On the Ganges

by George Black

  “Most people come to Benares to pay last respects to the memory of their near and dear ones who have passed away,” he said. “So I thought that on this bank of the river we could make a smriti, a forest of remembrance. This is my guerrilla warfare. I am not doing it for Mr. Modi.

  “So many people come here to cremate their dear ones,” he continued. “Afterward, you could put some of the ashes into the river and some into the base of a nice tree. Eventually, over the years, you could put benches here, you could take a boat across in the evening, you could make a walking trail, people could exercise, elders could sit quietly with their grandchildren and talk about the city they see in front of them. Traditions would be passed on. They would sit here and say, ‘See, this is a tree I planted for my wife or my father.’ And in this way, we could add to the cosmic energies of Benares.”

  He acknowledged that this vision lay far in the future, and I found myself thinking back to Ajay Puri, the businessman priest in Uttarkashi. When would the age of Kali end, I’d asked him, this era of vice and degradation? Four hundred and thirty-two thousand years, he’d answered.

  I asked Raman if he ever got discouraged by the slow pace of change, and he shrugged. “I am having faith in the great lord of our land, Shiva. When he gets annoyed, all the other gods put together cannot stop him from doing the dance of destruction. I have faith in his judgment.”

  We’d scattered the last of the seeds, and we walked back toward the boat.

  “India is a land of discouragement,” he said. “If you’re not discouraged by the harsh summers, then you are discouraged by the cow eating your plant, or the motorbike or tractor or car that is running over your plant, or the neighbor who is plucking the leaves from it just for fun as he is going by. If you can’t deal with discouragement, India has no place for you. You might as well leave.”

  PART THREE

  DELTA

  BORED IN BIHAR

  A confession: I never set foot in the state of Bihar, which begins just east of Varanasi and sprawls for three hundred miles or so to the border with West Bengal. Few people do. It may be the fear of its reputation for crime and violence; it may be fear of boredom. It may be the prejudice born of years of bad publicity, that if you’ve seen the poverty, caste prejudice, and corruption of Uttar Pradesh, the towns and villages of the Gangetic Plain in Bihar don’t have a lot to add. But avoidance of Bihar is nothing new. Even the great travel writers of the nineteenth century didn’t find much to say about it; their tacit message was that apart from two or three obligatory curiosities that wouldn’t have rated a mérite un détour in the Michelin Guide, they went there only because of the convenience, since the river ran through it.

  Fanny Parkes, a twenty-eight-year-old Welshwoman, daughter of an army officer, arrived in Calcutta with her husband, Charles Crawford Parkes, a minor functionary of the East India Company, in November 1822. In her first flush of innocence, she found the climate delicious. It was the cool beginning of the short Calcutta winter, and her servants spread fine carpets from Mirzapur around her new home for warmth. For the rest of the year, when the heat blasts you in the face as if you’ve opened an oven door, the floors would remain bare.

  Having fallen in love with the capital of the company, she began to keep a journal.

  Calcutta has been styled the City of Palaces, and it well deserves the name …

  Dinner parties and fancy balls were numerous.…

  The most beautiful French furniture was to be bought in Calcutta of M. de Bast, at whose shop marble tables, fine mirrors, and luxurious couches were in abundance.…

  I felt very happy cantering my beautiful high-caste Arab on the racecourse at 6 A.M. or, in the evening, on the well-watered drive in front of the Government House.…

  We drink water from the Ganges, reckoned the most wholesome in India.

  In June 1823, some friends decided to travel upriver to Lucknow, renting six boats for a family of three. “An absolute fleet!” Fanny wrote.

  Ist. A very fine 16-oared pinnace, containing two excellent cabins, fitted up with glazed and Venetian windows, pankhas, and two shower baths. In this vessel our friend, his lady, and their infant, will be accommodated.

  2dly. A dinghee for the cook, and provisions.

  3rdly. An immense baggage boat, containing all their furniture.

  4thly. A vessel for the washerman, his wife, and the dog.

  5thly. A larger boat with horses.

  6thly. A ditto.

