Slowly Down the Ganges

‘But they were given money to buy it. You gave it to them.’

‘They are saying that there was no time to buy it.’

‘Well, what are they going to do?’

‘Now they are awaiting your instructions.’

‘Can’t they get some from a village?’

‘Now I am asking them.’

An animated conversation ensued.

‘They have never been so far from their homes before. If there is a village they do not know it. They know nothing. It is difficult for me to understand these fellows,’ G. said.

We were in a fix, really the last of a succession of fixes, but the overcoming of insuperable difficulties is, of course, one of the unspoken reasons for travelling in remote places. Nevertheless it was a bore. We had anticipated living simply, and purposely we had brought with us simple things, for there is nothing more disagreeable than eating copiously in the presence of people to whom a square meal is an unknown pleasure. Now the whole lot of us were faced with the possibility of being without any food at all if the journey to the Balawali Bridge was unduly prolonged, for this was the nearest point at which we could be certain of getting any. We had bought what seemed a lot of rice in Hardwar, but not enough to feed everyone. We had chilli powder, sugar, tea, biscuits, a few tins of sardines and some Indian tinned meats. I was determined that we should not have recourse to the tinned meats unless we were forced to. Although there are numerous secret cow-eaters and a host of overt pig-eaters in India, the mere possession of tinned beef and bacon was enough to label us as cannibals so far as the Hindus were concerned, and as unmitigatedly filthy persons to any orthodox Muslim. To tell the truth, I was far less worried about the stigma that attached to its consumption than I was about the possible indignities to which it might have been subjected in the course of its preparation. Both beef and pork, according to the labels on the tins, emanated from the same factory. It was difficult to imagine any Indian sufficiently debased to can beef and bacon indiscriminately; it was equally difficult to imagine Hindus and Muslims both working under the same roof, each, in one another’s eyes, committing sacrilege. Did they, I wondered, have separate production lines or did they spit ritually in each tin before sealing it, in order to square themselves with their respective gods? But these were useless speculations. The boatmen had worked well, all three of them. There was nothing to do but give them food and hope that something would turn up.

Among our stores was a bottle of Indian whisky and a bottle of rum, which we had procured from Jawalapur, the place which the guide book referred to as being infested with thieves and pickpockets. It seemed as good a moment as any for a drink, but with only two bottles between three of us, in a land be-devilled by prohibition, either partial or complete according to where one found oneself, and no prospect of being able to buy any more, I jibbed at sharing it with the boatmen.

‘We don’t have to give them drinks as well, do we?’

‘Certainly not,’ G. said. ‘These men are not drinking. It is against their religion.’

A special journey had had to be made by bicycle ricksha in order to buy these two bottles. Because it was outside the sacred area, two miles away on the banks of the Ganges Canal, Jawalapur was the place of pilgrimage for those in search of forbidden pleasures. This was the rendezvous of secret drinkers, eaters of fish and fowl, eggs and meat; while across the canal in a sad area of mud-filled lanes and mean brick buildings were the stews to which the pandas came to stretch themselves after long hours of squatting on their wooden platforms, puja-chanting, casting horoscopes and making the tilak marks on the foreheads of the faithful.

The place was a great hive of whores. It was late afternoon when we arrived and they were just beginning to stir after the long sleep of the day. Bleary-eyed, the older ones leaned against the door posts in narrow alleys choked with sewage, babies at their slack breasts, while bigger daughters still too young to be broken to the trade, wearing frilly western dresses and with their hair in red ribbons, peeped round their skirts; others, younger women, crouched in doorways that were so low that they were more like entrances to a rock tomb than to a brothel, smoking cigarettes, and one could imagine the clients, emerging in the early dawn, half stupefied with hemp, hurting themselves dreadfully. Some were as stern and forbidding as the Goddess of Destruction herself, with long thin downturned mouths. Some had the broken-looking snub noses and the slightly bulbous foreheads that seem to be universally esteemed by men. All were heavily bangled; jewels shone in their noses, their eyes were set in black rings of shadow that proclaimed an intense fatigue. One needed courage to lie with women like this, to put out of mind the awful smells in the lanes; to banish the thought of their mothers and grandmothers who hovered behind them, too old for further service and an earnest of what they themselves would one day become, and of their husbands/keepers/fathers, whatever they were, still snoring, stretched out on charpoys under the washing that hung lifelessly in the airless courts, but they were in no real mood for business, and those that were offered their services without enthusiasm. In a little while they would begin to prepare themselves for the night’s work, but this was their quiet hour and they were making the most of it.

