Sagar Island, Makar Sankranti

MAKAR SANKRANTI at SAGAR ISLAND

     Bathing at Sagar Island on Makar Sankranti is the icing on the cake for Bijoy Tivari. For the past four months he’s been able to live a dream come true - to bathe all down Ganga at its most sacred tirthas. January 14 will be the climax. And what a climax!

     Makar Sankranti marks the date in the Indian winter solstice when the sun enters Capricorn, heads north - always auspicious—and the days begin to get longer. It’s also the last day of the Bengali month of Poush. But why always on January 14? Why is this one always fixed? All other Indian festivals change dates every year. This puzzled me a lot and I never found anyone who could explain the reason, until I read that Makar Sankranti is the only Indian festival that is celebrated according to the solar, as opposed to the lunar calendar.

     Remember why Ganga originally came down to earth? The sixty thousand sons of King Sagar had inadvertently angered the hermit Kapil Muni while he was meditating by the sea at the tip of Sagar Island. So he shrivelled them into ashes. It was Sagar’s grandson Bhagirath who asked the gods to send down the goddess Ganga to restore them to life. Ganga, of course, came to Earth in the locks of Shiva’s hair at Gangotri and then Bhagirath led Ganga down out of the mountains, across the plains to the sea, looking for that huge pile of ashes. They found them here. Ganga washed over them and the souls of the sixty thousand sons were liberated - they had found mukti to go to heaven.

     So every January, on this festival day of Makar Sankranti, thousands come from all over India to bathe at this spot where Ganga flows into the sea, carrying with her the souls of all the dead whose ashes have been consigned to her along her way. Makar Sankranti at Sagar Island is a Hindu equivalent of the Christian Easter Sunday, when souls arise from the dead. Bijoy swears that Allahabad is the Raj Tirtha, but most of the people here today are quite convinced this beats them all. Bathing here on Makar Sankranti for them truly is liberation, freedom.

     There’s also another way of understanding Makar Sankranti as a rather different story of life and death. The Gangetic plain is the most thickly populated and the oldest settled plain in the world, and agriculture sustains that population. The whole story of the ashes therefore becomes a metaphor for the cycle of famine and drought. Every year, Ganga brings the land back to life.

     The life-giving qualities of Ganga are ultimately what is conveyed through Makar Sankranti, just as the story of Ganga’s descent and the imagery of Shiva’s hair corresponds to the myriad mountain streams and rivers that flow down into Ganga. Imagery and mythology dovetail beautifully with one another.