Book review: The Holy Trail, a Pilgrim’s Plight

Nabaneeta Dev Sen recalls a line by Tagore as she arrives at Kumbh Mela for mauni amavasya: ‘I shall be one with the dust at the foot of your throne’. The Holy Trail is a determined pilgrim’s progress to the Maha Kumbh of January 1977. Though it was published as a travelogue in Bengali, this intense, felt-in-the-bones narrative recounts a seeker’s journey. An unsettling intellectual honesty engages us as we travel with this feisty young woman, stumbling along the way to Kumbh, her doubts only strengthening the resolve to persist. A healthy, robust humour clothes the most vexing situations, till we reach the point when we are utterly subdued by the overwhelming spiritual event of the Kumbh, coming upon us like a gigantic epiphany.

Kumbh Mela just happens to Sen. A chance query from someone she had met in Kolkata triggers off a “whim”. She is possessed by the wish to take a holy dip among 14 million devotees at Kumbh. Instead of returning home after an academic trip to Hyderabad, she heads towards Varanasi without appropriate clothes or footwear, disregarding the shock of conventional people who object to the idea of a young woman “going alone” to Kumbh. How can she be “alone”, she wonders. We hit the road with Sen in the rough and tumble adventure with all its hazards, the dirt, the hunger, the parched thirst for a cup of tea in the biting cold.

Kumbh is an experience to be earned at the cost of comfort. Suddenly, one’s belongings feel like a dead weight. Two small boys, Lala and Gunga, trudge along, carrying her bags, their faces shining “like lotus blossoms above their filthy clothes”. After they leave, young Bhikhu appears from nowhere to whisk up the heavy suitcase with a “smile on his face and bliss in his heart”. The boys, minor players in the epic drama of Kumbh, give Sen her first brush with divinity.

There are amazing, random encounters with strangers. Sen walks the streets of Kumbh at night, shivering in the cold. She is drawn to a warm fire, around which is huddled an all-male group headed by a sanyasi. She sits with them. They are uneasy but continue passing a chillum around, deftly avoiding her each time. Soon, a hot creamy tea is specially prepared for her with cardamom, cinnamon and sugar, and offered to her by the sanyasi himself, “Here, my child, have some tea.” As the Buddha said, we are all connected by a kinship that we cannot fathom.

Finally, Sen takes a dip with a prayer on her lips for her ancestors, while balancing precariously in one hand a sandal that threatens to drift away in the waters. Kumbh is a cathartic experience for her as she melts into the multitude: “When have I ever been able to join hands with one crore of my countrymen for a single purpose?” she asks herself. In her translation, Soma Das is able to capture what Sen calls her “odd sense of humour” (Author’s Note) in all its astounding range — swinging from the sceptical, the tongue-in-cheek, the irreverent, the naughty to a child-like delight in the ironic twists of life. The Holy Trail is a must-read for everyone — the agnostic, the pious, the intrepid traveler, and yes, the one who pretends to himself that he is an atheist.

Lakshmi Kannan is an eminent bilingual writer