Pushkar and Ajmer are two significant Hindu/ Muslim pilgrimage sites within 11 km of each other. The area draws flocks of devotees each year…and Pushkar seems to draw flocks of backpackers each year as well. I expected Pushkar to be like any other Hindu religious city that I have seen in India and imagined it would be teeming with devotional commercialism and middle class Indian devotees…like Vrindavan, Haridwar, etc…with never ending lines of street shops selling flowers, prasad, malas, murtis, etc. But in Pushkar, the number of backpacker clothing shops and falafel cafes way outnumber the typical shops seen outside mandirs in India. Some bohemian intellectual prob. popularized it in his writings back in the 80s. Indian spirituality is hot yo.
The town is centered around one lake so it’s easy to orient oneself. 50 some odd of us Americans arrived in Pushkar in the early afternoon. Isa and I decided to take a nice stroll around the town and cover as much as we could before dinner. Okay so fine, Pushkar is somewhat stereotypical as there are people capitalizing off of bhakti and literally at every ghat there are a minimum of five men claiming to be pujaris and pestering you to tie a thread to your wrist for a nominal donation of your discretion. Isa and I rock at the death stare (which is critical to survival here) so we didn’t get bothered much. We did our best to venture into gullies that didn’t scream touristy to get a bit of the local flavor. Just in time for the sunset we found ourselves at a ghat where the locals seemed to hang out. Here, we got to watch the magnificence that is the sun set in Pushkar only to rise elsewhere. And all the while we got to listen to a folk music father/daughter pair performing in the background. Fabulous evening.
Followed by cultural show night number one. Learning a new language is humiliating enough but the AIIS Hindi teachers have us be performance monkeys as well by means of “Hindi Shivir.” I was involved in two acts: a play mocking Bollywood through a spoof of the Abhi/Ash wedding and a parody of Sholay’s Mehbooba. The Advanced group likes to do it big and yes, that’s right…at the end of our play an actual wedding band marched into the hotel lobby. Seriously. How cool. We were planning on concluding with Om Shanti Om and opening up the dance floor so the shaadi band was a fantastic surprise.
The next morning a handful of us took an early morning hike to the Savitri mandir. Physical exertion for a purpose is all the more meaningful and I feel like it’s always more exciting to do darshan if you have t
o work for it…otherwise it’s so easy to take walking into a mandir and seeing yet another murti very casually and nonchalantly. Okay, so the Savriti mandir wasn’t that impressive on it’s own accord but it’s hilltop location and pre-requisite hike made it more exciting. Savitri and Gayatri were both wives of Brahma and they each have their own hilltop mandir in Pushkar. And Puskhar is of note because it is home to the only Brahma mandir in India. I have mixed feeling about idols like I do about movies based on books. A novel leaves much to the reader’s imagination and as most of us have experienced, a movie can take away some of the joy in self creating images of characters. So seeing the idol of Brahma in a way restricted his form for me. Maybe I feel this way with Brahma in particular because he is (for me at least) by nature intended to be a much less tangible deity then say Krishna or Rama. On the same token as someone who sucks at meditation, having an idol before me to facilitate concentration is extremely effective. I have nothing against forms/idols/symbols/objects that bring one closer to God…power to them. And hey maybe that is why Hindus have a plethora of idols to choose from - so that one can find a form that one can easily connect with….For instance it’s common to find mothers worshipping the child Krishna as opposed to the adult Krishna because a mother can likely relate more easily to offering unconditional love and devotion to a child figure than a peer.
We had some free time on Monday so Michael and I hopped on a bus to Ajmer. This way, we thought, we could compare the experience of two foreigners entering the crowded dargah during Urs versus 60+ of us trying to maneuver ourselves in the complex the next morning. I know Sufi traditions are not reflective of “mainstream” Islam as some people with overt religious/political agendas like to claim but I’m pretty sure I saw all sorts of devotees at the dargah. All sorts of devotees who prob. ascribe to all sorts of categories including “mainstream.” It was neat to see the significant number of Hindu devotees as well. Frankly, I can’t always even tell the difference sans the help of some blatant external markers. We didn’t get to stay long because the place was extremely crowded and we had to make it back in time for the Mehbooba performance.
Speaking of Mehbooba and thinking of Donovan’s cross dressing as Helen…when Michael and I were waiting outside the dargah during the male only time period I saw a hijra make his way to the entrance where he was immediately denied entrance. What ensued was a brief argument in which the hijra was able to claim successfully his male identity and thereby the right to enter the dargah during male hours. We all have several identities that can operate in their own separate compartments or simultaneously and it’s neat to reflect on how we change the persona we choose to identify with on a situational basis. I haven’t read much academic scholarship on Gender Studies in South Asia but experiences like these lead me to evaluate the (in)validity of the binary gender taxo
nomy that we are so conditioned by and take for granted so often.
That night after dinner/cultural program part 3 we went out for a Pushkar speciality – the “special lassi.” Several of the food items on menus in Pushkar have two categories: “regular” and “special.” The “special” items have a little treat that some use as a spiritual agent and since we were in a spiritual city, the agent was readily available and yes, legal. So a handful of us enjoyed the night on the rooftop at Birdspice? Café.
The next day we returned to Ajmer Sharif and the experience was more or less the same with the added bonus of more stares, less conversations, and the fact that people all up on me in the crowded dargah were friendly faces this time. There is something comforting about a crowd and letting go of one’s own volition. The idea of being an individual part of a whole crowd whose movements are but grand composite movements of the individuals that make it up is neat. Strange I know, but your mind goes to such places when you literally can’t control the direction of your movement and are in a hot/sweaty place.
