Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

So it is hallowed ground, and when you consider that almost every hill and pond and copse of trees in Braj is paired with a story of one of Lord Krishna’s frolics or flirtations, you begin to understand the environmentalist possibilities of Hindu belief. The very landscape of Braj is sometimes thought of as a physical expression of Krishna. And through it flows one of his lovers: the goddess Yamuna. In the temples of Braj, she is the holiest river of them all.

So the question isn’t why Shri Baba had launched the Yamuna yatra, but why he hadn’t done it sooner. Perhaps he was busy trying to protect the sacred hills and ponds of Braj. These were every bit as endangered as the Yamuna herself, and Shri Baba, in addition to pursuing a successful guru-hood at Maan Mandir, had made local conservation into a specialty—restoring ponds, protecting forests, fighting illegal mining in the hills, and establishing retirement homes for cows. (Not so ridiculous if you think cows are sacred.)

The embodiment of deities and sacred history in the natural world would seem to give Hinduism a huge leg up on Christianity in the eco-spirituality sweepstakes. St. Francis notwithstanding, Christianity has tended toward the anthropocentric. Our holy figures are all human, and live in the human sphere, which—some people argue—explains the West’s rapacious approach to its environment. Perhaps things would have been different if God had given Jesus the head of an elephant. And you know we Christians would have an easier time connecting to the rest of nature (and less trouble stomaching evolution) if there were a monkey in the Holy Trinity. Alas, we have no Ganesh, and no Hanuman.

Even worse, Christianity spent centuries promoting the idea that wilderness was either fodder for our dominion or a source of evil. The Devil was not in the details; he was in the woods. Of course, that’s not true anymore. Now, we love the woods, love nature, and save our fear and abhorrence for the dirty and despoiled places, precisely because they no longer count as natural. I guess that pent-up Judeo-Christian negativity had to go somewhere.

So, for a long time we were semiotically handicapped in the West, and there was no chance of us worshipping our forests. (What are you, an animist?) Besides, the world of forests and rivers and mountains was not the world that counted. All that mattered was the world that came after this one, a Kingdom that needed no conservation.

But don’t get all dewy-eyed about the alternatives. It seems humanity will find a way to ruin its environment, whether or not it’s holy. The funny thing about vesting the physical world with divine meaning, as in Hinduism, is that the world can retain its sacred integrity whether or not it gets treated like crap.

Years earlier, in my visit to Kanpur, I had seen pilgrims taking bottles of Ganga water home with them to drink as a curative—a curative laced with sewage and heavy metals. When I asked one man about the quality of the water, he told me he wasn’t worried. “It can’t cause disease,” he said. “Because Ganga is nectar. It can’t be made impure.”

And because a holy river has such purifying power, it is actually the perfect recipient for all your most impure waste—sewage, corpses, and so forth—which by mere contact with the water will be cleansed. So there is no paradox in the state of India’s rivers after all. Their very holiness speeds their ruin.

From the crown of its ridge, Maan Mandir commands a blinding view of the surrounding plain. To the west is Rajasthan, hills rising against the horizon. Our media handler, a skinny sadhu called Brahmini, showed us around the temple and down to the lower buildings, where we would be staying that evening. His manner was gentle, almost shy, and although he spoke with a faint lisp, his English was good. He used it to provide a detailed and unceasing account of Shri Baba’s work.

“Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj is the greatest saint of Braj,” Brahmini said. “In fifty-eight years, he never leaves Braj. When he came, there were robbers at Maan Mandir. They gave troubles to Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj. They threatened him and brought twelve guns. But Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj didn’t yield. He’s doing so many good works for India, specifically Braj. Braj has so many sacred places, but they are in a state of immense destruction.”

I perked up when he got to the Yamuna. “Yamuna River is also in very bad condition,” he intoned. “From New Delhi fresh water is not coming to Braj. It is stopped at the dam at Wazirabad. And instead of water, only stool and urine is coming to Braj. So yatra started two weeks ago in Allahabad, where Yamuna has confluence with Ganga. When yatra gets to New Delhi one month from now, millions of people will come to protest to the prime minister.”

Stool and urine, I scribbled in my notebook. Millions of people. Prime minister.

“Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj’s programs are not just for Braj,” Brahmini said. “Not just for all of India. But for all of the world.” He emphasized more than once that they accepted no money from the people who came to Maan Mandir, that free meals were given to all comers.

The most important part of their work, he said, was in the chanting of the holy names of God—specifically those of Krishna and of Radha, his lover and counterpart. Radha, milkmaid of milkmaids, was Krishna’s true love when he roamed the hills of Braj—never mind that she was married—and their relationship was so important to these particular followers of Krishna that they rarely spoke of one without the other.

“So much power is in the holy name of God,” Brahmini said. “You want to make sure that as many people hear the name of God as possible.” Maan Mandir had been distributing megaphones to devotees in small villages, so they could circulate through town every morning, chanting Hare Krishna, spreading the names of God. The program had reached thirty thousand villages so far.

I took a moment to mourn a million quiet village mornings ruined by amplified chanting. But Brahmini assured me it was worth it. “People and animals are salvated only by hearing it,” he said. “The entire atmosphere of the village is purified.”

Holy names could do more than purify village life. They were critical for the broader environment, a spiritual action necessary to confront the irreversible destruction predicted by scientists. “Only by chanting of holy names, the future and environmental problems can be saved,” Brahmini said. “He was a great environmentalist also, Lord Krishna was.”

In the evening we went to see Shri Baba preach. The sermon—or maybe it was a concert—took place in a breezy, square room in one of the buildings down the hill from the temple. The crowd was entirely Indian; Maan Mandir didn’t seem to be attracting any aging hippies or Silicon Valley dropouts. Shri Baba wandered in and sat on a low stage in front. He was in his late seventies but looked much younger. He had great skin. He was bald, with a perfect globe of skull that crowned an expressionless, hangdog face. He preached in Hindi, his voice low and strong, measuring his sermon with long pauses. As he talked, he noodled on an electric keyboard, and every now and then the music would take over, a drummer and a flutist would start up, and Shri Baba would shift seamlessly into song. His best move, which he pulled once or twice per song, was to let his melody soar into a high, long note: at this cue, the entire room would raise their arms and scream, an entire army of Gil Seriques. AAAGGHH!

Early the next day, we went to see the morning sermon up at the temple itself. Brahmini and Mansi and I climbed the stairs through the trees to the top of the ridge, toward an impossibly brilliant sky. Outside the temple, Brahmini led us into a small garden, in the middle of which stood the statue of a blue-skinned woman. It was Yamuna herself, a faint smile on her face.