Tag ganga river

How the holy Ganga became the Hooghly – Reshmi Dasgupta

VOI

Ganga Arati at Kolkata.

With the worship of the holy Ganga finally restarting with arati on the riverbank in Kolkata and ceremonial dips at Tribeni, is it not time to discard the latter-day secularised name of the Ganga—Hugli/Hooghly—coined and imposed by foreigners? – Reshmi Dasgupta

In 2023, rather belatedly, Ganga Arati on the riverbank unmistakeably similar to the hugely popular one at Varanasi began to be conducted every evening in Kolkata. Today, it’s a must-attend for tourists. Around the same time a Kumbh Mela also restarted up-river, held at the same time as the more famous one at Prayagraj. The natural question that comes to mind is, “Why on earth is the Ganga called Hooghly or Hugli then as it flows past the capital of West Bengal?”

More so as this undoubtedly ugly name was not given by locals. The Ganga bifurcates as it enters West Bengal from Bihar, with one distributary veering off into Bangladesh as the Padma. The one that remains in India is called the Bhagirathi. But once Bhagirathi/Ganga reaches the 16th century Portuguese trading post of Fort Ugolim (Bandel), its name changes to Hooghly, a corruption of that Portuguese word. And this name was readily adopted by the British.

Hundreds of years of Islamic rule, European traders flocking to establish trading posts on the river and, finally, Calcutta becoming the headquarters of British Raj all contributed to the inexorable de-consecration—secularisation—of India’s holiest river in the final stages of its journey to the sea. Retaining the name Bhagirathi would hark back the river’s sacred status, clearly did not suit either the Muslim conquerors or their white successors whose focus was commerce.

Obviously the ‘firinghees’ preferred Hooghly: most foreigners cannot pronounce Bhagirathi even today and back then they would not have even tried. But why has it not been changed back? It has been 78 years since foreigners finally ceased ruling India, and yet we persist with many exonyms—non-native names for places, peoples, geographical features or languages. Just indigenising Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, all essentially British-established cities, does not cut it.

The reason for the Ganga becoming and remaining the Hooghly for so long (too long?) is complicated. It can probably be traced back to the place in West Bengal called Tribeni, which echoes that similar sounding but far better-known place in Uttar Pradesh, Triveni. Both places mark the unified Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. Only, in UP it is known as Yuktaveni, where those three rivers converge, while in Bengal it is Muktaveni, where the waterways diverge.

Yuktaveni and Muktaveni were equally revered and till the Islamic conquest of Bengal in the 13th century. Back then the Kumbh Mela was said to have been held annually at Tribeni too. That ended when Zafar Khan Ghazi not only conquered that part of Bengal in the late 13th century but also built the earliest mosque-madarsa complex of eastern India—where he and his family were buried—at the exact spot of the holy Muktaveni. That surely cannot be a mere coincidence.

There is clear evidence visible there even today that parts of demolished Hindu temples were used to build those Islamic edifices, why which Zafar Khan justified his honorific Ghazi. Once the temples were destroyed, there was an inevitable loss of inheritance and memory. This, though remnants of Hindu iconography and Sanskrit inscriptions remain on the walls of the complex—as seen in Somnath and Gyanvapi—pointing to the conversion of yet another sacred Hindu site.

Ironically this Islamic complex at Tribeni is now touted as syncretic, a saintly dargah—of a Ghazi!—that supposedly even attracts Hindu devotees. It is more likely that the Hindus actually began by going to secretly pay their respects to the desecrated idols interred on the walls and mihrab of that tomb and mosque—as happens at Gyanvapi even today—though after 800 years that initial reason may not have percolated down to the current “secular” generation in Bengal.

Turning the final 160 km of India’s holiest river into merely a waterway for trade and commerce by the East India Company by the 18th century sealed the secularisation—desacralisation—of the Ganga-Bhagirathi. Though temples dot the entire length of this section, from the Ananta Basudev temple at Bansberia to the Brindaban Chandra quartet at Guptipara and more, attesting to the quiet faith that the river is indeed the Ganga, the focus on the secular trading centres.

