Manali: The Voice of God, Manu Mandir and the Silver Triangle

View of Old Manali

Another crazy afternoon, doing things that couldn’t happen anyplace in the world besides India. We’ve been spending most of our time in Old Manali, which has a far more peaceful feel than the semi-urbanized New Manali, which lies across the river. Woke up and took a walk to Manu Mandir, a nearby temple in honor of Manu, a man who occupies a similar role in Indian culture as the Judeo-Christian figure of Noah (of The Ark fame). As I was walking there I saw a large gathering going on in a small square right off of the road. Since many of the houses in Manali are built in the same Kath Kuni style as the temples I assumed that the building everyone was standing in front of was the temple so I didn’t go any further. I went into the crowd and saw a ring of men playing a number of ritual-use instruments around a man who was convulsing slightly while standing, hands clasped around a wad of bills. Another man joined him and they they both started to alternatively speak in Hindi, voices rising and falling and incredibly abrupt intervals.

There were two other white people in the crowd and I saw an Indian man explaining things to them in English so I wandered over since I was completely and utterly confused. I’d seen some similar things when I was with the Tibetan community but this was my first involved experience of a trance in the Hindu religious context. The man was saying that the voice of God was speaking through the two convulsing men (which God, he didn’t mention), and that the music was to hep sustain the trance. The non-entranced men standing across from them were responding to much of what the conduits of God were saying, trying to glean as much information from the divine as possible while the opportunity had arisen. Then it just stopped. The men wiped their faces of the tremendous amount of sweat that covered them and the one with the handful of cash distributed it to the other participants. Prasad of small leaves was given out to the crowd for people to put in their hair and people started leaving.

I talked with the two white girls for a bit, one of whom was from Canada and the other from New Zealand. They were asking me about the program I’d been on, and they also brought up the Karmappa so we talked about him for awhile. It’s been so cool to run into people randomly that know who the Karmappa is and want to talk about him, as well as any number of other fascinating topics. I think I’m going to get absolutely decimated psychologically when I go home and have no one to talk about these things with. They invited me to go get some Chai with them but since I finally realized that I hadn’t been at the Manu Mandir I decided to head up there and figured I might run into them around town again.

It turned out that Manu Mandir was only about another 200 meters up the road, and its huge guard tower looking roof was actually visible from where I’d been standing the whole time. Yet another temple that carried on the interesting Norse/pagoda/pyramid style of architecture that I had previously had no idea even existed in India. I’m finding that I actually prefer the wooden temples to the stone ones, largely because it’s easier to make incredibly detailed carvings so there are often many more of them (though nothing compares to Ranakpur, which I saw four years ago), plus the roofing style is extremely aesthetically pleasing. Manu Mandir had been reconstructed on the site of the original Manu temple, paying homage to the man who survived the Great Flood with the help of Visnu’s Matsya (fish) avatara. He brought seven great rshis with him and not only repopulated the earth but also set up many individual and social laws, such as the varnaashramadharma system, which lays the ground for the caste system. There are a number of local myths about his feats of mysticism.

Inside the temple had a very understated feel, extremely clean and simple, but was also somehow majestic as well. It was fairly empty except for the womb chamber in the middle with a number of ancillary shrines to Ganesha, Krshna, Kali, Durga, Visnu, and Siva circling it. I’ve been loving going to all these different temples, each with their own characteristic feel and attributes. There were also a number of people sitting on the floor preparing a large palanquin by decorating it with garlands and cum cum powder. Locals will often enlist spiritual men to bring these palanquins as vehicles for the deity to their households, where they will perform puja and hold a large feast. En route, these palanquins are carried on men’s shoulders while they are followed by a large procession playing ritual instruments.

(I tried to upload a photo I took of one of the marijuana fields to put here but somehow WordPress knew and blocked it. The Internet is a magical thing.)

Manali has been a fascinating town in general. There’s a very hippie, New Age-y feel to it. Fittingly, it’s known as the marijuana capital of India. There are patches of it growing all over the place and I’ve casually strolled by a number of fields. Even when I was at the police station yesterday there was a small field growing adjacent to it. It isn’t legal, but there’s such minor presence from any sort of authority that nothing really gets done about it. Even if something would get done about it, the corruption runs so deeply that police protection is purchased at a relatively cheap price (at least by the standards of foreigners.) Manali is part of a huge drug trafficking ring known as the Silver Triangle, which also includes Dharamsala and Leh. The trade is primarily run by Israelis who will drive from city to city on their Royal Enfield motorcycles with vast quantities of drugs on their backs. Although marijuana is one of the primary tradable goods, opium, ecstasy and LSD also make a large presence in the trade. For around 10,000 Rs (~$180) one can buy an acre which will produce around 40 kg of charas/hashish. The drug cartels in the area will often maintain headline fields that can be sacrificed if under pressure from the police but the ones higher up in the mountains are rarely touched by authorities. So looking at the economics of it, it’s not at all surprising how many people have flocked to the area to get in on the action. Given my current facial hair and overall appearance a lot of people have mistaken me for Israeli, so I certainly got asked a lot of interesting questions over the past two days.

Israeli?