The Kanwar Yatra

Almost every account of the Kanwar Yatra opens with a figure. Twelve million. Twenty-five million. Forty million. The figures are not compatible with one another and none of them comes from a count.

Where the numbers come from

They come from police and district administration estimates, produced for operational reasons during the month of Shravan, to justify deployments, road closures and camp provision, and then repeated in the press without the qualification. There is no ticket, no registration, no permit and no gate on the Kanwar Yatra. Nobody is counting because there is nothing to count with. The walkers set off from their own homes, join and leave the corridor at hundreds of points, and go home.

This entry gives no participant figure for that reason. The standard the atlas applies is a source and a date or nothing, and there is nothing here that meets it.

What can be stated

The things that can be said without a count are more informative anyway:

• State governments close and divert national highways for weeks, including sections of major routes into Delhi, and run the corridor as a managed operation with cameras, drones and dedicated policing. Nobody does that for a small event.
• Roadside camps are set up in the tens of thousands by local associations, political organisations and businesses, providing food, water, medical aid and rest without charge.
• The participation is overwhelmingly young, male and working class, and for most walkers it is the only occasion in the year on which the public road is theirs.

The recent growth

The offering of Ganges water to Shiva is old. The yatra as a mass phenomenon is not, and the observers who have looked at it closely date the growth to the 1980s and after. The enabling conditions are unromantic: motorable roads to Haridwar and Gaumukh, cheap onward transport, and organised sponsorship of the camps.

The friction

The yatra is now one of the more contested public events in northern India, and the disputes are about the road rather than the rite:

• The highway closures, which reroute freight and commuters for weeks and are litigated most years.
• Regulations imposed along the routes during Shravan, including orders on meat shops and on the display of proprietors' names, which courts have intervened in.
• The conduct of some groups, including recorded incidents of violence against motorists, which is reported and disputed.

A pilgrimage in which tens of millions of people walk barefoot carrying water that must not touch the ground is a remarkable thing on its own terms. It is not made more remarkable by a number nobody has counted, and the political fight it now sits inside is not separable from it.

The kanwar is a pole carried across the shoulders with a vessel of Ganges water hanging at each end, and the rule that defines the observance is that from the moment it is filled until the water is poured over the lingam, the kanwar must not be set down on the ground. That single prohibition turns a long walk into a continuous discipline: walkers rest by hanging the pole from a tree or a purpose built stand, they eat and sleep in relays, and the strictest form, the dak kanwar, is not rested at all but run in relay by a team until the water is delivered.

The water is drawn at a source of the Ganges. Most take it from Haridwar, some from Gaumukh or Gangotri, and those bound for Baidyanath at Deoghar take it from Sultanganj in Bihar and walk something over a hundred kilometres. The month is Shravan, in July and August, which is the monsoon, and the walkers wear saffron.

The story behind it is the churning of the ocean. When the poison halahala surfaced and threatened everything, Shiva drank it and held it in his throat, which turned blue, and the offering of cool river water over the lingam in the hot months is understood as continuing to relieve that burden.

The scale is modern. A local practice of limited size grew from around the 1980s into one of the largest annual movements of people in India, with highways closed for weeks, medical camps, sound systems mounted on trucks and a substantial policing operation. The growth is documented; the reasons for it are argued over, with better transport, urban migration and organised sponsorship all proposed.

The vessels are commonly decorated, and the whole assembly is treated as consecrated for the duration.