Sacred and Profane Bound-up in Varanasi

February 20, 2008
Namaste Loved Ones,

I am in one of the most holy places on earth: Varanasi-Benares-Kashi, three commonly used names of 108 for this old city on the Ganga River. Outside my hotel room door is a veranda that brings in the air off the Ganga-ji. If I take in even just a drop of water from the river, my life in samsara could be reduced, making moksha closer. I wonder if the boys who are constructing the roof of the gazebo outside care about moksha. It seems that most of us want to escape cycles of suffering, to have liberation however we may imagine, conceptualize, or name it, or whether we think it’s possible here or only after life. Beyond the boys crawling on the gazebo’s fragile top, there are construction workers painting, laying brick façade, cutting wires, and sitting under the shade. On the steps of the Assi Ghat, below the workers laboring, are their tent-homes. Plastic tarps in v-shapes create homemade tents where they sleep with their wives and children during the nights. A woman in a green saree comes out the yellow tent. She checks her family’s drying clothes. Hidden behind a large shrine, I only see a few pieces of the colorful clothes hanging.

Four water buffalo lie in the sand on the other side of the cement ghats. Most of the big beasts belong to people in the milkman caste, and thus it is mostly water buffalo milk, cheese, and yogurt that we find in our meals here. The water buffalo like to take dips in the Ganga River. Sometimes they flop right in and roll around, making sure their heads get scratched.

Hinduism brings all types of beings into its systems. Academics like to point out that there is not a radical separation, division between humans and gods/goddesses in Hinduism as there is in the three Abrahamic religions. Merely porous differences also mark the relationship between goddesses/gods and animals as well. One of the chief gods, Vishnu has had 9 incarnations (the ninth was as Buddha and the final, the tenth, is TBA). The first four of his incarnations were as animals (fish, turtle, boar, and man-lion (by the way, the fifth was as a dwarf)). Another one of his incarnations, Krishna, taught Hindus to respect the cow, and another, Rama, had a loyal servant who was a monkey-god, Hanuman.

As we were embarking on the river this morning a young monkey jumped on our boat, ran around its edges, pooped on the oar and then jumped into the river and swam back to land. It jumped on a shoulder of a man who attempts to make money from tourists through the monkey’s antics. The monkey’s a cheat and a god, our coordinator said, laughing. Rana-ji expounded: “Benares is a city of cheaters. God’s cheating us. We’re cheating God. We’re cheating each other. Others are cheating us.” That’s its beauty. The sacred and profane bound up together.

A young girl cursed me for not purchasing religious, ceremonial flowers from her. Following me, she asked me my good name, where I’m from, and then – thinking we’d made a connection – if I’d like to buy flowers from her. Next to us a funeral pyre was burning. A family had just finished haggling with a priest over the price of the cremation. The recently neglected woman’s body was now being gingerly placed into a fire so that she could receive fortune by being burnt along the Ganga. The little girl prodded me more to buy flowers. I was firm, and rejecting her assumptions about our connection, I told her no. “Bad girl!,” she said repeatedly. She took her curses seriously and their strength conveyed to me that she desperately wanted them to affect me. But I wasn’t phased, and that, more than the words, saddened me. I could only consider her words as a reflection of her and her life and as an outcome of the vast, unjust disparity between us.

Foreign tourism has increased since my first visit to Varanasi nine years ago. Beggars and vendors often convey feelings of resentment bundled with dependency towards us foreign tourists with too much disposable income. We tourists, on the other hand, largely remain visibly unmoved by the many vendors and beggars who want our attention. Comfortable relationships, we seek, and probably with this in my heart I have created a few acquaintances in the stores and restaurants I frequent – where we have a regular purchasing agreement. Still, these acquaintances and I have very different lives. The charming waiter at the secret coffee shop I found speaks 11 languages but can’t read or write in any of them. He works three jobs – waking up at 5 am and going to bed after midnight to serve his family.

The chief minister of the state we’re in, Andhra Pradesh, is coming to Varanasi today. The construction work and other activities to beautify the ghats along the Ganga are being undertaken to please her. She is just as much known for being a Dalit as for being a woman. Dalit is the word adopted by the lowest castes and the casteless, rejecting the word used by Gandhi, “harijans.” Critical of Gandhi, they point out that harijan, “God’s children,” most often refers to children of temple prostitutes, who are fatherless or whose fathers’ are unknown. Before arriving in Varanasi our group spent its time in a rural Dalit village outside of the Tamil Nadu city of Madurai. We studied and did activities related to Dalit religions, cultures, history, and political movements. Time with Dalits illuminated to me how much of what I’ve studied about Hinduism and India is more representative of higher caste understandings and foci. Over and over on CRC we see how studies and knowledge are not neutral but perspectival.

What do we do with a multi-perspectival understanding of the world and relativism when we can’t really escape understanding the world in terms of wrong and right and bad and good, and these binary understandings also have explanatory power? Limited relativism? Relativism within frameworks? Relativism that’s so annoyingly relative that it includes right and wrong, good and bad?

Even beyond understanding the external world, right here, right inside me, even with all of my relativistic understandings, I still so deeply fear being wrong and cling to being right. I fear being bad and so much want to be good. Even if I historicize and unpack the varying concepts as well as any deconstructionist; even if I place them in a complex narrative that takes away their power, that challenges the language, the framing, the dualities, the understandings that they rest upon; even if I can pull them up by the roots, there they are. They remain largely undisturbed, undeveloped, uncomplex. There's something true and beautiful in that though, isn't there? It seems that I must let their abiding presence inform me. It seems that I should respect and engage with them as though they too reveal some kind of truth. They have dignity and purpose.

A salesman here told me that you can find everything in Varanasi. At the same time, Varanasi reflects all of us, he said. I am a blend of sacred and profane. I am a city of cheaters, and that is inextricably related to the beauty of me. I long to have communion with others despite impossible disparities. I am drawn to moksha – now, in the after life, whichever comes first.