Upriver, a monsoon love affair with the Ganga

It's easy to see why Lord Shiva fell in love with the Ganga. Mere mortals can be hopelessly smitten


Bhageeratha watched with terror in his eyes as a miffed Ganga hurtled towards Earth from the heavens. His penance to bring Ganga down to earth to cleanse his ancestors' souls had succeeded; but in the process, did he bring forth the doom of all mankind? For Ganga, it was too much of an insult to be asked to descend from her abode among the gods and flow on earth among the mortals. She would show them her wrath; her immense force would flood the entire earth in the blink of a mortal eye.... But she was bridled, by none other than Mahadev Shiva, who stood in her path and let his matted locks intercept her flow. She entered his locks, and emerged in a placid and smooth flow, tamed. And her soothing touch on his temples even changed Mahadev's life. He fell in love... 


My much-awaited tryst with Ganga started at Haridwar, the gateway to the Himalayas, on our trip to Madmaheshwar. All along our flight from Chennai to Delhi, the skies were choppy, and it was no different in the Himalayas. Under a sky threatening to brim over, I saw her first, flowing with effortless ease, murky and swift under a bridge on the Haridwar-Rishikesh highway. Like a blue-blooded maiden, carrying herself with a dignity that evoked sighs of admiration, but from a respectful distance. The volume of water that flows along the river supports a big percentage of the world’s second largest population, and just a glance was enough to see how… We drove upriver for many kilometers. Past Rishikesh the Shivaliks rose up from the plains. The roads were built as ledges along the mountains, in whose gorges the Ganga flowed, keeping us company all the way. Signs screaming to beware of landslide/rockfall were everywhere along the road. But so captivated were my eyes that the fact that landslides could hold us up, delay us, or even doom our trip didn’t register in my brain. The mists seemed to rise upwards like an inverted curtain from the surface of the river. The skies were overcast and saturated, and a downpour seemed imminent. It seemed as if Mahadev had spread his locks a tad to allow more water to gush towards the Earth, perhaps to cleanse many more souls! The higher we went the river became more turbulent. At Devprayag, the Ganga splits into Bhagirathi and Alaknanda -- rather, the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi merge at Devprayag. From here, we followed the Alaknanda. Landslides littered our way, which was being cleared by bulldozers as we watched. The mud that the mountains shook up was pushed over the ledge, into the hungry river, which looked as if it could swallow entire roads, if not the mountains themselves. A few hours of driving upriver took us to Rudraprayag, where the Mandakini meets the Alaknanda. The waters were still turbid, but looked much more menacing. In the planes the flow was smoother but here the rivers dashed against rocks, around curves, churning and frothing. Here she resembled a young woman, hasty and headstrong, hissing and winding like an angry snake. Part of her vehement aspect, before she entered Mahadev's locks, seemed to have resurfaced.We followed Mandakini, which originates near Kedarnath, towards the Kedarnath/Ukhimath route. However next morning we parted company and met one of it’s most beautiful tributaries – the Madhyamaheshwar Ganga, which originates in the galciers of the massive Chakhamba. Past Ukhimath, Uniana and Ransi villages our drive ended, and we moved upriver of Madhyamaheshwar Ganga, a lovely jade green river, on foot, climbing the steep hills towards Madmaheshwar. Alaknanda never left our side, always flowing with a distinct rushing noise. On days that it didn’t rain, she sounded more like a girlfriend who doesn’t stop chattering, and on the days when it rained cats and dogs, she was a nagging wife. When we would return, the rains would let up in patches, and from the color of the water at the various confluences of streams, we saw where it had rained and where it hadn’t. The water in the streams flowing from areas of higher rainfall (and soil erosion) were a murky brown while others were a rich marble green! And soon we saw where all the water came from. There were numerous waterfalls streaking the landscape, and this in addition to the snowmelt from the extensive glaciers from the Chaukhamba massif. Like a few runaway streams caressing the temples of Mahadev, these streams slid down the ridges of the mountains... We drank from waterfalls far from habitation during our treks to Madmaheshwar and back, crossed rivulets flowing over the road (letting water and an occasional leech into our shoes), and lost count of the waterfalls which joined Madhyamaheshwar ganga. Some gushed, some giggled and some roared as we walked past them. Maybe due to the therapeutic powers of the waters, not once did any of us fall ill or face a bout of indigestion. The sun, when it chose to make an appearance, presented us with amazing spectacles -- causing rainbows in the spray that rose from the rocks, pounded by the the streams that would later join the Madhyamaheshwar ganga and then Mandakini, Alaknanda and finally the Ganga itself. And here, she looked like an innocent girl with rainbows and stars in her eyes. By the end of the trip, I could see why Lord Shiva supposedly made Ganga his wife. It was hard not to fall in love with her.

