Porbandar — Birthplace of a Nation

On any normal reckoning, the Western borders of the Indian state of Gujarat are benighted. A long way from anywhere, the flat land of scrub and salt marsh has a single natural resource — wind. According to the season it blows warm and wet from the unholy sea, or scorching and dry from the d esert. Much of the coastline is now guarded by those tall and handsome three-armed wind harvesters. No-one would be very concerned about their effect on this landscape.

How much more benighted must it have been in 1869, when the future Mahatma Gandhi was born here. Then Gujarat was feudal, a patchwork of insignificant little kingdoms. Gandhi's father is described as having been a Prime Minister here, but that can't have made him anybody very much.

The house is a minor place of pilgrimage. On an ordinary street, it would be indistinguishable from all the others, except that an admirer bought up the surrounding square and demolished them all to build a temple marking this sacred spot. There isn't a National Trust consciousness here, so the house is empty. There is only a picture of the great man, and another of his parents, and a swastika set into the floor in the front room to mark the exact spot of his entry into the world. This isn't "heritage" — there is no sense of wanting to recreate the great man's dwelling. All that is important is to have it clearly identified as holy.

The few visitors take it in turns to climb the stairs, so steep that we need the knotted rope to help us up and down. At the top of the house is a cupboard where, we are told, the young Gandhi with the big ears set earnestly to his studies. Even now Porbandar is a ten hour train journey from the state capital of Ahmedabad.

Porbandar is a fishing town. It has two ports, adjacent to each other. In one, a thousand fishing boats, all built to the same ancient design, lie in appearance of idleness. Here and there, a few boxes of undersized silver fish are being unloaded. Gutting them is a smelly process out in the sun, where they are then spread out to dry before being bagged up and piled into the boot of a waiting Mercedes. Small boys with sticks keep the dogs at bay.

This cannot be a profitable industry, yet biblical boatyards ring the port, where fifty more ship skeletons are being worked on by hand. It is a beautiful, if a sad, sight.

The other port, surrounded by military security — though it is the bureaucracy that is more effective at keeping us out — contains two ships. There is a magnificent coal ship of enormous proportions, a gleaming white gunboat, and vast empty warehouses. It is a very long time since Porbandar was a major point of entry for trade with Arabia, but presumably there is still a certain amount of smuggling along the old routes.

Back into town, past a row of ruined Stalinesque taxis — though each has its sleeping driver — to the Sudamaji temple, where I witnessed a strange sight. I had met them before, these one hundred Rajastani pilgrims, who had each paid £50 for a month's pilgrimage in an old bus. Their merit is being determined by the number of holy sites and offerings they can chalk up, so they have set themselves a cruel pace. After a week they are already looking tired. They did not go into Gandhi's house, but only touched his feet in the adjoining temple, before hurrying off again. For them, Gandhi is a figure of little value. They are more interested in Lord Krishna, whose legends fill this area, being not far from his 5000 year old capital at Dwarka. The Sudamaji temple has a miniature stone maze, its alleyways just large enough to put one foot in front of the other. Like bees on the honeycomb, the hundred pilgrims jostle their way around the maze, periodically falling over like dominoes. Their pujari urges them on, "Jaldi! Jaldi! — quickly, quickly!"

I asked him what it was all about, but he would not be interrupted. He thrust a plan into my hand, and I tried to decipher the misprinted text. Ah, it was not a maze, but a complicated mandala whose form allowed us to perform 8.4 million parikramas (sacred circumambulations) as we traced its route round the central swastika. The same number of sins could be forgiven thuswise, it proclaimed.

And as quickly as they had descended, they were gone. Off to Dwarka, further along the coast, a much holier town, where limitless merit could be acquired by those who know how.

Porbandar reverts to its quiet and normal demeanour, an Indian town of no distinction, where no drama occurs worse than a bullock and a bicycle trying unsuccessfully to occupy the same piece at road at the same time. Only under its surface seethes this extraordinary spiritual secret, that out of this narrow and provincial backwater emerged a man who went on to change the world. Like Porbandar itself, Gandhi spent much of his time doing things that seem to us pointless. Spinning by hand must be in the same category as building beautiful ships for a dead industry. But the paradox is that Gandhi could not have changed the world if he had not been wedded to such anachronisms. How could one not believe in humanity after a visit to Porbandar?

© Kenneth Wilson