CHAPTER ONE Long ago on the Ganges
Gange Cha Yamune Chaiva
Godavarai Saraswati
Narmade Sindhu Kaveri
Jale Asmin Sannidhim Kuru
(O Holy Mother Ganges! O Yamuna! O Godavari! Saraswati! O Narmada! Sindhu! Kaveri! May you all be pleased to be manifest in these waters with which I shall purify myself!)
Prayer to the Seven Sacred Rivers recited by
every devout Hindu at the time of taking his bath
I love rivers. I was born on the banks of the Thames and, like my father before me, I had spent a great deal of time both on it and in it. I enjoy visiting their sources: Thames Head, in a green meadow in the Cotswolds; the river Po corning out from under a heap of boulders among the debris left by picnickers by Monte Viso; the Isonzo bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps; the Danube (or one of its sources) emerging in baroque splendour in a palace garden at Donaueschingen. I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to retain some of the beauty with which they were born.
For me the most memorable river of all was the Ganges. I had not seen it for more than twenty years since the time when, as a young officer, I had spent six months on its banks at a remote military station some fifty miles from Kanpur.
I arrived there in March, at the start of the hottest season. That summer in the Indian Plain is something which I can never forget, and yet it is something which I find difficult to believe that I ever experienced. I remember a sky like an inverted brass bowl overhead and the earth like an overcooked omelette beneath it.
Through this desiccated landscape the Ganges flowed, not more than a couple of hundred yards wide. It was a disagreeable shade of green and in it floated imperfectly cremated corpses and an occasional crocodile.
All through March and April it was terribly hot but during the second week of May the weather began to change for the better. There were two light showers of rain, the first harbingers of the monsoon, and the midday temperature sometimes fell as low as a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
On 20th May I was standing on the parade ground where I had been teaching recruits to do up their boots. All that day the sky had been overcast. All afternoon it had been very quiet. At four o’clock the recruits were dismissed and they were clumping off to their tents in their great, newly-tied boots when suddenly they began to utter moaning sounds, break their ranks and run for their lives. I wondered if it was another Indian Mutiny.
It was only a dust storm. It came roaring across the plain as black and solid-looking as a cliff. I took one look at it, got on my bicycle and fled.
I reached my bungalow at the same time as the sandstorm and locked the door on it. Outside it was as black as night, the electric light cables snapped, trees were uprooted and a large marquee complete with flailing guy ropes and tent pegs whistled past on the wind. There was a terrible roaring sound. It lasted half an hour, then the wind died away as quickly as it had come, by which time the floor of the bungalow was ankle-deep in sand – one of the windows had been broken by the wind. It was succeeded by a violent rainstorm with thunder and lightning.
When it was all over I put on some old clothes and a pair of gumboots and went down a sunken lane to the river, churning my way through the mud.
At the foot of this lane which was thickly overshadowed by trees, there was a shrine dedicated to the god Siva. There was no temple, just a lingam, a black stone on a plinth at the foot of a pipal tree on which offerings of sweets and marigolds were scattered. Although I went there almost every day and I never saw anyone else, the offerings were always fresh. Buried in the heart of the tree itself, which had grown round it, there was a block of stone with a frieze of figures carved on it. It was a place with a feeling of great antiquity and the magic beauty of a sacred grove in a painting by Claude.
But on this particular day I had come because I wanted to see what had happened to the river as a result of the storm.
The water was no longer green and sluggish. It had been churned until it was the colour of milky coffee and it had spread up over the low-lying bank to the north and was flowing strongly. Overhead, apart from a few egg-shaped clouds which floated across it at regular intervals, the sky was clear and blue. Beyond the swollen river the sand flats on the opposite shore extended as far as the eye could see, to a distant skyline dotted with trees which I had never noticed. Everything in this landscape was brilliant and distinct. It was like the springtime of the world.
Downstream a herd of water-buffaloes was swimming the river. Men and boys were crossing with them, perched on the backs of half a dozen beasts out on the flanks of the main body. They were shouting and laughing to one another and making encouraging noises to the animals which breasted the stream powerfully but slowly. Then they came lumbering out of the water and thundered up into the combe where I was standing, their flanks all glistening, and as they went by the riders waved their sticks at me and shouted that the hot weather was nearly over. Then they all disappeared up the hill, and I was alone by the river. There was something about it, the ability it had shown to change in the space of an hour, to expand and stretch away to distant horizons, to the existence of which I had not even given a thought, that made me long to follow it on and on until it reached the sea. The next day I went on leave to the Hills, and when I came back the rains had come in earnest and the Ganges was itself like a vast, inland sea. A few weeks more and I was sent to the Middle East. Twenty-two years passed before I saw it again.
CHAPTER TWO The first sight of the river
How magnificent she is when she flows in the valley Rishikesh! She has a blue colour like that of the ocean. The water is extremely clear and sweet. Rich people from the plains get water from Rishikesh. It is taken in big copper vessels to far-off places in India.
Sri Swami Sivananda: Mother Ganges; Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy, 1962
Together with Wanda, my wife, I went out on to one of the platforms of the temple. Upstream towards Rishikesh, the river wound between sand and shingle, sometimes hidden from view amongst groves of trees from which long, horizontal bands of mist were slowly rising. Immediately below was the Har-ki-Pairi Ghat with its ludicrous clock tower and, just upriver from it, the barrage at Bhimgoda that channelled the water from the mainstream into the canal reducing the river below it to a trickle among stones that were the colour of old bones. This attenuated stream was the Ganges, the river that we hoped to travel down until we reached the sea. To the south of the Hardwar Gorge, here, at its narrowest, not more than a mile wide, it wound away, a narrow ribbon, reach after reach of it until it was swallowed up in the haze of the vast plain that stretched through all points of the compass from east of south to the extreme west.
Now, for the first time, I realised the magnitude of