BOOKS: POWER GAMES IN AKHARAS
As someone who grew up in Allahabad, I have been aware of the Kumbh Mela for as long as I can remember. Indeed, one of my earliest Kumbh memories is of the ashen faces of my parents when, in the winter of 1954, they returned after having survived the stampede in which hundreds were crushed to death. In fact, that stampede was related to the procession of Naga sadhus who are, famously, turbulent and untamed—so it has a direct connection with Dhirendra Jha’s book— Ascetic Games. I have other, less gory memories too—the mela itself, food stalls, bewildered pilgrims, the fakes and the frauds. All these memories relate to the consumption side of the Kumbh. Jha’s book, subtitled Sadhus, Akharas and the Making of the Hindu Vote, tells you everything you have ever—or, in my case, never—wanted to know about the production side of the Kumbh, and similar spectacles.
The Naga sadhus—wild, ashsmeared, flagrantly naked and stoned out of their minds—are, in some sense, a perfect symbol of the old, the secret, the mystic India. Come Kumbh, they emerge mysteriously, boisterously, riotously, create mayhem and provide high-value, internationally glamorous entertainment. Then, just as mysteriously, they disappear. Jha researched what they do between these appearances—and survived to tell the tale.
Unfortunately, however, the story soon falls into a pattern that is depressingly familiar. The infiltration of institutions by the Hindu Right is something one recognises. It is hardly surprising, then, that Hindu religious institutions—the traditional monastic orders, the akharas and the peeths— should have attracted the attention of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). Pretty soon, the lure of money and
power began to corrupt the institutions—corrupt them, be it said, in new ways—because, in Jha’s account, they were pretty corrupt even earlier. Obviously, monastic orders, here and everywhere else, have always been about money and power, about property and influence, but the ministrations of the VHP have scaled the whole game up to another level.
Nothing new, alas, in this appropriation of old India by new India, except that old India—in the alleys of Ayodhya and the dhoonis of Haridwar—is showing a kind of stubborn persistence. Often this is only cosmetic, but occasionally it spills over into something more. One wildly grotesque detail must suffice for the virtual banquet that is on offer here. Given that notionally celibate monks cannot have progeny, the transfer of property—temple rights, etc—is a fraught business. And since the rules are ambiguous, the whole thing turns on whoever has possession of the body of the deceased mahant and funerary rights, and, consequently, inheritance. Jha tells of one such body-snatch, where the bamboo bier on which the body rested having been stripped for sticks to fight with, one desperate monk picked up the body itself, and lurched into battle swinging the corpse. Fiction fails. Federico Fellini weeps with envy.
More substantively, however, the VHP’s attempt to weaponise the monastic orders has not been as successful as might have been expected. Many people—even Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, certainly Indira Gandhi, of course Madan Mohan Malaviya—have been tempted to make instrumental use of sadhu networks. But the “instrument” is, of its nature, unruly and unpredictable. Thus, the VHP has struggled to make the regular shankaracharyas fall in line. Consequently, the VHP has connived in the production of many shankaracharyas. According to one source cited by Jha, there are more than 100 shankaracharyas today! These shenanigans apparently led to a revolt, and the All India Akhara Parishad was forced to publish a list of people who had been, so to speak, defrocked. Among the many formerly “holy” people on that list, there was one Amritanand Tirth who, defrocked as shankaracharya, turned up as a prime accused in the Malegaon blasts case. Perhaps he can be made an MP?
Even Gandhi and Nehru and certainly Indira have been tempted to make instrumental use of sadhu networks