This writer was witness to the 1962 Ashtagraha Samyoga –a conjunction of Sun, Moon, Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and all the mass hysteria and panic associated with it. Much before the D-day on February 5, panic-stricken families began offering daan (donation) to the holy men and conducted havan (fire ritual) and puja (worship) on their behalf.
From noon onwards, six hours before the world was to end at 5.38 pm, families began collecting at the parks and open places with their bundles of eatables and water waiting for the apocalypse. DTU buses went empty, markets shut, streets wore a deserted look and private offices worked with thin attendance. But government and subordinate offices functioned near normal.
Some in government tried to strike a compromise. Since large sections of people were inconvenienced, government establishments were given the option to close the offices in the afternoon. But Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was firm. He said that making it a government holiday will amount to national endorsement of superstition.
Hence, the government offices worked in full strength. Later, addressing a rally attended by 3 lakh people – and not like today’s transported crowds – in Kanpur, Nehru appealed to the people to cultivate scientific temper.
“What is absurd cannot be accepted”, he said.
He called it a ‘laughing matter’ that so many people were taking a dip in Ganga during the eclipse. Superstitions were based on fear and it was difficult to erase it.
But the practice continues even today.
Also read: The Politicisation of Maha Kumbh: Where Will It End?
“Those who paid more silver to holy men expect better chances of escaping the catastrophe and there was a shortage of holy men,” Nehru had quipped. “And terrified people even stopped buying country liquor leading to a 50% drop in sales.”
What Nehru said was not an exaggeration. This writer could testify to the fear and anxiety and the resultant irrational behavior of the panic-gripped people.
Triggered by a few astrologers, through the local media and mostly by word of mouth, large sections of people had really believed that the doomsday predictions will happen at 5.38 pm on February 5, 1962.
If the conjunction of seven planets could lead to Mahabharata war, you can imagine the kind of disaster that a line-up of eight planets could cause, astrologers argued.
And for us, it was a rare occasion to travel in almost empty DTU buses on deserted roads and closed markets and visit the ghats, maidans and temples to watch the hysterical behavior of the crowds when the sun, moon, earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn formed a line. Yagna (rituals), havan and chanting of Vedic verses had begun a week before at Ram Lila maidan.
Volunteers directed visitors to drop the offerings to the holy men in red cloth wrapped brass vessels. The crowds reverently obeyed – most of them genuinely believed that offering to holy men, puja, havan and chanting of mantra would reduce the rigors of the calamity.
That was what some astrologers had suggested as a remedy. At the ghats of Yamuna, then a more lively river with clean flowing water, crowds collected to take a dip.
At big temples like Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place and Birla Mandir – which was then an essential itinerary in tourist guidebooks – too, people thronged for solace. As Jawaharlal Nehru said, there was actually a shortage of holy men.
Hawkers, perhaps unaware of the impending disaster, did roaring business even at 5.38 pm.
By noon, hours before the dreaded moment, families with women, old and children proceeded to the temples, parks and streets carrying eatables and water in surahi (earthen vessel) – plastic bottles were yet to appear. Chanting of hymns mingled with wild cries reached the peak as the deadline approached. Then it was a sigh of relief. As the sun set, people began returning home.
But astrologers are always the winners. They never admit failure of predictions. Hence a week later, some of them claimed that good deeds by people and god men spared the worst disasters. This apart, Chinese intrusion, wars with Pakistan, Lal Bahadur Shastri’s sudden death, Cuban missile crisis were all part of the Ashtagraha effects which will last up to 1994.
However, there was a godman who said that there was no need to bother about Ashtagrahi as the graha (planets) were all benevolent gods and they wouldn’t harm the devotees. He, however, appealed to people to pray, chant mantra and write the name of the respective ishta devata (favourite deity).
Western scientific temper is not much different
Look how astronomer Robert Richardson of Griffith Observatory, California, describes the mass frenzy:
“By two o’clock that day, roads leading to the observatory were a solid mass of cars lined up bumper to bumper for a mile and a half. One woman was weeping so hard to understand her. She was practically on the verge of collapse. ‘I know it’s silly to carry on this way,’ she said between sobs. ‘But I can’t help myself’.”
Science writer Carolyn Gramling says:
“Others around the world had even more extreme reactions, stoking up bomb shelters in the US and holding non-stop prayer vigils attended by millions in Bombay. One group of believers moved en masse to the town of Cleator, Ariz which the group thought was one of only 12 spots in the world safe from the imminent disaster.”
There is another set of conservatives who provide a seemingly scientific explanation to the holocaust theory. They argue that the conjunction of eight planets would unsettle the existing gravitational arrangement. If movement of the moon could cause high tides, one could imagine the disastrous impact eight or seven planets could have.
However, scientists counter this argument. “If all of planets were to align perfectly with each other… their gravity would raise the ocean tides by just one twenty- fifth of one millimeter,” scientists say.
History is replete with similar doomsday predictions. Conjunction of planets, seven, eight or nine were happening throughout the past. In 2022, there were two Ashtagrah samyogas – in June and December.
But none of these led to holocausts or even minor earthquakes. They were like any other day. The failure to understand this simple dynamic is what Jawaharlal Nehru described as the lack of scientific temper.
Consider a series of such parade of planets occurred in the past century. None of these had caused even a ripple, let alone a holocaust.
A rare conjunction of seven planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mercury – happened in January this year too. Unlike the Ashtagraha yoga of 1962, however, doomsayers did not predict any disasters like earthquakes and the mythical parlay.
The movie 2012, and its response, vividly described the kind of panic created when five planets apparently came in conjunction – solar flares, neutrinos, earthquakes, volcanos, floods, poles shifting, oceans washing over the tallest mountains in the world, cities falling into the sea, mass hysteria – basically total destruction. All this was supposedly predicted by Mayans thousands of years ago.
There was another prediction of the apocalypse soon after the end of World War I in 1919. It was when the world was struggling to recover from the destruction caused by the war. Western astrologers predicted the end of the world as seven planets came in alignment with the sun.
People fearfully waited for the disaster to happen at 8:31 am on December 17, 1919. It did not.
Europe and America, which was claimed as the epicenter of the disaster, waited and waited. Believers in Paris gathered in churchyards and prayed. At Canada’s Vancouver Island and in Oshkosh, people drank and danced to their content to end their lives in boozy parties.
From England to France, ‘people huddled, prayed, cried and stared at the sky waiting for the dramatic climax.’ But nothing happened.
In the end, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. On December 18, newspapers reported the non-event in derision. “We are still here,” said The Leon Journal-Reporter from Leon, Iowa.
Take the case of Millerites, a Christian religious sect, who were convinced that the apocalypse would happen by 1884. The disaster was known as the Great Disappointment.
“Thousands of people [went] out onto a hillside outside of Albany thinking they were going to go to sleep, and when they wake up, they’re going to be in the kingdom of heaven. But when they woke up [the next morning], they were still in Albany,” says Brain Regal, a historian of science at Kean University in New Jersey.
Regal says, most doom predictions come from religious groups.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.