On the Ganges

by George Black

  Kapuściński, who carried with him The Histories of Herodotus, the first travel reporter, understood the nature of journeys better than anyone. “A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again,” he wrote. “It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.”

  Part of my own film of memory was made up of stories that were drawn from other authors whose names would never be known, those who wrote the great legends of Hinduism: the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Puranas. They were a constant reminder that the Ganges is no ordinary river and that a physical journey is not the only way of going to its source. I found its beginnings in the unlikeliest of places, as far as you can get from the glaciers and the ocean and the cremation fires, in a land that had no rivers at all.

  PRESENT AT THE CREATION

  “Turn left at the monkeys,” said Sumant, an affable young man with the face of a cherub, who had come to the burning Thar Desert of Rajasthan to explore the possibilities of solar energy.

  Sure enough, a mile or two on, we came upon the monkeys, a pack of a hundred or more scavengers at a dirt truck stop, pouncing on plastic bags and mango skins and evading kicks and swipes from the drivers of the big painted Tata trucks. We turned left and headed deeper into the desert toward Jodhpur, the Blue City, where I was going to meet a woman named Kanupriya Harish.

  In the world of water, Kanupriya was something of a celebrity. She was a brisk young woman with sensible glasses and a laptop full of PowerPoint presentations. She was the head of the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, which had its offices in the converted nineteenth-century summer palace of Maharaja Takhat Singh, a sand-brown building on a low, sand-brown hill on the outskirts of Jodhpur. Twice she had hosted Prince Charles. The first time, he came with Camilla Parker-Bowles. The second time, he arrived in time for Holi, the spring festival of colors. Kanupriya invited him to join a celebratory dance with a group of local men. They wore turbans, earrings, and memorable Rajasthani mustaches. The prince wore a gray double-breasted suit. He twirled around for a couple of minutes, holding a brightly striped parasol. When they complimented him on his moves, he said, “It’s hereditary.”

  Kanupriya fired up her slideshow. A woman scrabbled a hole in the sand in search of seepage. Girls trudged through the desert with battered aluminum water pots on their heads. Men dug fathomless tube wells, going deeper each year. “There is nothing harder than finding water in the desert,” Kanupriya said, “and that is how we got our name.”

  You could have written my Hindi vocabulary on the back of a postage stamp and still had room for a shopping list, but one of the few words I did know was jal—water. So what about the Bhagirathi part? Desert?

  She shook her head. “Something that is very hard to do, a task that requires a lot of effort and brings praise and honor to the one who carries it out: this is called Bhagirath Prayatna.”

  “So Jal Bhagirathi is the task of finding water?”

  “In a way. But Bhagiratha was a king. Let me tell you the story.”

  * * *

  Every Hindu knows the legend, which is recounted in the scriptures with innumerable variants and sub-variants, elaborated and embroidered down the centuries by oral transmission. This is the version that Kanupriya Harish told me.

  There was once a king of Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Ram, named Sagara. He was a generous and judicious ruler, but his great misfortune was to be childless. However, the gods eventually granted his wish for an heir—which is something of an understatement, since one of his two wives gave birth to sixty thousand sons. Their seeds were nurtured in a gourd, and when they were born, a nurse tended to each of them in a jar of ghee, or clarified butter.

  Toward the end of his reign, Sagara decided to perform the traditional horse sacrifice, the aswamedha. This involved sending out a white stallion to roam the land for a year, at the end of which it would be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. The territories through which it wandered would be brought under the king’s sovereign rule. Those in its path would be offered a choice: succumb or fight. But somewhere along the way, the horse went missing, abducted by the gods because they were fearful that King Sagara’s power might come to extend as far as the heavens.

