Ganga

Ganga is the river Ganges worshipped as a goddess, and in Hindu understanding the two are not separated: the water is her very body, and to bathe in it is held to wash away accumulated wrongdoing and to bring blessing. She is among the most sacred presences in the whole of Hindu life. Along her banks stand the holiest of cities, above all Varanasi (Kashi), where the dead are cremated and their ashes given to the river in the hope of release from the round of rebirth; pilgrims carry her water home in sealed vessels, and it is used in worship and at the moment of death. She is a daughter of Himavat, the Himalaya, and thus a sister of Parvati, and she flows from the high mountains at Gangotri down across the northern plains to the sea.

The Puranic account of how the river reached earth centres on the royal ancestor Bhagiratha, who performed severe austerities to bring Ganga down from heaven to purify the ashes of his cursed forebears; because her full force would have shattered the earth, Shiva is said to have caught her descent in his matted hair, releasing her gradually onto Mount Kailash, an episode from which Ganga also carries the epithet Bhagirathi. At Gangotri, near the river's Himalayan source, the main temple honouring her is a comparatively recent structure, tradition crediting its construction to the early nineteenth century Gorkha commander Amar Singh Thapa, later renovated under royal patronage from Jaipur.

Ganga's central myth is that of her descent from heaven to earth. The sage Bhagiratha, seeking to release the souls of his ancestors, whose ashes lay unblessed, performs great austerities to bring the celestial river down to earth. But the force of her fall from the sky would shatter the world, and so Shiva agrees to receive her first upon his head: Ganga descends into the tangle of his matted hair, which breaks and tames her torrent, and she is released from it in gentler streams to flow across the land and give the ancestors rest. This is why Shiva is often shown with the goddess flowing from his hair, and why Ganga is bound to the Himalayan world of Shiva.

In the Mahabharata she is also the mother of the hero Bhishma, whom she bears to the mortal king Shantanu. To Hindus today Ganga remains a living mother-goddess, invoked daily; the modern concern for the pollution of the physical river has, if anything, intensified the sense of her as a sacred person to whom a duty of care is owed.