seasons, reach after reach of it until it is swallowed up in the haze of the vast plain, a 400,000-square-mile basin formed on the north by the Himalayas, on the south by the Vindhyan Ranges, and to the east where the Brahmaputra enters it, by the thickly forested hills which separate Burma from Bengal. To the west are the great deserts of Rajasthan. In three of the states through which the Ganges flows – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal – lived 190 million people, one third of India’s entire population.
A hundred miles below Hardwar the river is more or less what it will be for the greater part of the rest of its journey to the Bay of Bengal: a river about two miles wide, narrowing to half a mile or less in winter, then sometimes swollen by the monsoon rains to the proportions of an inland sea.
On the high, right bank, where they are robust enough to resist the encroaching, eroding river, are the permanent villages. It is impossible even to guess at how old they are, for they are built of undatable mud. This is Hindoostan as European artists saw it in the early nineteenth century. Banyan trees grow on the banks, their long branches hanging down like bell-ropes, and, in their shade, the water is the colour of greengages. On top of these banks spindle-shanked men run rather than walk, as such men always do in India, with bamboos slung across their shoulders which have heavy earthenware pots suspended at either end. Sometimes there are men carrying white-wrapped corpses on stretchers to the burning places, crying, ‘ Ram Nam Sat Hai! ’ (‘The Name of God is Truth!’), followed by the mourners, one of whom is carrying apot with a fire burning in it. In the river, where there is a shrine, a platform from which a black lingam rises decked with fresh marigolds, some white-clad figures perform their pujas and women and girls wallop the washing on lumps of brickwork – all that remains of some Mughal palace or gazebo – shouting to one another in coarse, cheerful voices. Out on the water there may be ferry boats loaded with men, bicycles and goats, fishing boats loaded with bag-shaped nets, or the cone-shaped traps which are set on the bottom of the river; country boats with upturned bows and square sterns with a crew of two, some of them being tracked upstream with a tow rope by one man, the other steering. All the way down the river there are shmasans , burning places for the dead, often nothing more than a piece of foreshore distinguished by some ashes and calcined bones. The river is full of imperfectly cremated bodies, floating downstream, often with birds of prey using them as rafts, pecking at them.
When the river widens to such an extent that no proper bank is visible, there is nothing but flats and sandbanks on either hand. By night there is pandemonium on these lonely reaches, what with the continual rumble of sandbanks collapsing into them; the noise made by the huge flocks of tall, grey and red sarus cranes as they trumpet and thresh the water; and the howlings of packs of jackals which are taken up and answered by other bands on the opposite bank.
The end – or one of the ends of Ganga, since she has a hundred mouths – is at the southern tip of Sagar Island, where the river meets the Indian Ocean. Here, at the same time as the Mela is celebrated at Hardwar and Allahabad, a great fair attended by many thousands takes place on the shore, lasting three days. Pilgrims used to sacrifice their progeny by offering them to Ganga, which was infested by man-eating estuarine crocodiles (C. porosus ), and sharks, a practice repressed in 1802 by Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, after twenty-three people had been either drowned or eaten the previous year.
But it is at the Sandheads, some sixty miles south of Sagar Island, among the dome-shaped sands, invisible twenty fathoms below, where the long trails of sand run down to the deeps of the Indian Ocean and the river in its multiple guises as Hooghly,
A hundred miles below Hardwar the river is more or less what it will be for the greater part of the rest of its journey to the Bay of Bengal: a river about two miles wide, narrowing to half a mile or less in winter, then sometimes swollen by the monsoon rains to the proportions of an inland sea.
On the high, right bank, where they are robust enough to resist the encroaching, eroding river, are the permanent villages. It is impossible even to guess at how old they are, for they are built of undatable mud. This is Hindoostan as European artists saw it in the early nineteenth century. Banyan trees grow on the banks, their long branches hanging down like bell-ropes, and, in their shade, the water is the colour of greengages. On top of these banks spindle-shanked men run rather than walk, as such men always do in India, with bamboos slung across their shoulders which have heavy earthenware pots suspended at either end. Sometimes there are men carrying white-wrapped corpses on stretchers to the burning places, crying, ‘ Ram Nam Sat Hai! ’ (‘The Name of God is Truth!’), followed by the mourners, one of whom is carrying apot with a fire burning in it. In the river, where there is a shrine, a platform from which a black lingam rises decked with fresh marigolds, some white-clad figures perform their pujas and women and girls wallop the washing on lumps of brickwork – all that remains of some Mughal palace or gazebo – shouting to one another in coarse, cheerful voices. Out on the water there may be ferry boats loaded with men, bicycles and goats, fishing boats loaded with bag-shaped nets, or the cone-shaped traps which are set on the bottom of the river; country boats with upturned bows and square sterns with a crew of two, some of them being tracked upstream with a tow rope by one man, the other steering. All the way down the river there are shmasans , burning places for the dead, often nothing more than a piece of foreshore distinguished by some ashes and calcined bones. The river is full of imperfectly cremated bodies, floating downstream, often with birds of prey using them as rafts, pecking at them.
When the river widens to such an extent that no proper bank is visible, there is nothing but flats and sandbanks on either hand. By night there is pandemonium on these lonely reaches, what with the continual rumble of sandbanks collapsing into them; the noise made by the huge flocks of tall, grey and red sarus cranes as they trumpet and thresh the water; and the howlings of packs of jackals which are taken up and answered by other bands on the opposite bank.
The end – or one of the ends of Ganga, since she has a hundred mouths – is at the southern tip of Sagar Island, where the river meets the Indian Ocean. Here, at the same time as the Mela is celebrated at Hardwar and Allahabad, a great fair attended by many thousands takes place on the shore, lasting three days. Pilgrims used to sacrifice their progeny by offering them to Ganga, which was infested by man-eating estuarine crocodiles (C. porosus ), and sharks, a practice repressed in 1802 by Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, after twenty-three people had been either drowned or eaten the previous year.
But it is at the Sandheads, some sixty miles south of Sagar Island, among the dome-shaped sands, invisible twenty fathoms below, where the long trails of sand run down to the deeps of the Indian Ocean and the river in its multiple guises as Hooghly,
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