  Where was the horse? Puzzled and angry, Sagara dispatched his sons to search for the missing animal. They scoured the high mountains and tore apart the forests. By some accounts they dug deep into the underworld, until eventually they came to the ocean, or perhaps it was their digging and delving that created the oceans in the first place. On the farthest shore, they found the horse grazing peacefully by the ashram of a great sage, a rishi, named Kapila. They cursed him as the thief. Kapila flew into a rage at being disturbed during his meditation, at the insult to his good name. He opened his eyes and shot bolts of fire at the intruders, or perhaps the fierceness of his gaze was enough to produce spontaneous combustion. Whatever the case, the sons of King Sagara, all sixty thousand of them, were incinerated on the spot.

  Kapila said that only one thing could redeem their ashes and allow them to enter heaven. The goddess Ganga would have to be called down from her celestial realm, where she had issued from the big toe of the left foot of Vishnu, preserver of the universe, and wash them clean of their sins.

  King Sagara tried for thirty thousand years to persuade the goddess to come to earth, but she refused. In the course of time, his great-great-grandson, Bhagiratha, took up the problem. He journeyed to the snowbound peaks of the Himalayas near Mount Kailash, the home of Lord Shiva, where he stood on a rock on one leg for a thousand years in a place that is now called Gangotri. Brahma, the creator, was so impressed that he agreed to summon Ganga to earth. But her descent, the Gangavatarana, was no simple matter; even if the impetuous young goddess agreed, she might crack apart the universe with the power of her flood.

  The dilemma was resolved by Shiva, the blue-skinned, trident-wielding destroyer of worlds, the god who was both benign and fearsome, ascetic and voluptuary, with the moon on his head. Curling around the moon, the temperamental goddess came down from the Milky Way in a frothing fury, her waters teeming with fish, but Shiva broke her fall by entangling her in his thick, matted dreadlocks. When he had tamed the flood, he channeled it into seven rivers. The most important of these issued from Gaumukh, the snout of the Gangotri Glacier, where it took the name of King Bhagiratha. From there to Devprayag, where it joins the Alaknanda, the river is still called the Bhagirathi.

  Ganga’s journey from there to the ocean was not without incident. As she crossed the plains, preceded by King Bhagiratha in his chariot, the torrent so upset a young ascetic that he swallowed her to the last drop. The gods were forced to intercede again, prevailing on him to release her, by way of his ear. Eventually the river reached its great delta, where it braided itself into a labyrinth of channels and distributaries as dense and tangled as Shiva’s hair. In the end, it came to Gangasagar, where today there is a simple, modern temple dedicated to Kapila, the sage who turned the sons of Sagara to a smoking heap of ash. The name can be translated in two ways: as the marriage of river and ocean or the union of goddess and king.

  THE WATER PYRAMID

  The road west from Jodhpur became narrower and emptier, threading its way through an infinite landscape of sand dunes, wild peacocks that erupted suddenly from the shade of khejri thorn trees, and plodding camel carts pulling water tanks with swastikas daubed on the sides for good luck.

  A few miles short of the border with Pakistan, we ran into a line of a dozen tanks performing maneuvers across a crunching salt flat. A soldier gave us a baleful look, hoisted his weapon, and signaled us to circle around the convoy at a safe distance.

  “Will there be war?” I asked our taciturn driver. India and Pakistan were in one of those cycles where the sabers were being rattled.

  “Most definitely,” he said. His expression suggested tha
t if he had been on the other side of hostilities, he would have added insh’allah.

  “But both of your countries have nuclear weapons,” I said.

  The response to this was an enthusiastic nod. “Yes, and we will drop one on Islamabad.”

  “But then they will drop one on Delhi.”

  “But if they do that, we will destroy all of their cities,” he said. A beatific look spread across his broad features. “And then there will be peace forever.”

  * * *

  We came to a collection of round mud huts with conical thatch roofs, encircled in a thorn break. We might have been in Africa, but for the barefooted women in rainbow saris who were stamping cow dung into a flat surface for their yards. When they were done, it had the look of poured and polished concrete.

  Beyond this compound, out in the open desert, sat the miraculous machine that the Dutch engineers had brought to the remote village of Roopji Raja Beri. It was a sleek mushroom cap of silvery plastic, thirty feet high. It looked as if the pilot of a UFO had set his machine down for refueling among the sand dunes, and it was Prema Ram’s pride and joy.

