Western Sadhus and San Franscisco Hindus

To describe a place as “really touristy” is slander in the backpacking world. Translation: Pack up your Lonely Planet and escape to a different “undiscovered” retreat. Varanasi – the most famous city along the Ganges, the center of Hindu sacred geography, and the oldest continually inhabited community in the world (existing since the time of Babylon) – is definitely “really touristy.” Its ancient ghats (riverbanks) that rise up in a flurry of color from the river are flooded with white and East Asian faces. And yet this place is far too amazing, far too unique, for anyone to pack up his Lonely Planet and move on (perhaps visitors feel the same pull that has kept people inhabiting Varanasi for so many millennia). So the white faces cringe at the other white faces, praying for the ability to ignore their continual, awkward presence.

The hypocrisy of this attitude I find in myself is all too apparent. How can anyone be annoyed by the people who are foreign to a place if he himself is a foreigner? Varanasi enlivens this identity crisis, since the line between foreigner and local is blurred. Europeans and Americans with sun-stained skin live among the sadhus (holy renunciants) of the riverbanks, donning yoga pajama pants and orange, Om-printed dhotis. Heavy, careless beards, chalky dreadlocks, and their lack of hovering hawkers demarcate members the washed-up hippie community, along with their new mentees, those from my generation who similarly find solace in Hinduism’s holiest city. We found another kind of spectacle at the Dashashwamedh Ghat’s sunset aarti. A group of at least twenty white American Hindu converts were the jajman (sponsors) of the ceremony, and took center stage in front of the hundreds of pilgrims who came for the puja. It was their pilgrimage to India, but it felt more like a religion hijacked. My reaction against this “takeover” was visceral, but why?

I think, on one level, tourists don’t like seeing tourists because it is a reminder: that no matter how much you pride yourself on either “going local” or understanding the local, that you can’t ever be local, nor fully understand the local. And this actually goes beyond superficial appearance; there is the kind of knowing that begins in books and photographs and quarter-life crisis journeys around the world, and then there is the kind of knowing that begins in the first few days of life, even at birth. Surely, there is a difference between feeling the Ganges with a twenty year old hand running alongside a hired boat, and feeling the Ganges with baby feet – smooth and flexible and new. And surely there is a difference between knowing the chants of the Ganga Puja as those you read in your “A Very Short Introduction to Hinduism” and knowing the chants of the Ganga Puja as what your grandmother sang while she dreamt of Kashi’s ghats. The kind of knowledge which the San Franscisco pilgrims can never have is a child’s knowledge, an ignorant knowledge, a knowledge of uninterrupted gaze. This is why their imbibing the culture feels strange – because on some level it cannot be true.

But I am then left with a question: What does one do with a passion, a powerful and motivating interest, in another society? Adopting its culture completely seems to cheapen it. To do nothing but observe it feels futile. Where is the middle way?