on, through the security cordon and up again onto the precipitous paths, deeper in to the mountains. By the time I reach the narrow, snowy defile at whose distal end the Holy Cave lies, hours later in a steady drizzle, I feel completely ready to make the acquaintance of Lord Shiva. He is said to reside here, within the cave, in the form of a stone lingam a kind of divine phallic symbol that each summer becomes mysteriously coated with a tower of ice. Im filthy, stinking and unshaven, but I drop my pack and climb the long stone staircase to the mouth of the cave, yawning and lambent in the semi-darkness, music spilling out into the dusk. My feet are shredded from blisters, but I leave my shoes in the pile and pad barefoot through the grit and the filthy water on the cold stones, and with the chanting
and prostrating pilgrims, move on inside the cave. Theres a metal gate before the lingam which, itself, has melted considerably and looks rather sad and lopsided, but I dont really care at all. I come carrying with me all the passion of my co-pilgrims, all the happy wishes and good things in my heart. I say my prayers and make my bows and am summarily shoved aside by the temple minders, and on my way out an Indian Army soldier smiles and gives me an orange scarf adorned with Shiva mantras. The whole thing, which Ive walked days to experience, is over in less than five minutes. Outside the cave, looking down on the steep, narrow valley below, the half-moon shines on the snow, on the peaked roofs of the tents, and the stars are bright as Christmas lights. I feel at once supremely alone here in this distant place and yet equally a part of an ecstatic whole, and I think: there are many experiences here on Earth, but truly none like this. I turn and bow once more, and then head downhill into the dark.