Wanda put on a lot more rice to cook, gave Karam Chand a wooden spoon and left him in charge of it. Then the three of us paddled out to the boat. Hidden from view behind the open lid of one of the trunks, as surreptitiously as any panda, we drank whisky that had been distilled with the aid of Scottish technicians, using Indian ingredients and Indian water.

At dinner we ate a mountain of boiled rice, heaped with chilli powder. In addition the three of us shared a tin of sardines and some slices of rather nasty cut loaf. We had difficulty with the sardines as there was no opener. Later, as we crouched round a gigantic fire that the boatmen had kindled I had the first real opportunity of observing them as individuals. Karam Chand, their leader, was about twenty years old. He was thin and intelligent-looking. He had shown himself an excellent navigator when there had been any water to navigate. The other two had more primitive countenances which, in the case of the elder one, Bhosla, verged on brutality. Jagannath, the youngest, was more animated. From time to time our eyes met, and I wondered what their feelings were, these men who had never left their native place, embarked on a crazy journey with no avowed purpose and now marooned with three foreigners (for them G. was as foreign as any of us) on a bank of stones in the middle of the Ganges. My heart, made mellow by whisky, warmed to them.

While the three of us were drinking more tea and smoking Trichinopoly cheroots, two men appeared and stood at the edge of the fire. They had been overtaken by night while in the jungle, they said, and had come to recruit their spirits by the fire before setting off for their village which was a couple of miles to the west. We gave them tea and cigarettes and, after ascertaining that we were outside the sacred area of Hardwar, ordered a dozen eggs from them to be delivered early the next morning.

We slept close to the fire cocooned in our bedding rolls, buoyed up by the rubber mattresses which we had cursed because they were so cumbersome. Before we went to bed, shamed by the inadequate coverings that the boatmen had brought with them, we gave each of them one of the blankets we had bought in the bazaar; but they were not in the mood for sleep and they remained hour after hour droning on about new masters while I lay listening to the sound of goods trains concertina-ing in the sidings at Hardwar and the water rippling over the pebbles. Overhead the sky was a great blanket filled with innumerable holes through which shone innumerable stars. To the north the lights of the town loomed above the mist that hung low over the plain.

At six o’clock the next morning the sky to the east began to glow. Soon it was fierce red. It was as if someone was stoking a furnace. Against it the Siwalik Hills undulated away to the east-south-east as far as the eye could see, like a giant switchback. Flight after flight of duck streamed up the river towards the north. Across the water the stranded trees were like sea monsters hauled out on the shore.

Then the sun rose over the Plains. Three spotted deer came out of the jungle which was still in deep shadow and crossed the river towards us, while a fourth emerged from a belt of long grass that fringed one of the tree-clad islands a quarter of a mile downstream. Seeing us it remained motionless until we got up to look at it. Then it took fright and went off together with the others. The nearness of the temples on either side of the Ganges gorge showed us how far we had really come. One of the two men whom we had met the previous evening arrived with the eggs but it was too late. We had already eaten our breakfast.

CHAPTER FIVE Through the Bhabar (#ulink_df124b87-084e-5125-a9c8-76c804fba199)

For a considerable distance below Hardwar the bed of the Ganges is composed of boulders … The stream has a far from stable course …

District Gazetteer of the United Provinces, Vol. III, Saharanpur;

Allahabad, 1909

We set off at nine o’clock. It was hopelessly late but it is always like this at the beginning of a journey. Even when we had bailed the boat dry, and carried out an anxious inspection of the plates and rivets and loaded it up again, there never seemed to be a quorum for the actual departure. Apart from some dents that showed through on the inside as large, ominous swellings, the hull seemed sound enough. Whether or not it was capable of enduring another day of similar battering was another matter.

