The premise of West Meets East (BBC4) reads like the summary of a car crash read out by an eyewitness: actor Dominic West travels to India to visit the Kumbh Mela festival in the company of his old school friend Jim, a dreadlocked yoga expert also known as the fifth Baronet of Walthamstow. You can see why I turned to the evidence with a heavy heart.
That summary, it turned out, was an injustice. James Mallinson is a renowned scholar with a PhD in Sanskrit, as well as being a de facto member of a sect of yogic sadhus called the 13 Renouncer Brothers. He’s also really bendy. With West as his initiate, Mallinson provided an even-handed introduction to a fascinating, not to say deeply weird, branch of enlightenment. And West was nothing if not game.
The Kumbh Mela, which happens every three years in one of four rotating sacred spots, is the biggest gathering of humans on the planet: roughly 100m people turned up on this occasion, to bathe at a sacred river confluence in Allahabad, which Hindus believe will cleanse them of sins and bring Nirvana, and quite possibly cholera.
It’s also a major convention for sadhus, who pitch camp, meditate, do yoga and take part in ritual penances and privations. West and Mallinson were staying with the 13 Renouncers (there are way more than 13 of them – 10,000 turned up for the festival). During the Kumbh Mela Mallinson was to be raised to the rank of mahant by his guru Babaji, although there was some grumbling in the ranks about a foreigner achieving this distinction.
“You’ve renounced status,” said West, “and now you’ve got more titles than the Queen.”
The Renouncers’ specialist penance involves sitting inside rings of smouldering cow dung in the blazing summer heat, for two to three hours a day, every day, for four months of every year, for 18 years, all gradually increasing the amount of fire, until you finally graduate to wearing a jar containing burning cow dung on your head all day. It’s not for everybody. Even Babaji gave up after seven years, deciding to stick with yoga instead.
It’s by no means the oddest of all the austerities available. West had a passing encounter with a sadhu who has been holding one arm above his head for 40 years, and another who vows not to sit or lie down (he appears to be allowed to lean against stuff) “until Lord Shiva manifests himself in front of him”.
Dr Sir James Mallinson is himself an intriguing figure, an Eton and Oxford graduate who discovered Indian mysticism during his gap year. “I found myself in a holy man’s cave and I didn’t look back,” he says. Although earnest by nature and straight of face, one has a sense that the Pythonesque quality of that statement was not lost on him.
He is by his own admission no sort of Renouncer at all. He mostly lives in England with his wife and kids. His wife was particularly bemused by the possibility of his accession to the title of mahant. “You have to be a Hindu ascetic,” she said, “and you’re not a Hindu and you’re not an ascetic. What are you doing?”
Though he may be at best an honourary sadhu, Mallinson clearly knows his stuff. The myth that Lord Vishnu spilled drops of the nectar of immortality into the rivers at the four sacred sites is, he tells West, a 19th-century innovation, aimed at providing a religious justification for the Kumbh Mela to the British, who weren’t keen on it.
“So they made it up,” said West.
“Effectively, yes,” said Mallinson.
West struggled with some of the basic privations holy men endure, especially all the sitting around cross-legged (it must help that sadhus smoke a lot of weed), but he was genuinely moved by Mallinson’s mahant induction ceremony. Mallinson, garlanded with flowers until his head disappeared, was visibly transported by it. And Babaji made for a most engaging guru: twinkly, approachable, chronically baked. “Dominic’s a very nice boy,” he said. “It makes me happy to bless him. Now he’s my disciple too.”
The celebrity-and-less-famous-friend-go-travelling format has brought us some pretty dire programming in the past, but West Meets East managed to skirt self-indulgence and provide the viewer with, if not total enlightenment, then a glimmer of understanding, plus a look at a guy who has been holding one arm in the air for 40 years. It was a mark of this documentary’s restraint that he appeared only briefly. Channel 5 would have given him his own series. I’d watch it.
