Tracing one’s roots in Haridwar

Pilgrimage to Haridwar —whether for immersion of ashes of deceased kin or just a plain dip in the Ganga — has over centuries generated a very valuable by-product. The devout, after doing the rituals, customarily record their visit, including names of existing family members, in scrolls or bahis maintained by generations of family priests known as pandas. These registers comprise a unique treasure trove of sociological data.

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Visitors to Haridwar can trace their genealogical record with reference to the family's name, place of origin, and date of a recent visit. The pandas have a system of indexing known only to them. 

Years ago I had gone there with my father's ashes. We went to Har-ki-pauri where the priests congregate and made inquiries about our family panda. The word went around and soon we met a person who said he was the guy we wanted. 

His name was Somdatt Khairwal. He asked about our family name and where exactly we were from. Our family had migrated from Lahore at Partition, so that is what he was told. Then he looked at his bahi. "No, you were originally from Wazirabad (also now in Pakistan)" he announced. Yes, it rang a bell. I had heard family elders mention it. He then proceeded to write down the narration of our visit.

A few years ago when an uncle passed away, my cousin photocopied some of the bahi pages and brought them back. A few sections were in archaic Urdu, which we had a maulvi at the Fatehpuri mosque in Delhi translate. The rest were in what seemed to be Devnagari script. The conjoined words of the text made reading very difficult. But I was very keen to get to know my ancestors, so I had to visit Haridwar. 

It was Somdatt's son Akhilesh, who I met on a more recent trip undertaken solely for the purpose of tracing my roots. I followed him along a narrow, broken, urine-smelling alley to a damp little room where we squatted on the ground as he opened our scroll and started tracing the course of our family's history backwards from the present day. 

The records are kept in a patrilineal sequence. Married daughters scarcely find a mention as they are supposed to figure in the bahis of the family they get married into, though now visitors often make sure that their names also get into the record. Whenever a new branch of a family opens up and they run out of space, the scroll is unbound and new a sheet of paper is inserted. So, one sees pages of different shades as age works on their texture. 

The bahis at Haridwar and other centres constitute a remarkable collection of sociological information. Their leaves are getting discoloured with age and whatever indexing they use is in the minds of the pandas. The Genealogical Society of Utah, USA has microfilmed some of them, but that is not good enough. 

lmohan41@hotmail.com