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This is the story of a twelve-hundred-mile journey down the Ganges from the place where it enters the Plains of India to the Sandheads, forty miles offshore in the Bay of Bengal, made by two Europeans in the winter of 1963–4. It is not an heroic story such as that of Franklin and his companions chewing leather on the banks of the Coppermine River but having got there (it is difficult to envy Franklin); of Ives seeing for the first time the great canyon of the Colorado; of Garnier reaching the headwaters of the Yangtze; or of Bailey and Morshead travelling sixteen hundred miles on foot through the gorges of the Tsangpo. We were born too late for such feats, even if we had had the courage and determination to perform them. We were even prevented from emulating the painter James Fraser’s long journey to the sources of the Bhagirathi Ganges – one which is made by numerous pilgrims – by the coming of the snow and our own meagre resources. It is not a book about India today; neither is it concerned with politics or economics. It is certainly not erudite, as must be obvious to anyone who has the patience to read it. It is about the river as we found it.

In most standard works of reference the Ganges does not even rate an entry in the tables which list the great rivers of the world, for it is only 1,500 miles long from its source in the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. The Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi/Missouri are all more than two and a half times as long as the Ganges. The Irtysh and the Yangtze are both twice as long. The Congo, the Yellow River, the Mackenzie, the Niger, the Danube, the Euphrates, the Brahmaputra and the Indus, to name only a few, are all longer. But, all the same, it is a great river.

It is great because, to millions of Hindus, it is the most sacred, most venerated river on earth. For them it is Ganga Ma – Mother Ganges. To bathe in it is to wash away guilt. To drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in bottles for those who have not had the good fortune to make the pilgrimage to it is meritorious. To be cremated on its banks, having died there, and to have one’s ashes cast on its waters, is the wish of every Hindu. Even to ejaculate ‘Ganga, Ganga’, at the distance of 100 leagues from the river may atone for the sins committed during three previous lives.

In almost any bazaar in India one can buy a little, oblong paperback book. It is rather like a book of tickets for some Eastern tram service. It contains two works, bound up together. They are the Gangastottara-sata-namavali and the Ganga-sabasra-namastotra. They enumerate the 108 and the 1,000 names of the Ganges, all printed metrically and in columns so that they can be chanted devotionally; but unless one is an expert in Sanskrit, as was Colonel Pickering in Pygmalion, it is impossible to understand them. She is The Pure, The Eternal, The Light Amid the Darkness, The Cow Which Gives Much Milk, The Liberator, The Destroyer of Poverty and Sorrow, The Creator of Happiness, to give only a few of her names.¹

The Ganges was not always so highly regarded. When the Aryan invaders first entered India they were more impressed by the Indus. It was only later that they gave Ganga the highest position, as Sursari, River of the Gods – perhaps because they had found out what European scientists discovered later: that its water has remarkable properties. Bottled, it will keep for at least a year. At its confluence with the River Jumna which, particularly at the time of the great fair which takes place there every January, contains dangerous numbers of coli, the Ganges itself is said to be free of them. At Banaras thousands drink the water every day at bathing places which are close to the outfalls of appalling open drains. They appear to survive. The presence of large numbers of decomposing corpses seems to have no adverse effect on it. (Before setting off we were advised that when we wanted to make tea sedimentation could be accelerated by stirring it with a stick of alum; but we never did this.) Taken on board sailing ships in the Hooghly at Calcutta it is said to have outlasted all other waters. In spite of this many Hindus have reservations about how far downriver they are prepared to drink it. Some say as far as Dhulian, near the place where the Ganges under the name of the Bhagirathi and later the Hooghly, takes off for Calcutta. The inhabitants of Soron, on the Upper Ganges far north of cities like Allahabad and Banaras, believe that this is the last point at which the water is really good because, they say, no sewage has yet entered it. (At Soron there is a large tank, reputed to be fed by the Ganges, the waters of which have the peculiar property of dissolving the bones of the dead within three days of their being deposited in it.)

