The imprint
Haridvara
Publications.
Haridvara is the old Sanskrit form of Haridwar, the town where the Ganga leaves the Himalaya and enters the plains. The name joins Hari, a name of God, with dvara, a door: the gateway to God. Read with Hara instead of Hari it becomes Shiva’s gate, and both readings are true of the place. Pilgrims have bathed there at Har Ki Pauri, the footsteps of the Lord, for longer than anyone has counted, and every twelve years the Kumbh Mela fills its banks.
Papaji and Haridwar
Papaji loved Haridwar. Before he settled in Lucknow he returned again and again to Rishikesh and Haridwar, meeting whoever came his way. His first Western students would join him there for months at a time, sharing a guesthouse and walking with him along the river, mostly in silence. In 1990 he rented a small house in Haridwar and met seekers on the bank of the Ganga. When he died in 1997, his ashes were given to the river he loved, at Haridwar.
Ganga and the river
Ganga met her Master on that same river, at Rishikesh, in 1968, and took her name from it. The two of them loved to spend time in Haridwar. In Satsang she still recalls walking from Haridwar out to Sapta Sarovar, when there were only a few traditional ashrams along the way, and finding a small Shiva temple painted inside: Shiva flying through the universe with the dead body of Parvati in his arms, weeping. “Shiva remains Shiva,” she says, “even if in this world of appearance he may react this way or that way.”
The imprint
Haridvara Publications was founded to bring Ganga’s spoken teachings to the page, in her own words. The four forthcoming books are its first. Selected and edited by Kabir.