Travelling Inwards And Outwards: Of Pilgrimages and more Pilgrimages
Dr. Padma V Mckertich
Image: Roland Varsberg
One of my favourite songs is the 15th century mystic and poet Kabir’s song “Paani mein meen piyasi, mohe sun sun aave haasi”. Roughly translated, it says, “The fish feels thirsty in water; it makes me laugh”. The song goes on to berate people who undertake pilgrimages to Kashi and Mathura but are bereft of self-knowledge (“aatma gyan bina nar bhatake, koi Mathura koi Kashi re”). The song probably appeals to what I feel is my healthy distrust with rituals, inherited I think from my father who till the end of his life had a problematic relationship with religiosity.
Born into a family not overtly given to ritual performances, we did not make regular pilgrimages to our family deity, Lord Venkatachalapthy of Tirupathi. Nor did we undertake travel to exclusively religious sites. Married to a person who has as healthy a distrust of rituals as I do, we still do not regularly undertake such travel.
The operative word there is ‘regularly’ — for we do, if only spasmodically, go to Tirupathi and Velankanni. I am well aware that a pilgrimage is meant to be spiritually cleansing, but to plan and execute a pilgrimage with a family — especially with, in turn, an infant, elderly and ailing parents, and elderly in-laws to be cared for (or whose care needed to be arranged for) — seemed an onerous task. Once we reached the pilgrimage site, I found the crowd and commercialism there quite inconducive to any kind of spirituality. The actual visit to the temple or church did not always allow for extended moments of introspection, which I felt, was the whole point of a pilgrimage. And then there was the inexplicable desire to buy some religious item from these places, for ourselves and for the immediate and extended family — to date I have around fifteen plastic bottles filled with holy water from Velankanni, as many vials filled with holy oil, twice the number of rosaries, many pictures of Lord Venkatachalapthy (with and without his consort, Devi Alarmelmangal) besides many items my family members and friends have brought back for me from their pilgrimages. The visit to the place of worship felt hurried and by the time we returned I was more than a little tired.
The idea of the pilgrimage as spiritually cleansing had never appealed much to me. During my teenage years, I found myself aligning with Kabir and the Nirguni bhakti poets who had insisted that the divine was to be found within ourselves and had sung songs categorically decrying the idea of a pilgrimage. The idea of finding the divine within myself was hugely appealing to a teenager.
Age has not really withered this appeal, but it has certainly tempered it. Wiser by three decades and armed with the wisdom of many bhakti saints from across religious traditions, I now realise that turning inwards to get in touch with myself is far more difficult and onerous a task than planning a physical pilgrimage. As a woman who (I think effectively) manages many spheres (like most women do), I find this particular task quite tough. For, the minute I sit down to embark on my internal pilgrimage, either my profession within or outside home would beckon, or the silence I would try to envelop myself in would remind me of some undone work that required immediate attention. At times I have wondered if it would not have been easier to travel physically to a pilgrimage site.
As I turned more and more towards feminine mysticism, I learnt to understand the idea of pilgrimages differently. I realise today that an internal pilgrimage is definitely arduous to undertake and requires specific procedures to be followed. Unfortunately for me, my healthy distrust with rituals goes along with a distrust towards godpersons and gurus. So, unlike my favourite bhakti saints, I would not allow myself to unquestioningly follow a teacher. This effectively meant that I needed to search for and find a method most suitable to me, keeping it open to changes. This search itself, I now realise, is a pilgrimage of sorts. Like the Kashmir Shaivite saint Lal Dhed, I find myself both teacher and student. These internal pilgrimages that I undertake of course require nothing more than a desire to undertake them and the will power to continue on the path — and that perhaps is the difficult part.
At the same time, I have understood the value of physical travel and the significance of certain sites. I understood that to get in touch with myself and the divine in myself, I needed to be aware of others around me — humans and non-humans. I recognised the value of travel that would put me in a different physical place and bring me face to face with others. Travel, I realised, was also a letting go of our comfort zone, if only for a short time. This letting go, I realise now, is one of the most difficult spiritual lessons to be learnt. If I found some aspects of the pilgrimage site ‘unconducive’ it was up to me to ignore those and focus on the ones I did find conducive.
I am also becoming increasingly aware of the spiritual significance of specific places, of the spiritual vibes that some places possess. Not all of them need be places frequented by pilgrims, but they could be. So a pilgrimage for me now, is not necessarily to a different city or state — my visit to Devi Karpagambal’s shrine in Mylapore or to the Church of Our Lady of Light — both located at fifteen to twenty minutes drive from my house — are pilgrimages I can make. So sometimes is a visit to the lush greenery of Theosophical Society.
Perhaps pilgrimages are best understood as all of these put together. As I sit in my room, in front of my altar filled with images of goddesses from various traditions and embark on my internal pilgrimage to the sound of my singing bowl, I might find myself in the innermost shrine of Devi Kamakshi of Kancheepuram whom I visited only once. I might equally find myself in the secret grove I have created for myself.
After all, we are the pilgrims and we can go where we choose.
(Dr. Padma V Mckertich is currently Assistant Professor in English at Stella Maris College, Chennai. Her PhD, was on Indian fiction in English and the bhashas in the 1980s and was published by Orient Blackswan as Fiction as Window. She has translated S Ramakrishnan’s Tamil play Aravaan into English and co-edited a collection of translations titled Four Tamil Plays. Her teaching and research interests include Indian Literatures, critical theory, Bhakti studies and science and literature.)