It is certainly responsible for more good than evil. Even cholera, one of the great killers, does not go down the river. It is born in the stagnant waters of the Delta in Bengal and ascends it carried by pilgrims who visit the sacred places in hundreds of thousands every year. The great nineteenth-century epidemics started in Bengal, spread to Hardwar, one of the holiest places of all on the Upper Ganges; then north-west into the Punjab and from there overland into Afghanistan, Persia, Russia and finally into Western Europe. Even today the seasonal rise in the incidence of cholera coincides with the great religious fairs which take place on the banks of the river.

The Ganges first sees the light of day when it emerges from an ice cave above Gangotri, 13,800 feet up in the Garhwal Himalayas. Hindus believe that it was from this cave that Ganga, the daughter of King Himavat and the nymph, Mena, was persuaded to come down to earth by Bhagiratha, a descendant of King Sagar, in order to redeem from hell the souls of the sixty thousand sons of the king who had been reduced to ashes by a holy man whom they had slighted.

There is some dispute between the devotees of Siva and Vishnu, the two principal sects of Hindus, as to which god assisted at the birth of Ganga. Vishnuvites believe that she rose from the big toe of Vishnu’s left foot, Sivites say that to break her fall on earth Siva allowed her to flow through his hair, which can still be seen hanging in the form of icicles from the roof of the cave.

At Hardwar, with twelve hundred miles of its course still to run to its nearest outlet to the sea it has already fallen 12,800 feet and here, only 1,000 feet above the sea, it begins to irrigate the land with the aid of wells and canals, and to give electric power. On its way to the sea it passes through three states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. In them live 150,000,000 people, almost a third of the entire population of India. Of these nearly half live in Uttar Pradesh. There are 69,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh with populations of less than 500 and in this state more than eighty per cent of the cultivated holdings are of less than five acres (some are as little as half an acre). For much of its course the Ganges is not a navigable river in the real sense of the word, although, in spite of the fact that millions of cubic feet of water are drawn off from it, its strength is constantly renewed by the rivers that flow into it. It is in the 600-mile stretch between Allahabad and Rajmahal that it really gathers strength. At Rajmahal, in full flood, it goes down at 1,000,800 cubic feet a second which is greater than the maximum discharge of the Mississippi (the Thames at Staines discharges at 6,600 feet a second in full flood). Fortunately it brings down with it vast quantities of silt which it deposits free of charge for a season before sweeping it further downstream. A Victorian engineer, Sir Charles Lyell, estimated that 335,000,000 tons of silt were discharged each year at Ghazipur on the Middle Ganges. ‘Nearly the weight of sixty replicas of the Great Pyramid.’ A useless comparison. ‘It is scarcely possible,’ he goes on, ‘to present any picture to the mind which will convey an adequate conception to the mind of the mighty scale of this operation, so tranquilly and almost insensibly carried out by the Ganges.’ Whether some smallholder in Bihar, watching his half-acre slipping noisily into the water and his family being swept downstream on top of a haystack would regard the operation as being either tranquil or insensible is open to question. No one knows for certain the depth of the alluvial silt in the Delta.

Like the black sheep of the family sent to Australia, the Ganges is always trying to straighten itself out. It sets its current strongly against one bank, undercutting it and leaving sluggish water on the other shore on which new deposits are made, until it finally breaks through and begins the whole process afresh. The Gangetic Plain is riddled with old, dead watercourses that the Ganges has forgotten about. At Kasimbazar in Bengal, where one of the first British trading stations was established in 1658, there is a flight of steps from which it is said that Warren Hastings used to come ashore. Only the river has gone, leaving a few pools choked with water hyacinth. The once illustrious city of Kanauj on the Upper Ganges is now so far from the actual stream that, passing it in a boat in the dry season, one does not realise that it is there at all. Rajmahal, once the capital of Bengal, was left high and dry, three miles from it, in 1863. Later, in the seventies, it was seven miles from it. Now the Ganges has returned. Too late, the city is moribund. The Bhagirathi, the short, eighty-mile stretch which connects it with the Hooghly, is more or less dry for eight months of the year. Power-vessels bound for Calcutta have to make a 400-mile detour through East Pakistan to reach the port which is itself always in danger of suffering the same fate as Rajmahal. Four hundred miles out in the Bay of Bengal the sea is discoloured by the silt brought down by it. The Ganges justifies the one hundred and second name given it in the Gangastottara-satanamavali – ‘Roaming About Rose-Apple-Tree Island’, which is India.

