According to Hindu tradition, when the waters of heaven poured down in the form of the Ganges to give life to the world, Shiva feared that the force would destroy the Earth. So the god stepped in and let the waters fall, gently and safely, from the locks of his hair. Shiv-Ganga is a powerful image in India, where water is a precious commodity, for spiritual and practical reasons. It’s difficult to overstate its importance. Nearly all Hindu rituals involve the use of water, often drawn from the Ganges itself. Bathing in sacred rivers and streams is a key component of religious devotion. India’s many other faiths—Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, and others—recognize the sacredness of water, as the entire subcontinent is dependent upon the seasonal monsoons for its annual supply of life-giving water. Water’s function is to purify, to animate, and to restore. “There is no life without water,” says Laxman Katti, general manager at Suraj Water Park in Mumbai. “Life is water.” Waterparks have seized the Indian imagination in ways that traditional amusement parks have not, and while attendance at amusement parks remains higher than at waterparks, the gap is quickly closing. Waterpark Monsoon Waterparks offer obvious health benefits, especially during India’s very long hot season (March through September), when temperatures readily soar past 100 degrees (38 degrees Celsius) until they break during the monsoon. No parents need convincing of the virtues of taking the kids to a waterpark during the summer, and when they arrive the venue will probably seem very familiar. At Suraj Water Park, two rides bear witness to the story of Shiva and the descent of the Ganges. A slide for children is topped by a large blue bust of the god, with water spouting out of his head. He has a cobra around his neck and carries a trident and a drum. The park has also built a large waterfall, with stairs leading up to a railed walkway where visitors can stand in the cascade. Sixty-eight feet tall and 95 feet wide, Har Har Ganga, the god of water, is an enormous, rocky head of Shiva, with water rushing down the length of his hair. With such familiar iconography, Suraj Water Park’s (the name refers to the god of the sun) mission is to combine entertainment with culture. In addition to presenting powerful images of Hinduism, the park also stresses environmental awareness and provides tours of its filtration systems. Katti sees three components of a visitor’s experience at Suraj Water Park: “tradition, technology, and education.” In addition to the Shiva installations, the wave pool, “lazy” and “crazy” rivers, and the Rainbow Slide (boasting 16 different flumes, an Indian record), Suraj offers a museum of ancient locks and a traditional Indian village spread over six acres at the center of the park. The Museum of Locks contains some 2,000 working devices, many from the seventeenth century, that secured forts, palaces, and armories against intruders. Collecting locks has been a hobby of Arun Muchhala, the park’s chairman, and the museum at Suraj is registered with the government as a national treasure. The Suraj Gandh is an adobe and terracotta village, laid out in a courtyard and ringed with lanterns along the wooden railings of the walkways. Recalling the traditional villages of the nearby state of Gujarat, it was designed as a rental facility for weddings, meetings, and other functions and is not accessible from the waterpark. The exterior walls contain intricate designs in red and yellow pigment, with bits of mirror and plastic (much like costume jewelry) in the traditional style. The modern conveniences, such as ceiling fans, sinks, and running water, are handled with a light touch, so the Gandh maintains a lovely traditional feel. Attached is a restaurant that, as a separate facility, serves vegetarian food prepared to exacting specifications. It is open every evening to the public and also caters to the Gandh. The waterpark also serves only vegetarian food, and no alcohol is allowed. “Every aspect of the park gives a message,” says Katti. “To be clean.” A Greater Good As waterparks enjoy a unique niche in India, offering family entertainment in a familiar cultural setting, they also have helped spark what some have called a social revolution. As Nilesh Mistry of nearby Water Kingdom explains, “Before the 1990s, India had no waterparks, and families were not keen on shedding their clothes—or their inhibitions—in public.” Indian society prizes modesty. Women wear long flowing saris or full-length pants, even at the beach. The notion of stripping down in public in the name of fun is alien. At some parks, like Suraj, women bathe in their saris. At Water Kingdom, they rent “costumes,” as they are called in India—nylon-Lycra tights, knee-length or longer, with tops and T-shirts, so the women look as if they are off to the gym rather than the pool (men wear swimming trunks). There is security in numbers, so when families at Water Kingdom see other families similarly attired—and enjoying themselves—they begin to feel less strange. “These platforms have made Indians take risks and become more decisive,” says Mistry. “They have allowed families to interact with each other in different ways.” The key, of course, is that these activities have to be enjoyable. India’s waterparks boast a collection of world-class rides in truly beautiful surroundings. Water Kingdom in Mumbai bills itself as “Asia’s largest themed waterpark,” with 26 slides and attractions. With the theme of a lost temple city, the rivers and flumes tunnel through the thick jungle. Sculpture and motifs drawn from Hindu temple architecture give visitors the notion they have stumbled, like Indiana Jones, upon a lost city of water-loving natives. Much of the marble for the columns and walkways was quarried from the north Indian state of Rajasthan, so parts of Water Kingdom are made of the same stone as the Taj Mahal. Like Suraj Water Park, Water Kingdom provides schoolchildren with tours of