The Ganges River

Gaṅgā (गङ्गा) is the Sanskrit name of the river and of the goddess who is the river. It is named among the waters in the Ṛgveda, in the Nadīstuti hymn of the tenth book that praises the rivers of the land, and it becomes in the epics and Purāṇas the great sacred stream and a deity in her own right, Gaṅgā the daughter of Himavat, brought down from heaven in the myth of the descent of the Ganges to fall, lest she shatter the earth, through the matted hair of Śiva. The word itself, with its reduplicating gaṅg-, may be of pre-Sanskritic origin, but in the tradition it is the river-goddess pure and simple.

Gaṅgā is the headwater of this page in the literal and the philological sense, and the source of its central contrast with the Indus. Where the Sanskrit Sindhu was handed from empire to empire and remade at each frontier, Gaṅgā was carried out into the world almost unchanged, because it went out as the name of a goddess and a holy place rather than a border. Greek Gángēs, Latin Ganges, and the Chinese Buddhist Hénghé all keep it recognizably intact. The Ganges is the river the world learned to name from the Indians who worshipped it, and it kept the name they gave it. Gaṅgā is the river’s living name, in unbroken use from the Ṛgveda to the present.

Pîšôn (פִּישׁוֹן) is the first of the four rivers that flow out of Eden in Genesis 2, said to wind through the whole land of Havilah, “where there is gold.” The Hebrew Bible itself knows nothing of the Ganges, and the Pishon is a river of paradise, not a geographical report; the identification with the Ganges belongs to the later interpreters. Josephus, retelling Genesis in the Antiquities, names the four Eden-rivers and equates the Pishon with the Ganges, just as he makes the Gihon the Nile, fitting the paradise-rivers to the great streams at the edges of the known world.

The identification is genuinely contested and always has been: the Pishon has also been placed at the Nile, the Indus, the Phasis of Colchis, and rivers of Arabia and Mesopotamia, and none of these commands assent. It is included here as the single exception to the Ganges’s unity of name, and it is an exception of the opposite kind from the Indus. The Indus lost its name to geography, renamed at every frontier by the empires that crossed it; the Ganges, which no western empire reached, instead had a name laid upon it from scripture, when a tradition that had never seen the river reached out to make a paradise-stream of it. The Indus is the edge of the world one crosses; the Ganges, in this reading, the river of the garden one can never find.

Greek Gángēs (Γάγγης) is the Sanskrit Gaṅgā taken almost without change, and it came into Greek by the most direct route any Indian name traveled: Megasthenes, the ambassador sent by Seleucus to the Mauryan court, lived at Pātaliputra on the bank of the Ganges and wrote the Indiká from which Arrian, Strabo, and Ptolemy drew their accounts of the river, its tributaries, and its mouths. The doubled gamma, γγ, is the Greek spelling of a nasal-plus-g, and it renders the Sanskrit cluster ṅg faithfully, sound for sound.

That faithfulness is the entry’s point. The Greeks did not reach the Ganges as a frontier and rename it, as they had taken the Indus second-hand from the Persians under a Persianized form; they were told the Ganges by a man who had stood on its bank and heard Indians say its name. The contrast on the page is exact: Indós is the river renamed at the edge of an empire, Gángēs the river named from its own shore. The Greek form, passing through Latin, is the one the modern world still uses.

Gaṅgā is the Pali name of the Ganges, the Middle Indo-Aryan continuation of Sanskrit Gaṅgā, unchanged in this case because the word had no clusters for the vernacular to smooth. The river runs through the Pali canon as its central geography: the Buddha’s career unfolds in the kingdoms along its middle course, and the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta has him cross the Gaṅgā at the village of Pāṭaligāma while the ministers of Magadha are still building the fortress there that will become Pāṭaliputra. In the canon’s stock phrases the river is the measure of number itself, “as many as the sands of the Gaṅgā.”

Among the names on this page, the Pali form is notable precisely for not differing from the Sanskrit: where Takṣaśilā became Takkasilā, the river’s name passed between registers untouched. What the canon adds is not a new form but a new relation to the name, the river as lived route rather than sacred abstraction; monks and merchants in these texts board ferries, reckon distances by its fords, and count its sands. The Greek Gánges that Megasthenes carried west reproduces exactly the form the Buddha’s followers spoke, and the name has not changed since.

