From the Household Bath to the Sacred River

Snan, ritual bathing, spans a considerable range of Hindu practice from the ordinary daily bath most observant Hindus take before performing puja, treated as a basic and expected act of physical and ritual purification before approaching the divine, to elaborate pilgrimage bathing undertaken at a tirtha, a crossing place, generally a river, confluence or tank held to be a point at which the divine and the ordinary world meet with particular accessibility, where bathing is understood to carry considerably greater spiritual weight than everyday domestic washing. Bathing in the Ganges holds a uniquely elevated place within this wider practice, believed across a large swath of Hindu tradition to cleanse accumulated karma and to be an especially efficacious act of purification precisely because the river itself, Ganga, is worshipped as a goddess and is held to carry a sanctity ordinary water does not, a belief that draws enormous numbers of pilgrims to specific points along the river, above all at Varanasi and at Prayagraj, considered particularly powerful for ritual bathing.