The Thames is Kali Ganga, the Outrage is Aarti-ficial

The outrage over the Ganga Aarti on the Thames is Deracination performing Aarti to its own ignorance. If you take offence, read on.

We worship the Sun, but it is not the only sun. There are a million suns and they have a billion moons. So too with the river. There is the Ganga, and there are many gangas.

The outrage over the Ganga Aarti on the Thames is Deracination performing Aarti to its own ignorance. If you take offence, read on.

Here is what became the grist to the social media mill. Thousands gathered on the banks of the Thames for London's first Ganga Aarti, as part of the Totally Thames festival to mark Chinmaya Mission's 75 years. No flowers, idols or offerings went into the river, and the lamps stayed on the bank. That makes it cleaner than most things done to rivers in the name of religion here in the land of the Ganga.

Social media went berserk. Industrialist Harsh Goenka @hvgoenka demanded to know "how does one have a Ganga Aarti without the Ganga?" and added a wishlist of absurdities: Kumbh Mela on the Seine, shikaras on Lake Como, a camel fair in Hyde Park, Ganesh visarjan at Buckingham Palace. Others ruled that it "should be called Thames aarti”.

The best reply came from Thane, where a gentleman pointed out that his city does a Ganga Aarti every year at Masunda Talao, a small lake.

Shreeniwas Gadiyar of Thane is right, and the grammarians are with him.

Ganga comes from gam, to go. She who goes. It is a description of what she does before it is a proper noun. That is why the Sinhalese call every river a ganga, Mahaweli and Kelani included. In Nashik, people walking to the Godavari say they are going to the Ganga, and the Brahma Purana backs them with a full account of Gautami Ganga. Search for Ganga on a map and begin counting: Banganga, Wainganga, Penganga, Ramganga, Panchganga, Dudhganga, Kishanganga. Stop to breathe. Even the Milky Way is Akash Ganga. Any river that sustains life is revered as the mother, Ma Ganga.

The mighty Mekong is claimed in Khmer as Ma Ganga. Me is mother, Kong is Ganga. Some linguists still squabble over whether the Thai Khong is instead an archaic Austro-asiatic word for river, but the Cambodians don't need anybody's permission to loan the word from the original Sanskrit. And the common Thai agrees.

I am sure Harsh Goenka has mumbled "Gange cha Yamune chaiva, Godavari Saraswati, Narmade Sindhu Kaveri, jale'smin sannidhim kuru" at some point in his life. The bathing mantra asks seven sacred rivers to be present in whatever water is at hand.

Sant Ravidas of Banaras, who lived a short walk from the real thing, settled the matter five centuries ago: man changa toh kathauti mein Ganga. If the heart is clean, the Ganga is in the tub where a baby takes a dip. Any vessel of water has Ganga in it. Ravidas had his kathauti, you have your peetal lota in Ghaziabad. If Ganga can manage those, she can manage Greenwich.

The Rigveda's Nadistuti opens its roll call of rivers with her name, and ritual has been franchising her ever since. Mauritius has Ganga Talao, a crater lake. Amit Schandillia on X pointed out that Sarnami Hindus (Suriname Hindus) take a dip in the Atlantic and call it Ganga Nahain. Hindus have never needed the Ganga to have the Ganga. That is the whole point of her.

A civilisation is a tree that must rise, branch out, and yes, drop a seed far from it, even in Greenwich, if the wind so wills. The sunlight of knowledge does the photosynthesis and feeds the leaves. The elixir, though, is drawn in the dark, by roots nobody sees and many forget.

Roots remind us of Thames coming from Tamesis, the dark one, and scholars reckon it shares a root with the Sanskrit tamas. A river named darkness got an evening of lamps. Tamaso ma jyotirgamaya.

The Kali Ganga is the functioning border between Uttarakhand and Nepal. Were the dark Thames located somewhere in the Indosphere, there is a good chance she would be called Kali Ganga. Har Har Gange. Har Har Kaligange. Har Har Thames. The Aarti on her banks is bona fide Ganga Aarti. Your objection is overruled.

(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)

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(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)