Ever since major European colonial powers—the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, French and British—established their trading posts along the Bhagirathi via permissions from the Mughal rulers and then local Muslim overlords and sultans, the original name of the northern-most firinghee settlement, Ugolim, became the convenient name for all of them to use and disseminate. And the sentiments of the Hindu population about the holy river were naturally drowned out.

The sad state and fate of the ‘Adi’ or Original Ganga’ also called Tolly’s Nullah—said to be the pre-17th century main channel of the Ganga-Bhagirathi-Hooghly near Kolkata—is further proof of the successful campaign to desacralize India’s most revered river. In 1777 the eponymous British engineer aimed to revive the old channel to facilitate an easier journey upstream for British ships, which found it difficult to negotiate the twists and turns of the mainstream ‘Hugli’ flow.

His plan failed to help the merchant ships so the British had no compunction in eventually turning the canalised ancient riverbed into a ‘nullah’ (drain) for the city’s effluents and sewage instead. This even though Kolkata’s most important temple, Kalighat, lies on its banks, testifying to its sacred antecedents. Amazingly parts of the putrid waterway are still revered as sacred by locals although the final blow came in the form of 300 pillars of the Metro rail being installed in it.

Not that dumping waste into the holy Ganga was confined to the part that flowed through Calcutta; that was perpetrated at many points along its course during the Raj. The most horrific example of that was the Sisamau Nullah in Kanpur (Asia’s largest) which pumped 140 million litres of untreated sewage into the Ganga daily from 1892 until it was finally fully diverted into a treatment plant in 2019.

That the Bhagirathi remained the Ganga in the collective Hindu consciousness, however, is clear from the name of the spot where it joins the sea: Gangasagar, an amalgam of the name of the river, Ganga, and an island, Sagar, named after the sea now called the Bay of Bengal. Millions of Hindus take a dip at on Makar Sankranti just as they do at other points along the holy Ganga such as Prayagraj and Haridwar. Note, it is not called Hooghlysagar—and never has been.

Interestingly, where the Padma-Jamuna-Meghna confluence—for now the bigger amalgam of Ganga distributaries—meets the sea in Bangladesh is not called Gangasagar although the name of the island that it flows past into the Bay of Bengal is evocative too: Bhola. But the Bhagirathi-Hooghly in West Bengal is obviously the true receptacle of the holy Ganga in the minds of the faithful.

With the worship of the holy Ganga finally restarting in West Bengal with arati on the riverbank in Kolkata and ceremonial dips at Tribeni, is it not time to discard the latter-day secularised name of the Ganga—Hugli/Hooghly—coined and imposed by foreigners? – News18, 14 February 2026

›  Reshmi Dasgupta is a freelance writer.

The Hooghly at Bandel.

Is the Ganga really self-cleaning? – Pranay Lal

VOI

Shiva with Ganga Devi in the raging river at Rishikesh.

The Ganga is no longer the self-cleansing river it once was. Its silicate-rich water, and less so, its myriad bot-like bacteriophages, are fading as the human stain deepens. – Dr. Pranay Lal

In 1896, a British bacteriologist named Ernest Hankin stood on the banks of the Ganga, watching as locals filled clay pots with water. He hoped that the dreaded cholera outbreak would not occur under his watch. In his attempt to avert it, Hankin discovered something extraordinary: water drawn from the river seemed to kill the pathogen within hours. In wells where the Ganga’s water was not introduced, however, the bacteria flourished.

Intrigued, Hankin conducted experiments, filtering and heating the water to determine what made it so inhospitable to cholera. He hypothesised that an unseen biological agent was at work. The notion that the Ganga could retain its self-purifying properties defied conventional wisdom. Even as evidence mounted, the idea was dismissed as anecdotal—a quirk of the river’s mythology rather than a function of science.

Hankin’s discovery would take another three decades to be recognised as the action of bacteriophages: viruses that prey exclusively on bacteria. It wasn’t until the 21st century that modern research tools finally confirmed what Hankin had suspected.

