Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And why not? Underneath the stink and the noise, the rationale unfolded. This was a
tributary of the Yamuna. Are you not to venerate it, merely because it smells? Why not
worship it, suspended solids and all? What could be more sacred than a river that springs
from inside your neighbor's belly?
The temple of Maan Mandir stands on a craggy hill outside the small, tangled city of
Barsana, seventy-five miles south of Delhi. They worship Krishna there, and you could do
a lot worse. Krishna comes in the guises of an infant-god, a young prankster, a musician, an
ideal lover, a fierce warrior, and—depending who you ask—an incarnation of the ultimate
creator. With Krishna, you get it all.
Maan Mandir is the headquarters of Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj. Shri Ramesh Baba
Ji—screw it, I'm just going to call him Shri Baba—was the guru who had launched the
Yamuna yatra, and I had been granted permission to join the march on the condition that
I visit him first. A reluctant guru-visitor, I had agreed only grudgingly. I was impatient to
fall in with the yatra. Images danced in my mind of contemplative Hindu ascetics walking
the banks of the Yamuna downstream from Delhi—the oxygen-starved, eutrophicated seg-
ment.
We had come to Braj, Krishna's holy land. Braj straddles the boundaries of several Indi-
an states, at the middle of the so-called Golden Triangle formed by Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra,
and is one two-hundredth the size of Texas. It was here, way back when, that Krishna spent
his days herding cows, stealing butter, and having sex with milkmaids.
So it is hallowed ground, and when you consider that almost every hill and pond and
copse of trees in Braj is paired with a story of one of Lord Krishna's frolics or flirtations,
you begin to understand the environmentalist possibilities of Hindu belief. The very land-
scape of Braj is sometimes thought of as a physical expression of Krishna. And through it
flows one of his lovers: the goddess Yamuna. In the temples of Braj, she is the holiest river
of them all.
So the question isn't why Shri Baba had launched the Yamuna yatra, but why he hadn't
done it sooner. Perhaps he was busy trying to protect the sacred hills and ponds of Braj.
These were every bit as endangered as the Yamuna herself, and Shri Baba, in addition to
pursuing a successful guru-hood at Maan Mandir, had made local conservation into a spe-
cialty—restoring ponds, protecting forests, fighting illegal mining in the hills, and estab-
lishing retirement homes for cows. (Not so ridiculous if you think cows are sacred.)
The embodiment of deities and sacred history in the natural world would seem to give
Hinduism a huge leg up on Christianity in the eco-spirituality sweepstakes. St. Francis not-
