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
long reads Updated: Jul 22, 2017 22:45 IST
Snigdha Poonam
Hindustan Times
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.
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.
“I
definitely remember we loaded them in,” says Raju, reaching under a
mattress in search of the hockey sticks. He goes by one name, like most
members of the Kanwariya gang: Naresh, Naveen, Ajay… The oldest of them
is 36 and the youngest 20, but currently their place in the hierarchy is
decided by their Kanwar cred. So it’s 28-year-old Naresh with four
yatras under his belt who took charge of the preparations a month and a
half in advance. “There is so much to arrange for. Clothes, trucks, DJ,
videographer, cook, diesel, generator, food, water,” he says, as the
truck whips round a bend, flinging us to opposite sides of a deck only
separated from open air by a rope. The “craze for Kanwar” only took off
in his village seven years ago. Since then, larger numbers of young men
set off every year on a week-long pilgrimage their parents hadn’t even
heard of. The men from Firozepur Jhirka know each other like brothers.
All of these men were born in the same village, belong to the same caste
– Mali (OBC) – and most continue to live and work there. “Some of us
work as cooks, some of us as vegetable vendors, some of us as
construction labourers,” Naresh says, now holding on to the bamboo pole
tied across the middle of the deck. He is a small man with dark skin,
high cheekbones and sunken eyes. He and his friends make up the first
generation of men in their families to work outside the fields; only one
of them has gone to high school. Naresh himself dropped out in fifth
grade to support his family. A vegetable vendor, Naresh makes Rs 15,000 a
month and saves at least Rs 7,000 through the year to put in the Kanwar
kitty. It’s what everyone must contribute towards a basic fund of Rs
1,25,000.
“Why spend the saving on Kanwar?” I ask him. “What to do – Bhole (lord Shiva) keeps calling me,” he says, sliding to the edge of the deck to prepare for the plunge.
That Special Feeling
Apparently, only a man can understand what a Kanwar yatra means to another man. Married for four years, Naresh has never brought his wife along on a Kanwar trip. “It’s not for the ladies. I have visited Hardwar with my wife otherwise but not like this. Some ladies from our village do the yatra but they prefer to walk back and forth, like the older people.” No matter what his wife thinks of his annual adventure, Naresh will keep returning to Hardwar with his gang. ““I like so many things about the journey.” It’s the only time in a year when, irrespective of his caste or class, the world treats Naresh like he thinks it should: families offer him meals, shopkeepers reserve a discount, complete strangers press his feet, and a policeperson accompanies his team from when their truck enters Delhi to when it recedes from the capital.
It’s the most conflict-prone leg of the Kanwariya’s journey: this is when Naresh and his friends come face to face with an urban middle class they only provide their services to otherwise. As Kanwariyas, though, their only loyalty is to each other and to “Bholenath” so the rest of the world can go to hell. The roads can remain jammed, the schools shut, and loudspeaker limits extended.
Halfway down the road from Hardwar, someone does
finally find the hockey sticks. The one to discover them next to the
stove is Vikram Majhoka, the youngest member of the team.
Twenty-year-old Majhoka, a tall, muscular man with a big forehead and
long hair, is also the most educated of the gang. He is currently
enrolled in a professional institute in Gurgaon from where he will
graduate in a year with a degree in computer applications.
He isn’t sure what he will do next. “I will sit for Haryana police exam maybe,” he says, panting. He has just covered about 25 km running with the Ganga jal. I wonder if the labour is for lord Shiva, but he doesn’t even see himself as religious. “Not really. My family does agarbatti-dhoop before the gods every Sunday. Sometimes I also stand around, that’s all.” I ask him why he is here at all. “To have a good time with friends. To have fun,” he says, sharing on Facebook a selfie he has just taken with me.
He would have got a real tattoo of Shiva on his arm for the trip if not for the fact that “some people have been rejected in the physical exam for Haryana police because of that.” He’s making do with a psychedelic tattoo sleeve. It’s his first Kanwar yatra and he tells me it’s been plenty fun so far. I ask him what he likes the most about it. He says it’s the dancing on the roof of the truck between the sprints. What about the part with the hockey sticks? “Oh that’s just to clear the traffic. If people are blocking the truck then you have to move them aside.” What if they are hurt in the process, I ask him as he swings a stick over his head. “No, no, we are not there to hurt anyone,” replies Omi Saini, who is now back on the deck after two rounds of running. “We are peaceful people.”
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.
A Kanwariya wearing a T-shirt with Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s photograph on it.
(Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)
“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.
Read more
“Why spend the saving on Kanwar?” I ask him. “What to do – Bhole (lord Shiva) keeps calling me,” he says, sliding to the edge of the deck to prepare for the plunge.
Read more
That Special Feeling
Apparently, only a man can understand what a Kanwar yatra means to another man. Married for four years, Naresh has never brought his wife along on a Kanwar trip. “It’s not for the ladies. I have visited Hardwar with my wife otherwise but not like this. Some ladies from our village do the yatra but they prefer to walk back and forth, like the older people.” No matter what his wife thinks of his annual adventure, Naresh will keep returning to Hardwar with his gang. ““I like so many things about the journey.” It’s the only time in a year when, irrespective of his caste or class, the world treats Naresh like he thinks it should: families offer him meals, shopkeepers reserve a discount, complete strangers press his feet, and a policeperson accompanies his team from when their truck enters Delhi to when it recedes from the capital.
It’s the most conflict-prone leg of the Kanwariya’s journey: this is when Naresh and his friends come face to face with an urban middle class they only provide their services to otherwise. As Kanwariyas, though, their only loyalty is to each other and to “Bholenath” so the rest of the world can go to hell. The roads can remain jammed, the schools shut, and loudspeaker limits extended.
A group of Kanwariyas take a selfie in Hardwar - the pilgrimage is increasingly becoming a show of male bonding.
(Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)
He isn’t sure what he will do next. “I will sit for Haryana police exam maybe,” he says, panting. He has just covered about 25 km running with the Ganga jal. I wonder if the labour is for lord Shiva, but he doesn’t even see himself as religious. “Not really. My family does agarbatti-dhoop before the gods every Sunday. Sometimes I also stand around, that’s all.” I ask him why he is here at all. “To have a good time with friends. To have fun,” he says, sharing on Facebook a selfie he has just taken with me.
He would have got a real tattoo of Shiva on his arm for the trip if not for the fact that “some people have been rejected in the physical exam for Haryana police because of that.” He’s making do with a psychedelic tattoo sleeve. It’s his first Kanwar yatra and he tells me it’s been plenty fun so far. I ask him what he likes the most about it. He says it’s the dancing on the roof of the truck between the sprints. What about the part with the hockey sticks? “Oh that’s just to clear the traffic. If people are blocking the truck then you have to move them aside.” What if they are hurt in the process, I ask him as he swings a stick over his head. “No, no, we are not there to hurt anyone,” replies Omi Saini, who is now back on the deck after two rounds of running. “We are peaceful people.”