  * * *

  Fanny Parkes made her first journey up the Ganges four years later, when her husband was appointed to a new post in Allahabad. It was eight hundred miles by boat, two and a half months of hard rowing and sailing against the current. But it was only five hundred overland, cutting a straight line across country away from the meanders of the river, as the railway does today. Fanny and Charles sold off their horses and their furniture and sent the rest of their possessions on ahead by boat. She didn’t relish the move. “The people in Calcutta abused the Upper Provinces so much, we felt little inclination to quit the city,” she wrote. They jolted their way across the hot, flat monotony of Bihar. She says very little about the journey; all she wants is to get to her destination.

  They arrived in Benares on Christmas Day 1826, lingered in “the high place of superstition” long enough for her to decide that “the organ of gullibility must be very strongly developed in the Hindoos,” and finally reached Allahabad on January 1. She found the city pleasant enough but didn’t care much for Kanpur, where Charles was transferred later, with its “bleak, dreary, sandy, dusty, treeless” hinterland. But whatever their differences, the life of a sahib and a memsahib in both places offered many of the same pleasures as Calcutta: balls, dinners, horses, dogs, billiard tables for the gentlemen, a book society for the ladies. Fanny’s journal listed all the servants that a typical private family could expect to employ. It came to fifty-seven, with an outlay of two hundred and ninety rupees a month, and included a water cooler, someone to flap the punkah up and down, a torchbearer, a sweeper, a furniture duster, and a man to take care of the pigeons and rabbits. At one New Year’s party, she and her friends sat up until four in the morning drinking Punch à la Romaine with ice. “The people here are icemaking mad,” she wrote. “I flatter myself I understand the mystery of iceification better than anyone in India.”

  But Fanny’s fascination with icemaking didn’t mean she was an idle dilettante; it was just the kind of thing that engaged her endlessly inquisitive mind. She assembled a cabinet of curiosities with “the skulls of alligators, crocodiles, hyenas, and tigers beautifully prepared.” She collected Persian and Indian proverbs and had them inscribed on seals. Regardless of her initial feelings about the organ of gullibility, she threw herself into the study of the Vedas and the Puranas. For one rupee, she bought thirty-two paintings of Hindu deities and constructed an organigram to show their hierarchy. She explored the secret, secluded lives of Indian women, which gave her the subtitle for the book she eventually published in 1850: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque During Four and Twenty Years in the East with Revelations of Life in the Zenana.

  People began to tease her.

  1831, July 6th.—I study the customs and superstitions of the Hindoos so eagerly, that my friends laugh and say, “We expect some day to see you at pooja in the river!”

  * * *

  Eventually Fanny and Charles moved back to the City of Palaces, and she immersed herself more and more deeply in the life of the river. She was fully aware of the difference between the Hoogly, as she spelled it, the distributary that ran through Calcutta, and the Ganges proper, which continued to the east before hooking southward to the ocean. But she accepted the common usage; to Hindus and company officials alike, the Hooghly was the Ganges.

  She fell under the spell of the boats in the crowded harbor, “vessels of all sorts and sizes, of the most oriental and picturesque form.” Chinese ships with an eye painted on both sides of the prow for be
tter navigation. Trading ships with sleek lines and well-trimmed sails. “Snake boats” that swarmed the river at festival time. The mor-pankhi, or peacock feather, “a kind of pleasure boat, with the long neck and head of a peacock, most richly gilt and painted.” Low-slung budgerows, with a cabin that ran almost the full length of the deck; when she sailed upstream on one of them as far as the old Danish settlement of Serampore, curious locals waded out to it and peeked in at her through the Venetian blinds.

  In March 1837, she made her first trip on the recently inaugurated paddle-steamer service to Allahabad, which was “very expensive, but … more agreeable.” It was safer from pirates than the budgerow, although the insurance company still charged the same premium for the journey as it did for the nine thousand–mile crossing from England. It also promised to cut almost two months off the journey, but she was dismayed to find that the low water of the lean period forced the captain to make a three hundred–mile detour to the east through the Sundarbans, the vast labyrinth of mangrove forests, temporary islands, tributaries, distributaries, and side channels that is now divided between India and Bangladesh.

