For centuries, the most popular destination for travellers to India was the Ganga. The mighty river steeped in religious and spiritual significance for Hindus captured the imagination of foreign visitors through the ages. The Greek Megasthenes in 302 BC was possibly the first foreigner to write about India’s holy river. The Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang in the seventh century was fascinated by the hoards of pilgrims who believed that a dip in the Ganga cleansed them of sin. Both the Greeks and the Romans were agreed that there was no river the Ganga’s equal in sheer volume and length. Arrian in his Anabasis of Alexander conceded that neither the Nile nor the Danube could compete with it. Dante in his Divine Comedy refers to the Ganga as the ‘‘Oriental Sapphire’’. It is not Hindus alone who swear by the purifying powers of the Ganga — Muslims, too, believed the waters contained special qualities. The Mughal emperors, including the orthodox Aurangzeb, went to great lengths to ensure that flagons of Ganga water accompanied them on their journeys. A cynical Mark Twain wondered how men and women could so reverentially drink the water of a river filled with corpses and into which the sewers flowed. He recounted the research of scientist M. Henkin who discovered that all cholera germs died within six hours of being released into Ganga water. Jagmohan Mahajan has compiled extracts from travelogues of foreigners on their discovery of the legendary river together with sketches and paintings. His book, which was first brought out in 1984, has been updated and re-released. Reproductions of paintings by British artists from the Picturesque school, including Thomas and William Daniell, William Hodges, James Fraser, William Simpson, Thomas Williamson and Edward Lear, brilliantly capture the scenic splendour and the mystical spell that the river casts. The rich selection of paintings is the book’s plus point. Unfortunately, the quality of the colour reproductions leaves much to be desired. Some of the black and white sketches are smudgy. The high production value required for a coffee table book might have been a better idea than cutting corners to make the book more easily affordable.
