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.

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.

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.

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.