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1.1 The Legend

Indians look upon their rivers with reverence and consider them holy. From time immemorial, their mythologies have been harping on the sacredness of rivers but there is none holier and popular than the Ganga. In the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, written in Sanskrit by sage Valmiki between 1400 and 1000 BC, which remains the bedrock of the Hindu civilisation, she is personified as a goddess. In Hindu mythology, she is the eldest daughter of Himavat and Menoka; her sister being Uma, or goddess Durga who is worshipped in autumn and spring by Bengalis, particularly. The Ganga became the wife of King Santanu and bore a son, Bhisma, who is known as Gangeya, after his mother. She is also the mother of Kartikeya, the chief celestial warrior whom she bore, being in love with Agni. She has many other names too – Bhadra-soma, Gandini, Kirati, Devabhuti, Hara-Sekhara, Khapaga, Mandakini, Tripathaga or Trisrota; the last means three streams, flowing in heaven, earth and hell (in the third, she is called Patal-Ganga). In Hindu mythology, she plays various roles – a child of Brahma, wife of Shiva, the metaphysical offspring of Vishnu, mother of eight Vasus and of Kartikeya. In the Rigveda, she is mentioned twice. Before descending on earth, she flowed in heaven and was the consort of gods. She was brought down to the earth by a scion of King Sagara whose 60,000 sons were burnt to death by the angry gaze of a philosopher sage, Kapil (founder of Sankhya Darshana) when they were looking for their missing sacrificial horse for the Ashwamedha Yagna and had arrogantly scattered ashes on his hermitage. They could be revived and their souls delivered in heaven if the Ganga flowed over and purified their ashes. King Sagara’s scions performed pious rites to bring down the Ganga on the earth but their two generations failed.

The third generation king, Bhagirath obtained the blessings of Lord Brahma through tapasya (penance) and succeeded in breaking, The Ganga’s obstinacy of flowing only in heaven. She was angry at being brought down to earth. The heavenly king, Indra’s tusker, Airabat pierced the hills of the Himalayas to contain her tremendous surge, unsuccessfully. Being entreated by gods, Lord Shiva caught her on his brow and checked her turbulence with his matted locks to save the earth from the shock of her fall. Because of this action, Shiva is called Gangadhar, or ‘Holder of the Ganga’. She descended from Shiva’s brow in several streams, four according to some and ten according to others, but the number generally accepted is seven. She is thus called Sapta-Sindhava, i.e., the seven Sindhus or rivers, of which the Ganga proper is one. She followed King Bhagirath, blowing a conch-shell as he trekked southeast and flowing over the plains of north and eastern India, reached the place where the ashes of King Sagara’s sons lay. As she flowed over them, their souls were delivered and ascended to the heaven. She flowed into the sea which is now called the Bay of Bengal, a part of the Indian Ocean.

In the Mahabharata (400 BC), the great Hindu epic written and compiled after the Ramayana, the Ganga is both a goddess and an earthly woman. In the Buddhist and Jain scriptures too, she is mentioned with reverence. From the third century AD she was invoked in rituals of birth, initiation, marriage and death. In many ancient Western and Chinese chronicles, she figures in the name of a vast continent, Gangaridi, i.e., the land whose heart is the Ganga. The name of its capital and of the river flowing by it is the Ganga. Ptolemy, Megasthenes and other travellers in India between 300 and 200 BC praised the defensive prowess of Gangaridi. The Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta whom even Alexander dared not confront, is said to have reigned over the kingdom.

In the post-Vedic era, the Hindu Puranas (ancient history-based literature) mention Viyad Ganga, or heavenly Ganga, which flows from the toe of Vishnu. The descent mythology figured in them before the Ramayana. The civilizations of Harappa-Mohenjodaro and of the Ramayana flourished at the same time. It follows, therefore, that the kingdoms, described in the Ramayana, existed on the banks of the Ganga and were ruled by the native Dasas, or the immigrant Aryans who gradually moved from the Indus Valley to that of the Ganga between 1400 and 1000 BC. As the Ramayana is believed to have been written in the post-Vedic period, the kings figuring in it might have been Aryans. Therefore, the people in the Vedic age might have been Dasas as well as invaders of the Indus Valley, whereas the people in the Ramayana age might have been Aryan city-dwellers. From this time onward, for centuries, the mixed civilization had sporadic and irregular growth. The people continued to fight against flood and famine which were caused by the rivers.

Then didst thou set the obstructed rivers flowing

And win the floods that were enthralled by Dasas.

