236 18 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6424 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: ISTOCK.COM/USER3A14F790_939I
nvoking the Ganges prompts two very
different visions. One imagines a sa-
cred destination for countless devout
pilgrims and the site of rituals repeated
for thousands of years. Another sees
a heavily polluted repository for the
sewage and industrial wastes
of dozens of Indian cities and
yet water source for half a bil-
lion people. In this dual vision,
the Ganges seems to embody
the disjuncture of our time: It is
both a dying piece of the planet
and an enduring natural symbol
of life and absolution.
Sudipta Sen’s Ganges: The
Many Pasts of an Indian River
invites its reader across the
space and time of this iconic riv-
erscape. Through a sweeping yet carefully
textured history, the layers of the Ganges’s
past assume a life that is both consequen-
tial and contemporary. We come to un-
derstand the Ganges as an expansive and
dynamic social and natural system, andENVIRONMENTAL STUDIESBy Anne Rademacher we gain a clearer perspective on the river’s
present and potential futures.
Sen begins this history with the ancient
and enduring human practice of pilgrim-
age. Recounting his own journey from Gan-
gotri, where the Ganges begins its descent,
to the river’s source at Gaumukh glacier, he
asks how it is that this single river came to
be imbued with sacred impor-
tance—nothing short, he writes,
of a “metaphysical threshold.”
He begins to explore this ques-
tion through the long and dy-
namic history of myths, which
narrate the river’s powerful cen-
trality in both spiritual cosmol-
ogy and the political imagination.
Although the details of the many
myths Sen recounts changed over
centuries, their core associations
with a feminine form of divinity
reproduced the river as both a sacred center
and a symbolic locus of political legitimacy.
Ganges is neither social nor environmental
history; it is inseparably both. Sen challenges
us to notice the myriad ways that social and
environmental transformation on this river-
scape produced one another, often without a
clearly linear story of cause and effect. Rather
than composing an explanatory history, then,
he emphasizes how social and environmen-tal change melded together as ongoing pro-
cesses. The approach, like the Ganges’s very
name, favors dynamism over stasis; Sen
notes that the Sanskrit root of Ganges, gam
(“to go”), invites us to study the river through
prisms of motion, flow, direction, and force.
From pilgrimage and myth, the book moves
through the heavily contested archaeological
quest to find and discern the river’s material
past. That quest guides the reader along the
vast tendrils of settled agriculture, reaching
back nearly 15,000 years. We are led to reen-
vision the many lakes, marshes, forests, and
grasslands that preceded the Ganges’s pres-
ent agrarian mosaic, in part through descrip-
tions from the Matsya Purana, a collection of
texts that date between the 8th and 13th cen-
turies. These accounts bring lush past land-
scapes, which today are all but lost, back to
conceptual life so that habitat transformation
made less discernable in spans of centuries
now leaves a more vivid trace.
Sen narrates the dramatic reworking of
the plant and animal world in part by trac-
ing equally dramatic social transformation.
With settled agriculture came land owner-
ship and taxation patterns, crop distribution
mosaics, and consequent trade patterns that
remade the riverscape and its social compo-
sition. The Ganges and the kingdoms and
cities that rose around it organized spiritual
and political identity, legitimizing successive
imperial projects whose armies, merchants,
artisans, and new religious practices carved
and recarved territorial claims.
Late in the book, Sen arrives at the pe-
riod of European empire building, the time
at which more conventional histories of the
present-day Ganges begin. With the benefit
of a fuller historical arc, we understand more
clearly how and why the Ganges was central
to the Victorian imperial imagination and
why the lower Ganges plains and the Ben-
gal delta formed the heart of the East India
Company’s imperial territories in India. It
also underscores why countless postcolonial
leaders have repeatedly invoked its place, as
Sen recounts using Nehru’s words, as “a sym-
bol and a memory of the past of India.”
Ganges is a study of a river as many si-
multaneous places, temporalities, and expe-
riences. It offers a way of thinking about a
river not only as it flows over a landscape
but as it assembles and connects aesthetics,
territories, habitats, and human beings. In
this sense, the book is an invitation to think
about all environmental history not only as
a story of a changing natural world but also
as a story about ourselves. j10.1126/science.aav8514Offerings are prepared on the banks of the Ganges
River in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.Human and environmental stories interweave in
a meandering meditation on the Ganges River
BOOKS et al.
The reviewer is in the Department of Environmental Studies
and the Department of Anthropology, New York University,
New York, NY 10003, USA. Email: [email protected]Ganges
Sudipta Sen
Yale University Press,- 459 pp.
The revealing history of a
revered waterway
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