by George Black
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About the Author
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For bridging the language gap and opening locked doors, thanks to Mostafizur Rahman Jewel, Praveen Kaushal, Damayanti Lahiri, Ajay Pandey, Pallavi Sharma, and Pranav Sharma.
For lending me an extra pair of eyes, thanks to Agnès Dherbeys, a brilliant photographer and awesome traveling companion, and to Diane Cook and Len Jenshel.
For helping to usher earlier versions of some of these stories into print, thanks to Doug Barasch, John Bennet, Alan Burdick, Scott Dodd, Mac Funk, Janet Gold, David Kortava, David Remnick, and Dorothy Wickenden.
For creating Paragraph Writers Space, where all this eventually came together, thanks to Joy Parisi, for her vision and her friendship. And for keeping the ship sailing smoothly and the jar of Hershey’s Kisses always filled, thanks to Lee Bob Black, Ryan Davenport, Maya Macdonald, Ilana Masad, and Amy Meng.
For teaching me new things about our shared craft (even if you didn’t realize it at the time), and for listening to my lamentations when the going was rough, thanks to all my fellow paragrafistas. It’s impossible to name everyone, but I’d be remiss not to give a special tip of the hat to Saul Anton, Zaina Arafat, Kavita Das, Lisa Dierbeck, Elyssa East, Will Heinrich, Sophie Jaff, Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau, George Kyrtsis, Tim Mangin, Ruth Margalit, Sam Nigro, Susanna Schellenberg, Kaushik Shridharani, Kathleen Smith, Sarah-Jane Stratford, Laura Strausfeld, and Cynthia Weiner. Aurvi Sharma has been a particular friend to this project, and her kindness, sharp intelligence, and sense of humor have saved me from countless errors, both large and small.
For sharing their time, advice, hospitality, and encouragement, and for putting up with my insatiable curiosity and often ill-informed questions, thanks to Anupam Agarwal, Fatima Halima Ahmed, Shirin Akhter, Babu Alam, Firoz Alam, Taj Alam, Abdullah Ansari, Alyssa Ayres, Jugal Giri Baba, Acharya Balkrishna, Adam Barlow, Rajiv Bawa, Martin Brading, David Bruce, Vidyawati Chaudhary, the myriad Chowdhurys of Varanasi, Akanksha Chaurey, Prateek Chawla, Dilip Chenoy, Sarat Dash, Kaushal Deb, Bibek Debroy, Paula Devi, Sumant Dubey, Michael Duffy, R. K. Dwivedi, Jennifer Fowler, Atanu Ganguli, Anshul Garg, Anchita Ghatak, Vignesh Gowrishankar, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hafizurrahman, Saleemul Haq, Kanupriya Harish, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, Shahidul Islam, Ramaswamy Iyer, Anjali Jaiswal, Rakesh Jaiswal, Maj. Rajinder Singh Jamnal, Jesmin and the women of Savar and Mirpur, Tara Joy, Babar Kabir, Kushi Kabir, Bonani Kakkar, Pradeep Kakkar, Capt. Mostafa Kamal, Abhishek Kar, Raju Keshri, Meeta Khilnani, Radhika Khosla, Zakir Kibria, Sivarma Krishnan, Col. Manoj Kumar, Nitish Kumar, Anil Kuriyal, Bharat Lal, Anuradha Lohia, Arun Lohia, Munmun Maharaj, Iftekhar Mahmud, Petra Manefeld, Elisabeth Fahrni Mansur, Yvonne McPherson, Brij Mehra, Mike Metrik, Vishwanbharnath Mishra, Ramgopal Mohley, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Mukhti, Bob Nickelsberg, Simon Norfolk, Martina Odermatt, Ragini Pandey, Deependar Panwar, Priya Patel, Ajay Puri, Prema Ram, Navneet Raman, Nithya Ramanathan, Jairam Ramesh, Anita Rana, Haroon ur Rashid, Mariam Rashid, Deepak Rathor, Shruti Ravindran, Shravya Reddy, Ibrahim Hafeez Rehman, Rahim Riyaz, Pallavi Sah, Arvind Sand, Ravindra Sand, Benedict Poresh Sardar, Suresh Semwal, Shabnam, A. K. Sharma, Mourvi Sharma, R. P. Sharma, Shashi Shekhar, A. C. Shukla, Ajeet Singh, Arun Singh, Mahavir Singh, Minijit Singh, Rakesh Singh, S. N. Singh, Violet Smith, Salma Sobhan (who left us much too soon), Leena Srivastava, Meera Subramanian, Mahmudul Suman, S. Sundar, Michael Thompson, Sir Crispin Tickell, Vijay Shankar Tiwari, Raitis Vaivods, Annapurna Vankeshwaran, B. G. Verghese, and Petra Wolf.
