Book Excerpt- Tripping Down the Ganga: A Son's Exploration of Faith by Siddharth Kapila

An exclusive excerpt from Tripping Down the Ganga: A Son’s Exploration of Faith by Siddharth Kapila (Speaking Tiger, 2024)

A Metamorphosis of God in Kedarnath

At a height of 3,583 metres, Kedarnath lies in the Garhwal Himalayas on the banks of the Mandakini River. As a jyotirlingam, or jyotirlinga, a spot where Lord Shiva’s light, jyoti, illuminates the Earth, Kedarnath is among India’s most revered Shiva temples.

The Kedarnath Valley was hit by unprecedented flash floods in June 2013. Over 5,000 people in the state of Uttarakhand were ‘presumed dead’. Even though the Kedarnath temple stayed intact, its surroundings—hotels, resthouses, shops—all flowed away with the waters. The search for bodies continued for several months afterwards. Approximately four hundred bodies were found in the valley ‘in highly decomposed states’, the newspapers said.

October 2016

Hanging by a string from the rear-view mirror, Lord Hanuman was dancing to his chalisa playing on the stereo. The Innova shook and the words ‘Jai Bhole Baba’ stickered on the rear screen came into my focus, and I thought, Yes, God’s signal is spot on today. Shiva’s blessings fit my journey perfectly indeed.

Panditji, seated behind me, had his hands joined in supplication. He began chanting and handed me a little prayer book. I remembered most of the words to the Hanuman Chalisa, but not by heart.

‘Jai Hanuman gyaan gun sagar, Jai Kapees tihun lok ujagar.’ He pulled up his legs and crossed them under his dhoti. ‘Ramdoot atulit bal dhama…’

At about five-foot-ten, Panditji, or Pandit Hemant, was taller than me by a couple of inches. And even though he was thirty-four, my equal in age, I had to treat him with that special reverence reserved for people much older than myself. This was not just because Panditji was, well, a Hindu priest, and we were going to one of the most sacred Shiva temples in the country. It was also because he was one of my mother’s legion of Rishikesh contacts. A pandit at Shivsagar Ashram.

Panditji clapped his hands and met my eyes, encouraging me to continue. His eyes were a kind brown, and his scant stubble was the main masculine aspect to his soft-featured Himachali face. He had a red tika, now dried, on his forehead. It split as he furrowed his brow in concentration.

I attempted to add to what was now a chorus (for the driver, Sanjay, too, I spied lip-syncing), but I sensed immediately that my words came more as strained echoes. So I motioned Panditji to carry on. I would listen to him quietly. How could I be expected to strike a beat of devotion in this state of undulating turbulence?

To my right, the road disappeared into a sheer drop. In the valley far below, the Ganga gleamed under the sun and across it a thick carpet of greens unfurled on the hills as if without end.

The trees were getting darker. They were taller, slenderer. I rolled down my window and a bracing piny scent took me over. Rishikesh was now some hundred kilometres behind me. Why, Rishikesh was where my religious journey began, I thought smiling to myself, long before I was even conceived in my mother’s womb!

The car banked a hard left and I roused up. ‘Sanjay, please take it easy!’

‘Don’t worry, bhaiyya. I’ve been driving in these mountains for ten years, and on this route, I can go eyes closed.’ Sanjay, a Rishikesh resident, looked no older than twenty-five, but the ease with which he steered over the bends belied his years. ‘You must know the story of Kedarnath?’ he turned back and asked with a twinkle in his eyes. I did, but I was curious to hear this young man’s narration. Like many millennials, Sanjay’s hair was up in spikes, and his ears were blocked with earphones. The rest of him though was all Hindu Indian. The back of his steering hand was tattooed with a fading ‘Om’ and his left bicep bore the stamp of Lord Shiva’s Trident.

