Farakka,

FARAKKA

       Ganga is seen as a munificent Goddess from Gaumukh all the way down to Varanasi. Then she swells threefold from the huge inflow from Ghaghara, Gandak and Kosi and becomes the Nepalese Ganga - a destroyer of land, animal and human life. Not surprisingly, not many people seem to worship her here as a benign, generous goddess, giver of life.

     Ganga flows due east from Patna for four hundred kilometres till it takes a right turn and begins its final descent to the Bay of Bengal. As it senses the sea, it loses all shape and form. It divides, subdivides, then seeps out through a myriad of smaller rivers and vast mangrove forests called the Sundarbans, which straddle India and Bangladesh. The estuary of Ganga in the Bay of Bengal is so broad atlases call it “The Mouths of the Ganga.”

     Ganga in Bihar is sluggish (the current is no more than four kilometres per hour), broad and flat as far as the eye can see. In the early afternoons, our eyes become drowsy from a combination of Mohan’s cooking, the hypnotic rhythm of two men rowing, and haze from the heat of the sun. The clean line of demarcation between water and sky blurs. Blue, grey, earth brown, so vivid and clean at eight in the morning, merge into a general wash of colour which defy precise identification.

     The river is empty of traffic, even of villages. Just the occasional town, Sahibganj or Rajmahal, until the barrage at Farakka.

     If Kanpur (and to a lesser extent Varanasi) represents institutional failures, Farakka is surely an example of man’s arrogance in assuming he can manipulate nature without paying the consequences. For many, Farakka is indeed the ultimate swear word. In India itself the government is acutely sensitive whenever the word is mentioned. It therefore asked me to exclude specific mention of it in my documentation when seeking permissions from the various ministries to undertake this yatra on Ganga.

     In the early 1970s, the Indian government built a huge barrage at Farakka on the border between West Bengal and Bangladesh to regulate and manipulate Ganga’s flow. But they failed to anticipate the consequences to the river’s hydrology. Ganga during the monsoon floods has always eroded land, especially in Bihar, largely because of the sheer volume of water pouring down into it from Nepal; it’s inevitable, natural. But the Farakka barrage has exacerbated the annual ritual of destruction. Ganga has been driven to extremes, her natural rhythms and cycles disrupted. Entire villages have been destroyed because the barrage has altered the hydrological dynamics of the river well beyond Kahalgaon.