January 8-13, 2012: Omkareshwar and Maheshwar

I left Indore by bus soon after 10 on the morning of the 8th, heading south.  It was a small bus, but had a television set over the driver, and so I could watch an Amitabh Bachchan video as we traveled.  The video seemed to be a compilation of song and dance numbers from his films of the '70's and '80's.  He is and was a big star and the video was entitled Bollywood Shahenshah ("King of Kings").  He seemed to me a pretty poor dancer and the songs were all lip-synched, but I enjoyed watching the video (although he looks to me a little like Klinger of MASH). I noticed that Indian actresses were quite a bit heftier in the '70's and '80's than now.  On the televisions I sometimes have in my hotel rooms and in magazines I've seen him, now with a gray beard and black frame glasses, do quite a few commercials and advertisements.  Heading south, we dropped down through a hilly ravine from about 1800 feet elevation to about 500 and reached the wide Narmada River, one of India's holiest rivers, running east to west and eventually emptying in the Arabian Sea.  As we crossed the wide river one of the bus guys tossed in a wreath of flowers, and two passengers tossed in coins.

We reached the small town of Omkareshwar about 2:30.  Omkareshwar is on the south bank of the Narmada and includes an island in the middle of the river said to be in the shape of "Om."  After spending three days there walking all over the island, I don't think the island as a whole is shaped like "Om," but rather perhaps that the high parts of the island around the ravine that cuts across it are somewhat in the shape of "Om," and even then perhaps only when using a lot of imagination.  (I read somewhere that "Om" has 120 meanings, one of which is "Welcome to God."  I'm still working on the other 119 meanings.)

Because of its shape and the temple on it, the island attracts plenty of pilgrims and the pedestrian bridge to the island was crowded with them, along with cows and beggars, on that Sunday afternoon as I crossed it and climbed the stairs up the steep hillside to a guesthouse.  It was full, so I had to recross the bridge and eventually found another one on the south bank, with quite a few western tourists.  After a good lunch at the guesthouse, I crossed the bridge again and walked along the little, crowded street with shops catering to the pilgrims and reached the main temple on the south side of the island.  The temple was crowded, so I walked back towards the bridge and then beyond it and ascended something like 300 steps up to another temple, high above the river.  The Narmada is at about 500 feet elevation and the top of the island, which is more than a mile long but not very wide, at about 800.   The temple has a lingam about six feet high and a statue of the bull Nandi, Shiva's vehicle, in front of it.  Nearby was a modern and very colorful hundred foot high statue of Shiva.  I walked along the top of the ridge for a while and then descended through a ravine past houses and kids playing back to the main temple, which I entered now that it was almost nightfall and most of the pilgrims had gone. This temple has another one of the twelve jyotirlingams, lingams deriving their power from themselves rather than from priestly rites.  Down below, a boat was leaving a line little offerings of floating lights on the surface of the river.  I walked back to my hotel across the bridge as a full moon rose over the island.  

I had a cold coming on (too many warm days followed by cold late afternoons and evenings perhaps) and spent the next morning on the ghats below my hotel. Omkareshwar was much less crowded after the weekend, but there was still a lot to see on the ghats.  People were bathing, barbers were shaving heads and beards, and priests were conducting pujas.  I talked to one shaven headed guy who told me he was from four kilometers away and was on the ghats to do a puja because his father had died ten days ago.  With him were about ten other men and perhaps seven little boys, all with freshly shaved heads.  They had just finished their puja and were taking the plate of offerings down to the river. They all immersed themselves in the river with the offerings at the same time. From the ghats I climbed some rock stairs to some other temples before coming back for lunch.  

In the afternoon I crossed to the island and spent almost four hours, until after sunset, doing the parikrama, the clockwise pilgrim route around the island.  The path was well-marked, along the rocky shores and up and down the heights and across the central ravine, passing temples and the ruins of temples and fortifications destroyed by Muslims.  At places there were good views down to the river and there was a very nice temple, with a frieze of elephants, near the eastern end of the island.  Lots of langur monkeys lounged around the route, much less shy here than in other places I've been.  I guess they are used to the many pilgrims.  There is a large and fairly newly completed dam just upriver. Just before sunset I descended to the rocky shore again, on the island's southeast side, where a large group of pilgrims, more than a hundred, were eating under a canopy to the accompaniment of loud music.  One guy (from Indore, he told me) brought me a little plate filled with sweet dough pellets.  I continued to the main temple and again saw the boat leaving little lights on the river.  At the temple I also saw a very old couple who had been doing the parikrama and whom I had seen here and there.  She had been walking with two sticks and he was carrying a large sack, and he had to help her down stairs. He nodded to me at the temple, the end of the parikrama, and I was glad to see they had made it.  

