Maha Ganga, Mukhba Temple
Sahdev Rana, my trusty driver and guide (1) and I left early Friday morning to drive to Gangotri, source of the Ganges and one of the famous Chota Char Dham Pilgrimage destinations sacred to Hindus. We had been here before, back in October 2020 when the restrictions imposed at the pandemic were first eased and inter-regional travel became possible again.
My intention on returning here had to do with re visiting a place that had been key in the mature period of my pilgrimage – the ending of the summer long lockdown in Rishikesh – and the entire 2019-2020 year, which had started when I left my home town of York and arrived into Delhi in November 2019. It represented a kind of closure to this whole sacred, if challenging, journey and an important line drawn under it.
The journey always takes some eight hours from Rishikesh and given the sheer quantity of vehicles on the road as you climbed higher into the mountains, could easily have taken a lot longer. Just about everyone seems to have made Chota Char Dham their holiday destination now, with thousands of tourist buses and coaches, jeeps and saloon cars bearing a motely assortment of mainly city folk, most totally unused to the privations of these journeys and the impact of high altitude. The newly introduced gate (manual traffic light) system stalled dozens of vehicles at the road side to allow the opposing direction to pass. We were lucky and were caught up only once, whereas others were delayed by many hours. The hospitality sector in the region had effectively collapsed under the pressure of the sheer number of travellers, and many people were lucky to get bed and board anywhere, sometimes reduced to sleeping in buses and cars.
I had planned a small puja the morning following our arrival at the ancient Kalp Kedar Shiva temple close to the Ganges at the village of Thais Dharali where we were staying. Given its architectural style, the temple seems to be about the same age as the two Shiva temples at Kedarnath, ie some seven hundred years old. Then, a long period of quiet contemplation on the banks of the Ganges, a perfect place for meditation. Despite being so close to the road and the village crowded with tourists and pilgrims, there was no one around to spoil the peace, and was quite deserted. Walking back to to the hotel afterwards, I saw that the apple I had left as part of my offering on the temple altar (shivalinga) had disappeared, and then saw that the small group of sadhus who were staying in simple quarters close by, had divided it between them. This is part of that tradition where eating the temple offering is seen as being sanctifying. It made me happy to see this, and later on I noticed the orange I had left had similarly gone.
It helped that I had never planned to go to the main temple in Gangotri itself, as Sahdev said there would be queues going back kilometres as there are no parking facilities there. However, and serendipitously, we eventually made it to the Maha Ganga Mukhba Temple on the far side of the river, where the statue of the deity spends the winter when the main temple is under snow. This was very lucky as it’s reached by a bridge and a little narrow road that passes through a big army encampment down by the river and the army control access to whomever tries to pass and exclude anyone who looks like they may be just tourists. Something about us and the way we looked clearly went in our favour that day.
The village is ancient with beautiful old timber houses and the temple itself. It’s such a delightful, peaceful location, half way up the mountain surrounded by peach and pear trees (and lots of wild cannabis). There was even a springtime cuckoo calling.
I had not planned on doing anything more adventurous, and given the state of congestion on the roads, it was clearly unwise to attempt much more anyway. But at least I was able to revisit some of the places that had so inspired me on my first visit back in 2020, when I had been vouchsafed such sublime mystical experiences here. Hence my having a particularly special feeling about this region.
The prevailing memory aside from my own private experiences is how modern tourism is in the process of destroying the places that it seeks out. Sahdev confirmed that he had never seen it so bad in all his driving career and was clearly very shocked. It was sad to see the impact on the authentic pilgrims who ply these routes for much of their lives, now having to negotiate immense queues of buses, cars and people who overwhelm these sacred places with very little interest in doing more than taking selfies to prove they’ve been there.
So we left at dawn on Sunday morning for the long drive back to Rishikesh. Already there were dozens of buses on the road making our return journey hazardous. Meeting a line of these around a blind bend on a narrow mountain road at high speed tests the patience and skill of even experienced drivers! However, we made it back eventually and safely to get caught up again in the queues approaching Rishikesh, with a distance of some three kilometres taking an hour and a half to cover.
The contrast between the timeless traditions of pilgrimage in this region plied by the many pilgrims and sadhus who still patiently walk these immense distances at high altitude, often in the cold and with little to eat, and modern city folk with their bucket list of the four Chota Char Dham Pilgrimage destinations (4) to be covered in a ten day tour could not be starker.
1. You can find Sahdev at Spiritual Himalayan Tours: https://g.page/r/CdcQlOyFbUM9EA0
2. Image courtesy of unnamed photographer at Google maps.
3. Image courtesy of Sahdev Rana
4. The four Chota Char Dham Pilgrimage destinations are: Yamunotri, Gangotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath. I have been to the last three, visited before leaving India in November 2020.