New Delhi: More than 2,000 years ago, a powerful king built a fort on the banks of India's holiest river, on the fringes of what is now a vast industrial city.
Today, little of the ancient construction remains, except for mounds of rubble that tannery workers pick through for bricks to build shanties atop what was once the fortress of the great King Yayati.
And Kanpur, where Yayati built his fort, is a city known for its leather tanneries and the relentless pollution they pump into the Ganges River.
Mouni Baba, a Hindu holy man, fetches water from a stream at the feet of Mount Shivling in Tapovan, at an altitude of 4,500 meters in Uttarakhand. Mouni Baba, on a silent vow, has been meditating in Tapovan for years, even during the long months when winter makes the place inaccessible. Tapovan is located just above Gangotri glacier, which is one of the primary sources of water for the Ganges. For more than 1,700 miles, from the Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges flows across the plains like a timeline of India's past, nourishing an extraordinary wealth of life. It has seen empires rise and fall. It has seen too many wars, countless kings, British colonials, independence and the rise of Hindu nationalism as a political movement.
The confluence of Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers, which is officially accepted as the start of the River Ganges, is illuminated at twilight in the town of Devprayag in Uttarakhand. In India, the Ganges is far more than just a river. It is religion, industry, farming and politics. It is a source of water for millions of people, and an immense septic system that endures millions of gallons of raw sewage.
A fisherman wades through shallow waters to reach the banks of the river Ganges after sundown in Bhagalpur in Bihar. A crowd gathers for a prayer ceremony dedicated to the river Ganges in Varanasi. To Hindus, the Ganges is 'Ganga Ma' - Mother Ganges - and a centre of spiritual life for more than a billion people. Every year, millions of Hindus make pilgrimages to the temples and shrines along its shores. To drink from it is auspicious. For many Hindus, life is incomplete without bathing in it at least once in their lifetime, to wash away their sins.
A worker who helps cremate bodies sits by the body of an elderly man, wrapped and weighed down by a large rock. For millions of Hindus, Varanasi is a place of pilgrimage and anyone who dies in the city or is cremated on its ghats is believed to attain salvation and freed from the cycle of birth and death. Funeral pyres burn at Manikarnika Ghat, one of the oldest and most sacred place for Hindus to be cremated, on the banks of river Ganges in Varanasi. But all is not well with the Ganges.
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Pollution has left large sections of it dangerous to drink. Criminal gangs illegally mine sand from its banks to feed India's relentless appetite for concrete. Hydroelectric dams along the river's tributaries, needed to power India's growing economy, have infuriated some Hindus, who say the sanctity of the river has been compromised.
Women wash their household items by a drainage flowing into the river Ganges in Varanasi. A man carries a bucket of water while people wash utensils, brush their teeth and bathe in the polluted waters of the river Hooghly, a distributary of the river Ganges, in the backdrop of the landmark Howrah Bridge in Kolkata. And over the past 40-some years, the Gangotri Glacier - source of almost half the Ganges' water - has been receding at an increasingly frightening pace, now losing about 22 meters (yards) per year.
For millennia, the Gangotri's glacial melt water has ensured the arid plains get enough water, even during the driest months. The rest comes from Himalayan tributaries that flow from the colossal chain of mountains.
Chemical foam caused by industrial and domestic pollution is seen flowing towards a figurine stuck in the shallow waters of Yamuna river in New Delhi. Despite the river being accorded the status of a living human entity by an Indian court, untreated sewage and industrial pollutants have turned it into one of the most polluted rivers in the world. The river Yamuna is one of the major tributaries of the Ganges. As the Ganges flows across the plains, its once clean and mineral-rich water begins collecting the toxic waste from the millions of people who depend on it, becoming one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Millions of liters (gallons) of sewage, along with heavy metals, agricultural pesticides, human bodies and animal carcasses, are dumped into the Ganges every day.
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At times, officials try to fix things but vast stretches of it remain dangerously unhealthy.
Still, to Hindus, the river remains religiously pure.
Smoke rises from chimneys of leather tanneries in Kanpur, an industrial city on the banks of the river Ganges. The city produces an estimated 450 million litres of municipal sewage and industrial effluent daily, much of which flowed directly into the Ganges until recently. Today that number is lower, though it's not clear by how much, after a Ganges cleanup project closed some drains and diverted industrial pollution to treatment plants. Every year, tens of thousands of Hindus bring the bodies of their loved ones to be cremated at the Ganges, in the city of Varanasi. A Hindu who dies in the city, or is cremated alongside it, is also freed from that cycle of birth and death.
After Varanasi, the Ganges continues its eastward journey through endless farmland as it nears the coast, eventually splitting off into ever-smaller rivers in the great wilderness of her delta. The biggest river, the Hooghly, heads south towards the sea, passing through Kolkata, the largest city in eastern India. Once the capital of the British raj, known as Calcutta, today the seething metropolis is home to nearly 15 million people.
Pilgrims walk on a pontoon bridge before dawn at Sangam, the confluence of rivers Ganges, Yamuna, and mythical Saraswati during Magh Mela, a festival that attracts millions of pilgrims every year, in Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. Eventually, its waters spill into the Bay of Bengal.
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Up near the Gangotri glacier, a genial Hindu holy man who goes by the name Mouni Baba and spends much of his life in silent meditation sees all of mankind reflected in the river.
A dog walks on a beach which was once a village on Sagar Island, one of the islands that make up the Sundarbans, a low-lying delta region of about 200 islands in the Bay of Bengal. The Sundarbans and its vast mangrove forests, a UNESCO world heritage site, have seen a dramatic rise in sea levels. The Geological Survey of India says at least 210 square kilometres of coastline on the Indian side has eroded in the last few decades. A pilgrim is stranded on a mobile toilet after high tide submerged the camping area for pilgrims on the eve of Makar Sankranti festival on Sagar Island. "Human existence is like this ice," he said. "It melts and becomes water and then merges into a stream. The stream goes into a tributary which flows into a river and then it all ends up in an ocean. Some (rivers) remain pure while others collect dirt along the way. Some (people) help mankind and some become the cause of its devastation."
(Associated Press Report)
