Shiva’s band of men: Into the world of the Kanwariyas
Who is a Kanwariya and what does he want from life? HT travels with a group of pilgrims, who are getting younger, wilder and more male every year, to understand why they take the journey
“Where are the hockey sticks?” Omi Saini shouts into the air as his open-top truck first hits traffic 25 km into the drive from Hardwar. His fellow travellers first look at him in puzzlement and then at each other in accusation. They are six in all, but except for the one at the wheel, the rest of them are sitting in the back of the truck on a deck erected on bamboo poles and stacked up with mattresses. Actually, not all five of them are together on the deck at any point in the 300-km drive between Hardwar and Firozepur Jhirka, their destination. Two of them are always on the road, running behind the truck with a bag carrying two bottles of water. The positions change every 100 metres but without the truck ever coming to a full stop. As the vehicle slows down, two men climb a wooden ladder to the deck dripping sweat and two slither down a large plastic drum dripping water they have just poured over themselves. All that passes between the two set of sodden men across the truck in this split second is water: two bottles of Ganga jal from one of its holiest sources in Hindu mythology – the ghats of Hardwar where the river is believed to descend from lord Shiva’s topknot. The men are dressed like a team: orange T-shirts inscribed with the name of their town, orange shorts, travel pouches across their chest, compression sleeves around their calves, rescue whistles around their necks, and ghunghroos around their ankles. The look – a mix of hiker, football player and Kathak dancer – is only strange until you notice that the highway is crammed with all-male teams dressed the same way.
The whole exercise is planned around the holy water. One is only a true Kanwariya if his Ganga jal remains in motion over the two-day Kanwar route between Hardwar and his home, where he will offer the water to the nearest Shivalinga. It’s up to him to decide how he wants to cover the 200-odd kilometers without spilling a single drop: walking, running, crawling, or participating in a relay race involving a moving vehicle. Hordes of pilgrims have covered the route carrying the Kanwar – a wooden pole with an urn of Ganga jal tied to each end – since the 19th century. Little about the pilgrimage remains the same, however. What used to be a monsoon ritual undertaken in pockets of the Gangetic plains is today India’s biggest annual pilgrimage. Only a few thousand made the journey until the 1980s; around 20 million carried the Kanwar between Hardwar and Delhi in 2016.
What has also changed is the scale and the style of the pilgrimage. The Kanwar itself is no longer two aluminium pots hanging from a wooden pole, but two multi-storied temples fashioned from every decorative item available in the local markets – tinsel, streamers, lace, Styrofoam – and attached to either side of a glittering rod. But only the pilgrims travelling on foot carry a Kanwar these days. The cooler set carry the water in bottles and switch between running like an Olympic racer and winding down on a motorbike or a truck. Nothing is cooler than a trailer – the bigger, the better. The trucks come equipped with a sound system and a DJ who can play the Kanwariya version of every hit Bollywood song. However, if you’ve got a trailer, you can pack it tight with speakers – floor to ceiling, side to side – turn up the bass, and blast the latest House beats from L.A. If you are more into sight than sound, you can hire a company of Kanwariya artists to dress up as Shiva and Parvati and enact domestic squabbles or swipe their faces with ash and roll their eyes into their heads.
“Bhole Has Called Me”
No change in the world of Kanwar Yatra is as visible as the composition of the Kanwariyas, who get younger, more male, and more out of control with every year. Until only a decade ago, the Kanwariya season meant a procession of saffron-clad men and women wobbling along the roads between Hardwar and Delhi. Now, it’s 200 kilometers of free-ranging masculinity: thousands of young men taking over every inch of public space to do what they think is their right – walking, running, driving, dancing, dressing, undressing, bathing, sleeping, getting high, and making all kinds of trouble.
SOURCE-HINDUSTAN TIMES
“Where are the hockey sticks?” Omi Saini shouts into the air as his open-top truck first hits traffic 25 km into the drive from Hardwar. His fellow travellers first look at him in puzzlement and then at each other in accusation. They are six in all, but except for the one at the wheel, the rest of them are sitting in the back of the truck on a deck erected on bamboo poles and stacked up with mattresses. Actually, not all five of them are together on the deck at any point in the 300-km drive between Hardwar and Firozepur Jhirka, their destination. Two of them are always on the road, running behind the truck with a bag carrying two bottles of water. The positions change every 100 metres but without the truck ever coming to a full stop. As the vehicle slows down, two men climb a wooden ladder to the deck dripping sweat and two slither down a large plastic drum dripping water they have just poured over themselves. All that passes between the two set of sodden men across the truck in this split second is water: two bottles of Ganga jal from one of its holiest sources in Hindu mythology – the ghats of Hardwar where the river is believed to descend from lord Shiva’s topknot. The men are dressed like a team: orange T-shirts inscribed with the name of their town, orange shorts, travel pouches across their chest, compression sleeves around their calves, rescue whistles around their necks, and ghunghroos around their ankles. The look – a mix of hiker, football player and Kathak dancer – is only strange until you notice that the highway is crammed with all-male teams dressed the same way.
What has also changed is the scale and the style of the pilgrimage. The Kanwar itself is no longer two aluminium pots hanging from a wooden pole, but two multi-storied temples fashioned from every decorative item available in the local markets – tinsel, streamers, lace, Styrofoam – and attached to either side of a glittering rod. But only the pilgrims travelling on foot carry a Kanwar these days. The cooler set carry the water in bottles and switch between running like an Olympic racer and winding down on a motorbike or a truck. Nothing is cooler than a trailer – the bigger, the better. The trucks come equipped with a sound system and a DJ who can play the Kanwariya version of every hit Bollywood song. However, if you’ve got a trailer, you can pack it tight with speakers – floor to ceiling, side to side – turn up the bass, and blast the latest House beats from L.A. If you are more into sight than sound, you can hire a company of Kanwariya artists to dress up as Shiva and Parvati and enact domestic squabbles or swipe their faces with ash and roll their eyes into their heads.
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