My feet are wet and my socks are caked with mud. When you climb the steps to enter a temple, you must remove your shoes in deference to the god worshipped. And so I did — in order to explore Nasik’s heritage to the extent that I could. I spent today on a self-guided tour of the more well-known holy pilgrimage centers and temples near my hotel. I’m posting an increasing number of pictures on this blog because I think they capture the essence of what I’m seeing better than I can. Full album here.
Nasik is known as a holy place. According to the poorly translated Nasik Guide I picked up for Rs 20, Indian mythology recognizes five locations as holy, and Nasik is among them because Ram-Seeta-Laxman lived here while in exile — according to the Ramayan Epic. The city hosts the Kumbh Mela, a gigantic gathering drawing millions of Hindu pilgrims that occurs every 12 years — a show of faith like no other. Upon visiting Allahabad’s Kumbh Mela in 1895, Mark Twain described:
It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.
This place really does have that kind of power, and I too have come here searching for my own answers. The first place I visited is known as Ramkund — a dammed off area of the Godavari River where Ram-Seeta-Laxman are said to have bathed. Indian pilgrims come here to cleanse themselves in the river and dissolve the bones of the dead in a special tank. It’s said that Gandhi’s bones are among those that have joined the holy waters.
