Slowly Down the Ganges

‘There are three thousand six hundred gaj in one kos,’ said Jagannath, the youngest boatman.

‘Now I am telling you,’ said G. ‘If one kos is three thousand six hundred gaj, there are two miles and eighty yards in one kos.’ If this was so, then we had not travelled more than five miles since the previous morning.

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We left the old man standing on the bank with a parting gift of boracic lint, penicillin powder and biscuits, and carried the gear two hundred yards downstream to a place where the shoal ended; here we loaded the boat. It was now a quarter to eight. What the boatmen called Zirrea, small ringed plovers, compact little birds with neat scarves of black feathers round their necks and yellow legs, rose from the shingle in which they had been pecking, almost invisible, and wheeled over us, uttering despairing cries while a pair of orange-coloured Brahminy duck watched us warily from the shallows on the far side of the river.

In slow succession we dug our way through the sixteenth shoal and descended the sixteenth rapid and so on through the eighteenth and nineteenth, up to twenty-one. It would be tedious to enumerate them all but as we proceeded downstream, literally step by step, I made a note of them. It seemed unlikely that I would pass this way again and I knew that if I kept no record, for the rest of my life I would suspect that my memories of the Ganges below Hardwar were the figments of a disordered imagination.

Even when we had completed our excavations there were only nine inches of water over the twenty-first shoal, but by rare good fortune, four men appeared and without being asked helped us to work the boat through to the accompaniment of a lot of ‘challo’ing and ‘shabash’ing while all the time covertly regarding Wanda who was a remarkable figure in red woollen skiing under-wear rolled up to the knees: for the sun had temporarily vanished behind some clouds and it was unusually cool.

‘You are by Bhogpur,’ they said; but it was little comfort to us. We had thought ourselves by Bhogpur two and a half hours ago, and it was now a quarter past ten.

As we came to the head of the rapid a line of bullock-carts came out of the jungle on the left bank and began to rumble down over the foreshore towards the very place through which we had just hauled the boat. There were so many of them and we were so unused to traffic of any kind, that we decided to watch them cross. There was no need to anchor, we simply stopped pushing.

As the leading bullocks entered the water, possibly because it was cold or because the stones with the water running over had a different feeling, they halted. The driver did not lash them. He simply waited perched high in the bows of his cart until they had become accustomed to the new element. The carts were piled high with grass. They were of the kind called chhakra, the heavier sort of bullock-cart, but not the heaviest. They were as simple as a jeep and yet, in their own way, as complicated; machines that could go anywhere; the despair of western economists because of their maddening slowness, the destruction which they wreak on unmetalled roads, and their great weight, grossly disproportionate both to their capacity and to the pulling power of the undernourished beasts which draw them.

Nose to tail with squeaking wheels and the groaning of stressed timbers, the carts lumbered across the river and, as they went, the drivers exhorted their beasts: ‘Mera achcha beta!’ (My good son!) ‘Aur thora!’ (A little more!) ‘Jor se cballo!’ (Get on with it!) Soon they disappeared behind one of the islands on the other bank and once more we were alone. For the first time we noticed that the Siwalik Hills to the east of the Hardwar gap were invisible. The river was running to the south and parting company with the whole range.

Now we entered a reach that was perhaps a mile long and a hundred yards wide down which we paddled until we came to an open expanse of shingle on the left bank which extended inland towards the forest. ‘This is our village,’ said the leader of the four men who had been helping us. ‘It is by the Rawasan Nala,’ and when he invited us to visit it, although Karam Chand and the boatmen were reluctant to stop, the thought of our food box with its diminished contents hardened our hearts, and we forced them to go ashore with us.

Leaving Jagannath to guard the boat we set off across the shingle which was covered with dry, silvery mud, shooing our unwilling little force before us in the direction of the village which was hidden behind a thick bed of reeds and tall grass. After a quarter of a mile we came to an inlet of brackish water full of frog spawn, the bottom of which consisted of thick, glutinous mud into which we sank up to our knees. On the far bank thousands of hairy caterpillars were exercising in the sun. Here a young man and an old woman were making a grass rope, using a flat stone with a hook on it and a piece of bamboo with three holes in it through which the strands passed. The entrance to the village from the river side was by a narrow path that wound through the grass which was very high. From beyond this plantation came the sounds of activity; the clinking of chains and weird snatches of song, and I had a feeling of pleasurable expectation which turned to terror as a horde of savage curs with sharp, brown teeth came pouring down to meet us. There was no question of saying ‘Good dog,’ or extending a friendly hand to beasts like these, and we laid about us with our bamboos with a will until they turned tail and vanished.