In the arms of Shiva - a trek to Tungnath

Only the peal of temple bells punctuates the stillness of the mountain air

This travelogue on my trek to Tungnath, the highest Shiva shrine in the world, has appeared as an India Abroad Magazine cover story with the dateline December 4, 2009.

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In the arms of Shiva



Off National Highway 58 at Rudraprayag, about a mile’s drive from the uproarious junction of two mountain rivers in the Garhwal Himalayas, stands an unimposing walled garden planted with crotons and overgrown with invasive weeds. At its center a white concrete plaque unceremoniously marks the spot where an Indian-born hunter of Irish descent shot a leopard in 1926. Beside it, a signboard in the green-and-red flag colors of the Uttarakhand forest department informs us that this was no ordinary animal: the cat had haunted the valley for eight years and claimed 125 human lives.


A man-eating leopard in these unrepentant urban environs? I imagine a shadowy creature, dappled with rosettes, stalking me. It’s pointless: the growl I hear emanates from multi-utility vehicles zipping on the macadam behind me.


In the 1920s, long before the muddy glare of sodium-vapor lighting and the glowering beacons of wireless towers had confounded Mother Nature’s circadian rhythm, the Himalayan night must have offered more grist for the imagination. Under starlight, fancy eloped with fact and spawned many myths around the beast. But this much we know to be true: villagers refused to step out of their homes after sundown for fear of being the leopard’s next quarry. And that was bad news for Rudraprayag, an important halt on the routes to the sacred Hindu temples of Kedarnath and Badrinath.


When the British government in India announced a reward for killing the man-eater, bounty hunters turned in many leopards claiming each one to be the culprit. Meanwhile, the death toll mounted. In desperation the British Parliament turned to Edward James Corbett, a railway contractor and a crack shot who lived in Nainital in the adjoining Kumaon region. Jim Corbett accepted the offer on two conditions: that all rewards for killing the leopard be withdrawn, and that other hunters trailing the cat be ordered to stop. In his gripping memoir The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, Corbett chronicles his dramatic two-year pursuit of the big cat before he gunned it down at this very spot.


Every year a fair is held to commemorate Corbett’s achievement and some village elders cling to the belief that this specialist hunter of man-eaters and pioneer conservationist (India’s largest national park, the Corbett Tiger Reserve, is named after him) was a holy man sent to rid them of an evil spirit. The younger generation, however, seems to have grown unmindful of this aspect of the town’s history. My friend Sahas had to instruct our driver, a road-raging boor, to slow down lest he missed the memorial.

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A Himalayan Griffon vulture soars above the temple of Tungnath. In his book Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga, Stephen Alter invokes a legend that deems the vultures as one of the first beings of the primordial world. The vulture's egg represents the world - its upper dome the sky and its lower dome the earth; the watery fluid the oceans and the yolk the land.

Rudraprayag is today the headquarters of an eponymous district in the Tehri-Garhwal region of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. At 4 pm, it is hot and stuffy in the marketplace and the air is rank with diesel fumes. Flies flirt with my eyelashes and nostrils. At the drugstore where I stop to stock our first-aid kit, the teenage shopkeeper does not lift his eyes up from the playlist he is shuffling on his cell phone. Nearby, overflowing rubbish bins invite dogs and donkeys to rummage for surprises.


