The daughter of the mountain

There is one deity in Kashi who sits in no temple, who is carved into no image, and who is worshipped by the whole city at once, every single dawn. She is older than most of the gods along her banks. She is the reason the city stands where it stands. And to the people who bathe in her at first light she is not a symbol of a goddess. She is the goddess, moving, cold, and alive, against their skin.

She is the Ganga. And before we walk her stone stairs, we should meet her as the tradition meets her, which is as a person with a story, and the story is one of the greatest in all of Hindu myth, because it is, from beginning to end, about the liberation of the dead.

The river that fell from heaven

The Ganga, the tradition holds, did not always run on the earth. She flowed in heaven, and she was brought down, and the reason she was brought down is a debt owed to sixty thousand dead men.

The tale, told in the Ramayana and the Puranas, runs like this. A king named Sagara had sixty thousand sons, and they were burned to ash in a single moment by the angry glance of the sage Kapila, whom they had wrongly accused. Ash, and worse than ash: they died an unclean death, their funeral rites undone, their souls unable to cross, stranded. Generations of their descendants tried and failed to release them. At last one of them, Bhagiratha, undertook an austerity so ferocious and so prolonged that it moved heaven itself, and he won the one boon that could save his ancestors: that the celestial Ganga would come down to earth and flow over their ashes, and by her touch carry the sixty thousand across to the far shore at last.

But there was a difficulty that turned the boon into a catastrophe waiting to happen. The Ganga was a river of heaven, vast and violent, and if she simply fell from the sky she would shatter the earth to powder under the weight of her descent. Only one being could take that fall. Shiva stood beneath the falling river and let her come down onto his head, and caught the whole crushing torrent of her in the coils of his matted hair, his jata, and there she wound and slowed and was gentled, and from his head he released her in streams the earth could bear. She came down, ran over the ashes of Sagara’s sons, and they crossed.

Hold everything that story contains, because it is the river’s whole theology in a single myth. The Ganga descended to earth in order to liberate the dead. She flows, to this day, from the head of Shiva, which is why the god wears a crescent of water in his hair. And her very coming was an act of a living descendant’s devotion reaching back to save ancestors he had never met. The river that runs past Kashi is, in the tradition’s account, a liberation made liquid, poured out of heaven for the sake of the dead and broken to a bearable gentleness on the head of the god of this very city.

The daughter of the mountain

She is worshipped, then, as no mere water. She is Ganga Ma, Mother Ganga, and she is a goddess with a lineage. She is the daughter of Himavan, the personified Himalaya, the great mountain, which makes her the sister of Parvati, Shiva’s own wife. The river that pours from Shiva’s hair is also, in the family of the gods, his sister-in-law, the daughter of the same snow-mountain that gave him his bride. To call her the daughter of the mountain is to place her at the very centre of the divine household of Kashi.

And this is why the whole city turns to the water at dawn. The morning bath in the Ganga is the daily devotion of Kashi, performed by everyone from the pandit to the pilgrim to the boatman: to walk down the stone steps into the cold river as the sun comes up across it, to immerse, to lift cupped hands of water toward the rising sun, to speak the river’s name. The tradition holds that her touch removes sin, that to bathe in her is to be washed not only of the night’s dust but of the soul’s accumulated wrong. Whatever else a person does in Kashi, this they do first, and daily, and it is the most ordinary and the most universal of all the city’s acts of worship. The river is the one shrine no one has to seek, because she runs the whole length of the city, and she is open at every step.

The water that would not rot

The Ganga carries an old reputation that has drawn the curiosity of scientists as much as of pilgrims: that her water does not spoil. Sailors and travellers noted for centuries that Ganga water, sealed in a vessel and carried across oceans, stayed sweet when ordinary water grew foul. The devout had a simple explanation. She is a goddess, and a goddess does not rot.

