By Dr Satish C Aikant
Recently a series of accidents of helicopters ferrying pilgrims to Char Dham shrines in Uttarakhand raised alarm bells about the safety of passengers jeopardised by poor state management and corporate greed. But it also reflects the changing nature of the journey of the pilgrims more intent on making an air – dash to say ‘hello’ to the deities rather than endure a slow and meditative journey to have a proper ‘darshan’ of the gods. It is the physical immediacy of pilgrimage, the actual contact with the land and solidarity with fellow pilgrims that intensifies the experience of pilgrimage.
The concept of pilgrimages in the Hindu faith is conceived as all-embracing spirit of religion, tradition and eco-sensitivity. Himalayan-scapes have been consecrated as shrines for Hindu pilgrimages where nature overwhelms the devout into humility and prayerful submission. The places pilgrims seek out are known as ‘tirthas’, literally ‘fords’ or ‘crossings’. The tirtha is a place to ford the river, and many of India’s religious tirthas are, to be sure, on the banks and at the confluence of its sacred rivers. At a spiritual crossing place, one’s prayers are amplified and the rituals performed are more efficacious.
Having commenced as an act of piety, practice of pilgrimage is now diluted by the masses as mere rituals or visitations to shrines, making it almost impossible to draw a clear distinction between true pilgrims/believers and mainstream tourists. The Himalayan pilgrimages would not merely entail the physical act of visiting the holy places but would also imply mental and moral discipline without which, pilgrimage would have very little significance. One may refer to the pilgrimage to Pandharpur in Maharashtra, the site of the deity, Vithoba, which is not an easy journey, and so, too, is another great pilgrimage to the mountain shrine of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala in Kerala. The discipline undertaken on this pilgrimage is extraordinarily challenging. As part of the austerities each pilgrim must take a forty-one-day vow of vegetarianism, utmost discipline, humility and walk barefoot the entire distance.
Pilgrimages are perhaps the earliest form of tourism. The two form a continuum. Yet in the earlier times individuals who undertook arduous and perilous religious journeys by way of putting their faith into practice were typically pilgrims. A pilgrim’s journey relates to the internal ‘spiritual’ objective that draws the devout to an external centre, a holy site. This intrinsic belief generates a sense of piety or devotion that eventually urges the individual to seek out and unite the self with the external centre which is considered as holy by the individual. A tourist on the other hand is driven solely by the exteriority of the landscape even without considering the necessity of negotiating the internal journey. There may however be tourists who may find congruence with the pilgrims within them. But such individuals are very few; the majority are out for fun and adventure and in search of the exotic to make it essentially a sensual experience.
The mountains are conceived as the abodes of the gods, but at ten thousand feet or above heaps of trash and pollutants at notable pilgrimage centres such as Gangotri, Yamunotri, Badrinath, and Kedarnath, have scarred the face of the majestic Himalayas. If the personification of rivers as goddesses was at all intended to secure their purity and aura, then our superficial measures for environmental conservatism have proven to be a dismal failure. Not only India’s rivers, but nearly all of its water bodies – ponds, lakes, seashore, temple tanks – are severely contaminated. The elaborate religious mythology that has been woven around the Ganga is beyond comparison anywhere in the world; and yet the Ganga, which serves millions of our population, is so polluted that at some places, it could be mistaken for a stream of turbid water.
Disasters do occur in their natural course, but they can also be attributed to man’s failure interpreted in terms of the failure of collective responsibility toward the natural environment and the violence to the environment through human intervention and mindless exploitation. In Uttarakhand, the indiscriminate felling of trees, blasting the heart of the mountains for widening of the roads for the Char Dham project and digging tunnels for the ongoing railway project as well as the obsession with glamourisation of the sacred shrines have only aggravated the crises. Over the years the number of pilgrims to the Char Dham shrines have only increased beyond the carrying capacity of the mountain settlements.
Those who advance the climate change argument for natural disasters recognise that the notion of growth has been the greatest intoxicant of modern society. Climate change is induced not by rich countries as such, but rather by the consumption levels of the rich, whether in India or elsewhere. It impresses upon the well-to-do to lower their standard of living and scale down their privileges. We are obliged to respect the laws of nature, observe limits and lower our consumption levels. ‘Nature has enough for everyone’s need,’ Gandhi famously said, ‘but not for every one’s greed.’
With a change in the predominant function of pilgrimages to tourism, the perception of Himalayan biospheres has undergone a paradigm shift – from conservation and sustainability to commercialism and consumerism. The Himalayan environments and communities have been under constant assault by powerful commercial interests often in collusion with the state.
In early January 2023, members of the Jain community were up in arms, protesting against the notification by the Union Environment Ministry declaring the Parasnath Hill, home to Sammed Shikhar, an important Jain pilgrimage site in Giridih district in Jharkhand, as a tourist spot. The Jain seers remonstrated that the move would disrupt the sanctity and decorum of the hill which is dotted with several temples. As the protests became widespread across Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, the central government was forced to withdraw the decision. In sharp contrast, both, the government and the local populations welcome every move to promote unchecked tourism to the Himalayan destinations with little regard to its social and environmental impact.
Given the premise that traditional religious centres naturally attract pilgrims and tourists alike, there seems to be a growing concern that sacred sites are now being inundated by tourists instead of pilgrims. Democratisation of leisure, social mobility and speedy transport network are some of the contributory factors leading to mass tourism. The sensitive and fragile regions of the Himalayas are ‘developed’ to make enormous profits from the ever-increasing tourist influx. This attitude which has crept into the tradition of the pilgrimages leads to the desacralisation of shrines and pilgrim routes, interfering with the sacred spirit of pilgrimage. In the euphoria of unfettered development, populist political leaders and planners ignore the fragile ecological systems of the mountains. As a matter of fact, the Himalayan environments and communities have been under constant siege by powerful commercial interests.
The objectives of the governments’ tourism policies ought to be to look beyond increasing the numbers of tourist arrivals and revenue earnings to the effects of the increased tourism activity on the socio-cultural well-being of society at large. At present there is no auditing of the effects of tourism on the social and cultural lives of people. The obsession with the economic parameters of tourism must be reconsidered and reconfigured since many Himalayan regions have become merely the playgrounds of the rich. We must understand that the sacred sites are not for consumption but for devotion. Places like Mussoorie, Nainital or Shimla are different from Badrinath and Kedarnath. The approach to tourism to these places will have to be different. It is not a very good idea to ‘develop’ the places of pilgrimage in lines of luxury tourism that merely promotes the culture of consumption rather than religious fervour.
Given that it is not possible to stem the tide of world-wide tourism that is taking place in this era of globalisation, or to dismiss its positive role in wholesome development, one needs to adopt an approach suited to local conditions. The hills of Uttarakhand are fragile and vulnerable, and tourism is often subject to the vagaries of weather. One cannot therefore be solely dependent upon tourism as a viable economic activity. The government must provide infrastructure to generate alternative sources of income for the local population to hold them back from migrating away.
At the 2009 Melbourne Parliament of the World’s Religions the Declaration on Climate Change stated that ‘the great forces of nature – the earth, the water, the fire, the air and space – as well as the various orders of life, including plants and trees, forests and animals, are bound to each other within life’s cosmic web. A radical change in our relationship with nature is no longer an option. It is a matter of survival.’
Let us not forget that Nature is for our engagement, not for amusement and exploitation.
(The author is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNB Garhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
