SPIRITED AWAY

WHAT happens when W you are open to all kinds of foreign experiences amid circumstances that are exotic to say the least? Doris Hahnloser, from Zurich, a retired manager of a retail multibrand family-owned boutique, who has been visiting India since 1985, probably has some kind of an answer.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

In the Mahakumbh, Prayagraj, for the first time, she tries to soak in all of it-the spectacle, the spirituality, the contradictions. "In India, I have seen the sane and the other side...," she says delicately. For her, a meeting with the sadhus at the Kumbh the high-point of the event, along with the Shahi snan falls in between the two stools. She does not completely understand them but feels "moved" by their life of renunciation; she realises that to them too, her life may seem an aberration, or just plain different. But she has "felt seen, and been heard".

From Hahnsloser and Atma Prem Giri Maharaj, a Russiaborn seer who came under the spotlight this Kumbh as 'Muscular Baba', to the late Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell, whose stay at the Niranjini Akhara camp and becoming 'Kamala' has stirred an internet storm, the East-West encounter is a puzzle. It is so for both sides, and this has been visible at the Kumbh. There have been attempts at identification, and there has been disorientation. Water has wanted to mix with oil.

Religious tourism

Orientalism has played no small part in this 'Eastward ho'. "Edward Pococke to Romain Rolland made India the centre of the world. Rolland asserted that the West has derived its gods and ideas from India; Pokocke explored the theory that Aryans may have originally travelled from India to Greece, colonised it, and influenced its culture," says Heramb Chaturvedi, retired professor of history, Allahabad University.