Diverse Banks

Though not exactly in the league of Bill Bryson, Hollick does come close enough, easily mixing the spiritual questions about Ganga as a goddess, along with the mythology about her origins, and the stark reality of a river that is besieged and at some places so narrow that nothing is possible 8220;except commuter ferrying8221;.

What makes Ganga interesting for even Indians is that it doesn8217;t presume too much 8212; not information but, importantly, not too much ignorance either. Perhaps the author, having done plenty of radio documentaries and shows for the National Public Radio US and vintage British BBC Radio Four stuff, has meant an easier, accessible narrative, more or less avoiding the pitfalls that several western commentators cannot but fall for when they get into difficult issues like Indian spiritualism and want quick answers.

In the introduction, Hollick has devoted a couple of pages to explain why he picked the Ganga as a special case. After all, as he himself argues, 8220;8230; thirty-four rivers are longer. The Ganga is only two thousand, five hundred and ten kilometers from source to sea. The Nile, Amazon, Yangtze and Mississippi are twice as long.8221; Yet, the author calls India8217;s greatest river his favourite, and the river that 8220;never stopped calling to me8221;.

His transition from being 8220;distinctly underwhelmed8221; to being 8220;hooked8221; is a slow journey, pretty much as winding and mysterious as the journey the river itself undertakes. It took Hollick more than 15 years to discover first-hand during the course of much reportage and radio documentaries he did at the time that the Ganga is a bit like India itself, with a wide and disparate range of personalities, from the rituals on its banks in Varanasi to its rather different significance in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

Hollick talks of the separation between the sacred and the secular in the West, but describes well how the two flow seamlessly into each other as you take a dip in the Ganga 8212; and how bathing in its waters is a 8220;combination of spiritual necessity and simple practicality8221;.

The best bits about the book are the descriptions of several interviews and meetings the author conducts with pandits and others living by the river. Like Veer Bhadra Mishra of Varanasi8217;s Sankat Mochan Mandir who has been trying to mobilise activity around the central problem of cleaning the Ganga. His own ambivalence about the Ganga needing to be looked at from both points of view 8212; as a mass of water he was trained as a hydrologist and what it means to him from a spiritual point of view to bathe in it each morning 8212; is also very well put.
But the best thing about the book is that it is never the Ganges, but always just Ganga.