Ganges River

The river's story is a descent. King Sagara's sixty thousand sons were burned to ash by a sage's anger, and their funeral rites could not be completed because no water on earth was pure enough; generations later Bhagiratha performed austerities until Ganga agreed to come down from heaven, and Shiva stood beneath to receive her in his matted hair, releasing her in streams so that the impact would not shatter the world. She flowed over the ashes and the dead were released. That is why the river is called Bhagirathi in its upper course, and why the story is told at the ghats where ashes are still immersed.

Ganga is worshipped as a goddess with her own iconography, riding a makara, and she is also a category. A tirtha is a crossing place, a ford between this world and the next, and the great tirthas of India are overwhelmingly on water. Diana Eck's study of Indian sacred geography follows how the whole network works: the Ganges is invoked into other rivers, into temple tanks, and into the pot of water used in a rite a thousand miles away, so that the presence of this river is portable in a way its water is not.

Seven rivers are named together in the standard invocation of the bathing rite, the Ganges first among them, and the confluence at Prayag where the Ganges meets the Yamuna and the invisible Sarasvati is the most powerful of all the crossings.

At Varanasi the Ganges turns north for a few miles, and the city built along that curve is held to stand outside ordinary time, resting on Shiva's trident. Its ghats run for several kilometres, and pilgrims descend them before dawn to bathe facing the sunrise. Two of them, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, are burning ghats where cremation goes on continuously, because to die in Kashi is held to bring release from rebirth altogether. Jonathan Parry's fieldwork among the funeral priests and the corpse-burners describes the economy and the ritual specialists that a city of dying supports, and how uncomfortable that trade sits with the doctrine it serves.

Upstream and downstream the calendar is full of water. The Kumbh Mela, held in rotation at four cities, gathers tens of millions to bathe at Prayag at the auspicious conjunction, the largest religious assembly on earth. Ashes are immersed at Haridwar and Varanasi; sealed pots of Ganga water are kept in households for use at death.

The river's physical condition is the standing scandal of its veneration. Sewage from the cities along it, industrial effluent from tanneries and low dry-season flow have left long stretches unsafe to touch, and the Ganga Action Plan of 1986 and the Namami Gange programme of 2014 have both fallen short of their targets. In 2017 the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganges a legal person with rights; the Supreme Court stayed the ruling within months.