For the beautiful maps, thanks to Joe Lemonnier.
For Anne, David, and Julia, thanks for your collective creative energy, intellectual and moral curiosity, and regard for fine writing.
For sixteen years of friendship, advice, and support, thanks to my incomparable agent, Henry Dunow. Long-lasting relationships and personal loyalties are increasingly rare in this business, and writers can often feel like relief pitchers in baseball, bouncing from one team to another in search of the best contract for each new season. For that reason, it’s a special pleasure to work twice in a row with the same house. Thanks then to Sara Ensey, Meryl Gross, Gwen Hawkes, Steven Seighman, Dori Weintraub, Michelle Cashman, Rob Grom, and the rest of the fine team at St. Martin’s Press, but above all to Michael Flamini, who came up with the idea for this book in the first place. Michael, this one’s for you.
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
For anyone with a love of language, India is a special delight. Indian English is deeply idiosyncratic, filled with quirky turns of phrase and archaisms from the days of colonial rule. For a speaker of “standard” English—whatever that may mean—the effect can sometimes be unintentionally comic, and in reproducing conversations verbatim, it’s easy for the writer to come across as condescending. I’m fully aware of those pitfalls, but my overriding goal was to capture and respect the authenticity of the voices of those I met on my travels along the Ganges.
Contrary to popular belief, only about ten percent of Indians speak English, and not always fluently. Many of the conversations in this book were with people who spoke only rudimentary English, or none at all. Some switched back and forth between English and their own language. Many spoke only Hindi, or in some cases Urdu. In these situations, the writer is at the mercy of the translator, and inevitably some translators are better than others. Again, I have done my best to convey the speaker’s voice as accurately as possible.
Since Independence in 1947, the anglicized names of more than a hundred Indian towns and cities have been changed. The effects of this on popular usage have been uneven. Madras has all but given way to Chennai, yet very few people refer to its southern neighbor as Bengaluru; it’s still Bangalore. While some argue for Mumbai, others stay loyal to Bombay. There’s a similar tension between the new Kolkata and the old Calcutta—a matter that is debated by residents of the city, fueled by vodka mojitos and bhang pakoras, at my Holi party. The most extreme case of all is Varanasi—aka Benares, Banaras, and Kashi. In writing about these places, I’ve used different variants according to the context, the source, or the speaker.
Above all, of course, there is the name of the great river itself. Is it the Ganges or Ganga? If it’s the river goddess, I’ve always used Ganga, or Ma Ganga. Otherwise, I’ve used both names, depending on the context and the speaker. When in doubt, my default has been to call it the Ganges, simply because it’s more familiar that way to non-Indian readers.
Calamity-averting Ganesh!
Salam!!
Thou who art invoked on the commencement of a journey,
the writing of a book,
Salam!!
Oh! Ganesh, put not thine ears to sleep!
Encourage me, and then behold my bravery.
—FANNY PARKES, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, 1850
PART ONE
MOUNTAINS
TRAVELERS’ TALES
Month after month, snow blankets the great wall of rock that separates India from China
and Tibet. It settles, compacts, changes its crystalline structure, freezes solid. The mountain peaks, the highest on earth, are covered with endless fields of ice. Sometimes people call them the Third Pole.
No one really knows how many glaciers there are in the Himalayas. Some say ten thousand; some say more. In India, the second largest is the Gangotri Glacier. In our warming world, it isn’t as big as it used to be. Before I left New Delhi for the mountains, I went to see India’s best-known glaciologist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain. A jovial, white-haired, grandfatherly man, he told me that the glacier used to cover more than two hundred and fifty square kilometers—about a hundred square miles. “But now it’s breaking up in many places. You will see blocks of dead ice that are no longer connected to the main ice body.” He chuckled, which seemed odd for someone who was so alarmed by his own findings. But I’ve often found that maintaining a sense of humor is a common trait among scientists engaged in possibly hopeless endeavors.