  Fanny and her fellow passengers didn’t ride on the steamer itself but on a small “flat” that was towed behind it. She was unimpressed by “these vile sundarbands [sic].… A more solitary, desolate tract I never beheld.” There were a few miserable huts here and there, but all the inhabitants seemed to be men. There were watchtowers, raised on poles, because “the thick jungle is full of tigers; so much so, that the Hindoos on board are not allowed to go on shore to cook their food on that account.” The captain of the flat pointed out an oar stuck on end in the sand to mark the spot where someone had just been carried off and eaten. To Fanny’s great relief, they eventually reached Kumarkhali, 150 miles into present-day Bangladesh, turned left onto the big river, and headed for Bihar.

  She seemed less interested in seeing its few noteworthy sights than in reading about them in the Calcutta Directory. There was said to be a curious village where people subsisted on crocodile meat. There was the Moti Jharna waterfall, in the hills to the north of the river, but “I neither saw nor visited it.” There was a mass of jumbled rocks that rose vertically out of the river at Sultanganj, the divided river rushing past it like a mill race. “They say no one lives upon these rocks; that a fakir formerly took up his abode there, but having been eaten by a snake, one of enormous size, and an eater of human flesh, the people became alarmed, and no holy or unholy person has since taken up residence.”

  When they reached Patna, the capital of Bihar, she consulted the Directory again. Noted for the production for opium, gram, and wax candles. Sole attraction: a giant dome-shaped granary built by Captain John Garstin in 1786 but presently used as a guardhouse. She gave Patna a pass. It was “a most uninteresting day among shallows and sandbanks.” She sketched and read and languished in the suffocating heat. “Very gladly shall I return to the quiet and coolness of my own home.”

  Finally, after twenty-three days on the river, she was back in Allahabad, back to the water cooler and the punkahwalla and the wonders of iceification.

  INDIA’S CORAL STRAND

  While Fanny Parkes turned left, the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, had turned right, deeper into the backcountry of Bengal and the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges. I’d first heard of Heber as a child, having spent an unhappy year at a Victorian redbrick primary school that bore his name—Eebah, as it was rendered by my South London classmates. The music teacher, a balding countertenor named Mr. Hatton, whose piercing voice made us snicker into our sleeves, had taught us some of the hymns the good clergyman had composed in the course of bringing the heathen to Jesus.

  From Greenland’s icy mountains,

  From India’s coral strand,

  Where Afric’s sunny fountains,

  Roll down their golden sand,

  From many an ancient river,

  From many a palmy plain,

  They call us to deliver

  Their land from error’s chain.

  It was a time when the relics of imperial India were being disposed of at estate sales and in junk shops, when the last generation of middle-ranking servants of the Raj had retired to their modest suburban villas and were now being taken to their heavenly reward. Neighborhoods close to ours had a Dacca Street and a Bombay Street, a Kashmir Road and a Benares Road. A warehouse near my home was crammed with elephant’s-foot umbrella stands, teak coffee tables, trays of chased brass, planters’ chairs, exotic prints foxed with humidity, and bronze sculptures of Bengal tigers, even the odd piece of Louis Quatorze that might have been bought of M. de Bast at his shop in Calcutta.

  Bishop Heber arrived in Calcutta in November 1823, less than a year after Fanny Parkes, forty years old and still baby-faced. “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” had already been translated into Bengali, not that anyone in Bengal had ever seen an icy mountain or a coral strand. Fanny thought the bishop “did not understand native character, and possessed much simplicity.” He set off for Dacca the following June, a trip that involved a major detour to the east as the first stage of his visitation of the Upper Provinces. Like Fanny’s friends earlier that year, he made the journey in a sixteen-oar pinnace. The crew were “all Mussulmans.… wild and odd-looking people, light-limbed, and lean, and very black, but strong and muscular … with a fiercer eye and far less civil manner than the Hindoos of Calcutta.”

