Slowly Down the Ganges

This frequently hilarious account of the author's boat trip down the Ganges River has it all: bureaucracy, a prickly spousal travelling companion, bizarre Hindu cultists, and dry streambeds loaded with basketball-sized rocks. Oh yes, there is also the heartland of classical India's Hindu culture unrolling along the shore, with the author's slightly quaint but extremely well-informed interest in the military history of the Raj (as well as reminiscences of his own exploits there years before) thrown in for good measure and some trips down side streets. Newby is one of the great travel writers, I prefer him to Theroux or Chatwin, he is down-to-eart, funny, and endlessly game.

I read this book after I'd spent a month in India and I found it LOL funny. There's no great insights here, no V.S. Naipual style reflection or analysis, it's just a tale of two Colonial-era Brits determined to travel the 1,200 mile length of the Ganges by boat in 1963/64. But if you're a westerner who's ever spent an extended period of time trying to get around inside of northern India, I suspect you'll find this book as amusing as I did. So in that sense it captures some of spirit of the place, though perhaps it's only amusing if you've experienced first-hand the chaos that is India. It's probably not a good choice if you're looking for a traveler's introduction to "modern" India.

Unlike his grounded colleague, the river traveller can indulge his bent for distraction only so far. His route is more or less fixed; certainly his destination is final. And so it is to Eric Newby's credit for eliciting from this journey 300 pages worth of erudite and witty observances, for it is essentially a procession of waterborne shuttles, one ghat to the next, punctuated only by the occasional onshore foray, the function of which mostly being to secure boat and crew for the succeeding leg. I suspect, though, that Newby could glean 300 pages from a dinghy ride in a swimming pool, and that that too would be immensely readable. The archetypical harrassed traveller, at every turn events conspire to defeat or, at the least, humiliate Newby. The atmosphere of the journey is established during preparations which smack of the comical: "I had even bought an immense bamboo pole from the specialist shop in the bazaar as a defence against dacoits whose supposed whereabouts were indicated on some rather depressing maps which G. [their sometime native companion] had annotated with this and similar information, in the same way mediaeval cartographers had inscribed `Here be dragons' on the blank expanses of their productions." In any case, these maps proved unserviceable. Because of hostilities with China, Indian Defence Regulations of the time (1963) were so stringent that it was impossible to buy large-scale maps of India of any kind. (At any rate, many maps of the Ganges are unashamedly indecisive of its course owing to the shifting alluvial bed.) Typically, arrangements that had been made in advance proved to be anything but arranged. The vessel intended to provide passage through the upper reaches of the Ganges was discovered to be in such a state of disrepair that use of it in a bathtub would have endangered lives. Attempts to procure another led Newby on an endeavour which he describes thus: "What we were doing in this instance was the equivalent in Britain of waking a fairly senior officer of the Metropolitan Water Board at a quarter to seven on a Winter's morning, in order to ask him to wake a yet more senior official and request the loan of a boat from one of the reservoirs in order to go down to Southend." Of course, the acquisition of another vessel appeased their troubles only momentarily. The journey proper was fraught from the outset: "It is difficult to describe the emotions that one feels when one is aground on a twleve-hundred-mile boat journey within hailing distance of one's point of departure." When not stranded upon a shoal Newby is confounded by the various tributaries shooting off this way and that. About this he consults the only man in India worse off than he: "There was only one person to ask the way from, an old man sitting alone on the shingle, but he was not very helpful. `I don't know where I am,' he said."When defeated by such circumstances Newby must, to advance his journey, venture ashore and seek out assistance. This dema