Sudipta Sen’s “Ganga: The Many Pasts Of A River” is a sweeping, interdisciplinary exploration of the third-largest river in the world, a highly venerated body of water with an incredible universal salience and a vast mythic geography.
Sen begins his chronicle in prehistoric India, tracing the river’s first settlers, its myths of origin in the Hindu tradition, and its significance during the ascendancy of popular Buddhism. In the following centuries, Indian empires, Central Asian regimes, European merchants, the British Empire, and the Indian nation-state all shaped the identity and ecology of the river.
Read on for ten fascinating manifestations of devotion to the Ganga whether ritual penance, miracles, or military conquest—
1. The ascetic who brought down the Ganga to cleanse the world of the sins of his ancestors
Bhagiratha could not beget any sons. To win the favour of the gods he went to the Gokarna Mountain as a humble ascetic and began a long period of austerity. He kept his arms raised at all times, ate only once, and succeeded in extinguishing all sensual desires. Much pleased with such virtuous behaviour, Brahma, the creator of the universe, granted him a special favour. He ordained that the waters of the Ganga would come down from the heavens and wash the ashes of Bhagiratha’s ancestors, releasing their spirits for their final resting place. The only condition was that the great Shiva must check the fall of the mighty Ganga, daughter of the mountains, once she plunged to this earth. Hearing this, Bhagiratha, in order to pay homage to the idiosyncratic Shiva, stood on the tip of one big toe for a whole year.
2. The act of waiting to die by the river Ganga under extraordinary austerities
The best way to die was to have spent at least three nights by the river, immersed up to one’s navel in the water, chanting “gan˙ ga¯na¯ra¯yan. abrahma” (Ganga is Vishnu and Brahma). A wealthy Calcutta native, Chudamani Datta, keen to outdo his social rivals, ordered a crowd of drummers for a procession the moment he was declared gravely ill. Seated in a silver carriage draped in cloth printed with Sanskrit hymns and strewn with holy basil, he asked the bearers to carry him to the Ganga. As the carriage wound its way through the city, a throng of singers sang about how, having conquered the world with his money, Chudamani was now going to conquer Yama, the Lord of Death.
3. The king who dismembered himself so as to be reunited with his putative ancestress-the river
An extraordinary act credited to King Dindiga (Prithvipati I) of the Ganga Dynasty of Talkad, in present-day Mysore in the state of Andhra Pradesh, was recorded in a copperplate inscription commissioned by his son. During the late ninth century c.e., at the battle of Vaimbalguri, fighting vassals of the formidable Rashtrakuta kingdom of the north, he was badly wounded. Anticipating death but unwilling to lay down arms, he cut off a piece of his bone with his sword and sent off the fragment with a messenger so that it could “enter the water” of the Ganga. His dynasty had taken its name from the River Ganga, claiming genealogical descent from the Solar Dynasty of northern kings.
4. If the devotee must not go to the Ganga, the Ganga must come to the devotee
Panditaraja Jagannatha, Mughal court poet extraordinaire, a scholar of linguistics, poetics, and philosophy hounded by the Brahmin orthodoxy led by Hara Dikshita for marrying a Muslim woman, sought refuge on the steps of Banaras by the side of the Ganga. Forbidden to step into the water lest he pollutes the river with his transgression, he was moved to compose his famous devotional eulogy of the Ganga known as the Piyushalahari. As he composed each verse, legend has it, the river rose step by step, and at the end of his recitation swept him and his devoted wife away.
5. The magnificent syncretism of Gangetic worship, as evinced in this ode to the Ganga
These Sanskrit shlokas, taken from an eight-stanza ode to the Ganga, have been a part of the oral tradition in Bengal for centuries, and many people knew them by heart just a generation ago. They were composed—surprisingly— not by a Brahmin, not even by a Hindu, but by a thirteenth-century author who went by the popular name of Darap Khan Gaji. The noted Bengali linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji identified “‘Darap Khan’” as Zafar Khan Ghazi, who is credited with daring military exploits during the first major phase of Islamic expansion in Bengal toward the end of the thirteenth century, after the Turkish Sultanate had been established in northern India around Delhi as the new capital.
6. The custom of touching feet as a mark of respect that arose as a result of pilgrimages along the Ganga
And yet there is an inherent and stubborn claim of Hindus of all denominations and castes to pilgrimage sites along the River Ganga. Just as there is ardent faith in the performance of arduous journeys, great respect is also given to all who return to their family, friends, and community from such long-distance, merit-seeking travel. This is one reason why the young still touch the feet of the elderly in greeting, to literally gather the dust of uncovered feet that have been on the pilgrim path. In many ways, the pilgrim’s journey is reminiscent of the final exit from mortal life itself, and thus the sacredness and merit reserved for such a journey are not ordinary.
7. The king who trusted a pitcher of Ganga water to save him from leprosy
In the legend of King Rai Mandlik of Girnar, Gujarat, a man named Vijnal had leprosy. He was a friend of the king, but he could not bear this state. He became a fugitive, hiding from the king, waiting to die. The king, meanwhile, set off in pursuit. On this journey, while encamped near a small rivulet, the king met a man who was carrying Ganga water from the east. The king had had no time to bathe. Seeing the water-bearer, he grabbed the pitcher and poured the waters over his clothes. When he finally caught up with his friend the leper, he embraced him. And again, without fail, the leprosy disappeared from his body in the blink of an eye.
8. The awe of the Greek army at the unparalleled magnificence of the Ganga
Arrian, echoing observers in the ranks of Alexander’s army, reasoned that if all rivers, large or small, in various parts of the world were capable of depositing mud and silt brought from down from the uplands where they rise, then there was no reason to doubt that India was also one giant alluvial plain. Rivers in the west would not, he marvelled, “for sheer volume of water, compare with any single one of the rivers of India—to say nothing of the greatest, the Ganges, with which not even the Egyptian Nile or the European river of the Danube is to be mentioned in the same breath.”
9. The significance of the Ganga as an emblem of regal power
Harsha seems to have been keenly aware of the bounty of the Ganga and the mythic potency of its waters. During his lavish abhiseka ceremonies, the wives of his most important vassals poured consecratory waters from the river on his crown from special golden pitchers. Like Emperor Asoka, he built thousands of stupas and resting houses all along its banks.
10. The proliferation of Ganga iconography in kingdoms far removed from the Ganga
These were massive undertakings that involved breaking, cutting, carving, and polishing giant slabs of stone or the refashioning of freestanding monolithic structures as in the chariot shaped Pancha Ratha temples of Mahabalipuram. Many of these projects outlived the rulers who commissioned them, and some lie unfinished to this day. The ubiquity of the Ganga image in Chalukya and Pallava temples as door guardian, goddess of bounty, or loving companion of Shiva entangled in the coils of his matted hair, not to mention the frequent invocation of the river in royal inscriptions, reminds us of the suffusion of myths, icons, and texts in the fabrication of political legitimacy. Placed within the sanctum of the king’s temple, the Ganga— the river that is supposed to emanate from the Milky Way galaxy—implied a communion between the ruler and the realm of Shiva in the northern mountains of Kailasa.