radhasoami. 185
ting on the other side—my strongest impression was of a pervasive friendliness,
bubbling over into welcoming smiles and the low-murmured cultic greeting of
“Radhasoami!” Most of the men and women in the congregation belonged to the
Sikh peasantry—the men tall and bearded, with fierce faces yet gentle eyes, and the
women stately in their traditional knee-length shirts and floppy trousers that nar-
rowed sharply at the ankles. There were others too: hill people from Kangra and
Jammu, petty traders and small housekeepers from dusty towns of the Punjab and
from as far away as (I discovered later) Mehsana in Gujarat and Bhopal in Madhya
Pradesh. Right up at the front, in a separate enclosure just below the fifteen-foot-
high dais from where Maharajji would address the congregation, sat the “elite” Sat-
sangis. Among these fifty-odd European and American Satsangis—many of them
reclining comfortably on cunningly designed chairs without legs that give a person
an appearance of squatting cross-legged without his actually doing so—there was
a sprinkling of industrialists, former diplomats, retired high government officials,
and an ex-prince of an obscure Indian state with a retinue of daughters, daughters-
in-law and a brood of solemn-eyed children.
While we waited for Maharajji, we sang. The mellifluous voice of apanthi—the
chanter of Sikh scriptures—drifted out of the loudspeakers strung out on the
grounds as he sang of man’s spiritual longing for the Satguru. The crowd joined in
the refrain at the end of each familiar and well-loved verse, fifty thousand voices
merging into one deep-throated chant that was scarcely a song any longer but more
an emotion, a yearning broken into patterns of sound. To anyone sitting within the
vast belly of the crowd, a choir of fifty thousand feels like an elemental sound of na-
ture—the rumbling of a volcano full of melody and meaning or, perhaps, like the
sound of high wind and torrential rain that has been shaped into a musical pattern.
Here I am deliberately emphasizing my subjective experience of the Satsang, on this
day as on the following days, and the fantasies that bubble up to the fore of con-
sciousness as one sits esconced in the warmth and closeness of thousands of bodies.
At first there is a sense of unease as the body, the container of our individuality and
the demarcator of our spatial boundaries, is sharply wrenched away from its habit-
ual mode of experiencing others. For as we grow up, the touch of others, once so
deliberately courted and responded to with delight, increasingly becomes ambiva-
lent. Coming from a loved one, touch is deliriously welcomed; with strangers, on
the other hand, there is an involuntary shrinking of the body, their touch taking
on the menacing air of invasion by the Other. But once the fear of touch disappears
in the fierce press of other bodies, and the individual lets himself become a part of
the crowd ’s density, the original apprehension is gradually transformed into an ex-