Uttarakhand
The Abode of Rivers
“At Varanasi I had met the Ganga as a grandmother — vast, slow, carrying everything. In Uttarakhand I met her as a child: freezing, loud, and entirely uninterested in my plans.”
Photo: Ms Sarah Welch / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Upstream
My whole journey, I realised on the bus from the Himachal side, had been conducted downstream of this state. The Ganga at Varanasi, at Patna, in every aarti lamp and every immersed ash, all of it starts here, in Uttarakhand's glaciers, and I was finally travelling against the current to the source of the source. The state styles itself Devbhumi like its neighbour, but its divinity is specifically hydraulic: this is the land of the Char Dham. Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath, the four high shrines where rivers and gods share addresses, and of the prayags, the five sacred confluences where Himalayan streams merge pair by pair like a bloodline assembling. I came in through the Kumaon hills with a plan built around three altitudes: the river towns, one high meadow, and one sunrise I had been promised would reorganise me.
Good?' she asked. I could not yet speak. 'Good,' she confirmed.From the chapter
The River in a Hurry
Haridwar is where the Ganga leaves the mountains and enters the plains, and the town has organised itself around the exit for a few thousand years. At Har ki Pauri at dusk I attended my second great Ganga aarti, and the contrast with Varanasi was the education. There, the river is broad, brown, imperial, and the ceremony moves at her pace. Here she is barely out of the glaciers: green-grey, snow-cold, running fast enough that the bathing ghats are strung with chains for pilgrims to grip, and the aarti feels less like veneration of an ancient monarch than the blessing of a strong young athlete before the long event of the plains. Leaf-boat lamps set on this water do not drift; they race. I gripped the chain, went under three times as instructed by a grandmother beside me who had appointed herself my supervisor, and surfaced with my entire nervous system rewritten in cold. 'Good?' she asked. I could not yet speak. 'Good,' she confirmed.
Rishikesh, half an hour upstream, is the river's next mood: gorge walls, suspension bridges.
The chapter continues in the book…
- AnticipationUpstream
- ArrivalThe River in a Hurry
- ExplorationConfluences and the First Forest
- DiscoverySunrise at Chandrashila
- The TableThe Hill Kitchen's Quiet Genius
- Traveller's NotebookUttarakhand Essentials
- FarewellDownstream
Uttarakhand, from the road
Read Chapter 24 in full
The complete Uttarakhand chapter — with when to go, getting around, what things cost, what to eat and how to travel responsibly — is in 28 Shades of India.