‘After the Pandavas won the battle of Mahabharata, they prayed to Lord Krishna asking for forgiveness,’ Sanjay said. ‘They begged him to open the gates to heaven. But he told them clearly, the decision was not his. The Pandavas had spilt the blood of their grandfather, their gurus, their brothers, and the only way they could get to heaven was by asking Shivji for forgiveness.’

Panditji’s prayers came to an abrupt stop.

‘Sanjay, stop the car!’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were feeling sick, Panditji?’

The priest clogged his mouth with his orange scarf. ‘I just…I didn’t realize it. It happened so suddenly, Siddharthji.’

We got off the car and I took in a deep breath. The last time I came up this way was almost twenty years ago. Back then, the in-vogue men’s hairstyle was long and wavy, the front falling over the forehead in leisurely droops, inspired by Ajay Devgn rather than Instagram. Kedarnath was, I believed, a place refined by the Himalayas and unspoiled by man. And I was an energetic teenager in whose recall lay stored a volume of prayers, the uppermost of which was the Hanuman Chalisa.

I helped Panditji get cleaned up, and we got back on our way. A milestone peeking out from a clutch of rhododendrons said: ‘You are in The Himalayas. This is Devbhoomi: The Abode of the Gods.’

Excerpted with permissions from the author and publishers of Tripping Down the Ganga: A Son’s Exploration of Faith by Siddharth Kapila (Speaking Tiger, 2024).

Read an exclusive interview with author Siddharth Kapila HERE

About the Book

‘To read Tripping Down the Ganga is to stream down Hinduism’s holiest river—the lifewater of India, the mirror of our immemorial civilization—on the raft of Kapila’s immensely readable prose.’—Shashi Tharoor

As a schoolboy in the early 1990s, Siddharth Kapila began accompanying his devout and intrepid mother on numerous yaatras to sacred sites along the Ganga. In 2015, now a more sceptical young man, he decides to visit them on his own. And over the next seven years, as he journeys from Gaumukh, the source of the river in the high Himalayas, to Ganga Sagar, where it meets the Bay of Bengal, he realizes that he isn’t simply exploring his mother’s faith—the faith of tens of millions of Hindus—but also his own.

Up in Gangotri, he meets renunciant babas who share with him their life stories and their meagre food. In Kedarnath, a sadhu tells him how the Shiva temple miraculously survived the devastating floods of 2013. At Badrinath, he attends a family friend’s marriage to Vishnu, to undo a defect in her horoscope. Walking from Haridwar to Rishikesh with the kanwariyas, many of whom have travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot, he sheds his disdain for these young men often accused of bullying and aggression. In Allahabad—now Prayagraj—he tries to parse facts about the Naga sadhus from legend as he watches them perform astonishing feats of strength. Ancient Varanasi offers diverse experiences, from a bhang-induced revelry on Mahashivratri to conversations on the occult with Aghoris, who tell him why they sometimes feed on the dead. In between, he visits Bodh Gaya, where he prays to Shiva at the Mahabodhi Temple dedicated to Buddha.

Moving back and forth in time, Kapila reflects on the politics—and economics—of religion, the hypocrisy and bigotry of some of his fellow pilgrims, the opportunism of some sadhus and the integrity and compassion of others. And he reflects, too, on the resilience of people’s devotion, the great diversity of Hinduism, and the mighty pull of the Ganga, which keeps bringing him back to itself no matter how hard he reasons against the faith of his birth.

As much an entertaining travelogue as an introspective memoir, Tripping Down the Ganga is an unprecedented book on the everyday Hinduism of believers and non-believers alike.

About the Author

Siddharth Kapila is a lawyer turned writer. He has written for The Wire, Livemint and The Indian Express, among other publications, with a primary focus on the Hindu faith and culture. He holds a Legal Practice Course (LPC) postgraduate diploma from The University of Law, London, a BA in Law from Cardiff University, UK and a BA (Hons) in Economics from Delhi University. He was born and raised in Delhi. This is his first book.