The village was in the form of a rough rectangle. It consisted of about forty mud huts with thatched roofs which sagged under the weight of the orange-coloured gourds which grew profusely on them and whose broad-leaved tendrils and yellow flowers seemed to bind them to the earth. In front of each house there was a platform of well-swept dried mud on which the female inhabitants were squatting until the moment when we came into view when they took to their feet and retreated indoors uttering little cries of alarm and mock modesty.

The place was divided down the middle by a straggling path on either side of which emaciated cattle were hobbled in rough pens made from the branches of trees. At the north end was a larger, open-fronted building with a space in front of it, the meeting place of the elders of the village council. It was furnished with a couple of kulphidar, communal pipes with clay bowls and jointed wood stems, which helped them in their deliberations. Everywhere, on the uneven but smooth surfaced ground that had been moulded by the passage of innumerable bare feet, lay the simple machinery of village life: the wooden ploughs which have to be light enough for the cultivator to carry them on his shoulders to the fields; mattocks with iron heads bent at a sharp angle to the hafts; harrows that were nothing more than flattened logs; sowing baskets made of slips of woven bamboo; bigger baskets for feeding cattle; small, wooden-handled reaping sickles; a potter’s wheel and broken potsherds (‘The potter sleeps secure for no one will steal clay,’ Karam Chand said, sententiously); open-ended sieves, that looked like dustpans, made from reeds; a grinding mill, the kind that is worked by two women, one of whom turns the upper stone while the other pours in the grain; a cast-iron chaff-cutting machine with a flywheel; filled water pots sweating moisture; ropes and chains and halters and small children with black-painted eyes; all together in the thin dust. Above the village a solitary great shisham tree that had given shade to the village longer than anyone could remember was dying now. Its branches were filled with vultures. For the most part they remained motionless but from time to time they raised themselves, turning arrogant heads to show off their profiles and flapped their great wings, displaying white back feathers as dingy-looking as an old vest.

Through a gap in what was otherwise an almost continuous wall of houses I could see the fields of wheat and gram that lapped the village on three sides like a sea in which men and women, bent double, were weeding and loosening the soil around the young plants with wooden-handled knives. This was the Rabi, the crop that had been sown in November. All through the winter, from December to February, it would be weeded and watered, and sometimes between the middle of March and the middle of April the harvest would take place. From April to mid-May the villagers would thresh it – first it would be trodden out by six bullocks yoked together moving round and round a central post; then it would be winnowed and a cake of cow dung placed on top of the heaped grain to avert the evil eye. In June or July, after the monsoon rains had begun, the Kharif crop would be sown – rice, maize and millets; and in early October there would be the harvest and then the land would be ploughed and the Rabi would be sown once more. Another important crop, not here but in irrigated land, was sugar cane, now more important than cotton. The land in which it was to be planted might need as many as twenty ploughings before it was ready to receive it, lots of manure and constant weeding. This was the cycle in the State of Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges Plain. Floods, drought, blight, pestilence, the incursion of wild animals into the standing crops, any of these might destroy them and often did. They might fail from lack of fertilisers or the land might fail from excessive cropping; or because the subdivision of the property between all the sons made it impossible to farm it economically. This was the law of inheritance carried to the ultimate limits of absurdity; by it the individual holding might be reduced to the size of the back yard of a slum property. But whatever happened to it this was the cycle and had been for two thousand years.

The other crops were mustard and tobacco. At one time, as the result of the efforts of two British officers, tobacco grown in the forests of Bhogpur, a town somewhere to the south-east, had been so esteemed that, mixed with Latakia and Manila leaf, it had been sold in tins, but this like so many other ventures had eventually come to nothing. In the fields round about the village, stood the machans, rickety constructions in which watchmen sat at night to scare off wild animals, principally wild pig and nilgai that would play havoc with any crop if they succeeded in entering it. Armed with a pot containing a smudge of fire they passed the hours of darkness groaning apprehensively and calling to their neighbours in other machans in order to keep up their spirits.

The Headman, an old-looking man but probably not more than fifty, spoke with nostalgia of the days when the British were still in India.

‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘this village is often flooded and at such times we are in great misery. We have asked the Government to provide us with an embankment. That was more than a year ago and so far nothing has happened. In the time of the Raj such a thing would not have been allowed. A Sahib would have come on his horse and quite soon all would have been well.’