  Prema Ram was the sarpanch, a figure of some considerable authority, acting as the intermediary between the village and the government. He was a tall, beefy man, draped in loose white cotton, his big head encased in a turban of red, green, purple, and gold. He wore small, petal-patterned earrings and an extravagant mustache. He was a proud twenty-year veteran of the Indian Army, and his barrel chest seemed to expand visibly as he recounted the particulars of his service, nose to nose with the enemy in the freezing altitudes of Kashmir. It seemed best to keep him away from the driver; I had no stomach for further talk of war.

  Prema Ram cleaned out some stainless-steel thimble cups with the meat of his thumb, and we drank the obligatory chai, tooth-rottingly sweet, and nibbled on the obligatory dry biscuits that are one of the minor legacies of the Raj. Prema Ram turned morose. Hearts and sometimes bones were broken over water here, he said. Four inches of rainfall amounted to a good year. What little remained in the ground was so salty it could burn your tongue. “The natural order is breaking,” he said.

  Then he led us across to the silvery structure, where he cheered up. He peeled back two flaps of heavy plastic film, like a conjurer demonstrating a magic trick. A blast of heat and humidity hit me in the face. He waved his hand at a shimmering sheet of water inside, which was the size and depth of a small backyard swimming pool. He thumped his fist on the side, and sparkling droplets trickled down the interior walls. It was an exercise in physics and chemistry, elementary but ingenious. You pumped the brackish water from the ground, used the blazing heat of the desert sun to evaporate it, drew off the salt to sell later, and collected the distilled drinking water as it ran down into a storage tank.

  “We call it the water pyramid,” Kanupriya told me. But it had another name, too: Shiv Jaldhara—Shiva’s constant flow of water, the guarantee of all life. Having brought the Ganges down to earth from the Milky Way, the great god is worshipped in every rock and ripple of the river, all the way from its source in the glaciers of the Himalayas to its Hundred Mouths in the Bay of Bengal, and out here in the farthest reaches of Rajasthan.

  The reason for this second name was that the water pyramid had been inaugurated a few years earlier on the Mahashivaratri, the Great Night of Shiva—the night, some say, of his nataraja, his whirling cosmic dance in a ring of fire. A statue of the nataraja stands outside the headquarters of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. For physicists, it is a symbol of the dance of subatomic matter, although others see it as the dance of divine creation and destruction. Which may arguably be two ways of saying the same thing.

  It was time for my journey to take a more conventional form, so I left the desert behind and headed for the mountains. The timing was good, for I arrived just in time for the Mahashivaratri. But that part of the story comes a little later.

  THE COW’S MOUTH

  When Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, arrived in Calcutta in 1772, the place was in turmoil. A parliamentary committee had recently accused the British East India Company of “the most atrocious abuses that ever stained the name of civil government.” All that mattered to the officers of the Hon’ble Company was the rapacious pursuit of private wealth. India was an unlocked store waiting for the shelves to be looted. “We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru,” said the politician and writer Horace Walpole. “They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal.”

  Hastings came in to clean the slate. If you were to rule a country, did you not have an obligation to understand it? He took pains to learn passable Hindi and Urdu. It might have been the Age of Empire, but it was also the Age of Enlightenment, although sometimes it was hard to know where to draw the line between the two. The Orientalists, as men like Hastings came to be known, wanted to know the size, weight, and value in pounds sterling of all things. They sought out intelligence on the riches that could be extracted from the lands they had conquered and the strength, location, and disposition of potential competitors. But at the same time, they were serious scholars of religion, promoters of Sanskrit literature, historians, geologists, philologists, archaeologists, antiquarians. In 1784, Sir William Jones, the very epitome of the Orientalist, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal. “The intended objects of the Asiatic Society,” he wrote, “were Man and Nature—whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other—within the geographic limits of Asia, with Hindustan as a centre.”

