INDIA, February 13, 2015 (FT Magazine by Victor Mallet): Gaumukh, nearly 13,000 ft up in the foothills of the Himalayas, the source of the River Ganges, is one of the most sacred places in Hinduism. But in truth the entire river, flowing for more than 1,550 miles across north India from the mountainous haunts of the snow leopard to the tiger-infested mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, is holy. Ma Ganga or Mother Ganges, described by Harvard religious scholar Diana Eck as “the archetype of sacred waters”, is worshipped as a Goddess by Hindus worldwide.
Reverence for the river should come as no surprise. Descending rapidly from the Himalayas before winding across its fertile and densely populated floodplain in north India and Bangladesh, the Ganges has helped to sustain a tenth or more of the world’s population with food, water and fish for millennia.
Like many non-Indians, I was vaguely aware of the sanctity and the economic and social importance of the river before I came to live in India three years ago. In his famous travel book “Slowly Down the Ganges” (1966), Eric Newby lists translations for 108 of the sacred Sanskrit names for the river, among them “eternally pure” and “a light amid the darkness of ignorance.” Legend has it that Shiva protected the world from Ganga’s destructive power when the cosmic waters fell to earth by releasing the streams gently through his hair. One Sanskrit hymn calls the river the “sublime wine of immortality”.
What I had not expected was to find the Ganges so polluted by untreated sewage, industrial waste and pesticides that parts of the river and its tributaries are not only filthy and unsightly but disease-bearing, toxic and carcinogenic.
More of this lengthy article on the state of the Ganges at “source”.