Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water?

Our holy rivers are in dire need of our help to reduce poaching and pollution and allow us safe access to their bountiful gifts

BY TULASI SRINIVAS

Every day at dawn in India’s high-tech city of Bengaluru, the 20-year-old priest Srikara Sudarshana of the Gali Anjaneya Temple turns his back on the sacred Vrishabhavathi River just beyond the temple walls and instead fills buckets and bottles with water from the temple’s high-end filtration system. The water, drawn from a deep well on the temple grounds, is not potable until run through the filtration system, which produces nearly 265 gallons of clean water per day. Sudarshana uses this for the daily ritual bath of Lord Hanuman. He adds camphor and tulasi (holy basil) to transform it into tirtha, or holy water, for the devotees to consume.

The Gali Anjaneya Temple, often featured in Lonely Planet-style guidebooks as a “must see” historic site, is dedicated to the Monkey God, Hanuman, also known as Anjaneya, son of the Wind God, Gali. The temple is covered with sculptured friezes of stories from the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Built in 1452 on a lush island in the Vrishabhavathi River by Sri Vyasa Raja, a woodland sage, philosopher and master teacher who was enamored of the river’s grandeur and importance as a source of water for the region, the temple honors the way the Vrishabhavathi has animated life through myth, ritual performance and ecological presence.

But now, that lush island is a mere memory. The channel that formed one arm of the river is now a highway—a maelstrom of trucks, cycles, bullock carts, buses, cars and scooters that swirl past the temple entrance, horns honking and engines revving all day and night. The other arm of the river is a concrete channel where stinking wastewater bubbles and froths behind high concrete walls.

Today, the God and His priests are trapped between the highway and the drain. Day and night, the temple is permeated by the burning stench of petro-dust from the highway and the rotten miasma from the drain. This pollution of the sacred river poses existential questions: how are you to live when the river has become a sewer? And how can we survive physically and morally in an ecological, cosmological and ethical breakdown, exacerbated by anthropogenic intervention?

Water Is Divine

For the past several years I have been exploring the relationship between the practice of Hinduism and the sacred landscape of India. In the United States, widespread belief in biblical inerrancy is related to decreased support for environmental protection policies and correlates with a denial of anthropogenic climate change. But some religious organizations are now engaging in social movements supporting climate justice. From Pope Francis’ laudato si to the 2015 Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, religious leaders and institutions are increasingly calling for action to curb pollution and reduce our carbon footprint.

The Hinduism is rooted in natural topography. Gods are found in rocks, hillocks, woodlands and trees, rivers and rills. In religious texts and myths, water bodies in particular have an explicit ability to transform space, to extend or truncate time and, most significantly, to manifest God’s paradoxical nature as simultaneously transcendent and immanent, independent and dependent, formless and formed. In practice, bodies of water are sacred places, held in special regard in processions and festivals—not only because they sustain life, but because they are considered the abode of the Gods.

In Hindu cosmology, the universe is thought to be a vast ocean on which the divine protector, Vishnu, floats sleepily on His divine serpent bed for eons. His consort Lakshmi, Goddess of wealth, emerges seated on a lotus, a perishable flower that grows in water and responds to the sun. These realms of mythic reality instructed generations of Hindus on their custodianship of water resources.

As I learned from my parents and grandparents and they from generations before them, in Hindu thought river waters represent purity and abundance and connect the twinned worldly and otherworldly landscapes. Rivers like the Vrishabhavathi and Ganga are thought to be Goddesses, made to descend from the heavens by human vows and penances, bringing abundant life to the arid earth of India through their pure waters. Water falling from heaven to earth—the monsoon rains that soak the subcontinent and form rivers and lakes—is conceived of as a material and spiritual bridge between the two realms of life and afterlife. In the Vaishnava scripture the Garuda Purana, all souls cross a sacred river in their journey towards the afterlife. Rivers mark the boundaries of sacred worlds, and their waters wash the soul clean.

In short, Hindus revere water and its flow as a powerful medium of the imagination that shapes space, molds Gods and Goddesses and births worshipful communities into existence. It is water, poured ritually over a God during a bath and subsequently drunk by devotees as a consecrated offering, that awakens the God and purifies the devotee. This cycle of water remakes earth into heaven and heaven into earth, and it is part of the fragile cosmological and earthly ecosystem.

For Hindus, the pollution of India’s sacred waters must therefore raise some fundamental questions: Where can and do water Gods go when the water is toxically inhospitable? What happens to a religious and moral imagination rooted in the natural world when the ecological landscape is rubbished? What do we do when a river is systematically killed?

Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water

The year 1975 was when Sudarshana’s grandfather remembers last going to the riverbank to draw water from the sacred Vrishabhavathi to bathe the Deity, drink and wash the sacred temple vessels. But when the river started smelling bad and became sludgy and grey, he sadly decided he could no longer use the river water for ritual purification.

The 1980s and 1990s, were years without rain. Water became scarce in the temple and in the city. The priests gathered every morning at dawn and performed ritual invocations to bring the monsoon rains. But none came. The waste water in the channel grew low and the smell became acrid. The priests bought expensive bottled water and saved tap water to bathe the God. Finally, after years of everyday drought, they raised the funds to deepen the well on the property and, some three years ago, installed a high-tech water filtration system.

One of the legends of the temple involves the gift of floods. During the monsoon rains, the river waters would rise and flow into the temple, lapping the feet of the Deity in small wavelets, a sign from the Gods that it would be a bountiful year for the crops as the river silt spread all over the valley through the network of lakes and streams. Today, in a painfully ironic reversal, monsoon season turns the temple into a hive of activity as priests and officiants anxiously build sandbag levees and connect sump pumps and hoses to prevent the toxic river waters from entering the temple premises. In Bengaluru’s historic 2017 floods, when the river started to rise, the priests had to sweep away the toxic sludge all day and night, working with brooms and mops, for fear the water would slime the entire temple and dump toxic waste on the Deity.

The priests watch the river with anxiety now. The flood is no longer a divine gift but a feared curse. Quite simply, Sudarshana and his fellow priests are afraid of the water.

Killing the River

The story of the Vrishabhavathi’s transformation from pure, sacred stream to its present state as a stinking nala, or drainage channel for solid waste, is the stuff of Srikara Sudarshana’s nightmares.

Ancient stone edicts and colonial documents of the region mention the sparkling river Vrishabhavathi (meaning “arising from a bull) as originating from the hoof of an ancient, sacred, monolithic Nandi bull sculpture in the south of the city. Another, lesser-known origin point was a temple tank with an eternal stream, also dedicated to the sacred bull, in the north of the city. Forgotten for decades, the temple tank was accidentally unearthed in the late 1990s, at the time I was in the city exploring the idea of wonder through ritual activity.

When the city was young, the river’s many tributaries, streams and rills formed a watery network as they flowed through Bengaluru, irrigating fields and providing drinking water for the inhabitants. But by the late 19th century, the city had become a colonial center. The Vrishabhavathi was mapped, dammed and rechanneled by British administrators to provide water for the mills and military encampments established in Bengaluru.

With Indian Independence in 1947, Bengaluru became a growing center of scientific and technological development, manufacturing everything from watches to rocket ships. Today, it is one of the fastest growing cities in Asia, home to the tech industry, the “Silicon Valley” of India, tagged as the number one “most dynamic city” by the World Economic Forum. Ringed by clogged highways leading to steel and glass “software parks” housing the global campuses of Fortune 500 companies, the city has doubled in size in 20 years, to over 12 million inhabitants. Bengaluru’s success, based on attracting global information and biotech companies, has been retold so frequently that it has taken on a magical, mythic quality of its own.

This growth has attracted migrants to Bengaluru. Newcomers now outnumber locals in neighborhoods all over the city, and conflicts arise. Small industries and businesses such as car repair shops, beauty shops, restaurants, printing businesses, paper mills, cloth mills, chemical plants, plywood and soap factories, tanneries and distilleries, often unlicensed and unregulated, have sprung up everywhere.

Overburdened by the city’s waste, the Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board has thoughtlessly connected the sewer lines to the river. Taking their cue from the city, factories in the Peenya industrial estate up river silently release their effluents into the water at night, while denying culpability to ecological watchdog groups during the day. Samples of water from the channel contain heavy metals, toxic substances and acids causing health concerns. Dead fish float on the dying river, and feral dogs roam its charred banks.

City ecologist Harini Nagendra warns the heartbreaking ecological violence, which includes polluting of ground water, cutting of trees, water theft and an escalating cycle of flood and drought, is leading to extreme water scarcity in Bengaluru. The city has been predicted to face a water crisis of epic and incendiary proportions—a Day Zero, when the water taps in the city are predicted to run dry—in just two short years.

This ecological evisceration of sacred water bodies is a global scourge that has accompanied development. Industrial capitalism, as sociologist Max Weber argued, relies on an extractive ethos that strips the world of its supernatural dimensions. Indeed, it seems that capitalism and development are stronger forces in today’s world than even the divine power of Hinduism’s Gods and Goddesses. Capitalism has rendered the priests’ rituals less sacred and encouraged political corruption. With development there has been a loss of resources, of community stakeholdership, of responsibility and of autonomy. As a result, the waters of the Vrishabhavathi River have become undrinkable.

