Reflections on a Rishikesh Ritual

Interview with an American university student
Mussoorie

It’s generally hard for me to explain my experience to myself because I was expecting to worry about ideas and concepts and gods there, and I ended up worrying about the food and about the water, what was clean to touch and where I should go. The whole town really smells and it’s hot and it gets me really tired. I leaned against a building by the banks of the Ganges I thought it was a place to rest and it smelled like urine so I really had to move over. It was really hard to find a place where I thought I could belong, because I really had no idea what my place was there. People are asking for money and you don’t know if you should give because then everybody else can just jump over you. So it’s confusing but it’s also very interesting because you don’t experience that anywhere else.

The ceremony was in a place specially consecrated for it where nobody else could go but the people partaking of it. There were about six people lined along the river on the steps with lamps, burning ghee that they were waving. And they had a towel over their hands where they were holding the lamps and it was being cooled with water by somebody else once in a while. It was strange because I didn’t really know what to expect, what was going on, why it was done, and what was going to happen afterwards.

There was a loudspeaker and somebody chanting over it, and at the same time they were waving these lights. And for a couple of seconds, everything — the sound and the people moving together, the chanting, and the lights — everything came together. It was a feeling that you could distinctly distinguish that there’s something happening. And then it just ended in a few seconds, just like that.

It wasn’t terribly powerful. It wasn’t some kind of image or revelation, but it was something that made you feel that you were there. And then all the people dispersed afterwards. No cries of joy, no hurrah. Everything went back to normal.

I was really there to see what I could find. I had no idea, because everything I experienced in my first few days was so confusing in terms of religious experience. I had no idea what to look for. My interest is religion, and that’s why I am here. I wanted to see how I could approach these things, and I came away not really knowing what to do, what to look for, or what to ask for; if I should pay attention to the flowers being offered or to the people offering them, or to what’s painted in the temple, what deity [is there], how its being prayed to, or how many people are there at one time. And I’m not sure how to put it together.

That experience was what seemed to pull everybody together — the tourists, the beggars, the people that were praying there, the kids and everybody else. For one moment the attention wasn’t placed on me, it was placed on something else that I was also looking towards. And I think I understood that moment in much the same manner, if not exactly, as all the other people did.