Ganges
India's sacred river, holiest waters of Hinduism
No river on Earth is venerated like the Ganges. To Hindus it is a goddess, Ganga, whose waters cleanse sin and carry the dead toward release, and along its banks lie the holiest cities in India. It is also one of the most densely populated river basins anywhere, sustaining hundreds of millions of people across the plains of northern India and Bangladesh. From a Himalayan ice cave to the great delta on the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is at once a sacred presence and an immense working river.
The Ganges runs roughly 2,600 kilometers from the Gangotri Glacier, where it emerges as the Bhagirathi at the ice mouth called Gomukh. Fed by Himalayan snowmelt and the monsoon, it descends onto the flat, fertile Gangetic plain, the most intensively farmed landscape in the country. Downstream it joins the Brahmaputra and the Meghna to build the largest delta in the world, the Sundarbans, a maze of tidal channels and mangrove forest that is home to the Bengal tiger before the combined waters reach the Bay of Bengal.
Pilgrims have bathed at Varanasi and gathered for the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious assembly on Earth, for many centuries. That same reverence sits uneasily with the river's condition: untreated sewage, industrial waste and the residue of cremations have made stretches of the Ganges badly polluted, prompting enormous and so far only partly successful clean-up campaigns. The river also faces shrinking glacial sources and heavy water withdrawal, even as it remains the spiritual and agricultural heart of the subcontinent.