Note: All diacritical marks which correctly should appear in Indian names have been omitted in this book.

Gangastottara-sata-namavali

(The 108 names of the Ganges)

1 Ganga	Ganges
2 Visnu-padabja-sambhuta	Born from the lotus-like foot of Vishnu
3 Hara-vallabha	Dear to Hara (Siva)
4 Himacalendra-tanaya	Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya
5 Giri-mandala-gamini	Flowing through the mountain-country
6 Tarakarati-janani	Mother of [the demon] Taraka’s enemy (i.e. Kartikeya)
7 Sagaratmaja-tarika	Liberator of the [60,000] sons of Sagara (who had been burnt to ashes by the angry glance of the sage Kapila)
8 Sarasvati-samayukta	Joined to [the river] Sarasvati (said to have flowed underground and joined the Ganges at Allahabad)
9 Sughosa	Melodious (or: Noisy)
10 Sindhu-gamini	Flowing to the ocean
11 Bhagirathi	Pertaining to the saint Bhagiratha (whose prayers brought the Ganges down from Heaven)
12 Bhagyavati	Happy, fortunate
13 Bhagiratha-rathanuga	Following the chariot of Bhagiratha (who led the Ganges down to Hell to purify the ashes of Sagara’s sons)
14 Trivikrama-padoddhuta	Falling from the foot of Vishnu
15 Triloka-patha-gamini	Flowing through the three worlds (i.e. Heaven, earth and the atmosphere or lower regions)
16 Ksira-subhra	White as milk
17 Bahu-ksira	[A cow] which gives much milk
18 Ksira-vrksa-samakula	Abounding in [the four] ‘milk-trees’ (i.e. Nyagrodha (Banyan), Udumbara (glomer ous fig-tree), Asvattha (holy fig-tree), and Madhuka (Bassia Latifolia))
19 Trilocana-jata-vasini	Dwelling in the matted locks of Siva
20 Rna-traya-vimocini	Releasing from the Three Debts, viz. (1) Brahma-carya (study of the Vedas) to the rishis, (2) sacrifice and worship to the gods, and (3) procreation of a son, to the Manes
21 Tripurari-siras-cuda	The tuft on the head of the enemy of Tripura (Siva). (Tripura was a triple fortification, built in the sky, air and earth of gold, silver and iron respectively, by Maya for the Asuras, and burnt by Siva)
22 Jahnavi	Pertaining to Jahnu (who drank up the Ganges in a rage after it had flooded his sacrificial ground, but relented, and allowed it to flow from his ear)
23 Nata-bhiti-hrt	Carrying away fear
24 Avyaya	Imperishable
25 Nayanananda-dayini	Affording delight to the eye
26 Naga-putrika	Daughter of the mountain
27 Niranjana	Not painted with collyrium (i.e. colourless)
28 Nitya-suddha	Eternally pure
29 Nira-jala-pariskrta	Adorned with a net of water
30 Savitri	Stimulator
31 Salila-vasa	Dwelling in water
32 Sagarambusa-medhini	Swelling the waters of the ocean
33 Ramya	Delightful
34 Bindu-saras	River made of water-drops
35 Avyakta	Unmanifest, unevolved
36 Vrndaraka-samasrita	Resort of the eminent
37 Uma-sapatni	Having the same husband (i.e. Siva) as Uma (Parvati)
38 Subhrangi	Having beautiful limbs (or body)
39 Srimati	Beautiful, auspicious, illustrious, etc.
40 Dhavalambara	Having a dazzling white garment
41 Akhandala-vana-vasa	Having Siva as a forest-dweller (hermit)
42 Khandendu-krta-sekhara	Having the crescent moon as a crest
43 Amrtakara-salila	Whose water is a mine of nectar
44 Lila-lamghita-parvata	Leaping over mountains in sport