Although at this point the Ganges was about seventy feet wide, it was still not more than twenty inches deep; but the pebbles which were covered with weed of a greenish-bronze colour seemed smaller and, foolishly, thinking that they would soon vanish altogether, we congratulated ourselves on having done so well.

As soon as we set off we went aground. This was a bad patch. There were three rapids one above the other, each preceded by its own dreary shoal through which we manhandled the boat swearing monotonously. Half way down the third rapid, a fast exciting ride, we hit a large rock head on; the stern reared in the air, a bedding roll went over the side and was rescued by Jagannath as it started to go downstream; the boat broached-to; the gunwales went under and it began to fill with water. We slithered out, righted it, pulled the head round and went down the rest of the way with our stomachs on the gunwales and our feet dragging on the bottom; ending up as we always did in a deep, calm pool of cold water; this time in the lee of an island under a high steep bank of silt and sand to the edge of which a number of stunted trees clung by the last of their roots.

We were in the tract called the Bhabar (the porous place). Here the torrents from the Siwaliks lost their steepness and flattened out, depositing the rocks and boulders which had been making life such hell for us ever since we set off. All the time, on its passage through the Bhabar, the Ganges, already enfeebled by the loss of the vast quantities of water that were drawn from it into the Upper Ganges Canal, was being deprived of even more of its strength as a proportion of it sank into the dry limestone and percolated away. Somewhere further downstream, the water would emerge again to give fresh impetus to the river, but we needed it here and now. With the onset of winter and the dry season the water coming down from the Himalayas was diminishing rapidly. Each day the level of the river fell an inch or more. In a week’s time there would be no water at all in some stretches we had passed through. We were engaged in a race with a dying river which threatened to leave us high and dry, a race which we might have lost without knowing it.

At the end of a short reach in which we were able to use the oars, we went aground in a place where the stream divided itself into three parts. All were equally uninviting. They all began with waterfalls; none gave any indication of which was the principal one, or, whether it bore any relation to the others. It was a problem that from now on was to be with us constantly.

For the purpose of navigation the map was useless. The scale was a quarter inch to the mile. The original survey had been made in 1917 by the Survey of India, and it had been published in 1924 with corrections up to 1950 but only so far as roads, railways, tramways, canals, car tracks and tube wells were concerned. ‘The course of the Ganges River is liable to continual change owing to the shifting of the river bed,’ a note on the map stated. Because of the fighting with China the Indian Defence Regulations were so stringent that it was impossible to buy a large-scale map of any kind in India – I had brought this one with me from England. We could scarcely be accused of being unprepared but for all we knew the right hand channel might be the Banganga, another river altogether. There was no way of knowing. The jungle on the left bank which up to now had extended to the water’s edge had receded and was invisible as was the bank itself; the right bank was equally so. We were somewhere in the middle.

The Banganga is really a backwater of the Ganges; it is said that in ancient times it may have been its bed. Completely unfordable in the rains, it takes off from the parent stream about four miles south of Kankhal on the right bank – we were still not more than four miles from the temple of Daksheshwara – and from this point meanders inconsequentially through the Khadir, the lowland of Saharanpur, in which the principal crop is unirrigated wheat, and through wastes of sand, savannahs of tall grass and marshland before rejoining the Ganges some thirty miles downstream, in the district of Muzaffarnagar, during which it covers at least three times this distance. If we ended up in the Banganga, which at this season must have already reached a point nearing extinction, it would take more than the thirty-two men whom we had employed at Hardwar to carry the boat from the canal to the Ganges to put us on our way again.

The Ganges Canal was the brain-child of Captain Proby Cautley of the Bengal Engineers. He was convinced that it was possible to get water out of the Ganges and into the Doab,

(#litres_trial_promo) the land between the Jumna and the Ganges, an immense area which suffered from frequent and terrible famines. He made his first survey in 1836.

