What used to be an expression of folk religiosity has morphed into a carnival under the auspices of the State, which seeks to reduce chances of a challenge against the status quo emerging from the underclass
Kanwariyas carry holy water during the Kanwar Yatra in the month of Shravan. Pic/PTI
The Kanwar Yatra has always been a sight to behold: swarms of mostly men walking down highways, ferrying pitchers of the Ganga water suspended from colourful slings, or Kanwars, balanced on their shoulders as they walk a hundred kilometres and more to their villages. Once there, they offer the holy water to Shivlings in temples.
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Yet the sight, with time, has transformed: increasingly, in raucous groups, many fetch the Ganga water in trucks and pickup vans, with loud music blaring, halting at makeshift stalls where they feast on sumptuous meals provided free. The pilgrimage is also a time to party, to engage in infractions as well. The Kanwar Yatra grows into a bigger and bigger spectacle every passing year.
The yatra’s expansion is vividly recorded by anthropologist Satendra Kumar, of University of Zurich, in research papers he wrote, based on his field studies conducted in 2004-05 and 2015-16 in villages of west Uttar Pradesh. I read some of the papers—and also spoke to him. In Meerut’s Khanpur village, Kumar found that in the memory of those born in the 1950s and 1960s, the Kanwar Yatra was not a momentous event. Even in 2004-05, only two Khanpur residents had been on it. But this number, 10 years later, grew to 30, comprising mostly members of the Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes.
The yatra’s form as well as the reason for undertaking it changed. Kumar cites the example of Khanpur’s Ramcharan Kashyap, who pined for a grandson. On a local hermit’s suggestion, he embarked on the yatra to have his wish fulfilled. Ramcharan walked alone to Haridwar. In his absence, the women of his family fasted, fed the indigent, and lit a lamp at a pipal tree. When Ramcharan returned, the holy Ganga water was offered at the Shiva temple as women sang devotional songs. It was a quiet family affair. The yatra was then a form of “folk religiosity”, Kumar told me.
At Khanpur, a decade later, Kumar met Ankit, Akhilesh and Ramnaresh. Ankit and Akhilesh were Dalit, Ramnaresh OBC. Both Ankit and Ramnaresh had passed Std X on their third attempt. They went on the yatra, hoping their expression of devotion for Lord Shiva would enable Akhilesh to secure recruitment in the state police force. On their way to Haridwar, they banded with three other SCs desperate to pass their school examination.
The yatra was a revelation: people would give them way, as if they were royalty. At Purkazi, in Muzaffarnagar, a bearded Muslim motorcyclist bumped into them. Enraged, they beat him up. Others joined the six as they set an eatery on fire and ransacked buses. To Kumar, Ankit compared their action to Lord Shiva’s Tandav—the dance of destruction.
Khanpur’s trio increasingly represents the typical participant of the Kanwar Yatra—alienated lower-caste/lower-class young man of rural India, reeling under agrarian distress and employment crunch. The introduction of OBC reservation and economic liberalisation in 1990-91 fanned aspirations. It was almost a compulsion for the youth to escape rural India. Yet, a broken education system ensured he could compete only for poorly paid jobs in urban India.
The weakening family and kinship structure, under stress as well, could no longer be their refuge. A new form of religiosity was required to negotiate the precarity of life. It was at this juncture, from the 1990s, the Kanwar Yatra underwent a metamorphosis. Behind its expansion, Kumar notes, were the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates, establishing either directly or indirectly, through their wealthy members, stalls providing lavish meals and entertainment. They reinterpreted and incorporated the folk or little tradition of the Kanwar Yatra as part of the Great Tradition of classical, textual Hinduism. On offer to the alienated youth is the middle-class Hindu identity.
Samajwadi Party leader Sudhir Panwar, a resident of Shamli, west Uttar Pradesh, wrote an article in 2019, pointing out that the strongest impulse for the yatra’s expansion came after 2014, following the rise of Narendra Modi and Adityanath. The State now became the yatra’s principal patron, deploying its machinery to turn the annual pilgrimage into a carnival, with helicopters showering rose petals on yatris and the administration blocking segments of highways for them. Traffic snarls vicariously enhanced the yatri’s self-worth.
But this is principally the carnival of subaltern caste-class participants, whose identity is merged into casteless-classless nomenclature of Bholey, a name of Lord Shiva, with which all are addressed during the roughly 16-day yatra. This practice camouflages their low status and makes them experience ersatz equality. It is also empowering because wealthy upper castes, mostly Baniyas, and the State fete them. Panwar quipped to me, “While Bahujans go on yatra, elite-caste members prepare for competitive examinations.”
The yatra turns into a 16-day festival of forgetfulness for the subalterns trapped in misery, reduces the possibility of a challenge emerging from the underclass against the status quo and softens them for Hindutva politics. Not surprisingly, the controversial order asking eateries to display their owners’ names during the Kanwar Yatra, an obvious attempt at religious polarisation, was first issued in Muzaffarnagar, a Hindutva lab the Bharatiya Janata Party lost in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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