Difficult to describe the emotions we felt aground on a 1200-mile boat journey within sight of our point of departure.
What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is Ganga Mai , Mother Ganges. For a Hindu to bathe in her is to be purified of all sin. To say, with love, the words ‘ O, Ganga! O Ganga! ’, even when far from her banks, can atone for the misdeeds of three previous incarnations. To be cremated on them, preferably having died there, and have one’s calcined bones scattered on her bosom, or to cast those of one’s deceased parents on it, is the ardent desire of every Hindu.
Even before death, sick and aged people who have the means to do so, and others who have not, make what are often long journeys to spend their last days by her side. Some reside in little huts, while those in extremis endeavour to have themselves immersed in her so that their sins may be washed away while there is still life in their bodies.
And to drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in vessels for future consumption – both confer great merit. Many devout Hindus drink no other water, and those who live at a distance contrive to receive regular supplies of it, for Ganges water has extraordinary qualities. Bottled at one of the sacred bathing places, or anywhere else for that matter, it will keep for at least a year. Taken aboard outward-boundships in the days of sail on the Hooghly near Calcutta, it is said to have outlasted all other waters. It also seems to have a genuine capacity for absorbing germs and rendering them innocuous. We drank it unboiled in the fifty-mile stretch of the river after it first enters the Indian Plain, and boiled and made into tea thereafter for most of the rest of its course without any unfortunate effects. Yet whenever we left the river for one reason or another, we invariably became ill. I would not attempt to explain this. I only state it as a fact.
What confers on the Ganges this unique holiness among rivers? It was not always so. The first Aryan invaders of India thought more highly of the Indus. It was much later that they gave Ganga the highest position and called her Sursarit, River of the Gods. The Ganga emerges under the name of Bhagirathi from an ice cave at the foot of the Gangotri glacier, 12,770 feet up in the Garhwal Himalayas. The cave is known as Gomukh, the Cow’s Mouth; certainly nothing in nature could be nearer the divine than this lonely place to which only the most determined pilgrims used to penetrate back in the 1960s.
Three hundred miles from its source the Ganges breaks through the Siwalik Range, outriders of the Himalayas, in a gorge a mile wide, and enters the plains of India where the town of Hardwar stands. Spoiled by a number of hideous buildings, some of them plastered with equally hideous advertisements, this is one of the seven great bathing places of pilgrimage in India.
The ghat – steps leading down to the river – is the scene of great bathing ceremonies, especially on the birthday of Ganga, at the beginning of the Hindu solar year, when as many as 400,000 people gather for the bathing, and on the occasion of a Kumbh Mela (a mela being a fair), which occurs every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh), the bathers are said to number millions.
Here, and everywhere else on the banks of the Ganges, thebathers can be seen engaged in various acts of reverence to her: drinking her waters, icy in winter; launching small, green, boat-shaped baskets of stitched leaves containing marigolds, rose petals and white sweets, placing them carefully on the water which whirls them about a bit until they are upset and their contents are carried away downstream. There the river winds away, a narrow ribbon of water in the dry
What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is Ganga Mai , Mother Ganges. For a Hindu to bathe in her is to be purified of all sin. To say, with love, the words ‘ O, Ganga! O Ganga! ’, even when far from her banks, can atone for the misdeeds of three previous incarnations. To be cremated on them, preferably having died there, and have one’s calcined bones scattered on her bosom, or to cast those of one’s deceased parents on it, is the ardent desire of every Hindu.
Even before death, sick and aged people who have the means to do so, and others who have not, make what are often long journeys to spend their last days by her side. Some reside in little huts, while those in extremis endeavour to have themselves immersed in her so that their sins may be washed away while there is still life in their bodies.
And to drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in vessels for future consumption – both confer great merit. Many devout Hindus drink no other water, and those who live at a distance contrive to receive regular supplies of it, for Ganges water has extraordinary qualities. Bottled at one of the sacred bathing places, or anywhere else for that matter, it will keep for at least a year. Taken aboard outward-boundships in the days of sail on the Hooghly near Calcutta, it is said to have outlasted all other waters. It also seems to have a genuine capacity for absorbing germs and rendering them innocuous. We drank it unboiled in the fifty-mile stretch of the river after it first enters the Indian Plain, and boiled and made into tea thereafter for most of the rest of its course without any unfortunate effects. Yet whenever we left the river for one reason or another, we invariably became ill. I would not attempt to explain this. I only state it as a fact.
What confers on the Ganges this unique holiness among rivers? It was not always so. The first Aryan invaders of India thought more highly of the Indus. It was much later that they gave Ganga the highest position and called her Sursarit, River of the Gods. The Ganga emerges under the name of Bhagirathi from an ice cave at the foot of the Gangotri glacier, 12,770 feet up in the Garhwal Himalayas. The cave is known as Gomukh, the Cow’s Mouth; certainly nothing in nature could be nearer the divine than this lonely place to which only the most determined pilgrims used to penetrate back in the 1960s.
Three hundred miles from its source the Ganges breaks through the Siwalik Range, outriders of the Himalayas, in a gorge a mile wide, and enters the plains of India where the town of Hardwar stands. Spoiled by a number of hideous buildings, some of them plastered with equally hideous advertisements, this is one of the seven great bathing places of pilgrimage in India.
The ghat – steps leading down to the river – is the scene of great bathing ceremonies, especially on the birthday of Ganga, at the beginning of the Hindu solar year, when as many as 400,000 people gather for the bathing, and on the occasion of a Kumbh Mela (a mela being a fair), which occurs every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh), the bathers are said to number millions.
Here, and everywhere else on the banks of the Ganges, thebathers can be seen engaged in various acts of reverence to her: drinking her waters, icy in winter; launching small, green, boat-shaped baskets of stitched leaves containing marigolds, rose petals and white sweets, placing them carefully on the water which whirls them about a bit until they are upset and their contents are carried away downstream. There the river winds away, a narrow ribbon of water in the dry
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