‘I wonder,’ G. said, ‘why they did not ask the Sahib for an embankment when he was coming here on his horse.’

In the circumstances this did not seem to be a good time to produce Mr Nehru’s letter which asked for assistance on our behalf, rather than proffering it. Instead we bought some potatoes and some stunted eggs for the boatmen, and the Headman gave us a bunch of green bananas. This was the extent of our shopping, for this was all they had to offer us. The Headman was genuinely sorry to see us go, as were the other inhabitants and we left watched by the women. They were wraith-like, swaying figures dressed in the lugri, the poor woman’s version of the sari, and wrapped overall in yet another sheet called the chadar. There are some 450,000 villages in India similar to this, all with less than 500 inhabitants, all with similar problems. Who can know what it is like to live one’s life in a village such as this with its 300 inhabitants and its 5,000 bighas

(#litres_trial_promo) of land, except those who are born there and live in it all their days? Not even the most assiduous anthropologist or the most devoted social worker. The windowless front that this village presented to the world seemed to be a symbol of the inhabitants: turned in upon themselves by its very layout, as if in a hall of mirrors; still, in spite of legislation, inhibited by consideration of caste; still, in spite of legislation, the victims of moneylenders paying off their never-to-be-discharged debts at an interest of anything up to 25 per cent; desiccated by the summer sun; ploughing through a Passchendaele of mud in the rainy season; creeping into the fields to put out a black pot to ward off the evil eye. Poor ignorant people, living on a knife-edge between survival and disaster.

CHAPTER SIX The way to the Balawali Bridge (#ulink_e271975e-8934-5122-9c06-a6cd1499793f)

The river is not navigable until it reaches the vicinity of Nagal in pargana Najibabad.

District Gazetteer of the United Provinces, Vol. XIV, Bijnor; Allahabad, 1908

Back in the boat I began to feel better. The weather was fine and warm, like a beautiful summer’s day in England; the sort of day I remembered, or thought I remembered, as being commonplace when I was a child and now only half-believed had ever been. To the north the Siwalik Hills had reappeared once more, wrapped in a haze which gave them an agreeable air of distance. Behind them rose a cluster of snow peaks, while downstream and far below the level at which we were, the jungle on our left extended eastwards to the foot of the mountains like a great green rug.

In spite of all the difficulties everyone, including Bhosla, whose lugubrious appearance and taciturn manner concealed and belied an optimistic nature, was in good spirits. I myself had not felt so well for years. Hard exercise and short commons, as my father would have called them, and minimal quantities of alcohol were all conspiring to do me good. Even my feet, now that I had decided to sacrifice one of my two pairs of shoes to the river, no longer hurt. It was fortunate that this was so, as we were now faced with the task of digging yet another channel for the boat, this time thirty yards long, to the head of the next fall, down which we plunged into a deep pool of green water in which the bottom could only be dimly seem. Here we let the boat drift aimlessly while we each ate half an orange, a surprise treat which Wanda produced from her useful bag.

The next rapid, the twenty-seventh since leaving Hardwar, was a long narrow race between banks eight feet high, two vertical slices of silt marked with long scourings, one below the other, the lower ones not yet dry, a reminder if we needed any that the water level was sinking fast. ‘Much more than two inches a day,’ said G., gloomily. But whatever was happening to the water level, the appearance of the river bed itself was changing too. Westwards it broadened out in huge expanses of sand and shingle. There was a feeling of great loneliness in this place, borne out by the map which gave no indication of any settlement or habitation.

We entered a wide lagoon in which there was no perceptible current and went aground in it. By now our sense of well-being had deserted us and we felt weak and disinclined to face new difficulties, for it was now one o’clock and so far we had had little to eat. Languidly gnawing giant white radishes, we splashed ashore and set off, each on a different course, to try and find a usable channel, leaving Wanda to curry rice and potatoes for the boatmen.

After twenty minutes during which the only living thing I saw was a crab too small to be worth eating, we reassembled. All reports were bad: the lagoon ended in a trickle of water with a short fall to the next reach; somewhere in the centre there was another, longer fall, but it was almost as feeble as the first; far over to the right there was a third that was deeper than the others, but very long. This was the one that Karam Chand favoured. After a good deal of wrangling and a frugal lunch – a tin of sardines, three cream crackers, two sweet biscuits and jam and a mug of tea – not much of a meal on which to push a boat through India (for that is what we seemed to be doing) – we decided to try it. We unloaded the boat, leaving Wanda to guard the gear, and pushed it back the way we had come and round a promontory to the head of the fall.

