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Happily, unlike most of our rather grotty and teeming pilgrim towns, Amarkantak looked like a quiet resort spread over a green and watered valley, 1,065 metres above sea level. Forests arose all around and spread through the valley, stepping back only when they encounter shimmering water meadows. We drove out of the settlement, stopped at the edge of a forest. A small, cemented, pond had been built at the foot of five mango trees and, from a tiny hole in the wall of this pond, water bubbled out. From here it flowed into a stream gushing alongside the flight of steps descending through the forest. This was the young Sone.
When we were standing on the platform, looking at the playful Sone, in all her infant aggressiveness, a group of mendicants came. They were carrying staves, backpacks of rolled blankets, and were accompanied by two dogs. They stopped, cupped water from the stream in their hands, drank it, spoke briefly to us, then hurried up the steps, the dogs trotting happily behind. They were on a Narmada parikrama, a circumambulation of the river; and they could cross it only here or at Baraoch, where it flows into the Arabian Sea. This religious trek would take them three years, six months and 13 days: a hiking schedule which would have to be as rigidly controlled as a motor rally! A short stroll away was a group of largely dilapidated temples built in the Khajuraho style. Later, we learnt that archaeologists had dated the temples as belonging to the 10th century. We believe that these monuments had been sited here because it was close to the legendary source of the Narmada. Just across the road from this group rose the walled complex of the Narmada Udgam. A number of shrines had been built around two tanks. Water from the basement of a single-celled temple trickled into the little tank, filled it up, and then overflowed into the larger one. From there it emerged as a stream which, eventually, becomes the Narmada.
The idol of Narmada Devi was dressed in a white sari with a red boarder. Curiously, it had the large, almond-shaped, eyes often associated with tribal deities. This is significant. The Ganga, at Varanasi, apparently marks the boundary between Aryan cultural mores and the more ancient ones of the earlier inhabitants of India. Narmada Devi was, possibly, the Mother Goddess of the first pre-Aryan people to colonise this fertile valley of the Narmada and she had retained her physical attributes when she was absorbed into the Hindu pantheon. Amarkantak has grown around the Narmada, and the river burgeoned in size and stature as it flowed out of its place of birth. We followed it through watered, green meadows, where brooklets added to its strength, and into a forest where, according to another legend, the sage Kapil once had his hermitage. Now the path began to get a little tacky underfoot and there was a distant roaring as if an enormous steam engine was exhausting its built-up pressure. We trod, gingerly, around the forest path and were surrounded by a cloud of drenching spray. There, ahead of us, the Narmada, full of power and fury thundered down a 45-metre cliff, filling the forest with its foaming anger. There is a certain compulsive logic in the view that, since living creatures cannot grow as quickly as the Narmada had then, she must be divine and these roaring falls are a manifestation of her implacable power. It, therefore, follows that this green bowl in the old Vindhyas must, certainly, be a place of great virtue: especially as not one, but two, holy rivers flow out of the fertile, earthly, womb of Amarkantak.
GETTING THERE
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They
We scrambled down the steps, the chortling baby Sone keeping pace with us. At the end of the stairs, an old mendicant sat in that thatched hut, reading. His young companion spread his saffron robe to dry in the sun and the breeze. Beyond the hermitage, the forest ended in a sheer cliff and the Sone tumbled off it into a densely wooded valley below. This was the first waterfall of this great river, and an iron and concrete platform thrust out over the cliff giving dizzying views of the cascade.
Pilgrims bathed, drank water from the small pond, consulted pundits sitting on little platforms or under a shed with a corrugated-iron roof. Some devotees, after their spiritual cleansing, had themselves massaged by professional masseurs. It was all rather informal and relaxed.
