On the Banks of the Gaṅgā PDF Download

Author: Kelly D. Alley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068081
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Explores the collision of sacred purity with environmental pollution of the river Ganga (Ganges)

Author: Sudipta Sen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030011916X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the world's third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora Originating in the Himalayas and flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is India's most important and sacred river. In this unprecedented work, historian Sudipta Sen tells the story of the Ganges, from the communities that arose on its banks to the merchants that navigated its waters, and the way it came to occupy center stage in the history and culture of the subcontinent. Sen begins his chronicle in prehistoric India, tracing the river's first settlers, its myths of origin in the Hindu tradition, and its significance during the ascendancy of popular Buddhism. In the following centuries, Indian empires, Central Asian regimes, European merchants, the British Empire, and the Indian nation-state all shaped the identity and ecology of the river. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers in this lavishly illustrated volume a remarkable portrait of one of the world's largest and most densely populated river basins.

Author: George Black
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250057353
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Travel along the shores of the Ganges and glimpse the past and future of the people who live there.

Author: Victor Mallet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198786174
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
India is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. The waterway that has nourished more people than any on earth for three millennia is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health. Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost. As one Hindu sage told the author in Rishikesh on the banks of the upper Ganges (known to Hindus as the goddess Ganga): "If Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people is no small thing." Drawing on four years of first-hand reporting and detailed historical and scientific research, Mallet delves into the religious, historical, and biological mysteries of the Ganges, and explains how Hindus can simultaneously revere and abuse their national river. Starting at the Himalayan glacier where the Ganges emerges pure and cold from an icy cave known as the "Cow's Mouth" and ending in the tiger-infested mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, Mallet encounters everyone from the naked holy men who worship the river, to the engineers who divert its waters for irrigation, the scientists who study its bacteria, and Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, who says he wants to save India's mother-river for posterity. Can they succeed in saving the river from catastrophe - or is it too late?

Author: Ezekiel N. Musleah
Publisher: North Quincy, Mass. : Christopher Publishing House
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Author: Julian Crandall Hollick
Publisher: Shearwater Books
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Combining travelogue, science, and history, Ganga is an extraordinary journey through northern India: from the river's source high in the Himalayas, past great cities and poor villages, to lush Saggar Island, where the river finally meets the sea. Along the way Julian Crandall Hollick encounters priests and pilgrims, dacoits and dolphins, the fishermen who subsist on the river, and the villagers whose lives have been destroyed by her. He finds that popular devotion to Ganga is stronger and blinder than ever, and it is putting her--and her people--in great risk.

Author: Pranab Kumar Parua
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048131030
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
From time immemorial the Bengal Delta had been an important maritime des- nation for traders from all parts of the world. The actual location of the port of call varied from time to time in line with the natural hydrographic changes. From the early decades of the second millennium AD, traders from the European con- nent also joined the traders from the Arab countries, who had been the Forerunners in maritime trading with India. Daring traders and fortune seekers from Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England arrived at different ports of call along the Hooghly river. The river had been, in the meantime, losing its pre-eminence as the main outlet channel of the sacred Ganga into the Bay of Bengal, owing to a shift of ?ow towards east near Rajmahal into the Padma, which had been so long, carried very small part of the large volume of ?ow. On a cloudy afternoon on August 24, 1690 the British seafarer Job Charnock rested his oars at Kolkata and started a new chapter in the life of a sleepy village, bordering the Sunderbans which was ‘a tangled region of estuaries, rivers and water courses, enclosing a vast number of islands of various shapes and sizes. ’ and infested with a large variety of wild animals. In the language of the British Nobel Laureate (1907) Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). ???? ???? Thus the midday halt of Charnock grew a city.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788194365761
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Author: Ted Lewin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547562748
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description
All rivers in India are sacred, and the Ganges most of all. Every year, more than one million Hindu pilgrims journey to Benares to renew themselves in its waters. Caldecott Honor medalist Ted Lewin joined the pilgrims at the river's edge for an experience he describes as one of the most unforgettable of his life. His luminous watercolors and simple, evocative text brilliantly capture the traditions, beliefs, and colorful pageantry of the devout and their ancient city.

Author: Nachiketa Das
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN: 1638326347
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Save This Land discusses some topical issues of the environment. In each of the six chapters, a topic is chosen, the problem is analysed, the dangers are described and the solutions are presented with an appeal to all for proaction to save this land. The imminent desertification caused by deforestation of land, amply served by the monsoon, must be averted by the construction of hundreds of thousands of micro-dams. The threat of sea level rise needs to be combated by undertaking a massive project of Coastal Works. The Ganga could remain perennial only with significant reforestation and strengthening of lateral and terminal moraines in the Himalaya. “When rivers die, civilisations die,” and this land faces an existential crisis because of the rivers choked to death by a vast deposition of sediments that need to be excavated for their revival. The Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi must be revived too. Bodies of good clean drinking water are the heritage of humanity and they are getting polluted. The water quality is paramount and must be maintained.