45 Virinci-kalasa-vasa	Dwelling in the water-pot of Brahma (or Vishnu, or Siva)
46 Triveni	Triple-braided (i.e. consisting of the waters of three rivers: Ganges, Yamuna and Sarasvati)
47 Trigunatmika	Possessing the three gunas
48 Sangataghaugha-samani	Destroying the mass of sins of Sangata
49 Sankha-dundubhi-nisvana	Making a noise like a conch-shell and drum
50 Bhiti-hrt	Carrying away fear
51 Bhagya-janani	Creating happiness
52 Bhinna-brahmanda-darpini	Taking pride in the broken egg of Brahma
53 Nandini	Happy
54 Sighra-ga	Swift-flowing
55 Siddha	Perfect, holy
56 Saranya	Yielding shelter, help or protection
57 Sasi-sekhara	Moon-crested
58 Sankari	Belonging to Sankara (Siva)
59 Saphari-purna	Full of fish (esp. Cyprinus Saphore – a kind of bright little fish that glistens when darting about in shallow water – or carp)
60 Bharga-murdha-krtalaya	Having Bharga’s (Siva’s) head as an abode
61 Bhava-priya	Dear to Bhava (Siva)
62 Satya-sandha-priya	Dear to the faithful
63 Hamsa-svarupini	Embodied in the forms of swans
64 Bhagiratha-suta	Daughter of Bhagiratha
65 Ananta	Eternal
66 Sarac-candra-nibhanana	Resembling the autumn moon
67 Om-kara-rupini	Having the appearance of the sacred syllable Om
68 Atula	Peerless
69 Krida-kallola-karini	Sportively billowing
70 Svarga-sopana-sarani	Flowing like a staircase to Heaven
71 Sarva-deva-svarupini	Embodied in the pantheon
72 Ambhah-prada	Bestowing water
73 Duhkha-hantri	Destroying sorrow
74 Santi-santana-karini	Bringing about the continuance of peace
75 Daridrya-hantri	Destroyer of poverty
76 Siva-da	Bestowing happiness
77 Samsara-visa-nasini	Destroying the poison of illusion
78 Prayaga-nilaya	Having Prayaga (Allahabad) as an abode
79 Sita	‘Furrow’. Name of the eastern branch of the four mythical branches into which the heavenly Ganges is supposed to divide after falling on Mount Meru
80 Tapa-traya-vimocini	Releasing from the Three Afflictions
81 Saranagata-dinarta-paritrana	Protector of the sick and suffering who come to you for refuge
82 Sumukti-da	Giving complete [spiritual] emancipation
83 Siddhi-yoga-nisevita	Resorted to (for the acquisition of success or magic powers)
84 Papa-hantri	Destroyer of sin
85 Pavanangi	Having a pure body
86 Parabrahma-svarupini	Embodiment of the Supreme Spirit
87 Puma	Full
88 Puratana	Ancient
89 Punya	Auspicious
90 Punya-da	Bestowing merit
91 Punya-vahini	Possessing (or producing) merit
92 Pulomajarcita	Worshipped by Indrani (wife of Indra)
93 Puta	Pure
94 Puta-tribhuvana	Purifier of the Three Worlds
95 Japa	Muttering, whispering
96 Jangama	Moving, alive
97 Jangamadhara	Support or substratum of what lives or moves
98 Jala-rupa	Consisting of water
99 Jagad-d-hita	Friend or benefactor of what lives or moves
100 Jahnu-putri	Daughter of Jahnu
101 Jagan-matr	Mother of what lives or moves
102 Jambu-dvipa-viharini	Roaming about (or delighting in) Rose-apple-tree Island (India)
103 Bhava-patni	Wife of Bhava (Siva)
104 Bhisma-matr	Mother of Bhisma
105 Siddha	Holy
106 Ramya	Delightful, beautiful
107 Uma-kara-kamala-sanjata	Born from the lotus which created Uma (Parvati) (presumably a poetic way of saying that they were sisters)
108 Ajnana-timira-bhanu	A light amid the darkness of ignorance