Latin Ganges, with the genitive Gangis, is the Greek Gángēs taken over unchanged, the name of the river at the eastern limit of the world the Romans imagined. Pliny describes it among the great rivers of India and counts its mouths; Virgil uses it as a figure of the swelling, exotic East; and the historians of Alexander set at it the famous turning-point of his campaign, when his army at the Hyphasis refused to march any further toward the Ganges and the kingdoms beyond, and the conqueror turned back.

The Ganges was, to Rome, the river even Alexander did not reach, the edge of the earth where the known world gave out. Yet its name came through whole, three languages deep from the Sanskrit, Gaṅgā to Gángēs to Ganges, and passed from Latin into the modern European tongues unaltered. It is a quiet measure of the difference between the two great Indian rivers: the Indus, which Roman writers knew as a frontier their hero had crossed, fragmented into a half-dozen names, while the Ganges, which he never reached at all, kept the single name the Indians gave it across the whole width of the world.

The Tamil name of the Ganges, Kaṅkai, the Sanskrit Gaṅgā passed through Tamil’s phonology: the language admits no voiced stop at the start of a word, so g- hardens to k-, and the final long -ā is reshaped to the Tamil feminine ending -ai. The river stands at its most dramatic in the Cilappatikāram, the earliest Tamil epic, whose final movement sends the Chera king Ceṅkuṭṭuvaṉ marching the length of India so that the stone for the slain heroine Kaṇṇaki’s image can be cut in the Himalaya and bathed in the Ganges before it comes south; in later medieval Tamil the Chola kings made the same journey a boast, Rajendra I taking the title of the king who fetched the Ganges.

On this page the river’s name mostly travels west, to Greek and Arabic and Latin ears that knew it as a rumor at the world’s edge. The Tamil entry is the opposite case: a name that traveled south inside India, to a people for whom the river was no less distant, three thousand kilometers of someone else’s country away, but who made it the fixed pole of sanctity all the same. The epic’s kings do not trade with the Ganges or map it; they walk armies to it so that its water can consecrate what matters at home. For the Greeks the Ganges measured how far the world went; for the Tamils it measured how far a king would go.

Chinese Héng hé (恒河), “the Ganges,” joins the suffix hé (河), “river,” to a transcription of Gaṅgā; the underlying phonetic rendering is Hénggā (恒伽), of which the river-name is the shortened, naturalized form. The character 恒, also written in the traditional shape 恆, means “constant” or “enduring” and is here chosen for sound over sense. The river runs through the whole Chinese Buddhist canon, the highway of the holy land the pilgrims sought, and above all it survives in a single fixed phrase: Héng hé shā (恒河沙), “the sands of the Ganges,” the standard Buddhist image for a quantity past all counting, recurring in the Diamond and Lotus sūtras wherever a number beyond number is meant.

Where the Indus entered Chinese as a frontier the pilgrims could not even spell the same way twice, the Ganges entered it inside scripture, its name carried intact by the Buddhist translators. The contrast holds at the eastern end of the world as at the western: the border-river fragments, the holy river endures. And the Ganges left Chinese something more than a name, for in “the sands of the Ganges” a river in India became the language’s own measure of the infinite, the countless grains of one sacred stream standing for all the numberless things there are.

Al-Bīrūnī’s Arabic transcription of Sanskrit Gaṅgā, written nahr Kank, “the river Kank,” throughout his Taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind of c. 1030, the systematic study of India he composed at Ghazni from Sanskrit sources and Indian informants. Arabic has no letter for g, so the velar kāf stands in for both stops of the Sanskrit name. He records not only the river’s course but the beliefs attached to it, reporting that in Indian tradition the Ganges once flowed through the land of paradise, a doctrine he presents with the same care he gives its astronomy.

The entry is distinctive on this page for its directness. The Greek and Latin forms above reached the Mediterranean through Persian intermediaries and returning campaign literature; the Chinese form traveled with pilgrims; Kank was taken down from Sanskrit at first hand by a single scholar who had learned the language for the purpose. It is also a record of method: al-Bīrūnī transcribes the sacred river of a religion not his own without polemic and without conversion of the name into something more familiar. One man with a working knowledge of Sanskrit moved the name straight from one classical language to another, no empire required.