On the Ganges

by George Black

  Conventional wisdom, such as it was, held that Ganga must have come to earth in or around Shiva’s Himalayan abode, Mount Kailash, a great pyramidal slab of black rock, twenty-two thousand feet high, in western Tibet. Tibetan Buddhists also held the mountain sacred, and they reinforced this legend in their conversations with the first European missionaries to reach the secretive kingdom. Perhaps the river did not spring from the mountain itself, the lamas said, but from nearby Mansarovar, the Lake of Consciousness, or from a smaller body of water next to it, Rakshastal.

  Rennell went along with the Mansarovar theory but added one intriguing detail:

  This great body of water now forces a passage through the ridge of mount Himmaleh, and sapping its very foundation, rushes through a cavern, and precipitates itself into a vast bason which it has worn in the rock, at the hither foot of the mountains. The Ganges thus appears to incurious spectators, to derive its original springs from this chain of mountains: and the mind of superstition has given the mouth of the cavern, the form of the head of a cow, an animal held by the Hindoos, in a degree of veneration, almost equal to that, in which the Egyptians of old, held their god Apis.

  For a generation of British explorers, that detail—the cavern and the cow’s head—was like the first clue in a treasure hunt that became an obsession.

  * * *

  In 1808, Robert Colebrooke, a military surveyor and talented watercolorist, planned the first official expedition to find the source of the Ganges. He fell ill and died before the mission could depart, but Captain William Webb and the unfortunately named Captain William Raper took up the mantle. They passed through Haridwar, cut across country, and reached the ruined town of Uttarkashi, which had been flattened by a great earthquake five years earlier. They made notes on local cultural practices and agricultural methods. They calculated the height of mountains by triangulation. They labored on for another twenty miles or more upriver. Their equipment was burdensome. Should they leave their tents behind? No, the spring weather was too fickle. The march was slower, more arduous, and more perilous each day, before finally they decided to abandon the expedition, across the river from a village called Salang and still five or six days short of Gangotri.

  They persuaded one of their local guides to go on alone, however. They gave him a compass and instructed him in its use, and with his help, they eventually produced a map that traced another thirty miles or so of the river before dribbling away into uncertainties: the word Gangotri floats among some vague contour lines showing the “Himalaya or Snowy Range of Mountains” and then, somewhere to the north, is Mahádéva ca linga—a reference to Mount Kailash.

  In the reports they published in Calcutta in Asiatick Researches, Webb and Raper discounted Rennell’s notion of the curiously shaped cavern. Webb wrote, “Every account agreed that the Source of the River is … not, as it is related, through a Secret passage or Cavern bearing any similitude to a cow’s mouth.” Raper concurred: “With respect to the Cow’s Mouth, we had the most convincing testimony to confirm us in the idea that its existence is entirely fabulous, and that it is found only in the Hindu book of faith.”

  The first European finally reached Gangotri in 1815: the intrepid Scottish painter and travel writer James Baillie Fraser, fifteenth laird of Reelig. Along the way, he created a series of paintings and aquatints that gave interested parties in Calcutta and London their first sight of the inspirational landscapes of the upper Bhagirathi, subtly enhanced in the best Romantic manner: the peaks always steeper and sharper than they are in reality, the chasms deeper and darker, the torrents fiercer and more tumultuous, and the colorful locals looking like extras in a production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Fraser, too, had heard the stories of the Cow’s Mouth. “Enquiries were made into the origin of this fable,” he wrote, but a priest at the Gangotri temple “gravely assured us that no such thing happened.” No doubt, like Raper’s informants, he had his reasons for trying to throw sacrilegious foreigners off the scent.

  By 1817, two things had changed. After a two-year war, the recalcitrant Gurkhas had been put in their place, and the British took over direct rule of the mountainous region. With this came an end to the local maharaja’s divinely ordained monopoly of the right to enlist porters without pay. Tourists and explorers took full advantage of the change, and if a porter protested, one of the standard punishments was to have a commode stuck on his head.

