NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 8 Dharampal's account of pilgrims travelling from Rameswaram to Haridwar — LET'S EXPLORE

Observations from the excerpt — five things stand out:

• Ordinary villagers, not rich pilgrims. About twelve people, three or four women and seven or eight men, from two villages north of Lucknow.
• A very long journey. Three months, and Rameswaram — the southern tip of the country — was only one of the places they had visited.
• They carried their household with them. Bundles, earthen pots, and “all the necessities for their food — atta, ghee, sugar”. They cooked their own meals instead of buying them, which kept the journey affordable and kept their food rules intact.
• The group is the unit. Nobody travels alone; men and women of two villages move as one party, sharing cost, cooking and safety.
• A firm sense of purpose. “We don't have time … We have to go to Haridwar. And then we have to get back home.” The pilgrimage, not sightseeing, is the point.

The route. They were travelling by train, so the natural line runs up the eastern side and then along the Ganga plain:

A pilgrim group would keep touching tīrthas along that line — Rameswaram, Kanchipuram, Puri, Gaya, Varanasi, Prayagraj — which is why the pilgrimage lasted three months.

Why they did not stop at Delhi. Because Delhi is a great capital city, but it is not part of their tīrtha list. Three reasons together:

1. Purpose. Their journey was a religious vow with a fixed sequence of sacred places. Haridwar — a tīrtha at the point where the Ganga enters the plains — belonged to that list; Delhi did not. For them Delhi was only a railway junction where the train had to be changed.
2. Time and money. They had been away three months, carrying their own flour and ghee. Every extra day away meant more expense and more work left undone at home. They said it themselves: “We don't have time.”
3. Completing the circle. A yātrā is finished properly — a dip at Haridwar and then straight home. Sightseeing in between would break the discipline of the journey.

Follow the road north from Madurai and the answer builds itself.

Languages they would cross

How they would communicate. Four ways, all still in use today:

• Sanskrit as a link language among priests, scholars and monks — a Tamil scholar and a Kashi paṇḍit could discuss in Sanskrit even with no other language in common.
• Gestures, numbers and a few trade words for buying grain, hiring a cart or asking the way — the way people still manage in a new city's market.
• Guides and go-betweens — panḍās at tīrthas, caravan leaders, and traders who dealt with several regions and therefore spoke several tongues.
• Shared religious vocabulary — the names of deities, rivers and festivals were recognisable everywhere, so “Kāśhī”, “Ganga” or “Rāma” needed no translation.

Where they would stay. In dharamshalas, chhatrams and satrams built by kings and merchants; in temple maṭhas and monasteries; in caves and rest houses on trade routes (the chapter mentions the Naneghat caves used as a rest house for traders); in the courtyard of a village temple; or simply camped in a grove or by a riverbank, as pilgrims still do.

What they would eat. Mainly food they cooked themselves — rice, flour, dal, ghee, salt and jaggery carried in bundles and pots, exactly as Dharampal's group did. On the road they would also eat what each region offered: rice and sambhar-like preparations in the Tamil country, ragi and jowar rotis in the Deccan, wheat rotis and dal in the Ganga plain, plus temple prasāda and annadāna — free meals served to pilgrims, a custom still alive in Puri, Varanasi and Amritsar.