The Ganges

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The Ganges is the great river of northern India, rising in the western Himalaya and running some 2,500 kilometres across the plains to the Bay of Bengal. In Hindu tradition it is not a river that happens to be holy but a goddess in liquid form — Ganga, whose presence is the water itself. The coordinates here mark Devprayag, the Himalayan confluence where the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda meet and the river is first called Ganga; this is one of its principal places of pilgrimage, though sanctity is held to travel the whole length of the stream.

The myth most often told of its origin makes the river a descent. Ganga flowed first in heaven, and was brought down to earth to release the dead; her fall would have shattered the ground had the god Shiva not caught the torrent in his matted hair and let it down gently. The story is recounted in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata and across the later Purāṇas, and it fixes the river’s standing: water that came from above, carrying the power to purify what it touches.

What practitioners hold of the river turns on that power. Bathing in the Ganges is believed to wash away sin and ritual impurity; its water is carried home, kept for years, and used in rites of birth, marriage, and death. To die beside it, or to have one’s ashes given to its current, is held to ease or end the round of rebirth — which is why the cremation grounds of Varanasi draw the dying from across the subcontinent. The Kumbh Mela, the mass pilgrimage that gathers many millions to bathe at fixed astrological moments, is among the largest religious assemblies on earth.

Scholarship reads the cult as very old and continuous. The river is named and praised in Vedic and epic literature; archaeology traces dense settlement along its banks for millennia; the personification of rivers as goddesses is attested across early South Asian religion. What the texts assert as the river’s celestial source and sin-dissolving virtue is reported here as the tradition’s own claim, not as established fact — and the two are easy to keep apart. The measurable history is the unbroken human attachment to the water; the descent from heaven is what the tradition says that attachment is for.

The river’s sacred standing and its physical condition now stand in open tension. The Ganges is among the most polluted major rivers in the world, and successive efforts to clean it have met the difficulty that its holiness and its use as a sink are bound to the same water. Indian law has at points named the river a legal person, an attempt to give the goddess standing a court could recognise. The water still carries the dead, and the living still come down to it.

→ In the library: Woodroffe — Hymns to the Goddess (1913) · Woodroffe — Mahānirvāna Tantra (1913)

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