I had a sort of religious experience in Pushkar, though it's probably just voices in my head. It's somewhat embarrassing to recount since I have to admit - this at least is true - that I had before yesterday not been taking India seriously in a religious way at all - not just as a "scholar of religion" armed with sociological, psychological, phenomenological and other theories. The climax of this tale is rather small but the roundabout way to it may be amusing.The most surprising thing about Pushkar, "holiest city of Hinduism" it claims (along with a few other contenders), is not that it's home to the world's only Brahma temple: that's easily explained by his wife Savitri's curse. When she found he'd married someone else because she was late for some do (and a low caste woman to boot, though she'd been passed through a cow - in the mouth and out the other end - as decontamination), Savitri swore that her husband should be worshipped no other place but here. No, the most surprising thing about this city teeming with temples (400, 500, 1000 depending whom you ask) and not much more is that it is full of Israelis.
What on earth are they doing in this city devoted to nothing if not idolatry? ("Idol" is the standard word used in the temples here.) I learned later that many Isrealis flock to Varanasi and Pushkar after their military service, decontamination of another kind I suppose, but at the time I somewhat naively thought it might have something to do with the fact that Brahma, much maligned and fenced in though he is, is the Creator. A bit more like Yahweh than the rest, maybe?
Perhaps because I'd had this thought, when I finally went to the Brahma Mandir yesterday afternoon - it took some effort since I'd eaten nothing all day and have found Pushkar's temples aesthetically uninteresting - and stood gazing on the idol, his faces pointing in the four directions, I found myself mouthing the words: If you're in there... I didn't finish the phrase till later, mainly out of a sense of grammatical duty. Groping for words I ended up with: ... I salute you. Salute?! What was I thinking?! What I must have meant is I salute you for putting up with all this (!). Not something I'm proud of, but it's what happened. "If you're in there" sort of hovered on my lips the rest of the day, though, a question without a question-mark, - a mantra if you will.
This morning I decided to watch the sun rise over the hills from one of the ghats on the lake, and after that had happened, with the changing light on the lake (pictured above) and the sound of bells and chants and songs picking up all around (the tinny recordings of songs and chants hadn't come on yet), I had a little time on my hands. Not quite on purpose I drifted back to the Brahma Mandir. There were fewer people there than yesterday afternoon, and the golden light of morning. I gazed a bit longer at Brahma, and concluded: Of course you are.
This reminded me - how awkward that it should be three weeks into my three-and-a-half-week trip to India! - of an article I've had scores of students read by Diana Eck called "Is our God listening? Exclusivism, incusivism and pluralism." I use it to at least introduce religious questions to an otherwise humanistic course: if you are of a particular faith, what do you make of the truth claims of others? If you don't bother to ask yourself this, you're not taking the others seriously - or, perhaps also, your own. (Eck's a religious studies bigwig and also the author of an important book on Varanasi, but this is from a book recounting her own return to native Christianity through the experience of spending time in a Hindu holy city.) I realized I hadn't been asking any religious questions (beyond theodicy questions) at all here, despite having been to and through many very important pilgrimage sites. Oops.
But then it was time to go. (Well, first I celebrated feeling better by having some chai - water, tea, milk, spices and lots of sugar thrice boiled - at a non-tourist-oriented street stand, and an old man came up to me and said with wonder "you are drinking tea!") I'd told the driver we were leaving at 9, but checkout of the laid back, affordable and perfectly located Hotel Amar in the heart of town (thank you, Rough Guide) was done by 8:45. As the owner ran off to get change for 1000 Rupees I noticed an old tourist map on the wall, with a grainy black and white photo of a fat American-looking tourist on a camel holding a camera like a weapon. It showed that very near the hotel was a temple I hadn't seen, called Vara (one of Vishnu's early incarnations, as a boar). Shall we look at it? I asked the driver.
He'd already made the temple rounds several times but was happy to go again. The temple itself is unremarkable - whatever was remarkable here must have been among the stuff destroyed by Aurangzeb, last of the Moghuls, whose visit to the Dharga - the tomb of tolerant Khwaja in Ajmer - did not temper his iconoclastic zealotry. But as we walked up the steps we encountered at the top left a goofy-looking statue, perhaps a meter high and deep, round and painted white except for a few thin lines like a simple cartoon, some in red but most in black. (I didn't have my camera along, so I tried to draw it: see above.) The eyes, looking straight at us, seemed wide in amusement. The mouth seemed a silly grin, the lips pressed together as to contain laughter. He's probably supposed to look fierce: the driver told me later that it was Arjuna's powerful older brother from the Mahabharata, Dhram Raj or Yudishtar. But at the moment I saw him and thought him more like a court jester than a king he seemed to say: Of course I am.
Irshadat-e-Aalea [Sayings of the Khwaja] #37: The more you seek God the more you will be surprised.