  On May 31, 1817, Captains John Hodgson and James Herbert finally proved that the Cow’s Mouth was no fable. After reaching Gangotri, they pressed on for five days to the western tip of the Gangotri Glacier, where they found the Bhagirathi gushing out of its low-arched cave, surrounded by forbidding snow peaks. Hodgson took out his measuring chain. The stream was twenty-seven feet wide and eighteen inches deep. This was the true source of the Ganges, he decided. “There is every reason to suppose, its first appearance is at the debouche, which I will call MAHA’DE’O’s hair.” This is the strangest detail of all. Mahadeo, or Mahadev, is Shiva. But why his hair? Because of the icicles hanging down from the cow’s mouth. According to a contemporary account, this notion came from an illiterate Brahmin whom Hodgson met in Gangotri: the icicles were the dreadlocks of Shiva.

  THE TEMPLE ON THE ROCK

  On the way to Gangotri, I fell in with a motley group of assorted nationalities, two Americans, two Indians, and a German. The Indian woman was named Pallavi, and her son, Pranav, drove us up there. One of the Americans, Paula, was a serious student of Ayurvedic medicine who had rented a tiny cottage on the riverbank in Uttarkashi. Petra, the German, and her American husband, Mike, were traveling around India on foot, but the road to Gangotri was steep and winding and crowded with buses, and even though the buses had a disturbing tendency to barrel around blind corners, they’d hopped aboard one of them to spare their tired legs.

  Other than the caves and rough shelters that house a handful of sadhus, Gangotri is the first human habitation on the Ganges. At the northernmost extension of the town, a swami had painted his house electric blue and set out a La-Z-Boy recliner on the deck so he could enjoy an unobstructed view of the river. Behind his home, the head of the valley was closed off by formidable snow peaks.

  The river is still named the Bhagirathi here, honoring the king who impressed the gods by standing on one leg for a thousand years. It is a modest stream that runs blue gray with silt from the glacier. Pilgrims were clustered on the rocky bank. Some were swallowing mouthfuls of the icy water as an elixir. They call it amrit, nectar. Women in bright saris waded out knee-deep, filling small plastic flasks to take home. Indians living abroad can buy a bottle on Amazon or eBay for $9.95.

  The town itself was similarly modest. An open area for the buses to park, a narrow main street lined with guesthouses and stalls selling religious items and trinkets, leading to a flagstone square with a squat white temple where the effigy of the goddess Ganga is housed until the first snows, when she is carried farther down the valley for safekeeping in the village of Mukhba. Pilgrims were lined up in single file behind a chain barrier, waiting their turn to squeeze between the iron concertina gates that guarded the entrance to the temple. Children dressed up as gods patrolled the crowd with begging bowls.

  The goddess was still inside, because we were in the brief window between the snowmelt and the onset of the monsoon when it’s safe to travel up here without the risk of floods and landslides that can block the road for weeks. Even so, the nights were bitingly cold, and I slept fully clothed under a pair of rough, scratchy blankets in a guesthouse called the Ganga Nivas, the Ganges Residence. It had a dozen rooms. Spartan would be a kind word. The only light was a feeble bulb on the balcony, powered by a diesel generator that ticked all night. The room keys hung from hooks on a wooden board right out on the street. We were above eleven thousand feet, and a sign on the facing wall advertised Free Oxygen Service.

  In the morning, we found a restaurant that served regional specialties for pilgrims from South India. It had bathroom-tile wa
lls and a kitchen open to the dining area, where the waiters shoveled masala dosa and idli onto stainless-steel plates. A tourist poster showed men playing golf at the old British hill station of Ranikhet. The dosa were fragrant and spicy; the idli were as insipid as always. We drank watery Nescafé against the cold, and the women wore heavy shawls over their heads.

  Petra did a lot of the talking. She had a square, jolly face with glittering eyes and a pronounced gap in her front teeth, which put me in mind of Chaucer’s garrulous and sensual Wife of Bath. “Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.… Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve.”

