I grew up with India in my ears. My maternal grandfather had been a commissioner in the Indian customs service and my mother went to school in Mussoorie, on the hem of the Himalayas.

I remember suitcases in the attic full of folded dress clothes, white gloves and letters from England – and every time my mother stopped her knitting and fell silent, I could see it in her eyes. India is where she went, and she took me with her.

I have always wanted to go there, to taste it, to test it. And so I turned up in a dry river bed on the outskirts of Allahabad, one human being among the 20m who had come to bathe in the holy River Ganges at the Hindu Kumbh Mela, the biggest gathering of humanity at the largest camp site on the planet.

From here, my journey would take me upstream into the Himalayas, as far as our vehicles could go – which is no further than the snowline. I would be living with a group of sadhus, peripatetic holy men, and seeing the country they see every day – very different from the rich economic pastures we are being sold as “the New India”.

In search of China's Shaolin soul

Shaolin monks are the stuff of martial-arts legend, but, says Peter Owen Jones, they’re also earth's most contented people

Background

• Dine with a maharajah in Udaipur

• Tea time in Kerala

• Ageless Udaipur

• Do the hippies still run Goa?

Related Internet Links

• Read more articles in our India travel section

Related Links

• Mumbai: a city of two tales

• 10 classic India stories

Most sadhus live alone, in caves in the mountains or in makeshift shelters under holy trees on the outskirts of towns and villages. The Kumbh Mela is one of their few opportunities to be together.

I was there for five days, and it’s like living, eating and sleeping in the middle of a cup final, a metropolis of boulevards and backstreets constructed from canvas and carpets. There are children dressed as gods, gods dressed as children, elephants dressed in chalk. The sadhus either wear nothing but a light covering of ash, or are draped in marigold-orange – except, that is, for a small group of travelling minstrels. These sadhus have been castrated and dress as women, moving from tent to tent, dancing very badly and singing even worse.

Other sadhus practise what they call “austerities”, many of which involve self-mortification. One middle-aged man had held his right arm above his head for 14 years, another had not sat down for six – he slept standing, slouched over a cushion suspended from the roof.

I slept at an ashram – one of perhaps a thousand at the Kumbh Mela, each centred on a guru. I had been adopted by a guru called Jagdish, and for the duration of my stay he treated me as his son. He spent his days sitting in the lotus position on a small platform above a holy fire. I never saw my “father” without a smile on his face.

THE MELA is a sensory onslaught: I didn’t sleep for three straight nights, and after five days I was ready to go. The plan was to travel north by road into the Himalayas – a three- or four-day journey. I intended to sleep all the way.

Some chance. In the first 12 hours on the road, we hit 50mph once and, frankly, I didn’t want to go any faster. The problem is the prevailing overtaking ethic, which manifests itself as an endless game of chicken. I was travelling with a young sadhu called Vasistha, and every time we dodged disaster by millimetres, he would look at me wide-eyed and say: “We are all going to die, yes, very soon I think.” Then he would laugh uncontrollably. At first I thought this was just bravado, but then I realised it was more serious – he genuinely didn’t mind whether we survived or not.

Thankfully, Indian main roads seem to have a broken-down lorry every mile, slowing the traffic. Nine times out of 10, the back axle has gone because of overloading. Most things in India are overloaded – the buses with people, the arms with bracelets, the air on the plains with dust, the tea served up beside the road with sugar. The sugar itself comes from the roadside: from mile upon mile of sugar-cane fields interspersed with smoking clockwork molasses refineries. These are family concerns, staffed by grandparents, barefooted children and their bored oxen, all sweating those sweet crystals out of stalks and soot.

I couldn’t work out whether India was falling down or going up. The towns on the plains are ugly and dirty, but the people are beautiful, and occasionally there are incongruous reminders of another country. The ghosts of the Raj are everywhere – haunting the stations, ringing the church bells.

The ghosts had faded away by Haridwar, the gateway to the Himalayas. Here, the Ganges splits into seven channels and turns a milky blue, stippled with geese and orange clumps of sadhus meditating on the stony banks. The city is crammed with ashrams: this is where older sadhus come to retire and lay their bodies to rest. In death, they are buried crosslegged, as if meditating.

Given the choice, I would far rather stay in an ashram than a hotel: you get a much bigger view of India, and some are lovely. But the quality of the experience depends on the resident guru, whose take on life and the universe is potentially very different from the guru next door.

I was in Jagdish’s ashram, and he met us, smiling, at the gates. The small knot of buildings was set in flower gardens leading down to the banks of the seven blue rivers. I stayed for three days, and I don’t think I have been treated so tenderly since I was a child.

There is much talk about the “new” or “emerging” India, and what this really means is the arrival of gleaming commercial towers and western hotel chains. Before too long you could be anywhere. Should the advancement of humanity be measured in shopping centres?

A good deal of building is taking place in Haridwar, along the banks of the Ganges. These are new ashrams, with self-contained rooms and medical facilities, the idea being that here is rest for the soul, a place where your senses Soul food: Peter Owen Jones dines with sadhu Alwar Giri (left) and sadhu Vasistha HIMALAYAS antithesis of physical excess.

As a result, something gets under your skin here. This had started to happen to me. India challenges needs: the need for sleep, for comfort, for meat. To complete my own journey, I was dressed in orange and packed off to spend a few nights in a cave in the foothills of the Himalayas. This, too, is very much part of the sadhu tradition. A novice will serve a master for up to 10 years, until the master says one day, “I think it is time you were moving on.” The young sadhu then takes to the road, to the forest or a cave.

I can’t say the foothills of the Himalayas are beautiful: they are big more than anything else. They appear unfinished rather than untamed; they are brown and pleading for water. Yes, they are spectacular, a postcard around every hairy bend, but the mountains didn’t beckon me or call me to them.

It wasn’t until I’d settled into Vasistha’s cave, just outside the village of Thadoga, that the mountains came into focus. There is so much life that’s hidden from the road. Hornbills, little owls, butterflies – though I’m afraid I killed the scorpion that scuttled down the rock wall towards me in the middle of the night.

In the evenings, the village men would arrive with food and we would smoke a little hash around the fire outside the cave entrance and tell stories until the early hours. Vasistha came and stayed one night, jumping over the flames and dancing.

“Come dance, what a beautiful night this is,” he said, wild-eyed. I shuffled round the fire a couple of times.

“Look, you are getting old now,” he said. I agreed, and he looked at me quizzically.

“It is the body that grows old, not the man, my friend.”

It was a significant lesson. I had learnt at least three others on my pilgrimage to India. The first is that comfort is a mental state, not a physical one. The second is that the British have forgotten how to smile. The third, that it takes more strength not to kill a scorpion than to kill it.

Travel details: specialist tour operators can create itineraries that visit the Ganges at Varanasi, and other pilgrimage sites in the Himalayan foothills. Try Abercrombie & Kent (0845 618 2200, www.abercrombiekent.co.uk), Ampersand Travel (020 7289 6100, www.ampersandtravel.com), Audley Travel (01993 838000, www.audleytravel.com) and Somak Holidays (020 8423 3000, www.somak.co.uk).

Peter Owen Jones’s journey is featured in Extreme Pilgrim on BBC2 on Friday at 9pm

Times recommends

• Win a Zeppelin flight over London
• A first timer's guide to... Morocco
• The budget guide to the French Riviera