Several recent studies have mapped the prevalence of bacteriophages in the Ganga, in water samples collected from Hardwar to Varanasi. These studies have found unusually high concentrations of phages targeting common pathogens of waterborne diseases. Some scientists have even isolated bacteriophages that neutralise deadly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

When phage therapy was first discovered, researchers were elated that the Ganga was an untapped reservoir.

But bacteriophages exist only because its prey, the bacteria, is found in abundance. They would not exist without them. Simply put, the presence of bacteria-killing viruses is a symptom of bacterial pollution. It is not the sign of some potent power of the river.

Further, the presence of bacteriophages is only a small part of the Ganga story. The secret of the river’s anti-bacterial water lies in its unique geochemical properties.

All about silicates

On the slopes of the Himalayas and in the waters of the Ganga and its tributaries, an invisible process unfolds. It was first articulated by Nobel laureate Harold Urey, who proposed a deceptively simple equation: CO2 reacts with calcium-bearing silicate rocks, forming limestone and releasing silicates. This reaction, playing out over geological time, acts as a planetary thermostat, drawing carbon dioxide from the air and locking it away in ocean sediments. This entrapment, called deep carbon burial, prevents the carbon from returning to the atmosphere, helping regulate atmospheric CO2 and global warming.

Nowhere is this process more pronounced than in the Himalayas, where young, rapidly eroding rock faces provide an ideal surface for chemical weathering. Rain, made slightly acidic by atmospheric CO2, scrubs the mountain’s flanks, washing sediments down the Ganga and ultimately to the deep basins of the Bay of Bengal. There, carbon mineralises and settles into long-term storage, part of a vast, slow-moving cycle that has regulated global temperatures for millions of years.

In theory, this should be a stabilising force. The amount of organic carbon buried in the Bengal basin alone accounts for up to 20 per cent of terrestrial organic carbon reaching oceanic sediments. But this process is not immune to disruption. Some climate scientists have turned their attention to what happens when pollution, deforestation, unchecked urbanisation, and large and small dams interfere with the carbon reaction explained by Urey.

The Ganga’s seemingly staid landscape is actually quite complex. The rocks and sediments that get carried down from the high Himalayas define its chemistry. In the highlands, calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate dominate, pointing to carbonate weathering. But as the river descends, sodium, potassium, and excess bicarbonate take over—evidence of silicate weathering and inputs from alkaline soils and groundwater.

The clays and sediments of each river are unique, and they entomb a variety of silicate-rich minerals. These minerals deter bacterial growth, killing them or reducing their reproduction. The river, along its course, deposits different silicate concentrations: the higher the concentration, the lower the bacterial counts.

No longer a purifying force

A 2024 paper has found that the Ganga’s dissolved silicon (DSi) and silicon isotopes build up in the river but their potency reduces downstream, in the plains.

At higher elevations, only some silicates bind with iron oxides and carbonates. When the river meets the Yamuna and the Gomti, more silicon gets added, from other rocks and river sands. At the place where the Gomti meets the Ganga, the silicate concentration reaches its maximum limit.

As sewage gets dumped into the river, farm and industrial pollution builds up and much of the silicates get bound. By the time that the silicates reach the mid-Ganga, they’re completely sequestered. Most get bound to organic molecules like bacteria or sewage. This would not have been the case in the pre-industrial era. As cities and industries have grown, Ganga’s silicate potential has diminished. Instead of trapping CO2, it now combines with human waste.

The Ganga is no longer the self-cleansing force it once was. Its silicate-rich water, and less so, its myriad bot-like bacteriophages, are fading as the human stain deepens. Restoring the river isn’t just a matter of environmental conservation or a public health imperative. It is critical that this ceaseless engine of carbon capture isn’t lost to modern neglect. – The Print, 25 October 2025

› Dr. Pranay Lal is a biochemist and natural history writer. He is the author of ‘Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent’ and ‘Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses’. 

Sri Devi dies on the Ganga bank in Kolkata.