After all the business of lightening the boat it was enraging to find ourselves making an easy descent in ghostly silence by a narrow sluice-like run with a sandy bottom. It was a journey of only half a mile, but by the time we had carried everything down from the lagoon to the boat, we had each covered four times the distance.

The whole operation had taken nearly three hours; but it seemed worth it. Before us stretched what appeared to be the longest, most inviting reach we had so far encountered. There were no sandbanks and there was no sign of any rapids. To me, in one of those moments of insane optimism which no amount of experience was capable of shattering, it seemed that we might, with a little luck, reach the Balawali Bridge by nightfall; but no sooner had I expressed this hope than we were grounded again – this time in quicksands which quivered underfoot in a particularly horrible manner, as if one was walking on a blancmange.

At four-thirty we came to a place where four men were sitting marooned in mid-stream on four grass rafts on which they had been attempting to float downstream to their village which was somewhere near a place called Nagal on the way to Balawali Bridge. As we came abreast of them they appealed to us to take them aboard. ‘We, too, are watermen,’ they said. This was an admission so rare in our experience on the Upper Ganges, where everyone we had met had hastened to dissociate himself from it, that we would have taken them with us if for no other reason.

It was unfortunate that we chose this moment to run aground ourselves and we now found ourselves in the ridiculous position of having to ask the raftsmen for help before we could help them. These men were in a terrible state. They were wet and shivering and dressed in nothing but sodden loin-cloths that were mere vestiges of clothing. Now they abandoned their rafts and joined us in the boat, wrapping themselves from head to toe in long damp sheets, more like corpses exhumed from the tomb than living beings. ‘We have come from the jungle, northwards of the Rawasan Nala,’ they said. ‘For two days we have eaten nothing.’

We gave them sugar and sweets, all that we could lay our hands on without unloading the boat; but their pleasure was short-lived. We were now approaching the fifteenth rapid of the day, the twenty-ninth of the journey, a particularly frightening one, and the boatmen, whose sympathy for the newcomers was of a less demonstrative order than our own, made them disembark and stagger along the bank for half a mile on foot, while we descended the long run of water in comparative comfort.

The long day was drawing to a close – far too rapidly for my liking – although I had had more than enough of it. We would never reach the bridge, that was certain; what seemed equally certain was that we would not even reach Nagal before nightfall. Already the plumed grasses and sugar cane on the islands to the west were silhouetted against the sun which was sinking at an unseemly rate and deep in the bed of the river we were already in cold shadow.

As the boat entered the thirty-first rapid down which it careered silently, rocking from bow to stern on the powerful stream, we had a respite from the oars and now for the first time we had the feeling of being carried on the bosom of a great river. This was what I had imagined that the descent of the Ganges would be like.

The sun had gone now and for those who were not at the oars the air was very cold; but in spite of everything it was a lovely time and I felt strangely contented rowing like mad down this long reach, stripped to the waist, with the wild duck rising in hundreds and the Sarus Cranes, tall grey birds, standing in the water on long, bare, red legs, trumpeting to one another; while in the afterglow sky and water became blood-red and a long line of cliffs to the east which were now closing with the left bank of the river were the colour of canyons at sunset in the National Geographic Magazine. It was very calm and very impressive, but when we asked the raftsmen how far it was to Nagal – ‘Wuh kitni dur hai?’ – they said it was ‘Bahut dur’ (very far), and wrapped themselves closer still in their wet rags. These men were remarkably vague about their whereabouts. All they seemed to know was that their village was somewhere near Nagal, a small market town of 2,000 inhabitants, which lay somewhere to the east of the Ganges.

Now we went aground in the last of the light. Nine men and one woman hopelessly lost in a maze of shoals; blundering about in the darkness probing for a channel with bamboo poles; at one moment up to our waists in water, the next with it barely covering our calves. When eventually we did find a way it led through quicksands in which it was impossible to let go of the side of the boat for an instant for fear of disappearing for ever; attempting to move the boat in these circumstances, with no solid substance underfoot, was rather like pedalling a unicycle in a circus.

As we went slowly on, Karam Chand interrogated the raftsmen about the whereabouts of their village. ‘Three miles,’ they said at first, and then much later, ‘Two miles’, from which distance, however far we travelled, they refused to be dislodged. Finally, even Karam Chand became exasperated. ‘It is my opinion,’ he said, ‘that their village is nowhere near Nagal at all.’