Ganga-maiya ki dain

Travel books come in many guises. There is the purely personal, one-damn-place-to-another account. Then you have the breathless "Gosh, how-wonderful-these-savages-are" variety. Snobs and cynics abound, too.

Also, travel writers come in many guises: sociologists, anthropologists, even "" if you don't watch your back "" economists. But it is rare to come across a travel writer who asks a really interesting question, one that borders on a genuine paradox.

For example, how come Indians venerate the Ganga so much and yet seem bent on destroying it with such vigour with their pollution, dams and other acts of the most frightening vandalism?

Julian Crandall Hollick, a radio journalist, was sufficiently intrigued by this. So he set out on a trip down the Ganga to find out. It seems traversing the Ganga is not as easy as it sounds. It is a very tough river to boat down. The result, anyhow, is a super-duper book, because it is like a 2-in-1 ice-cream, a sort of literary schizophrenia that leads to two books in one.

There is the part for those who like all that stuff about trekking, boats, rivers, camps, tents, wood smoke, guides and so on. And there is the part for people who like facts.

Hollick has also taken the trouble to speak to many scientists whose views would not otherwise become known to the lay public. They appear to confirm what the godmen have been saying about the Ganga "" that, thanks to the amount of dissolved oxygen in it, not to mention other things like its high rate of aeration and its amazing ability to retain dissolved oxygen, it is something of a scientific marvel.

Hollick also scores another first for a travel writer: he has inserted hundreds of footnotes, all of which inform. But it is hard to wonder why these needed to go as footnotes. They always distract from the main flow of a book. Most of them could have been very easily integrated into the text. In the next edition, maybe?

He makes three points. One, the Ganga is not one river, but several. If that's a bit hard to stomach, it is at least two rivers because by the time it has reached Allahabad, it has almost dried up and only the Yamuna saves it.

Two, if Indians don't stop messing with it, it is going to die out in North India, divinity or not. There simply won't be enough water left in it between Hardwar and Allahabad. It is already in severe distress.

And three, the chemical composition of the water in some stretches in North India is such as to make people believe it has miraculous properties. So if they want to preserve the river, they'd better stop thinking that as a goddess it will somehow save itself. It won't, even if it does purify itself "" if not the sinners who bathe in it "" 20 times faster than its saviour, the Yamuna.

Hollick has also described the fate of a dolphin sanctuary set up by the government. As with tigers and other species, it is a grim and sad tale. The locals call the meat susu and make a jolly good thing out it, in kind and in cash.

There are several propositions and ideas that go against the received wisdom. One of them concerns the effect of the Ganga on soil erosion. Most of us think it is the top soil that gets eroded first. "But the exact opposite occurs with the Ganga ," he says. "It is the foundation that caves in first, not the fine silt on top."

And guess bloody what? This is what makes Bihar so fertile. Now we know why the locals offer living proof a backward-bending supply curve of labour.

It is all the Ganga's fault.

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GANGA

Julian Crandall Hollick
Random House
Rs 450; 279 pages