  The Wife of Bath was also a traveler. “Thries hadde she been at Jerusalem,” Chaucer wrote, and Petra said she had also been there. In fact, she and her husband had just completed the second edition of their book, which was called Encounters on the Road to Jerusalem. They also had a website called walkingwithawareness.com. They had been bitten by the walking bug after meeting on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, and after marrying, they walked across the United States from their home in Paso Robles, California. When they got to the other side of the Atlantic, they kept going all the way to the Holy Land. The whole journey took them a month short of two years, and they arrived in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. Now they walked everywhere.

  * * *

  After breakfast, we went up the square and stopped at the home of one of the temple priests. Several soldiers were standing around inside. They wore patches on their uniforms identifying them as grenadiers, and they were looking for a place to sleep. The priest, who was wearing a scarlet scarf over a yellow cotton shirt, asked me to sit next to him on a sort of low platform. He had a kind and gentle face.

  His name was Suresh Semwal. He told me that like all the Semwals, he came from Mukhba, twenty-five kilometers downstream, where the effigy of the goddess spent the winter months. The priesthood was hereditary and had been passed down through at least fifteen generations of Semwals and perhaps twenty. I asked if he had a son, and his expression turned despondent. He said the young man had moved away and was studying engineering. “He can choose his own career,” he said. “The income here is not good.”

  He leaned over and patted my arm. “But our faith is very strong. Ma Ganga flows in us like your blood is flowing through your body. It is our lifeline.”

  I asked him how many priests served in the temple.

  “Two hundred gents are doing worship here,” he said. They worked on a rota system, and their main source of income was donations from pilgrims. Five hundred people ate in the temple kitchen each day, and the money went into the temple trust. The pilgrims came from all over India, from Madras, from Bombay, from faraway Bengal. The most pious or energetic ones did the full char dham yatra, which took them to four sacred sites on the headwaters of the river. These days many of them came on package tours. The wealthiest ones even came by helicopter. But then the state of Uttarakhand had been struck by disaster. In 2013, six thousand people had died in freak monsoon floods that came in June, a month earlier than usual; the roads were impassable for weeks. Two years later, the yatra had still not recovered. Before the catastrophe, as many as a million and a half people had come each year; now there were barely a tenth of that number.

  We went outside, and I told the priest that I wanted to see the rock on which King Bhagiratha had performed his one-legged austerities. I imagined a flat boulder in midstream. But perhaps it was no longer there? Those events had happened in ancient times. He smiled and walked me over to an enclosure where a small area of bedrock had been left deliberately exposed among the flagstones. He waved an arm around the square. “All of this is the rock on which King Bhagiratha stood,” he said. “The whole town of Gangotri is founded upon it.”

  “Yes,” Pallavi said under her breath, “and every building here is illegal, but what can you do about it?”

  Semwal introduced us to a group of three fellow priests who were chatting on a green-painted bench that would not have been out of place in an English park. On the wall behind them, the words Record Room were written in faded red paint. One of the other priests, an imposing middle-aged man with a large nose and a clipped gray mustache, took me inside. There was hardly any room to move about, because the floor was almost entirely covered with large wooden crates. We sat on one of them, and he opened the one next to it. It was filled with dog-eared ledgers, the pages densely covered with spidery writing, figures, and dates. They were records of those who had made the pilgrimage, organized by family and place of origin; you could trace when your ancestors had visited.

  The priest sighed. “There used to be records here that went back more than two hundred years,” he said. “But they were stored in a wooden hut that burned down fifty years ago.” He closed the lid of the crate and pushed it back into its corner.

  Records that burned; pilgrims who drowned; a temple too poor to sustain its hereditary traditions. It was a day of brilliant spring sunshine, but I found Gangotri to be a melancholy place.

  CAVE DWELLERS

  Suresh Semwal said that about twenty sadhus lived year-round in caves in the mountains around Gangotri. We went to see one of them.

  “A sadhu’s only connection is with the underlying reality, the truth eternal,” said a woman who lived in a nearby ashram. “He renounces all worldly things and severs all ties to society. This is why he wears saffron, because it’s the color of fire, the fire that burns away all bonds.”