  He packed James Rennell’s map of Bengal, and I tried to use it myself as a guide to his route. But it was almost impossible to decipher; most of the place-names had changed, and the bishop himself was often confused because the rivers of the delta were such constant shape-shifters, even in the half century since Rennell had completed his survey. It was even harder to trace Heber’s path on a modern map, which made the waterways of the delta look like a CAT scan of the central nervous system.

  * * *

  Some Englishmen in India clung on to their Englishness more fiercely than others, and “our own dear England” was Heber’s constant point of reference. The countryside around the Hooghly was not unlike parts of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire along the Thames, although the Hooghly was wider, and the Thames is not known for rice paddies and palm trees. The tumbledown governor’s mansion at Chandernagore put him in mind of Moreton Corbet, a ruined Elizabethan manor house in Shropshire.

  About forty miles north of Calcutta, the boatmen struck off to the east, following a small, winding distributary of the Mathabhanga, itself a distributary of the Ganges. They were now in “a part of the country I am told not many Europeans traverse.” The river they were on was “about as wide as the Dee a little below Chester.”

  Bearing north, he reached the town of Shibnibash and stopped to inspect its objects of interest. On the jetty, he saw men carrying large kedgeree pots full of gangajal from Benares, bound for a cluster of local temples, where he examined a shiny black shivling and a statue of Ram and Sita. The priest declined his offering, saying he could accept money only from a fellow Brahmin. Nearby were the overgrown ruins of a Mughal palace. They reminded the bishop of Conway Castle, or Bolton Abbey. Or perhaps Carnarvon Castle was closer to the mark?

  After Shibnibash, the pinnace appeared to meander westward. Dacca lay in the opposite direction, and the bishop felt “some perplexity about our further progress.” One morning, he woke to find the river choked in “stinking fog.” There were sudden squalls of rain. His mood declined. He tried chewing paan and was shocked to find that it turned his tongue and lips bright orange (though he “thought it not unpleasant”). “Rennell … is indeed nearly useless here,” he grumbled, and looking at the map, I had to agree.

  “Dear, dear England!” the bishop wrote. “There is now less danger than ever of my forgetting her, since I now, in fact, first feel the bitterness of banishment.”

  Eventually they found a navigable channel that led due east to the main stem of the Ganges, and beyond that was Dacca. Despite his frustrations, Heber had never lost faith in
his Muslim oarsmen. “Though they may sometimes be over-cautious, they always know their own rivers, and the state of the weather, better than we can do. Most, if not all the accidents which occur to Europeans on the Ganges, arise from their making their crews proceed against their wishes and judgment.”

  They passed a pretty tributary that made him think of the Cherwell at Oxford, and then, quite suddenly, he found himself looking across a vast sheet of water dotted with sandy islands. The landscape spread out before them was “not unlike the coast of Lancashire, as seen trending away from the mouth of the Mersey.” It was, in fact, “Gunga in her greatest pride and glory.” Five days later, he was in Dacca, exhausted and sunburned but eager to preach his first sermon.

  * * *

  It was a ruinous place. Its glory had been the production of fine muslin, but the local handloom weavers were no match for the cheap mass-produced cotton goods that had begun to flood in from the mills of Manchester. Most people lived in squalid huts, and many of the better houses had been ravaged by floods. The city was surrounded by impenetrable jungle. “Much place for elephant,” said the bishop’s servant, Abdullah, who had converted to Christianity.

  The local magistrate guided Heber around and gave him a breakdown of the population. A few Armenians, several of them quite wealthy; a handful of Portuguese, “very poor and degraded”; a fair number of Greeks, “industrious and intelligent people.” The only English civilians were a couple of indigo planters, although ten companies of infantry were also stationed in Dacca to defend the city against Burmese raiders.

  The population of “Hindoos and Mussulmans” numbered about three hundred thousand. By the time I got there, almost two hundred years after Bishop Heber, East Bengal was Bangladesh, the city’s name had changed to Dhaka, and the population was more than fifteen million. All that remained the same was that the great majority of them still lived in squalid huts.