The tip of the Gangotri Glacier—what scientists call its toe, or its snout—has receded by about two miles since the first European explorers reached it two hundred years ago. It loses another sixty feet every year. When glaciers decay, they become sad, derelict things. The ice cracks and crumbles and turns a dirty pale blue before melting away altogether. At the snout of the Gangotri Glacier, a thin stream of gray, silt-laden water trickles from a cave surrounded by a bleak, colorless rubble field. So much of the ice is gone that you would have to use your poetic imagination, or look at a very old photograph that shows the long-vanished arch of the cave, to understand why, for centuries, Indians have called it Gaumukh: the Cow’s Mouth.
* * *
Two hundred miles downstream, the stream reaches a town called Devprayag, which sits on a triangular promontory. By now it has picked up countless tributaries, passed through innumerable villages and pilgrimage towns and a couple of dams, and become a broad, whitecapped torrent. At Devprayag, it is joined by another river of roughly equal size, the Alaknanda, which flows deep and green from the east. From there to the Indian Ocean, another thirteen hundred miles, it is Ma Ganga—Mother Ganga, or, as the British chose to call it, the Ganges.
At Haridwar, the “Gateway of God” and one of the holiest places in Hinduism, the Ganges leaves the mountains and enters the endless dusty plains of North India. Its main tributary, the Yamuna, runs dead and black through Delhi, then skirts the walls of the Taj Mahal in Agra before eventually joining the Ganges in a place that is sacred to Hindus but carries the name it was given by an invading Muslim emperor: Allahabad, City of God. Farther on, bodies burn around the clock in another city, one that has four names: Kashi, Benares, Banaras, Varanasi. The hinterland towns and villages of the great Gangetic Plain seem sometimes to encapsulate everything that ails India: caste prejudice, corruption, rape and sex trafficking, Hindu-Muslim violence, poverty, and pollution. A pall of brown dust and soot hangs over the fields for most of the year, rising from the cookstoves that burn firewood, kerosene, and cow dung in tens of thousands of villages. Three kilometers thick, the brown cloud drifts northward to the Himalayas, turning the ice dark, increasing the speed at which it is melting. But the northern plains, especially the state of Uttar Pradesh with its two hundred million people, also control India’s political destiny.
When the river finally approaches its delta—the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges—geographers and believers part company. The Ganges divides. Names change. Swollen by the power of the Brahmaputra, the Son of Brahma, the main stem sweeps eastward into what used to be East Bengal and is now Bangladesh. From the geographer’s point of view, this is the true Ganges. It picks up the Jamuna, becomes the Padma, morphs finally into the Meghna, whose estuary is twenty miles wide. But the sacred Ganges of Hinduism—which is also to say the secular Ganges of the British East India Company and the Raj—peels off before the border and heads south, changing its name again as it cuts through the fertile rice fields and palm groves of West Bengal. By the time it reaches Calcutta, present-day Kolkata, it has become the Hooghly.
Seventy miles south of the megacity, and one thousand, five hundred and sixty-nine from the Gangotri Glacier, the Hooghly arrives at last at a flat, oval island, the final point of land. At its southernmost tip is Gangasagar, the last of the river’s innumerable pilgrimage sites, where the river dumps a coffee-colored plume of silt a mile long into the Indian Ocean.
* * *
By the time it reaches the Bay of Bengal, Ma Ganga has fed half a billion people. The great river is the source of their rice, their wheat, the sole guarantor of their two-dollar-a-day survival. But it is also a seducer, a magnetic field that for centuries has drawn in millions more—empire builders and seekers after enlightenment, butchers and plunderers, scholars and teachers, painters and poets and moviemakers, curiosity seekers and consumers of poverty porn, package-tour pilgrims and yoga-mat carriers and bungee jumpers and drug-addled Deadheads, devotees of the sacred and the profane. They come to witness ineffable beauty and surpassing ugliness, the river as goddess and place of worship and the river as open sewer and factory drain.
