Slowly Down the Ganges

ERIC NEWBY

Slowly Down the Ganges

Dedication

To Wanda – my fellow boatwoman

Epigraph

‘The Ganga has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the Himalayas, snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below where my life and work have been cast.’

Jawaharlal Nehru

‘Here I asked repeatedly, and received a different account … Perhaps these particulars vary in different instances. At all events it is a proof how hard it is to gain, in this country, accurate information as to facts which seem most obvious to the senses.’

Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India Reginald Heber, D.D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Long ago on the Ganges

2 The first sight of the river

3 Life at Hardwar

4 Down the Ganges

5 Through the Bhabar

6 The way to the Balawali Bridge

7 A short halt at a railway station

8 An encounter with a bridgekeeper

9 Terra firma

10 A journey through Uttar Pradesh

11 A place in the country

12 From a carriage window

13 Remembrance of things past

14 Slow boat to Kanpur

15 Christmas at Kanpur

16 The Ganges at Prayag

17 The way to Mirzapur

18 The fort at Chunar

19 A stay at Banaras

20 The day of Makara Sankranti

21 From Patna to Bankipore and back

22 Cooking a Baffat

23 The islands at Colganj

24 Into the Bhagirathi

25 Arrival at Calcutta

26 Down to the sea

Plates

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Footnotes

Maps

The course of the Ganges

From Hardwar to Bijnor

From Calcutta to Diamond Harbour

List of Illustrations

Stuck fast on the Upper Ganges, south of Hardwar

Newby carrying oars

Wedding at a village near the bridge at Raoli

Ram Baba, Lalta Prasad and Jagdish – our boatmen south of Fatehgarh, on the sands with a fire of stolen dung

Early morning

Between Allahabad and Mirzapur, with Bag Nath and Hira Lal

Bullock-cart from the ferry at Araul to Araul Mankapur

Devotee performing his morning puja

Mendicant child on the great sandbank at Allahabad

A bhur at Dinapore

Beggars on the way from Akbar’s embankment to the Sangam at the confluence of the Jumna and the Ganges at Allahabad

Dawn at the Sangam

A cremation at Banaras

Outside the post office at Banaras

A goddess

Wanda outside the Victoria Jubilee Club at Bankipore

The Ganges at Sultanganj – the embarkation point for the island of Jahngira

Arrival at Calcutta

Introduction

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