Killing the Ganga

I don't recall when it happened during my early years, but it happened.  I read about the Ganges River.  I was confused. Ganges?

It turned out that they were referring to the Ganga.  Had I known the expression "WTF!" I would have used that over and over.  Ganges?

In the old Hindu traditions, the Ganga is more than a river.  It is the holiest of rivers.  Holiest as in every river is holy, and this was the holiest of them all.  How holy?  Here is an example: There is an "exquisite rock-cut relief showing the fall of the Ganges that was carved in the seventh century AD at Mahabalipuram, well over one thousand miles south of the basin." That holy, even back then!

(BTW, what's the deal with "AD"?  We have long ago switched to the "CE" usage.  Such a usage in the revered NYRB?  WTF!)

If only such a worship of nature had continued.  But, we humans got on to the treadmill.  And the colonizers whose religious framework encouraged them to dominate nature switched the treadmill to a different model and speed.

The Ganga is now a mess.

To anyone who surveys the Ganges from one of the industrial towns along its course—Moradabad, for example, or Kanpur—humankind can seem peculiarly negligent of its own long-term interests. The exposed banks run with factory effluents while pigs snuffle untreated sewage and India’s poorest people pan for metal in the toxic shallows. Partially cremated corpses and devotional sculptures that have been committed to the waters drift downstream alongside vast quantities of plastic and the odd dead dog. In the plangent words of Sudipta Sen, a history professor at the University of California at Davis and the author of Ganges, the river has become endowed with a twofold character: “one as the immaculate and eternal deity of the flowing waters, the other as a mundane river, repository of accumulated human misdeeds.”

I don't understand how even the faithful Hindus willingly poison the holiest river!

Who is the world for? Me and you? Or all its organisms in perpetuity, as the dominant species abstains from further wanton destruction, exercising foresight and restraint? These are the questions that latent history tells us we should be asking as India’s population grows with extraordinary speed and the country’s water stocks are spoiled or depleted.

Well, not only should people in India ask those questions--we all should, wherever we live.  Who is this world for?

Very few seem to ask such questions anymore.  And we think that traditional cultures and peoples who live consistent with that framework are not "modern."  Is modernity worth killing the Ganga?  And here I use "Ganga" as a stand in for the living and non-living natural world all around us.

The final carve-up of the Himalayas is underway. Between them, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bhutan have planned some four hundred large dams that would make the Himalayan rivers the most heavily dammed in the world. Inevitably, the brunt of the dams’ impact will fall on the rural poor as they lose their homes and livelihoods and in many cases join the drift to the cities, where they will meet more extensive environmental degradation.

No number of holy dips in the holy rivers will be able to absolve us of our sins :(

(Yes, I am aware of the contradictions in me blogging about this from unimaginable comforts that modernity has provided.)