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

No, I said. It is I who must apologize.

Conditions on the yatra were spartan but well managed. The tents were large, sturdy structures of green canvas, perhaps handed down by the British upon their departure in 1948. Each tent was strung with a single, blinding lightbulb hanging from an old wire connecting it to the generator. There was a steel water tank on a trailer, and a truck mounted with an oven for baking flatbread, and a crew of at least half a dozen guys whose job it was to drive ahead of the march, set up camp, and cook. All we had to do was walk.

There is a long tradition of political walking in India, and this particular yatra happened to coincide with the anniversary of Ghandi’s famous Salt March, the yatra of yatras. For more than three weeks in the spring of 1930, Gandhi and an ever-increasing army of followers marched toward the sea, where they would make salt from seawater, symbolically violating the Salt Act imposed by Britain fifty years earlier. Along the way, Gandhi made evening speeches to the marchers and to the thousands of local people who came to investigate.

Covered widely in the international media, the Salt March gave a huge symbolic boost to the Indian independence movement, and put civil disobedience on the map as a major political strategy. The marches of the American civil rights movement were yatras. And it was in hope of a similar runaway train of popular righteousness that Shri Baba and company had launched the Yamuna yatra. So far, though, he had motivated somewhat fewer marchers than Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. had. It was hard to be sure in the dark, but I counted about twenty tents.

In the middle of camp, they were holding a satsang —a kind of group discussion or teach-in. Two dozen people from nearby villages sat on the ground in the garish light of a work lamp, while Jai talked over a microphone connected to a pair of earsplitting loudspeakers.

“You are the owners of this country,” Mansi translated. “Taxes are supposed to perform for you, but they don’t. You don’t get what you deserve. Come with us tomorrow morning. Come walk with us. Come with us to Delhi.”

At quarter past five in the morning, I became aware of the ground, and then of the tent, and then of the sound of tiny cymbals clashing together. I unzipped the collapsible mesh pod of mosquito netting—thoughtfully provided by Sunil—and stumbled out of my chrysalis into the dark of a new day. Bats flickered overhead.

Jai was on the loudspeakers again. “FIVE MINUTES!” he said, through a squeal of feedback. “IT’S OKAY TO CHANT GOD’S NAME, SO LET’S DO IT!” He warmed us up with a piercing round of Radhe Krishna Radhe Sharma. A couple of men in orange robes bumped around and got in line behind the white pickup truck on which the loudspeakers were mounted. Jai gave us our marching orders. “Don’t get in front of the truck!” he said. There was some hollering, and they gave the truck a push. The driver popped the clutch, the engine burped to life, and just like that, the yatra was in business for another day.

There weren’t more than twenty-five of us. We walked down the road, following the pickup truck, which was mounted with side-facing banners showing pictures of Shri Baba and the leader of the farmers’ union, with whom Shri Baba had formed a strategic alliance. There were several union members among us, recognizable by their green caps.

We walked, passing misty fields of green wheat, and the day came up. I hung back a little, avoiding the sonic kill zone directly behind the truck, and settled into the rhythm of the march. Eventually Jai would tire of leading us in chants of radhe-this and radhe-that, and a combo of young sadhus would get out their drums and cymbals and improvise a vigorous set of Krishna-themed songs. Jumbled among them in the bed of the truck, a young man cradling a laptop with a data antenna and a webcam tried to throw together a live webcast. Once the musicians exhausted themselves, they would patch the speakers into the computer to play some pre-recorded Krishna hymns, and then some archival recordings of Shri Baba himself, his halting baritone resounding over the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Then we would pass through a village, and Jai would get excited again, and take up the mic, and the cycle would repeat.

At breakfast, eaten off leaf plates set on the ground by the side of the road, Sunil suggested that Mansi and I might prefer to ride in the pickup truck, or even in his jeep. It took some effort to convince him that we had come to the march with marching in mind.

The modest procession began again. A squat sadhu with a gray beard and a potbelly ranged to the side of the road, handing out handbills to onlookers, who gathered in small groups to read the news. Creepy Baba had his camera out. For every picture he took of the marchers or the countryside, though, he seemed to take two of Mansi.

Oh god, she said. He is so creepy.

Mansi wandered off to take some pictures of her own, and I found myself overtaking a trim man of sixty-some years, who was pushing a bicycle. He had been at the previous evening’s teach-in.

“What is your country?” he asked, in cautious English.

“USA,” I said, and he nodded and smiled. For his benefit, I decided to rock out my very best Hindi.

“Kya yatra acha hai?” Is the yatra good?

He nodded again. “The sleeping Indians must awake,” he said, employing somewhat more English than I had expected. “Natural resources provide so many things to humanity, without which life cannot exist. The people in high power are interested only in a life of luxury. They must be dethroned.”

His name was M.P. and he was a retired schoolteacher from a nearby village. His shirt pocket was weighted down with pens. He told me he was only joining the yatra for the day. I asked him if he thought the yatra would have any effect.

“If the task is great and the desire is good, it must have success,” he said.

We walked a little farther.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He looked at me in smiling disbelief.

“But God gives air, water, so many things! To not respect him and believe in him is ingratitude.”

I couldn’t disagree. But I couldn’t agree, either.

“I’m grateful,” I said. “And I respect him. I just don’t believe in him.”

Our conversation was interrupted by Jai, who sprang from between us and bolted for the truck, jabbing the air with his fingers as he went. A new song had started, and he wanted to be in the mosh pit.

The more I thought about the Yamuna yatra, the more it blew my mind what a diverse range of traditions it interwove. There was the forceful nonviolence of Gandhi’s political campaigns, of course. Then there was the ancient practice of religious pilgrimage, Hindu or otherwise. But since I’m an American, it was also impossible to spend any time with a troupe of scruffy, nature-worshipping activist holy men without stumbling, inevitably, over Henry David Thoreau.

It’s hard to believe that a single, self-proclaimed slacker could be largely responsible for delivering us two of the best ideas of the last 150 years, but in Thoreau’s case the slacker had some tricks up his sleeve. The first idea was that of civil disobedience, which Thoreau named and explained, and which he practiced in a limited, proof-of-concept kind of way. Half a century on, his ideas became a major inspiration for Gandhi, who credited Thoreau as an indispensable political strategist. (Another half century, and Thoreau’s ideas found their way in front of Martin Luther King Jr.)