Abstract
The Ganga (or Ganges) is the most sacred of all rivers in Hinduism and is revered as a goddess with purificatory and emancipatory powers. Worship of the river traditionally involves bathing in and drinking her waters in order to cleanse the body of physical and spiritual ills, and to hasten the path to Moksha (or Mokṣa) or liberation from the karmic cycle of reincarnation. Today, the river is also widely regarded as one of the most polluted in the world, with water quality measuring far lower than either national or international standards for drinking and bathing at most sites. This chapter explores the changing religious significance of the Ganges in the face of decreased river water quality, with particular attention to how river worshippers and devotees of the Ganga are renegotiating water use practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and survey data collected in 2008 and 2009 in the central river basin city of Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), I argue that popular awareness of the presence and risks of pollution in the river is leading goddess worshippers to reduce contact with river water during devotional practices, to change the sites or frequency of their worship or to abandon the practices traditionally associated with worship of the Ganga. These renegotiations have significant consequences related to how devotees conceive of and portray the river as an inviolable goddess, as well as the success of efforts to inspire pollution abatement by appealing to the traditional religious values associated with the goddess Ganga.
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Notes
- 1.
Kanpur’s population is approximately 6.3 million people (Census of India 2011).
- 2.
Of India’s 14 Prime Ministers, 8 were elected from Uttar Pradesh, including the powerful Nehru family. Leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC) Party also frequently come from UP.
- 3.
GPD is an interstate pollution abatement program implemented since 1985 in dozens of cities along the Ganges.
- 4.
On the eve of Independence, 42 % of factory workers and 62 % of textile workers employed in the state worked in Kanpur (Spate and Ahmad 1950).
- 5.
In the Rig Veda (seventeenth to twelfth century BCE), both the Ganga and the Yamuna are given priority over other rivers and described as divine (Pandey 1984).
- 6.
Kumbh refers to the “pitcher” or “urn” that contains Amrit, or the nectar of the gods and of life, while mela refers to a festival or fair.
- 7.
The most recent Purna Kumbh Mela, held in Haridwar between January and April 2010, was attended by tens of millions of people, with about 10 million of those bathing on April 14th (Yardley and Kumar 2010). Chapman (1995) reports that of the estimated 30 million pilgrims at the 1989 Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 15 million bathed at daybreak on 6th of February. At the last Kumbh Mela to be held in Allahabad, in 2007, approximately 50 million people were present (Kishore 2008).
- 8.
Precolonial descriptions of the Ganga “are unanimous in their description of the Ganges as wholesome, clear, sweet, tasty, and digestive” (Markandya and Murty 2000: 222). But, in 1859, the Mela festivities at Allahabad were nearly cancelled by local authorities concerned about the possibility that a cholera outbreak had been caused by the collection at the Sangam of “all the dejections and filth of this immense population” (Deputy Inspector General’s Office, as quoted in Maclean 2008: 78). Concerns about the relationship between poor water quality and the outbreak of disease inspired the creation of Sanitation Police and later an office of North-Western Provinces Sanitary Commissions who were, on many occasions, charged with dispersing crowds, controlling mass bathing in the river, and even breaking up festivities during annual Mela celebrations (Deputy Inspector General’s Office, as quoted in Maclean 2008). In 1896, Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, described the Ganges River at Varanasi as “nasty” and joined scores of other foreign travelers in complaining about the partially decomposed bodies found floating in the river (McNeill 2001).
- 9.
At Independence, India’s population numbered only 350 million people, with about a third of those living in the GRB (Chapman 1995). Over the past six decades, the population of India has grown to 1.21 billion people (Census of India 2011), with the population of the Indian GRB alone calculated between 400 million (Rashid and Kabir 1998) and 500 million (Sharma et al. 2008). Much of this population is clustered in the central basin states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which claim some of the largest (199 and 103 million people, respectively) and densest (828 and 1,102 people per sq km (320 and 425 per sq mile, respectively, compared with 382 per sq km (147 per sq mile) nationally) populations in the country (Census of India 2011).
- 10.
GRB states alone consume nearly 10 million tons of chemical fertilizer each year (45 % of all fertilizers utilized nationally), of which 10–15 % are estimated to end up in surface water systems. The Ganges and her tributaries are believed to contain up 70 mg/l nitrogen and .05–1.1 mg/l phosphorus rates; much higher than 10 and 0.1 mg/l phosphorus rates that are considered unsafe in drinking water (TERI 2011). Pesticides, which have a greater toxicity than fertilizers are also used profligately throughout the GRB. About 21,000 tons of pesticides are applied to cropland in the GRB each year (47.6 % of those used nationally). However, it is difficult to get accurate data on the types and chemical composition of many pesticides, as they are often protected as intellectual property of their manufacturers.
- 11.
Only 29 % of India’s population lived in urban centers in 2001 (Census of India 2011).
- 12.
The textile industry serves as a good example of a high water consumption industry in the GRB. Almost every step of fabric production requires water, including scouring, bleaching and dyeing the product. As each stage of production, fabric is re-washed with fresh water in order to remove chemicals applied during previous stages, and is then often disposed of without treatment. Production of one kilogram (1 kg) of cotton fabric consumes between 272 and 784 kg of water, depending on processes and equipment used (AquaFit4Use 2010), and produces between 150 and 75 l of wastewater for every kg of fabric produced (Jacob and Azariah 1998/2008).
- 13.
Some of the most flagrant polluters in the GRB are government-owned industries, including the Ordnance Factory in Kanpur and the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi (Krishna 2004).
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Kedzior, S.B. (2015). Pollution and the Renegotiation of River Goddess Worship and Water Use Practices Among the Hindu Devotees of India’s Ganges/Ganga River. In: Brunn, S. (eds) The Changing World Religion Map. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_28
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