The Moral Justice of Thirst

A time of thirst is upon us all. Urban water scarcity is the biggest crisis of the Anthropocene. Cities with a majority-poor population like Cape Town and Flint, and those that are growing rapidly like Los Angeles, Bengaluru, Beijing and London, are on the path to drought or violent floods. As Anna Tsing notes, we all live in a “disturbance regime” of “blasted landscapes.” The World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2025, two thirds of the world population will face severe water shortages. The urgency of climate justice and water security concerns is obvious and looming.

On June 19, 2018, the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI), an Indian Government think tank, warned that India’s water shortage will worsen and is likely to adversely impact some 600 million people, most of them women and the poor. By 2030, India—home to one seventh of the world’s population—stands to double its yet unmet water needs. Water wars will undoubtedly erupt between those who have access to clean water and those who don’t, those who pollute common water sources like the Vrishabhavathi River and those who rely on them.

Today, the Vrishabhavathi froths daily, its greenish-yellow suds popping, its banks squelchy with dark fluids. Residents south of the nala, who used to till small market gardens of vegetables using the water, now report falling ill frequently with gastroenteritis, bronchitis, skin diseases, coughs and other lung diseases. They make sure their animals don’t go into the river. Nobody dares drink from the sacred river, regardless of how thirsty they might be.

Are we now in a permanently thirsty, fiery, post-ecological epoch, as Greta Thunberg suggested at Davos 2020? Are we heading towards a post-life era, or can we begin the moral work of undoing toxic development?

Temples to Rubbish

Bengaluru is no exception. Most of India has a toxicity problem. Its cities quiver with mountains of rubbish; its lakes, rivers and streams are awash with factory pollutants, detergent runoff and sewage sludge. At its inception, the Modi government used this encroaching dirt as a potent symbol, suggesting we “wipe India clean” with their Swach Bharath campaign to make India “clean and pure” in the 21st century. Photo ops of ministers symbolically sweeping city streets flooded the newspapers.

But six years since the Modi government took office, little has been done for one of the program’s main goals of improving waste management. Every day, new stories of land thieves and water pirates make headlines in newspapers as the commons are privatized for profit, particularly the forests and waters owned or utilized by poor and lower caste groups.

In the general election in 2018, the Modi government won a resounding majority while ignoring rising pollution. Rather, they politicized the scarcity of water resources as a soul-of-the-nation battle with Pakistan, pivoting to the protection of Indian air and water resources—ecological custodianship implicit in Hinduism’s great myths and epics. The focus became policies on Indian prosperity and development amid proud calls for “a new India.”

What’s Next?

In this chaotic world, the Gods become more important. People pray, more fearful and uncertain of the future. In November 2019, an article in The Economic Times went viral with photos of devotees praying knee deep in the Yamuna River near the capital city of Delhi, surrounded by growing clouds of toxic foam. At the same time, the air pollution in North India was so extreme that devotees dressed their Deities in air filtration masks. Is it surprising, then, that in this new India people are falling chronically ill? Is it surprising that the Goddesses of water such as Ganga and Gods of the air like Vayu are choking and sick? Will our Gods and Goddesses finally decide it just isn’t worth staying in this new India?

The Waters of Hope

I have family and friends who are torn over what they see as eroding Hindu pride. In this new India, Hinduism is relegated to performing endless elaborate rituals and expressing a divisive, nationalistic rhetoric. Its vital theological and dynamic ecological principles disregarded, the religion is now publicized as a tool used by angry, ideological politicians to (once more) divide neighbors and friends.

But now, in this undeniably fulcrum moment, I ask: could this be an opportunity to think of a different way to revitalize Hindu pride? Is it time to recognize that the waters and air of the earth are cosmological forces that, once spoiled, are irretrievable and that in their presence they give and sustain life? Can these waters quench the fires of hatred and distrust, birth hope and flow to justice instead?

Indeed, I am hopeful that Hinduism can offer us a new imaginative geopolitical theology for this growing ecological apocalypse. Hinduism can propose a language to think of this catastrophe in religious terms, without being fatalistic or exclusionary. For the very essence of Hinduism—that of earthly custodianship and ecological care—is beyond any single religion and vitalizes a pan-Indian culture that can emancipate us from the dangers of unthinking development and discrimination.

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TULASI SRINIVAS is Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of several monographs, most recently, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke University press, 2018). Her current research project is The Missing Goddess: Women, Water and Violence in Urban India. She has held recent fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and the Luce-American Council of Learned Societies.