Bharat Darshan: I Have Been on That Road All My Life (Curtain Raiser)

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

I was too young to understand why we were going Baba Dham when we visited for the first time. Someone in the family was ill, or a car had been bought, or a wedding was being planned. Joy and sorrow both travel the same road to Deoghar, to the Vaidyanath Jyotirlinga, where Lord Shiva receives whatever you bring him without asking why you brought it. My mother carried whatever needed to be offered. I sat in the back and watched the road. That was my introduction to Shiva. Not theology. The road to Deoghar.

Representational Image:Nine Dhuni Agni Tapasya; Via: AIR

There is a train that no longer runs. It was called the Gyanodaya Express, and it carried students between Delhi and the cities of western and northern India. I boarded it as a student at Delhi University and found myself standing inside Somnath for the first time — on the Arabian Sea, where the shore holds the memory of every invasion that tried and failed to erase it — and then inside Kashi Vishwanath, where the Ganga bends north against the logic of rivers and Shiva is said to have stood since before the city existed. I had enough reading behind me to know what these places were supposed to mean. I had no idea what they actually meant. What I found was something that no amount of reading prepares you for. The sheer fact of a living tradition so old that history itself seems like a recent development by comparison. I have been trying to write about that ever since.

Gujarat I covered first as a journalist for The Statesman, at the invitation of its state tourism board — Gir, Somnath, Dwarka, the whole western circuit — and then returned with my parents at a different pace and time, with different eyes, driving through the flat enormous landscape to Dwarka where Krishna is said to have built his city and the sea has been slowly reclaiming it for centuries, to Somnath again where the temple has been rebuilt twelve times and stands anyway, to Nageshwar where the land flattens toward the Arabian Sea and the sky takes over. There is a version of these places that the tourism board shows you and a version that only appears when you slow down. This journalist learnt, eventually, to look for the second version.

Uttarakhand came later, and on foot — Yamunotri where the river begins as a trickle from a glacier and the climb strips everything unnecessary from you before you arrive, Gangotri where the Bhagirathi runs green and cold through a valley that feels geologically recent, Kedarnath above the tree line where the glacier is retreating and the shrine remains, Badrinath where the Alaknanda runs fast and the Neelkanth peak stands behind the temple like a statement that requires no elaboration. I walked through Himachal. I walked through much of Nepal. I came back to Kashi and lived there for a stretch of time that changed the way I think about cities, about rivers, about what it means for a place to hold memory across millennia without apparent effort. From Kashi I eventually went east to Konark and Puri, where Jagannath stands with his brother and sister in a form so abstract it unsettles the eye trained on conventional iconography.

This year I went back to finish what the circuit required. From Kashi again — it is always from Kashi, which is itself the answer to a question nobody has cleanly formulated — south and west through the remaining Jyotirlingas: Mahakaleshwar at Ujjain where the Bhasma Aarti begins with ash from the cremation ground and the city orients itself around the god rather than the other way around; Omkareshwar on the Narmada where the island is shaped like the syllable it is named for and the river does the pradakshina so you don't have to; Grishneshwar at Ellora a kilometre from the rock-cut temple that took a hundred years to carve from a single hillside and where you can touch the Shivalinga with your own hands, the only one of the twelve that permits this; Trimbakeshwar near Nashik where the Godavari begins at the foot of a hill and the black stone temple holds a Shivalinga with three faces; Bhimashankar in the Sahyadri hills inside a wildlife sanctuary where the giant squirrel moves through the canopy above the shrine and nobody finds this remarkable; Mallikarjuna at Srisailam where the Krishna river cuts through dense forest and the Shakti Peetha stands beside the Jyotirlinga as though the two were always meant to share the same ground; and finally Ramanathaswamy at Rameswaram, completing a loop that had taken the better part of a lifetime to close.

Twelve Jyotirlingas. The tradition holds that these are not representations of Shiva but Shiva himself, who is present in twelve locations across a subcontinent that understood, long before the modern nation-state arrived to formalise the idea, that it was a single coherent thing. Jyotirlinga is the linga of light.

Shiva is the god who cannot be domesticated. The other gods have courts, retinues, preferred residences. Shiva lives on a cremation ground, in a cave, on a glacier, inside a river island, at the edge of several different seas. To travel his circuit is not necessarily an act of devotion. It can be an act of attention, of what the tradition itself calls yoga, much more than the postures the world now exports, the older discipline of moving through the world with intention, of being fully present to what is actually in front of you rather than to what you expected or were told to find. A journalist and a yogi, it turns out, are after the same thing. The difference is in what they do with it afterward.

IndianRepublic.in is being built on the understanding that India is too large, too layered and too serious a subject to be covered from a distance, from a press release, from the received consensus of what the story is supposed to be. We cover India like nobody else does because we go where the story actually is — at ground level, in the languages the ground speaks, without the mediation of hospitality packages or official narratives.

The Bharat Darshan series that begins today is that commitment applied to the oldest story this country has. The pilgrimage circuit that has held the subcontinent together as a civilisational idea for longer than any of its current political arrangements have existed. Sixteen shrines. Sixteen pieces. Each one reported from the site, grounded in history and geography, written for the reader who wants to make the journey and for the reader who simply wants to understand what these places are and why they have lasted.

I am writing this from Varkala on the Kerala coast, where the monsoon has arrived and I have been grounded by a foot injured in the Arabian Sea during a surfing misadventure. The cliff above the beach holds its usual congregation of the world's restless. Backpackers, families, a sadhu who appears to be charging his phone, and the ocean doing what it has always done, which is to remain completely indifferent to everyone's plans.

Happy Reading.