My delusion of the Corbettian Himalayan hamlet has evaporated and found a place alongside other disappointments – fetid gutters gurgling beside the highway, deforested landslide-scarred slopes crowned with modern temples the color of unappetizing confectionery, and hummocks of garbage and polythene bags where crows and kites bicker over morsels.


Yet, in other ways, Father Time has not grayed for the last thirty years. Tacked to the pillar of a wayside temple, a Garhwali film poster for Meru Gau [My Village] has artwork redolent of an age bygone when Indian cinema was besotted with nationalism. Vendors hawk vegetables and fruit on wooden carts, shooing away wandering cows that pause to inspect their wares. In a sooty teashop, a hirsute cook in a grimy sleeveless vest rolls parathas while his slick-haired apprentice shapes dough into cones, tucking a dollop of spiced potato into the hollow of each one. Sealing the ends, he drops his finished creations delicately into an enormous wok of sizzling oil that browns them into crisp samosas.


Three ceiling fans spin giddily inside the dormitory of the Rudra Guest House run by the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam, a government-owned tourism agency that offers reliable budget accommodation. From its courtyard I take in an unbroken view of the gorge about a hundred feet below, where the deep-green Mandakini (which rises near Kedarnath) is consumed by the foamy wake of the silt-laden Alakananda, a major headstream of the Ganga that springs near Badrinath.


Washed by the sacred waters of two streams of faith, Rudraprayag is the fourth of the five sacred prayags, or confluences, of the Gangetic riverine system in the Himalayas. Forty-two miles southwest, at the final confluence in Devprayag, the Alakananda joins the clear waters of the Bhagirathi, the source stream of the Ganga which has flowed 435 miles from Gaumukh at the lip of the Gangotri glacier.


From Rudraprayag, our bus crosses the Mandakini and takes us 25 miles to Ukhimath, a village of terraced rice fields 4,500 feet above sea level. In October, before autumnal snowfall makes the trail to Kedarnath unwalkable, the deity is brought down in a ceremonial palanquin to the Omkareshwar Pith temple at Ukhimath and worshipped here till it is returned to the mountain shrine in mid-May. Another Shiva idol, from the shrine at Madhyamaheshwar, is also housed here in winter. Both Kedarnath and Madhyamaheshwar are among the five sacred Shiva shrines known collectively as the Panch Kedar (the Five Kedars – Kedar being a local name for Shiva). The others are Tungnath, Kalpeshwar and Rudranath.


Legend holds that the Pandavas, protagonists of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, having decimated their cousins the Kauravas in the great war at Kurukshetra, wished to atone for the sin of fratricide. They arrived in the Himalayas to seek Shiva’s blessings but the Lord, disgusted with the horror of war, changed form into a bull to avoid them. His pursuers saw through his disguise and gave chase. In the scuffle, the bull was dismembered. Its body parts reappeared in various regions of the Himalayas – the hump at Kedarnath, the arms at Tungnath, the face at Rudranath, the navel at Madhyamaheshwar and the locks at Kalpeshwar. The head, it is believed, emerged at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. Pilgrims consider a circuit of these shrines to be auspicious.


Our destination is Tungnath, the third Kedar, and my purpose is religious only in a pagan sense. To walk the wild Himalayas, breathe their bounteous air, encounter their wildlife, their trees and wildflowers, rivers and springs, and to be at the mercy of their elements is pilgrimage enough for us.


The timing of our trip is significant. In late September, the monsoon gathers its weakening winds to drench the Himalayas in a final burst of rain. Last November, I followed the monsoon on its return journey through the southern hills of Tamil Nadu (Chasing the Other Monsoon, India Abroad Magazine, May 1, 2009) and now, I am here to witness the spectacle of its retreat from the Himalayas.