Living with gods



Just as we came across animals everywhere in India, we likewise encountered gods. The trappings of religion were everywhere, as they are in parts of Sicily, for example, and as they were in my North Queensland Catholic childhood. Our tour leader told me he has 45 T-shirts featuring Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of new beginnings, who -- he said -- is his favourite. In his home there is a picture of the blue infant Krishna caught stealing butter. (In my childhood home there were a number of images of a man-god, one as an oddly mournful child, several of an almost naked man tortured and dying on a cross, and one with a burning and pierced heart on display: all issues of belief and significance aside, I found the contrast refreshing.) He told us that in his childhood his mother made frequent visits to a shrine of Durga at times when he or his brother were having difficulties -- when Penny asked if the visits helped, he was apparently surprised that she had to ask.

We learned to keep an eye out for patches of orange cloth tied around trees, and sculptures or even rocks painted orange. These were signs of the presence of a deity. This, for instance, is the orange Ganesh beneath the sacred peepal tree in the main square of a village we visited, a rough equivalent, I think, of a village church in Europe:



On our first day in Delhi, before our Intrepid Travel tour started, we let ourselves be talked into a tour of interesting sites by a tuktuk driver outside our hotel. Most of the sites he chose were temples: Hindu (to Vishnu and Parvati, with statues of Krishna and Radha, as well as Hanuman and Ganesh); Issan, or maybe he did say Christian (a Catholic Church that could have been flown in from suburban Sydney fifty years ago); Muslim (actually an ancient ruin featuring the extraordinary Qutub Minar tower



and Bahá'í (the Lotus Temple, which owes something architecturally to the Sydney Opera House, and easily excels it in the number of visiting tourists)



On the first day proper of our tour we visited another mosque -- an open-air, working one -- and a Sikh temple. At the latter, we had an educational session before entering the temple proper, and though our instructor spoke too fast and at too much length for easy comprehension I have a greatly increased knowledge of and respect for Sikhism. (A quote from the holy book -- the Sri Guru Granth Sahib -- struck me: 'You are a spark from the divine consciousness: remember what you are.' I now have the last clause of that on sticky yellow paper on the wall above my computer.) We saw two parts of the temple: in the first, a number of men were chanting from the Guru Granth Sahib while men and women, all with heads covered and feet bare, sat, knelt or stood in attitudes of prayer and contemplation. Apart from my bare feet and the scarf on my head, it was strongly reminiscent of the Good Counsel Church, Innisfail, in the 1950s. Oh, and instead of an altar, there was a gloriously ornate golden canopy over the gold-cloth-wrapped holy book, and two of the officiants were waving fans over it. Having seen this, I recognised what was happening in Delhi Airport a couple of weeks later: at a small table near our gate, two men in blue turbans and military fatigues were waving fans over a gold-wrapped object beneath a tasselled yellow umbrella; they were protecting the Sri Guru Granth Singh that was to accompany a UN peacekeeping force to Kenya, of which about two thirds of the soldiers were wearing Sikh turbans.

But back to the Sikh temple in Delhi: the second part of our visit was to the kitchen out the back where vast amounts of dal and chapati were being cooked. A key requirement of Sikhism is that one does regular community service, and every Sikh temple offers free meals and shelter to anyone who asks.



Given that all I 'knew' about Sikhism before this visit was that it endorses the kind of violence that led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi which I'm not now convinced it does), I can say that this brief visit was a huge eye-opener. Not that I understand how the violence, the honesty and the generosity all fit together ...

And every bus, tuktuk and rickshaw, even those driven by monotheistic Sikhs, had images of two or three gods on the dash. How lonely an atheist's cosmos sometimes seems.

Posted: Fri - January 25, 2008 at 08:08 PM           |

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