Both Dasas and Aryans considered rivers as sacred and thus recited their names while bathing, as their ancestors did for centuries:

May the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu and Kaveri mingle with the waters – here and now!

In another legend, Manas Sarovar in Tibet, stretching at the foot of Mount Kailash, is the source of the river. This natural lake, sprawling over 500 km2 at an altitude of 5000 m, has been attracting Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims and devotees since the early Christian era from India, China, Tibet and Japan. Three other great Indian rivers – the Yamuna, the Indus and the Brahmaputra – are believed to be also originating from this natural lake, literally.

In course of time, the fame and sacredness of the Ganga reached the Western world. She figured in the imagination of poets, writers and travellers. In poetry, T S Eliot, Heine, Andrew Marvell, and Goethe, to name a few, referred to her with reverence. Roman and Italian poets – Virgil, Ovid and Dante – also mentioned the Ganga. Hart Henry in a long poem narrated the mythology of the Ganga’s descent on the earth to revive King Sagara’s 60,000 sons and deliver their souls for ascent to heaven. I quote a stanza from the long poem.

Ganga, whose waves in heaven flow

Is daughter of the lord of snow?

Win Siva that his aid be lent

To hold her in her mid-descent,

For earth alone will never bear

Those torrents hurled from upper air.

Columbus on his fourth voyage to the New World heard the natives of Panama speak of the great river, The Ganga which lay 10 days’ journey ahead from the coast. Megasthenes described the Ganga as the largest river of the world. Ptolemy’s account and the graphic, showing the descent of the river on earth influenced and attracted geographists. Alexander imagined the river to be the farthest limit of the earth and while invading India, aspired to reach it. She figured in the translations and commentaries of ancient Indian texts by Max Mueller, William Jones etc. In New Testament, the tale of river Physon in the Garden of Eden has strange similarity with the Hindu mythology of the Ganga’s descent on earth, giving rise to the hypothesis that the Ganga and the Physon was the same river. It persisted throughout the Middle Ages until the end of the 15th century and was held by Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrosa and Saint Jerome.

The Ganga mythology not only described her descent on earth but narrated her journey to the sea also. Great engineers like Travernier (1666), Bernier (1669), Rennel (1760), Sherwill (1857), Fergusson (1863) and Reaks (1919) drew many conclusions from, and laid great importance on, the incidents narrated in the mythologies about the Ganga and other sacred Indian rivers as well as from the views of learned men on them. The place where the Ganga merged with the Yamuna and Saraswati near Allahabad is called ‘Juktabeni’ i.e., three plaits of holy hair tied together and the place where its two tributaries – Yamuna and Saraswati – come out of the Bhagirathi at Triveni in West Bengal is called ‘Muktabeni’, i.e., the ‘plaits separated’. The diversion of the Ganga to the Padma was caused, according to Captain Sherwill, by the collapse of the left bank, which he attributed to another legend in the Ramayana. A sage, Jahnu drank up the Ganga in retaliation of her washing away his holy copper utensils when she was following Bhagirath. He entreated the angry sage who pleased with his prayers, let her out through his thigh (hence Jahnabi, another name of the Ganga) and allowed her to flow again.

According to another mythology, Bhagirath was tired in his long journey from Haridwar and when he stopped for eating, the Ganga who had also stopped heard sound from a shell and taking it to be that from Bhagirath’s conch-shell, followed the former which was actually blown by Padmavati, after whom the diversion was called the Padma. Seeing she was diverting, Bhagirath blew his conch-shell, at which realizing her mistake, the Ganga returned to follow him southward. In Chandi Mangal, a long poem by Kavikankan Mukundaram (1400 AD) a merchant, Lakshapati, on his way to Sri Lanka (then Singhal) along the bank of Ajoy river crossed the Ganga at Konnagar, Kolkata, Kalighat, Bostom Ghata (presently Baishnab Ghata), Mogra etc. The Ramayana mentions Sagar Sangam, i.e., the marriage the Ganga with the sea to which it flows in the Bay of Bengal. An island has emerged at the holy confluence, called Sagar Dweep where a fair is held annually on Makar Sankranti day, i.e., the end of winter solstice, usually in mid-January.

India’s greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa (500 AD) thus describes the Himalayan city of Alaka (perhaps so named, being on the bank of Alakananda):

Where maidens whom the gods would gladly wed,

Are fanned by breezes, cooled by the Ganga’s foam

In the shadows that the trees of heaven spread.

People, all over the world, believe their mythologies. The ones about the Ganga, which is one of the mightiest and longest of the world’s rivers, are no exception.