Almost 150 metres above the village of Kotgan in Mangar Valley, my ecologist guide Sunil walked us to what looked like a hilltop shrine from the outside. This is where Lathdhari baba made his abode. Once upon a time.
For the uninitiated, lathdhari is what you call the wielder of the stick, that could be both the mendicant's staff, as well as the shepherd's crook, depending on where your conviction, and therefore, devotion rests.
Nobody quite remembers who this ancient holy man was, when he came here, where did he go and when. All they can tell is he was here before all of them came around.
Sometime.
And that was good enough reason for the villagers to imagine how he looked like and install his idol astride a horse to enshrine his memory at the temple under the protective gaze of Hanuman, the monkey god.
What's unusual about this place, I asked my shepherd Sunil.
Wait, he replied.
In a moment, we were crouching into the bowel of a primordial cave in hunt of Plato.
Mangar and the surrounding hills defy time, Banani Bhattacharyya the boss lady at the Haryana archaeology department had told me days ago.
This is where the first prehistoric man, and then stone age humans, made home. In caves, and rock shelters, leaving their imprint on carved rocks and wall paintings, that Sunil chance discovered during the lockdown and Banani has since documented as part of her archaeological research in the last few years.
She told me Mangar, and the entire ridge, all the way down to Mehrauli, has been continuously inhabited by us, humans, since pre-history till the advent of Islam. And it continued to be inhabited under the Brits. Even now in 21st century India.
Let's take you back in time.
Given the huge backdrop of where we were roaming, it appears that the Gujjar herders, Lathdhari baba, and lately a Krishna worshipping monk from Mathura, Baba Narayan Das, are otherwise uneventful punctuations over a stretch of uninterrupted time that, according to Banani, has populated this hilly outcrop for, at least, a hundred thousand years.
You find the first signs of that habitation outside the converted cave, in a grove right behind the temple, where the ancients ring-fenced a patch of land with boulders and dry tree branches. While the patch is now home to a local Gujjar herdsman, its structure and layout have the makings of what looks like an ashram and might have been the prototype of the first fortified human settlements that evolved elsewhere into medieval hilltop citadels.
Ashram, ordinarily abode of hermit, also translates to resting place of horses, elephants and cattle (asa: horse, cattle, elephant + aram: rest).
Mehrauli, down the ridge, was an ashram, before becoming the political nerve centre of the first generation of invading sultans, local Brahmin pundits at the Yogmaya temple there told me.
It is in groves like these that the ancients, right till the days of the Buddha, stepped out of the comfort of their caves to contemplate on the cosmos, its creator and her creation, watching the star spangled sky at night and tending to cattle in day time.
Where did all this begin?
Where did all this come from?
Where does all this lead to?
Here the hermit pondered on the wonder of wilderness, repeating his questions and answers in the rhythm of his footsteps and those of his cattle, giving our rich Indian civilisation its coded philosophy in versatile vernacular prakrit poetry of 'dopais and chaupais' that were later ornamented into garlands of Sanskrit slokas, giving mankind its earliest chants to the never-changing-ever-changing divine.
Nearly 200 km southwest of Mangar on the same Aravalli ridge, deep inside the tiger country of Sariska, a Nath minstrel from the Juna akhara, once sang to me the creation song of his timelesses temple that might have once been the caveman's shelter, in the rhythm of the shepherd's footsteps.
Try singing this aloud:
kaun sa yug mein yog yoganta
kaun sa yug mein ladey chela
kaun sa yug mein firey akela
yugan yug yogi yog ramya
nahin thi dharti, nahin thi akash
nahin thhey pawan aur pani
nahin thhey ved aur vani
sunn mata argat pita
alakh niranjan apaap
arbad yug diya avatar
narbad yug mein thhape sansar
asang yug mein garbh ka waas
arrey bolta nazar nahin aaya
nakey chonch, pankh nahi kaya
bina pale bhau sagar bhaya
neerey nazar nahin aaya
pehley bhaag, peechhey ling
pehley mai, peechhey baap
pehley dharti, peechhey akash
pehley raat, peechhey din
pehley chanda, peechhe suraj
pehley hawa, peechhey pani
pehley ved, peechhey vani
Loosely translated the creation song goes somewhat like this:
If this was all that was at start,
When did, then, the first coupling take place?
When did the first offspring take birth?
When this was the only creation, and nothing else was created
That was when the copulation took place
There was then...
no sky, no earth
no knowledge, no word
no father there, no mother either
All there was was wonder
That was when the divine arose first
Next was then when appeared this world
And so was the (cosmic) womb impregnated
That was when the told was untold
For there was no beak to chirp the song, no wings to fly, no form to shape
The outside was all inside
All this was all there was
All that was was This Ocean alone
Here Pannanath, the Nath minstrel, broke tune to say that after all this, we humans appeared as the 8.4 millionth form of life in the evolutionary cycle, pretty close to what modern science calculates as 8.7 million evolutionary steps to mankind. And then he revealed that in the creation song, feminine vigour came first, and male grace followed. Hear on:
And so...
the vagina came first, the penis later
the mother came first, the father later
the earth came first, the sky later
the night came first, the day later
the moon came first, the sun later
the wind came first, the water later
the knowledge came first, the words later
Millennia later, that wonder of the first caveman, as he watched the night sky above Mangar, went forth to shine as the centerpiece of the Rig Veda, in the marvelously magical creation hymn that has come down to us as the Nasadiya Sukta, brilliantly answering the question that our Man from Mangar raised first:
"Who really knows?!
Who will then proclaim it?!
Whence was it produced?!
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe? Who then knows whence it has arisen?!
Whence this creation has arisen -- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -- the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows -- or perhaps he does not know."
True, Who knows?! But that's another story.
For now, let's trek around Mangar.
Keep walking 🚶♀️
Back to Essays