The strange thing is that the observation, stripped of the theology, turned out to hold something real. In 1896 a British bacteriologist named Ernest Hankin, studying cholera on the Ganges, reported that the river’s water had a marked power to kill the cholera bacterium, and that this power survived in the water itself. Two decades later the French-Canadian microbiologist Félix d’Hérelle, working on the same puzzle, helped identify what was doing the killing: bacteriophages, viruses that prey on bacteria, present in the river in unusual abundance. Modern studies have confirmed that the Ganges, along its Himalayan and plains course, carries a remarkably high load of these bacteria-killing phages.

This is a place to be careful, because the fact is easy to inflate into a falsehood. It is true that the river has an unusual self-purifying capacity, and that this is a real and measurable phenomenon rather than a pious legend. It is not true, and it must not be implied, that this capacity keeps the Ganga clean today. The self-purifying power is modest against the scale of what the river is now asked to absorb, and to suggest that the phages solve the problem of the Ganga’s pollution is to hand a devotional comfort to a public-health disaster. The honest statement holds both halves: the tradition’s instinct that there is something in this water was not empty, and the water is nonetheless, today, gravely fouled.

The goddess and the sewer

That is the hardest thing to hold about the Ganga at Kashi, and this treatise will not pretend it away.

To the devout, the Ganga cannot be polluted. Purity is her nature, not her condition. She is a goddess, and a goddess is not made unclean by what is poured into her; on the contrary, she cleanses what touches her. The anthropologist Kelly Alley, who studied exactly this question on the ghats of Banaras, found the belief robust and unembarrassed: the river receives the ash of the dead, the run-off of the drains, the leavings of a great city, and remains, to the faithful, Ganga Ma, undefiled.

To the scientist with a testing kit, the same stretch of water is among the more polluted major rivers on earth, carrying untreated sewage from dozens of cities and the effluent of tanneries and factories, its bacterial counts at Varanasi many times over any safe threshold. The government has poured enormous sums into cleaning it, most recently through the Namami Gange programme launched in 2014, with results that even sympathetic accounts call partial at best.

Two truths, in two registers, about one river. The temptation is to make one of them cancel the other, to say either that the sacredness is superstition in the face of the sewage, or that the pollution does not matter because the goddess is pure. This treatise does neither. It holds that the Ganga is, at once, a goddess whom the faithful rightly hold beyond defilement, and a physical river that human beings are, in plain fact, defiling, and that the second truth places a real and urgent duty on the first. The most devout position, rightly understood, is not that the river cannot be harmed and so need not be protected. It is that the river is the Mother, and one does not leave one’s mother to drown in filth. The reverence and the responsibility belong together, and the honest devotee holds both.

Older than the gods on her banks

Step back from the river and one fact settles over everything the treatise has said so far.

The Ganga is older than the city. She is older than most of the gods enshrined along her, older than the Kashi Khanda that praises her, older than the stone the eighteenth century laid down at her edge. The temples on her bank have been raised and thrown down a dozen times. She has kept flowing through every destruction and every rebuilding, indifferent and constant, the one presence at Kashi that no army ever touched and no emperor ever demolished. When the tradition says the buildings come and go but the ground does not, it might as truly say: the buildings come and go, and the river does not.

And every crossing this treatise has described turns out, in the end, to be a crossing of her water. The dead are burned at her edge and their ashes given to her current. The living step down into her at dawn to be washed. The taraka mantra ferries the soul across an ocean that is, in the tradition’s images, this very river widened to the width of death. She is the medium of the whole thing, the liquid form of the crossing that the city exists to make. The daughter of the mountain fell from heaven to carry the dead across, and she has been carrying them, and washing the living, ever since.

She runs, at Kashi, along an almost unbroken arc of stone steps, more than eighty of them, the stage on which the entire drama of the city is played out morning and night. It is time to walk down onto them. The next chapter leaves the temples and the river-goddess for the ghats themselves, and for the strange, beautiful geography of the Kashi waterfront.