  In the narrow streets of Gangotri, there are blind sadhus and sighted sadhus, sadhus with one arm, sadhus with one leg, sadhus with no legs at all who propel themselves around on little wheelie carts, and sadhus with the physiques of Olympic athletes. There are sadhus who will happily tell you the story of their past lives, a disgruntled high school teacher from Kolkata, a widowed company executive from Mumbai. There are sadhus who will answer your greeting with a stare as icy as the glaciers, and sadhus who will respond with bursts of stoned hilarity.

  We crossed a small bridge and hiked along the east bank of the river for a couple of miles. It had cut its passage through the bedrock in a thunderous series of channels, chutes, caverns, and waterfalls. The rough trail took us through an airy forest of deodar cedars and chir pines, and along the way, Pallavi told me that this was no ordinary cave we were visiting. It made a cameo in a story from one of the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata.

  A king named Yudhishthira, his wife, his four brothers, and his dog decided to renounce the world and walk all the way to heaven, passing through Gangotri. This cave was one of their resting places. After they moved on, they began to fall off the cliffs to their death, one after another, failing to reach heaven because of one sin or another—gluttony, narcissism, overweening pride. Only the unblemished Yudhishthira and his dog were spared. When they reached the highest peak, Indra told the king that he had passed the test and was free to enter heaven, but it was no place for dogs. Yudhishthira refused to leave the animal behind; it was his faithful and devoted companion. Indra relented, saying that the dog must be the incarnation of dharma, the divine principle of righteousness. So both of them climbed into Indra’s chariot for the ascent to heaven. The moral of the story appeared to be that dharma will follow you to the end.

  * * *

  Dark smoke was wafting from the mouth of the cave, which had a heavy, barred iron door. Inside it was pitch-black apart from the red glow of the sadhu’s fire, and the air was thick with woodsmoke and reefer. We felt our way to a flat outcrop of rock. The sadhu cackled and chanted Om, Jai Ram Shri Ram in the darkness.

  “Why did you become a sadhu?” Pallavi asked him after a decent interval of silence.

  He chanted some more of his devotion to Lord Ram, then finally said he had been born in the town of Muzaffarnagar, down in the plains, halfway between Delhi and the sacred city of Haridwar, where he went to college and studied Sanskrit. He had come to Gangotri ten years ago. “You ask why I became a sadhu?” he said, cackling again. “Well, everyone has to do something
in life. Most people get married and have babies. I decided to do something different.”

  Pallavi asked him who his guru was. This is a matter of deep significance, and she and her English husband, Michael, had told me the story of how they had found theirs. Pallavi was a journalist. Michael was working for a small environmental organization in Vrindavan, which stands on the Yamuna near its confluence with the Ganges and is the place where Lord Krishna played his flute for the milkmaids. They met online, just before Michael turned fifty. He was searching for something that was still elusive. In Haridwar, he found a sadhu named Jagdish Giri, who agreed to take them on. Michael was his only Western initiate; Pallavi became his first woman initiate.

  “Your guru sees you, he judges you, he whispers a mantra that he thinks will help you,” Pallavi said. “Michael and I were initiated at the same time, so we probably have the same mantra. But you never divulge it to anyone, not even to your spouse.”

  Jagdish had lived for thirty years in a cave in the mountains above Gangotri. He was a warrior sadhu, a member of the fearsome Juna Akhara. “They’re trained to be very hard-core, trained in martial arts, then given weapons,” Michael said. “They’re the protectors of other sadhus. They have fortified areas up in the mountains, and they’ll drive away outsiders with slingshots.”

  But Jagdish was anything but a forbidding character. “He’s about seventy now,” Michael said. “He’s a virgin, never touched cigarettes or booze. Lives in a hut under two trees that are intertwined, a peepul and a neem. Terribly eco-conscious. He’s a simple person. You know, suffer the little children, no skullduggery, no agenda. We don’t even see him that often, but we don’t really need to. When your guru is spiritually attuned to you, it’s like remote sensing.”