the treatment facilities and presentations about rainwater harvesting and recycling. “This is a place where you can learn as you play,” says Anand Lamdhade, Water Kingdom’s senior manager of operations. A Cultural Ride As these parks have shown the water’s ability to refresh families on hot days and animate the normally shy and reserved, they have not forgotten about water’s capacity to restore. Both Suraj and Water Kingdom make their facilities available to disabled children and charities that serve street children and orphans. For Mumbai’s disabled children especially, waterparks provide the experience of moving, playing, or even walking in the controlled and safe environment of a pool, where disability may be less of a burden. Of course, schoolchildren are always a park’s lifeblood. Kishkinta, a combined amusement and waterpark in the southern city of Chennai, sponsors an annual award for academic excellence for the top students in the tenth and twelfth grades in all of the state’s 250 districts. Kishkinta charters a special train that departs from Kanyakumari, the city at the southernmost tip of India, and makes its way to Chennai in the northeast corner of the state of Tamil Nadu. It stops at the towns and villages along the way, picking up the winning students and their families. They spend three days at Kishkinta, enjoying the park, participating in an awards ceremony (this year’s speaker is the president of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam), and taking trips into Chennai, the state capital, for meetings with members of the government. Like its counterparts in Mumbai, much of Kishkinta’s appeal lies in the incorporation of cultural motifs into its entertainment offerings. The park takes its name from the legendary monkey kingdom in the Indian epic, the Ramayana, and its centerpiece is Chennai Kuttralam, an enormous man-made waterfall, nearly an exact replica of the famous Kuttralam Falls in the southern part of Tamil Nadu, one of the state’s most popular tourist spots. While the real one is seasonal and flows most heavily during the monsoon, Chennai Kuttralam rages every afternoon at 1 p.m., when the engineer turns on the tap. Bathers swim in the shallow pool at the base or stand in the cascade from a railed walkway. There is also a special section for ladies. One recent addition to the park is the Snake Boat, a 110-foot-long narrow warship, powered by 100 rowers. The historical vessel comes from the family of Kishkinta Chairman M. C. Appachan in the southern state of Kerala. Not a ride but a cultural artifact, the Snake Boat is used for demonstrations and special occasions. Kishkinta has also developed cultural rides from farther afield. A white water, six-seat tube ride takes visitors through a re-creation of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s famous temple compound built in the twelfth century and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With surprising attention to detail, Kishkinta’s ride boasts copies of some of the Hindu-influenced sculpture, in a lush jungle setting, reminiscent of the Cambodian site. The ride celebrates the spread of Indian culture to the Far East. Kishkinta has been able to mount its cultural rides on a grand scale, thanks in part to the fact that, unlike its counterparts in overcrowded Mumbai, Kishkinta has the luxury of space. Located well inland from the main part of Chennai, a large coastal city, Kishkinta was developed in a low-lying tract near the suburb of Tambaram. The park’s managers say that developers considered them crazy when they chose the site in the mid-1990s. The land was barren and rocky, with only dry scrub and grass, hardly an ideal site for an amusement and waterpark. But Kishkinta quickly blossomed. The park dug five reservoirs, which today serve to harvest rainwater. The wasteland was transformed overnight into an oasis. Those reservoirs are now recreational lakes, and there are more than 1,800 meters of winding canals. By planting 10,000 saplings and transplanting 2,000 full-grown trees in 1990, Kishkinta today boasts over 120 acres of greenery. Visitors taking advantage of the park’s traditional amusements, water rides, and lakes for boating also enjoy the second largest green space in the city. Suraj Water Park, Water Kingdom, and Kishkinta know that for all their cultural offerings and other strategies to make waterparks familiar to Indian visitors, safety is their top concern. The amusement industry is so young in India that any accident, however minor, will have serious repercussions. “We are setting standards, benchmarking in the industry, which is very important in a country where people don’t always follow the rules,” says Water Kingdom’s Nilesh Mistry. “Safety is an emotional issue at any time,” says P. K. Thothadri, Kishkinta’s safety officer. “But in the context of family entertainment, the issue is paramount.” The biggest danger, he notes, stems from some of the positive benefits of waterparks themselves, the loosening of visitors’ inhibitions and their willingness to take risks. “People come to relax and have fun, but when they see the rides, they become more adventurous,” he says. “The biggest challenge is the unpredictable behavior of the public.” Thothadri credits Kishkinta’s spotless safety record to the guidelines issued by IAAPA. “We follow them meticulously,” he says. This uncompromising attitude toward safety is vital, as waterparks become increasingly popular. India’s waterpark industry may be young, but it draws on one of the world’s oldest and most resplendent cultures, which never ceases to fascinate. One of Hinduism’s great virtues is its ability to absorb, even celebrate, new features and elements of other cultures. One of the slides at Water Kingdom is called Humunga Kowabunga, with the sign in English and phonetic Hindi. Kids might imagine that Shiva himself uttered these words when the Ganges spilled from his hair and gave life to the world.
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