Vyas | June, 2003

A bath in the Ganga undoubtedly absolves one of all sins; but what does that avail? They say that the sins perch on the trees along the banks of the Ganga. No sooner does the man come back from the holy waters than the old sins jump on his shoulders from the trees. The same old sins take possession of him again. He is hardly out of the water before they fall upon him.

	Ramakrishna Paramhamsa

Ravana - the mythical king of Lanka was a staunch devotee of Lord Shiva. He is said to have composed a supremely lilting prayer in Sanskrit known as Shiva Tandava Strotam (prayer based on Shiva's fierce cosmic dance). In the very opening stanza of the prayer Ravana sings:

"I salute Shiva who is adored with the garlands of snakes around the neck which is consecrated by the streams of Ganga falling from the forest - like matted hair."

Little did Ravana know that the snakes around the neck of his Lord could portend the selfish and callous disconcern of the inhabitants living on the banks of Ganga who would relentlessly emit poison into it. Examples of callous disconcern are scores of people seen washing their clothes with soap on the banks and drainage water being poured into it.

There again was a time when Shamkaracharya - the Advaita Vedantin philosopher perceived sacredness of Ganga as all-powerful and overpowering. One of the stanzas in praise of Ganga reads as under: "Just as a piece of iron gets converted into gold by a mere touch of the philosopher's stone, just as the filthy water of the drains becomes sacred by mingling into Ganga, so there is no reason why my mind that is immersed in Shiva-consciousness should not be purified at once."

Sins can be metaphorically seen as spiritual filth and dirt. Just as filth defiles and can be got rid of, sins can be got rid of by taking a dip into Ganga or any other sacred river or pond. There is a well-entrenched tradition of treating Ganga as victim of its own altruistic act of washing the sins of its devotees. The story goes that Gyaneshwar, a medieval saint-poet of Maharashtra saw in dream three rivers incarnated as three beautiful women who introduced themselves as Ganga, Yamuna and Krishna. The rivers narrated their plight that in the process of washing the sins of their devotees who took dips in them, they were now super-saturated with sins, the burden of which was intolerable. They entreated Gyaneshwar to visit them for a religious bath so that they are relieved of the unbearable weight of sins. Although the underlying idea of the story is to emphasize the spiritual excellence of Gyaneshwar, the other point underlined is that even a saviour might have to be saved.

In a Raj Kapoor film, Ganga is treated as having become dirty while discharging her role of cleansing the sins of sinners. But by a sheer quirk of poetic justice sin or spiritual filth is taken as a potent factor leading Ganga to its present state of abject pollution.

While a sin or spiritual filth is removable by a physical act of taking a dip is a matter of faith, sins accumulated over along period in Ganga are liable to make it dirty is a conclusion which stems from a metaphorical confusion - treating spiritual filth a something tangible like physical filth. Again, Shamkaracharya's analogy of instant conversion of filthy drain-water into sacred Ganga by mere mingling of the former into the latter loses sight of important point that the former is nevertheless capable of rendering the latter unclean, even infinitesimally. Centuries of metaphorical confusion has deluded us into thinking that one need not worry about Ganga, she only need to be worshipped.