Imagine if one of the world’s most famous rivers could naturally provide a non-antibiotic treatment for, among other things, tuberculosis, typhoid, pneumonia, cholera, dysentery, and meningitis. Then, consider the fact that this river is in India—a country of over 1.3 billion people that continues to grapple with all of the above health issues. As reported in the Times of India last year, microbiologists from the country’s Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH) in the Punjab, isolated over two dozen potent bacteriophages, viruses that gobble up nasty bacteria, corroborating long-held myths, beliefs, and theories that the Ganges, or Ganga Mata (divine mother) as it's known to the devout, is a self-purifying entity. The phages keep its water, which emerges from high in the Western Himalayas and exits through the low, swampy, tiger-filled Sundarbans of Bangladesh, from putrefying and, incredibly, increases oxygen levels in the water to nearly twenty-five times that of similar rivers.
This alone would be enough to be remarkable if it related to untouched flows like those that inhabit remote and uninhabited terrain like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, but we’re talking about the Indian Subcontinent, and the Ganges runs for 1,569 miles through one of the world's most populated, industrialized, and polluted regions.
If that weren't surprising enough, add to this the fact that the world’s third largest river by discharge is considered the personification of the Goddess Ganga by Hindus. Immersion in the river is thought to purify them of their sins and facilitate liberation from an eternal cycle of life and death (in other words, reincarnation). Every twelve years for more than 2,500, tens of millions of pilgrims congregate in two northern towns, Allahabad and Haridwar, to bathe together during the Kumbh Mela. Crowds, chaos, and litter aside, this is considered one of humanity's greatest gatherings. You've a few years left to work up the courage for a dip—the next melas will occur in 2021 and 2025.
Grant me a personal aside: As an expat infant in Delhi in the late 1960s, my New England grandparents came to visit for a second trip. Grandmother, dressed in winter tweed from Talbots, durable hosiery, a string of cultured pearls around her neck, and an impenetrable handbag on her arm, found her coiffured-self surrounded by pilgrims, beggars, lepers, cows, dogs, and the din of day-to-day-life (and death) along the Ganges in Varanasi. She thus declared to my mother: “Now I am in India!” Taj Mahal, what Taj?
It is Varanasi, the holiest of seven sacred cities in India, where many hope to be cremated—on stepped platforms, ghats, lining the riverbank. Early-rising tourists can hire boats out to witness this. It’s a near-palliative experience from a distance, but the effluence of ashes of scattered souls is clearly visible alongside detritus of ongoing life. How anyone could even think of bathing in this mélange is confounding—but they do. Faith is a force not to be reckoned with, not even in the face of millions of gallons of additional industrial sludge and human waste dumped upriver on a daily basis.
Last year, the Ganges—along with one of its tributaries, the Yamuna, which meanders through Delhi and Agra—became the first non-human entity in India to be granted the same legal rights as a person by a court in the northern state of Uttarakhand. The Supreme Court in New Delhi, however, overruled the order this past July, deciding that the rivers cannot be categorized as victims of an ‘assault’ or ‘murder' and therefore are disqualified from being considered an 'entity.' It's paradoxical.
Yet there's still hope for this mighty body of water and it’s potential healing properties. If the phage virus continues to proliferate, scientists keep studying them, and people remain believers, the Ganges might soon prove a potent petri dish for the healthy well-being of not only those in India but of everyone on the planet through major advances in modern medicine. Until then, you can best experience this marvel by keeping well above the waterline on a journey through West Bengal with Uniworld Boutique River Cruises.