River of Life, River of Death
The Ganges and India's Future
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Estimated delivery time: Expected time of arrival: end of January 2026.
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 19 October 2017
- ISBN 9780198786177
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages344 pages
- Size 224x159x32 mm
- Weight 506 g
- Language English
- Illustrations Approx. 20 colour illustrations and 1 map 0
Categories
Short description:
India is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost.
MoreLong description:
India is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. The waterway that has nourished more people than any on earth for three millennia is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health.
Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost. As one Hindu sage told the author in Rishikesh on the banks of the upper Ganges (known to Hindus as the goddess Ganga) - 'If Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people is no small thing.'
Drawing on four years of first-hand reporting and detailed historical and scientific research, Mallet delves into the religious, historical, and biological mysteries of the Ganges, and explains how Hindus can simultaneously revere and abuse their national river.
Starting at the Himalayan glacier where the Ganges emerges pure and cold from an icy cave known as the Cow's Mouth and ending in the tiger-infested mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, Mallet encounters everyone from the naked holy men who worship the river, to the engineers who divert its waters for irrigation, the scientists who study its bacteria, and Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, who says he wants to save India's mother-river for posterity.
Can they succeed in saving the river from catastrophe -- or is it too late?
The book is well written and easy to read, even for a non-specialist audience...there is much to learn from River of Life, River of Death, and it is to be hoped that Mallet will repeat his journey down the Ganges in a decade or two to update us on the fate of this extraordinary river.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Killing the mother goddess
Mouth of the Cow: the Himalayan source
Holy waters
How to build a megacity - and save the Ganges
Varanasi: Hinduism's capital city
Varanasi revisited: Two days in the holy city
Toxic river
Superbug river: Not a magic cure - a deadly gene carrier
Of dolphins, crocodiles and tigers
Demography: not a dividend
Water and wells: why the taps run dry
Droughts and dams: engineering the Ganges
A Bollywood star: Ganga on film
Exotic river: the Ganges seen by foreigners
Storms and sandbanks: boat travel on the Ganges
Trade artery no more: Calcutta and Bengal
Mission impossible? How to clean the Ganges
Beautiful forest: Where Ganga meets the ocean
Bibliography
Notes
Index
