Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River by Sudipta Sen

Author:Sudipta Sen [Sen, Sudipta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asia, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems & Habitats, History, India & South Asia, Nature, Rivers, Science
ISBN: 9780300119169
Google: BHN_DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07L13LYRP
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-01-08T03:00:00+00:00

The empire of Harshavardhana of Kanauj. Map by M. Roy Cartography.

CHAPTER 7

CRUCIBLE OF EMPIRES

The Ganges near Kanauj that the Chinese traveler and scholar Xuanzang saw was pure and blue like the ocean, its banks full of fine-grained sand. He describes it as the legendary “river of religious merit” that had the manifest power to wash away countless sins.1 He also saw large crowds at the major pilgrimages along the river, such as the Ganga-Yamuna confluence at Prayag, full of merit seekers gathered to assuage the wrongs of their lifetimes. Some had come for penance and mortification, some to fast unto death in the hopes of getting to heaven quickly. Bathing in the Ganges was synonymous with the acquisition of merit as a kind of spiritual collateral for divine judgment after death, and the regimes that succeeded the Maukharis and Pushyabhutis of Kanauj fought over the distinction of protecting the many pilgrimages and sacred cities that dotted the Ganges valley. The Gupta Empire had left behind a rich and variegated iconography of the Ganges. Some of these representations, especially of the river as a female guardian or as the heavenly companion of Shiva, became standard figures installed in temples throughout the Indian subcontinent.

These images also began to appear routinely in temples of the far south. The Pallavas of Kanchi, who ruled from the valley of the Kaveri River and the emerald strip of the Coromandel Coast, paid rich tribute to the Ganges in their rock-cut structures. Their rivals, the Chalukyas of Badami, who held the territory between the Krishna and Narmada Rivers in western and central India, did the same. The Rashtrakutas, who displaced and succeeded the Chalukyas, also designed temples to create replicas of the mythical mountain Kailasa, Ganga’s celestial abode. For an entire century they fought with the Gurjara-Pratiharas of western India and the Pala Dynasty of Bengal over control of Kanauj and the western Ganges valley. A ruler of the Chola Dynasty whose empire stretched across most of the southern peninsula and who sent overseas military expeditions to Sri Lanka and Indonesia took the title “the conqueror of Ganges.” Having vanquished the major powers of the north, he brought back great quantities of sacred water as a prize to his newly constructed capital, to be stored in a massive temple complex that still dominates the surrounding countryside.

This chapter describes how the image of the river, its valley, cities, and kingdoms, became an inextricable part of the political imagination for a succession of imperial regimes. It was not just the sacredness of the river or the antiquity of its Hindu pilgrimages and bathing steps that inspired such a vision of territorial power. It was also the rich trove of agrarian surplus from its fertile basin that helped sustain the armies and courts of the Gurjara-Pratiharas and their vassal kingdoms, the Gahadavalas of Kanauj, the Turkish sultans of Delhi from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries C.E., and indeed the great Mughal Empire. An essential thread in the flow of riparian

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