As they have swelled in numbers so have their woes. From few thousands half a century ago to an estimated 12 million now, these barefoot pilgrims continue to be ridiculed, almost reviled, for clogging roads and disrupting traffic by the urban middle class who find this annual ritual of carrying holy water for offering to their local deity a disgusting act of vulgate religiosity. Undeterred, the pilgrimage has a growing following among poor or lower-middle-class youth who have made Kanwar, the largest annual religious congregation. What keeps them going, and what motivates others to join the ritual remains open to multiple interpretations?
Attracting gullible youth to prove their resolve, endurance, and moral worth, the annual pilgrimage has continued to grow in size despite lack of an organizational structure to back it up. Actual walkathon receives voluntary benevolence for food, refreshment, and medical assistance en route, and the participants called bhola (simpleton/fool, after the patron deity Shiva (Bhola) remain its intended beneficiaries. Are these youth on a foolish pursuit or is there a deeper meaning to this devoted act of walking hundreds of kilometers on bare bleeding feet carrying water vessels hanging from the shoulders on a wooden plank? Scholars have argued that the growing number joining the Kanwar Yatra reflect an act of solidarity to seek social recognition aimed at subverting attention from their near-pathological uncertainty of existence.
Exploring multiple dimensions of this religious ritual, the provocatively titled book Uprising of the Fools sees the practice of kanwar as a reactive assertion against social change that has pushed them (pilgrims) to the margins of uncertain conditions. Vikash Singh, a sociology professor at Montclair State University, stretches his analysis to argue that religion has come handy in becoming an expression of anxieties, responsibilities, and desires for millions. Rich with ethnographic insights, the book examines how the person (bhola), the practice (kanwar), and the politics (yatra) may eventually merge to convert popular religiosity into a potential political project. By joining the pilgrims during one of their arduous journeys, the author undertook an intellectual adventure for getting an inside view in connecting religious practice with social theories. Curiously, the populist pilgrimage is more than what it may outwardly seem.
Uprising of the Fools is a definitive inquiry into an annual ritual which has grown in leaps and bounds ever since it was first reported as a religious practice of little consequence by the Jesuits and English travelers who had seen Kanwar pilgrims during their journeys in northern plains of the country during 17th and 18th centuries. Proliferation of the pilgrimage in recent times, however, is seen as a dramatized performance which carries with it the pulse of social conditions in contemporary India. There seems some truth in it, as espoused by pilgrims’ lived reality of paradoxical experiences between hope and despair, desire and responsibility and, religion and recreation. Voluntary self-surrender is seen as an alternate source of comfort and hope.
The book is enriched by the stories of pilgrims like Kamarpal, whose anxiety-laden experience under a hegemonic social order is the cause to prove his resolve by submitting to the divine powers. The pursuit of the religious practice provides a textual medium for him to evade being called ‘failure’, ‘unemployed’, and even ‘outcast’. The appeal of contemporary religious practice lies in its promise to emancipate from the agonies of choice.’ Will such unfailing faith in the daunting pilgrimage help them get the desired recognition from the family, and the society?
Singh’s argument about the forces driving the growth of the annual ritual is endorsed by scholarship in psychological and philosophical theories. The author leaves the reader wondering about this religious ritual being enmeshed and almost inextricable from the undesired fallout of neo-liberalism. If it indeed has arisen in reaction to globalization, then how is this collective expression being perceived and acted upon by the society? In somewhat disturbing tone, the book highlights the factuality of the subject that has so far been ignored in dominant liberal discourses. Only a social system that is not unforgiving of itself accommodate such reactive assertion.
Scholarly and illuminative, but heavy in academic prose, Uprising of the Fools could not have come at a better time as sectarian forces have gathered momentum to promote religious nationalism. Pilgrimage, the yatra, has always come handy to champion the sacred cause in the past. It is here that politically motivated assertion of national identity may align with the individual’s search for emancipation under duress of globalizing social conditions. Will the gullible youth constituting bulk of the pilgrimage see the sinister side to their likely appropriation by the political project? Uprising of the Fools cautions against being fooled by the system that the pilgrims have intentions of transforming.
by Vikash Singh
Stanford University Press, USA
Extent: 256, Price: US$28.
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