Slowly Down the Ganges

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

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,10 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.

We started to carry the gear a mile downstream to the place where the falls ended, through wastes of sand and stones that were now so hot that it was impossible to remain standing on them barefooted without dancing up and down. Bent under the weight of tin chests, oars and gratings, with hurricane lanterns held improbably in the crooks of our arms, we resembled the survivors of a shipwreck on the coast of Namaqualand, all except Wanda who, wearing a bathing costume of Helanca yarn, high wellington boots and her General’s hat on top of which she balanced a tin full of kerosene, was a fantastic figure, more like a drum-majorette in some Middle Western town than a memsahib on a serious excursion, and the boatmen regarded her with awe.

Suddenly, by the kind of miracle which all true travellers regard as inevitable and almost unworthy of remark, three men appeared. They were on their way to cut wood in the jungle, but when we asked them for help they said, as the others had, that their work was not with water. Nevertheless we pressed them into our service at a colossal wage of two rupees a head and although they were poor, emaciated, gentle creatures, with their unwilling help the boat began to move over the stones, making a noise like an old tram.

But it was only for a short while. At first the air resounded with encouraging cries. ‘Challo!’ (Oh, move!); ‘Shabash!’ (Well done!); ‘Aur thora!’ (A little more!) but in the face of the almost overwhelming difficulty of the operation, the noises soon died away and our efforts were concerted by a succession of unintelligible grunts. I could think of nothing but my bare feet, which, as I pressed them down on one rounded stone after another, felt as if they had been bastinadoed. I only possessed two pairs of shoes, one for social occasions and one for walking. The size and shape of my feet made it certain that, unless I was able to remain in one place long enough to have them made-to-measure, I would never find another pair however long I remained in India. I was very reluctant to ruin my shoes by using them underwater, but in the course of the next hour I was forced to put them on, for it took an hour to get the boat to the top of the fall. Even then it was not just a question of leaping into it or holding the gunwales and careering down as it had been previously. The water was too shallow. It was not until the boat was part way down the second rapid that it suddenly floated. It now gained such a momentum that it shot right through a large pool, over the top of the third fall and down it into a beautiful open reach. We had managed to transport some of the gear from the boat this far, but the rest was spread out in small dumps over a mile of beach, dropped at the whim of whoever had been carrying it, and while Wanda boiled the kettle for tea we went back to retrieve it.

We drank our tea and set off again. We were very tired. It was a beautiful river; but it was destroying us. Almost at once we heard the sound of more rapids. To our diseased imaginations they sounded like the Victoria Falls. We were hungry now. It was three o’clock. Since breakfast, a thin meal, we had eaten nothing except some hot, white radishes that Wanda had produced artfully from a mysterious-looking bag. Now she began to cook in a space which she cleared for herself in the bottom of the boat and when we finally came to the next rapids she refused to be off-loaded and separated from the stove. ‘If I stop cooking now we’ll never eat,’ she mumbled doggedly.

But this time there was no need for any of us to get out. There was a superabundance of water in these rapids and we went down at a terrific rate, clasping the seething cooking pots as if they were sacred relics. Safe at last we stopped to eat alongside an island that rose steeply out of the river. The water had cut away the banks, exposing stratas of smooth oval stones embedded layer on layer in the silt, like the flint wall of an old English house. The island was thickly wooded with shisham trees whose trunks and lower branches were closely wrapped with band upon band of coarse grass brought down by the flood waters and bleached white by the sun. It gave them a strange surrealistic appearance as if they had been bandaged. It was a sinister place; even the sandbanks in the river which had now begun to supplant the shingle seemed to float on its surface, and although I tried to rid myself of the image they reminded me of the bodies of long-dead, bloated animals that had lost their hair.

We set off again at four, and immediately, conforming to a ritual to which we had long become accustomed, came to another fall. These were the longest, most hazardous rapids we had so far encountered; but fortunately we did not know this. With the last dreary portage behind us we had hoped that we had turned the corner, crossed the high pass. Certainly the character of the river was changing. Boulders had become stones and now, where previously there had been shingle on the bottom of the river, there was sand with chips of mica in it that glittered in the afternoon sun.

There was no difficulty about entering these rapids. The top end was like the mouth of a large funnel. Into it the water was being sucked with a singularly powerful motion which gave the surface an oily appearance. For a moment the boat remained almost stationary at the top; the next moment it was thundering downhill. There was barely time to ship the oars. The channel was not more than a dozen feet from side to side, but in it the current was running between steep banks of gravel which accentuated the feeling of speed. As we went down a cloud of small white birds enveloped the boat uttering indignant cries. It was terrifying but at the same time it was wonderful. It was as I had always imagined the descent of the Cresta Run on a bob sleigh. High in the stern, Karam Chand was grasping the tiller with both hands and uttering cries of exultation. The two boatmen, Bhosla and Jagannath, were leaning on the bedding rolls ecstatically chanting something that sounded like a triumphal hymn. Wanda, as devoted as the boy on the burning deck, was grimly trying to finish the washing-up. G. was in the bows, at look-out. It was a superfluous office. We swept on. We were all set for a spectacular disaster.

It came. The water ahead was curling back on itself. Under it there was something dark. G. uttered a despairing cry of warning, but it was too late. There was a tremendous crash as we hit the rock and everyone was thrown forward on their faces. Cooking pots erupted from the bottom of the boat. It reared in the air; Jagannath, the young boatman with the moustache, shot clean out of it, presumably into the water. At this moment, irrationally, Wanda could be heard asking to be put ashore. It was like an old print of a whale-boat with a whale surfacing underneath it. But there was no time to worry about Jagannath, even if we had wanted to. The bows came down again on the water with a resounding smack and now we were approaching the bottom of the fall at an appalling rate. At the bottom there was a bend so sharp that it gave the impression of being a dead end. It was, in fact, a right-angled bend with a twelve-foot-high bank of sand and shingle across the bottom of it, but there was nothing anyone could do about avoiding it. Karam Chand had as much chance of turning the head of the boat from its course as the driver of an express train who sees the gates of a level crossing closed against him. The boat simply ignored his efforts at the helm. It cut straight across the right angle of the turn and buried its head with enormous force in the sand and shingle which exploded about our heads like shrapnel. For the second time we were thrown on our faces, then the current took hold of the stern and slewed the boat round so that it lay across it, with its starboard under water. For a moment I thought it was going to capsize, but the bows broke loose from the bank and it began to gather way and shot stern first into deep, comparatively still water. We had made it, and so had Jagannath who came limping down the bank towards us. In one hand he carried an aluminium saucepan. Through the bottom of the boat two stiff jets of water were rising like an ornamental fountain.