  Of all the scholarly disciplines Hastings had at his disposal, the most important was cartography. If you wanted to understand the country you were ruling, the first thing you had to do was map it, and much of India remained terra incognita, especially its great northern barrier wall of rock and snow. The greatest mystery of all concerned the source of the Ganges. The Orientalists were familiar with the rudiments of its creation myth, but renderings of the upper course of the Ganges in eighteenth-century maps might just as well have been labeled “Here Be Dragons.” What little the mapmakers knew was drawn from travelers’ tales and anecdotes, not from science or firsthand observation—and that had remained true since the days of Ptolemy, fifteen hundred years earlier.

  Drawing on the accounts of early Greek and Roman writers, Ptolemy made a map that showed the Ganges flowing in a southeasterly direction from the Himalayas to the ocean. He distinguished the regions to the west and the east of the river. India intra Gangem, India extra Gangem. There was general agreement that neither the Danube nor the Nile could bear comparison. Pliny the Elder had heard that the Ganges “bursts at once with thundering roar from its fountain.” Downstream there was a giant lake. After that, the river was never less than eight miles wide, he reported, and never less than twenty fathoms deep. The third-century poet Dionysius Periegete seems to have been the first to comment on the spiritual significance of the river as well as its physical character. “Hard by the fair-flowing Ganges is a wondrous spot of holy ground greatly honored,” he wrote.

  The seventh-century pilgrim Xuanzang was one of many Chinese who made their way at the time to the holiest Buddhist sites in India, bringing back manuscripts and artifacts. The most notable of these sites was Sarnath, six or seven miles outside Varanasi, where the Buddha had preached his first sermon and the two great religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, diverged to follow radically different paths, one serene and contemplative and the other clamorous and charged with myths and epic stories. Xuanzang reached the Ganges after spending two years in Kashmir. “The water of the river is blue, like the ocean, and its waves are wide-rolling as the sea,” he wrote. He also wrote about the funeral rites that were conducted on its banks, describing it as “the river of religious merit, which can wash away countless sins. Those who are weary of life, if they end their days in it, are borne to heaven and receive happiness.”

  Muslim travelers arrived with the Mughal invaders who swept down from the plains o
f Central Asia, beginning in the eleventh century, put North India to the sword, and razed thousands of its temples. Al-Biruni synthesized accounts of the “River of Paradise” from Hindu scripture. Ibn Baṭṭūṭah described how water from the Ganges, gangajal, was transported overland for forty days for the delectation of the sultan of Delhi. Later, the Muslim emperor Akbar, who gave Allahabad its name, employed specially designated servants to carry it in fine copper jars all the way from the holy city of Haridwar to his court at Agra, where his grandson, Shah Jahan, would later build the Taj Mahal.

  Akbar ruled in the seventeenth century, and the accounts of his high regard for the “water of immortality” come from the first European writer-travelers in India, who arrived at around the same time. The Englishman Nicholas Withington was probably the first to add scientific curiosity to what was by now a good number of generally repetitive accounts of the river’s religious attributes. What struck him most was that the water of the Ganges “will never stinke, though kepte never so longe, neyther will any wormes or vermine breede therein.” The Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was skeptical of this theory, “taking into consideration the number of bodies which are constantly being thrown into the Ganges.” Dr. E. Hanbury Hankin, chief medical officer for Agra, was still puzzling over the phenomenon in 1896, when the Institut Pasteur in Paris published the results of his investigation. Hankin described how he had collected cholera-infected bodies thrown into the river at Varanasi and found that the microbes died within a few hours of contact with water.

  * * *

  The Orientalists’ first great mapping effort was conducted by the surveyor general of Bengal, Major James Rennell. A Bengal Atlas and Map of Hindoostan, which he published in 1781, gave a strikingly accurate picture of the Ganges south of Haridwar. But in the mountains to the north, he was as lost as anyone. All he had to go on was scripture, myth, and hearsay. Where was the rock on which King Bhagiratha had stood for a thousand years? Where was Shiva standing when the goddess came hurtling down from heaven through his dreadlocks? This part of his map was drawn with frowns of puzzlement.