![]() But who in 1645 had heard of the Hooghly, a fairly short distributary of the Ganges which eventually finds its way south to the Bay of Bengal? Probably not even Andrew Marvell, writing a hundred years or so after the Portuguese merchant Pedro Tavares first set foot on its bank in 1578, and born a year after the English arrived in Bengal (1620).įor modern readers, however, this compelling, scholarly and engagingly written account of the Hooghly by Robert Ivermee, who teaches at SOAS University of London and the Catholic University of Paris, more than makes up for our lack of familiarity with Indian rivers other than the Ganges. ![]() The West has long been fascinated by the Ganges writing in the late 1640s, the poet and MP Andrew Marvell imagined his “coy mistress” wasting her time, of which he imagines they had an eternity, in India instead of responding to his advances “Thou by th’Indian Ganges side shouldst rubies find,” he whinges, while he is left in England “by the tide of Humber” to bemoan his enforced celibacy. Like all rivers, the Ganges was, of course, a river of life as well as death, the reason for people settling along its banks and nurturing themselves with its flowing waters. It also features the half-burnt corpses of devout Hindus floating down it on their final journeys and people bathing in it to purify themselves. ![]() When we think of Indian rivers, it’s usually the Ganges that comes to mind, that mysteriously holy river now polluted by sludge and city waste. ![]()
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