Most leave as bewildered as when they arrived. Invariably they report, record, scribble down their thoughts. They contemplate the incomprehensible. How can there be thirty-three million gods? And why do others of the same religion say thirty-three? Why is it auspicious this year to marry between 3:48:16 P.M. on February 14 and 5:29:37 A.M. on the following day? How can an open sewer be holy? They struggle to make sense of the endless conundrum of India.
This place! How can we describe it to you?
They write reports to their imperial masters, newspaper stories, magazine articles and travel journals, scholarly histories, ecstatic poems, catalogs of fish, inventories of temples, lists of the hundred and eight names of Ganga, the thousand and eight names of Lord Shiva, analyses of dissolved oxygen and fecal coliform bacteria. They send prayers to heaven. They write emails home, groping for words. They take countless photographs. They make feature films and reverent documentaries. They post jerky amateur videos on YouTube.
In their suitcases and backpacks, the travelers carry the tales of those who traveled before them. I still remember the first time I read about the Ganges. For an eleven-year-old, I had an odd assortment of passions: soccer, stamp-collecting, and scouring junk shops for antique books and prints. One day, for a few pennies, I bought a slim, leather-bound volume with its title gold-tooled on the spine: Strange Lands and Their People. Published in 1827, its purpose was to edify, horrify, excite curiosity, but above all to rally the reader behind the civilizing mission of Christianity. The text was broken up every few pages with a woodblock print showing some piece of local exotica: a sled pulled by reindeer in Lapland, ranks of Muslims pressing their foreheads to the ground in prayer, the skeleton of a woolly mammoth encased in Siberian ice. In the chapter on India, the image was of a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre on the banks of the Ganges in Benares. Formally dressed Englishmen stood off at a distance, clapping their hands to their mouths in horror.
I thought of that woodcut often as I traveled along the Ganges, imagining that this might have been one of the books that early English travelers packed in their portmanteaus and steamer trunks for the three-week journey from Calcutta to Allahabad, whiling away the long hours under a sunshade on the sweltering deck of a budgerow or swaying from side to side in a palanquin. Today’s travelers do their reading on the long flight to Delhi, by the dim night-light in the 2AC coach of the Shiv Ganga Express as it clatters across the endless plains of Uttar Pradesh, or sitting cross-legged on the ghats of Varanasi, the steep steps and platforms where the pilgrims come at dawn for their holy dip. The books they carry could stock a small library. There are accounts by those who have traveled all the way from the Cow’s Mouth to the ocean on foot, sunburned, stricken with dysentery, sleeping every night in a different but identical village, getting by on a dozen words of Hindi, starting with chapati and dal and chai. Others have made the journey by boat
and where necessary by bus, nostalgic for the days of the Raj, tossing out droll asides about impassive or incompetent oarsmen and native bearers. Others have sailed the whole way. Some have struck off on side trips through the labyrinthine channels of the delta in Bangladesh. Others have attempted the journey to the Himalayas in reverse, fighting against the current in jet boats, until they had to admit defeat when faced with the last of the rapids.
As I traveled the Ganges from source to mouth—not in a single journey but in many discontinuous ones—I carried my own share of these books, with each of the authors leaving something new imprinted on the long chain of narrative, adding their own notes of curiosity, distaste, cynicism, ecstasy, and reverence.
Rudyard Kipling, writing for The Pioneer, the newspaper that briefly employed him in Allahabad, hated the sight of dead bodies floating in the river.
Mark Twain wrote the line that has been quoted more than any other: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”
Seventy years later, Allen Ginsberg would sit for hours in a kind of morbid trance among the naked sadhus on the cremation ghats. One night, stoned as usual on ganja, he watched, fascinated, as “the middle corpse had burst through the belly which fell out, intestines sprang up (that is) like a jack in the box charcoal glumpf.”
George Harrison spent equally long hours in the beehive-shaped meditation chambers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, composing songs for the Beatles’ White Album. “That Maharishi’s a nice man, but he’s not for me,” said Ringo Starr, who was homesick for Liverpool and tired of eating eggs and beans.
When Poland opened its borders in the 1950s after the death of Stalin, the journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s first trip was to India. Like everyone, he watched the bodies burning on the ghats of Varanasi. From there he took the train to Calcutta, where he struggled through the crowds sleeping on the floor of Sealdah Station in the floodwaters of the monsoon.