The next morning was quite a bit colder, with a cold wind, and with my cold I stayed in my room until I had breakfast about 10.  Then I went down to the ghats again and saw the same group that I had seen the day before, except that only one of the kids was there.  They were conducting another puja and I must have watched them for an hour or so.  Led by a priest, they built a little fire out of cow dung and straw and poured ghee onto it.  They fed a nearby cow a handful of unhusked rice.  Nearby were about thirty dough balls, of rice flour, I think, and about an inch in diameter.  One of the guys, instructed by the priest, lined them up and then poured river water and then milk on them.  Then he put strings along the four rows of dough balls and dropped flower petals and seeds and colored powder on them.  Then he took some larger, perhaps three inch, dough balls and rolled coins into them.  They group of men passed around these larger, coin-filled, dough balls, pressing them to their foreheads.  Finally, all were transferred to a large plate and taken down to the river for immersion, just like the day before.  Then they all rubbed some dirt or clay and some oil on their bodies before washing it all off.  Some bowed down before a little flame on a step just above the water.  Finally, they all dressed and headed home. 

After lunch I went over to the island and walked up to the old maharajah's palace, white outside but colorfully painted inside.  I climbed further up to the island's top and again followed part of the parikrama path.  There were lots of langur monkeys and I watched them for a while.  There were two very small babies and I noticed they were passed around from female to female.  Actually, they weren't so much passed around as grabbed by one female from another.  I went back to the temple with the elephants and eventually to the main temple again before heading back to the hotel.

It was warmer a bit the next morning, but I still had a cold.  I found a newspaper that said the high that day would be about 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) and the low 6 (43 Fahrenheit).   I left Omkareshwar on a bus just before noon and it soon became crowded as we crossed the Narmada (with flowers again thrown into the river by one of the bus guys) and then headed west just north of the river.  It took us about two and a half hours to travel less than 50 miles, past wheat, corn, cotton and other crops.  Upon reaching Maheshwar, on the Narmada's north bank, I got off and found a very good hotel right next to the walls of the fort.  I walked up to the fort and had a potato parantha in a little cafe before exploring the fort and the ghats below it.  The fort was built by Akbar in the 16th century, but the small, simple palace within the fort was built by the Rani Ahilyabai in the 18th century.  The fort walls rise about a hundred feet above the ghats and the view of the river and the ghats is quite impressive from the top of the walls.  Along the ghats are memorials to various satis.  The story is that Rani Ahilyabai, too, was going to commit sati upon her husband's death, but her father-in-law persuaded her not to because she was too valuable in the running of the kingdom.  She succeeded him and ruled from 1765 to 1795 and is now quite revered almost as a god, it seems. She rebuilt temples, governed wisely, and now there is a statue of her on the ghats and pictures of her all over town.  There was also a statue of her in the main square in Indore.  I walked down to the ghats passing some interesting temples built by the Rani and similar in style to the Holkar temples I had seen in Indore.  There wasn't much going on at the ghats, though activity picked up towards sundown.  A priest celebrated an aarti after dark, with about fifteen celebrants.  Jupiter was high in the sky, with another planet, perhaps Venus, to the west. 

It was cold the next morning – 6 degrees (43) according to the newspaper that morning.  I walked down to the ghats and it slowly warmed up in the bright sunshine.  There were a few bathers, but more women washing clothes.  I explored the temples below the fort, and then walked up through the fort and had a parantha and curd breakfast.  In the fort is a collective of women weavers and I spent some time watching them weave colorful saris while I tried unsuccessfully to figure out how their looms worked.  In town I saw a bus very carefully edge by a man lying in the street.  Another, larger bus came by and a pedestrian picked up the man by his shirt and trousers and unceremoniously dropped on the edge of the street, out of the way of the bus.  I napped in the afternoon for a while.  My cold was developing into a sinus infection and I was tired.  Late in the afternoon I headed to the ghats and came back after sunset.

It was chilly again the next morning and I spent a half hour or more on the top of the fort walls enjoying the sunshine and the views of the river and ghat activity below.  After another parantha and curd breakfast I decided to spend a leisurely day in Maheshwar rather than heading to Mandu, my next destination.  I did head down through the fort to the ghats in the late afternoon, and there was much more activity than on previous days.  Big crowds were gathering and the people were almost all Muslim, with many women in black robes but many others in colorful clothes.  Many men had skull caps.  Just before sunset a procession came down the lane to the ghats.  Men were carrying the colorful paper and wood representations, some almost ten feet tall, of the tomb of Ali that are characteristic of Muharram.  Apparently this was the fortieth day after Muharram.  The fifteen or so structures were set down on the ghats and then taken by boats out onto the river to be set afloat.  They submerged partially almost immediately and soon there was a line of sinking structures floating down the river.  The friendly crowd began to disperse before the last one was set on the river and soon almost all had left.  A Brahmin priest conducted the evening aarti for the few Hindus there, maybe five of them plus a Canadian woman and me.  We left afterwards and there were quite a few sadhus and beggars camped out in front of one of the temples on the ghats.  Tomorrow is a Hindu holiday and I was told they gather early for the free food.