Every kind of difficulty had to be overcome: orders and counter-orders came from the authorities, civil and military, in bewildering succession. One moment it was to be an irrigation canal, next for navigation only. Then it was not to be built at all; notwithstanding the fact that the East Jumna Canal which had originally been built by the Mughals in the eighteenth century had been extremely successful in combating famine in the country which it passed through. It was said that earthquakes would destroy the viaducts, that miasmas would hang over the irrigated land, that malaria would become rife and that the navigation of the Ganges would be affected. (The last objection was the only one that proved to be right.)

The builders laboured under the most fearful difficulties. Rain destroyed the brick kilns and the unbaked bricks along the whole line of works. Often the wooden pins which marked the alignments on which the excavations had to be made were knocked down by cattle or else stolen by the local inhabitants. There were also the problems of working so far from the base at Calcutta, 1,000 miles away. There was no railway in those days. It was found, for instance, that the steam engine which had to be sent to them at Roorkee had been manufactured the wrong way round for the building into which it was intended to fit.

Nevertheless, twelve years after its commencement the Ganges was finally admitted into the canal at Hardwar in April 1854. It was still some time before it was finally finished but when it was it watered the whole tract between the Jumna and the Ganges, bestriding it like a colossus extending to Etawah on the Jumna, and to Kanpur on the Ganges 350 miles downstream. By the eighties it had been extended as far as Allahabad and the irrigation of the Doab was complete. Its completion marked the end of serious famine in the region.

There was only one person to ask the way from, an old man sitting alone on the shingle, but he was not very helpful. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he said. ‘Nor have I heard of the Banganga.’

It was Karam Chand who discovered the proper channel; rather he divined which was the correct one.

‘Sahib,’ he said. ‘This is the way of Ganga.’ None of us believed him; but fortunately we decided to take his advice.

Once more we started our miserable excavations and once more, having reached the head of the fall, we tipped over it and roared downhill watched by the old man, the solitary spectator, who had moved down to the foot of it and was squatting there, happily anticipating disaster, in much the same way as an inhabitant of an outer suburb who takes his ease on a bench at a dangerous corner on a warm August afternoon.

But this was only the beginning. At the bottom there was yet another fork. Here, however, the choice was a simple one. A prolonged reconnaissance showed that the two streams joined again a mile lower down. It was only a question of which was the least disagreeable. The one on the right had four separate waterfalls; the one on the left had three. The difficulty lay in the approaches. There was not enough water in either to float a cork, let alone a twenty-five-foot boat, drawing eighteen inches of water, and it lay on the stones as incongruous as a rowing-boat on a gravel drive after a sharp shower of rain.

Far away to the right, four men appeared and began to fish using weighted nets. G. set off to interview them. We saw him flourishing one of his swagger-sticks at them; then we saw them turn their backs on him and take up their nets and make off.

‘These men are not knowing anything,’ he said when he returned. ‘And, what is more, they are not helping us.’

‘You might have got some fish,’ I said – tempers were becoming frayed.

‘They were catching fish,’ G. said sadly. ‘They were catching Rahu but they were not giving me any.’

The boatmen set off in search of a village, a temporary place inhabited only during the dry season, which the fishermen had told G. existed not far off, where they hoped to buy food and get help. We waited for them to return and time, which we were in the process of learning to disregard, ceased to have any meaning at all. A black and white pied kingfisher with a beak shaped like the pick of an ice-axe and equally deadly, hovered motionless over what little water there was. Occasionally it hurled itself into it with its wings tight against its body, emerging with something which might have been a small fish or a tadpole which it walloped savagely on a stone in order to make it more digestible, before swallowing it. High overhead bar-headed geese flew purposefully in long, undulating ribbons wing-tip-to-wing-tip on their way to some distant feeding-ground.

Eventually the boatmen returned. Although they had phrased it differently the villagers had given the same reply to their requests for assistance that the fishermen had given to G.

‘We spoke to them for some time,’ said Karam Chand. ‘Huzoor, all that they would say was that their work was not with water.’

Both he and the others had also failed to get any food; whether by accident or design it was impossible to say.

We removed all the baggage from the boat and stripped it of everything we could; the rudder, the oars, the bottom gratings, and the stretchers. Without all these things it was still immovable. Our only hope lay in recruiting extra help but there was no one to give it.