Mount Girnar
The beginning, in the dawn light, was magical. The initial steps, that lead through a teak forest, are entirely lined with small temples and associated souvenir stalls, which thin out slowly and eventually disappear. Emerging from the teak forest at around the 2,000-step mark, I had the first spectacular views of the surrounding hills catching the earliest rays of sunlight. At 8.30, after about 3,500 steps, I reached the first cluster of Jain temples. There was something so thrilling to be at such a height, wandering around temples so early in the morning. The oldest temple, Neminath, is about 800 years old according to the guidebook, and to my inexpert eye this seems perfectly plausible, although the guard at the entrance tried to fob me off with a date of around 2,500 years ago! I responded with a good-natured, but firm homily about the beauty of truth, although I really wanted to shake him and say, “Do you really believe that rubbish?” Ungrounded in any sense of history or architecture as he may well have been, he probably did believe it, or at least did not attach any particular importance to the date of the temple’s construction, therefore allowing himself a flexible approach.
By this time the sun was high enough in the sky to light up pretty much everything and it was getting hotter. I made regular purchases of nimbu paani, a deliciously refreshing mixture of lemon, water, sugary syrup and some salt, to which I have become addicted. The path was also getting crowded, mostly with devotees from nearby towns, but also quite a number of Rajasthani villagers. The stock greeting between pilgrims was “Jai Shri Ram”, but I also heard “Jai Girnarji” and sometimes used that myself. My enjoyment of the climb was enhanced by a number of sightings of Egyptian Vultures circling far overhead.
As I reached the first Hindu temple, a rather sweet-smelling and kitsch affair called Amba Mata that seemed crude and cluttered compared to the spacious Jain temples of marble, I began to wonder what motivates these people to make the arduous climb. A pilgrimage or a picnic? I suppose the jovial party atmosphere is a way of softening the challenge of the climb, although at the same I suppose the whole experience ties in with the very Indian notion that work is worship, and pushing oneself is virtuous in itself. I met a slightly crazed man in Palitana who claimed to have been climbing up and down the hill without food or water for 48 hours as a way of worshipping his god. I told him I didn’t think much of his god’s morals, and as if to illustrate the point he tried to grope me on the bus journey back to Bhavnagar!
Amba Mata is at the top a first peak, which leads on to two more peaks. The second peak is topped by the temple of Gorokhnath, which is simply a concrete cube. One of the pujaris at Gorokhnath has been up there for five years without coming down. “Don’t you ever have the urge to go down?” I asked in my pidgin Hindi.
“What’s down there?” he asked in mock indignation.
“Duniya” [the world]
His reply was to the effect that this, here, was his world.
The third peak was an extraordinary towering cone of huge boulders. Even up here the steps, which were built in the late 19th Century and are perhaps Girnar’s greatest miracle, managed to penetrate, leading up to the Dat Tatraya temple. This is a corrugated shack with a Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva idol. A Marwadi villager, whose party I had fallen in with, looked around him outside the temple and told me that on seeing this view “Kavitha ata hai” [poetry comes to him].
Marwadi Pilgrims
Interestingly, while most of Girnar’s stallholders, pujaris and temple guards sleep up in the hills, two boys running a stall at the bottom of the third peak told me that they come up and down daily. And on my own descent – a fiercely hot, draining experience – I encountered them on their way down, as if to prove their point: a two-hour walk to and from work every day!
Once down, I spent a fairly non-descript afternoon, which involved chatting to a Canadian called Alex who was staying in my hotel. We had a stroll round the town and met a peculiar NRI from Denmark in a juice bar. I met up with Shyam and some of his friends for some contraband Kingfisher later in the evening. Nobody spoke much English and we didn’t have a great deal in common, they being steel construction workers or waiters, so the beer provided a bright spot in an otherwise indifferent social gathering. Shyam himself is extraordinarily self-assured for an 18-year old and is affluent in a brash sort of way. I enjoyed his company on the three times we met, but I don’t think we’d have much more to say to each other if we met again.
Nice Post.,Thank You..
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