Originally posted in 2018 

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Sharing with you some impressions on "Slowly Down the Ganges" by Eric Newby (pub 1966, 1983).

Not "new" by any stretch of imagination, unfortunately.

Years ago, I had happened purely by chance to locate a slim volume, “Slowly Down the Ganges” at a Baroda bookstore. Narrated by Eric Newby and a classic in its own right among travelogues, this was the 1983 Picador (Pan Books) edition, the first edition having been brought out in 1966 by Hodder and Stoughton. 

Newby and his wife Wanda (his “fellow boatwoman” to use Newby’s own endearing epithet), undertook an arduous “twelve-hundred-mile journey down the Ganges from the place where it enters the Plains of India to the Sandheads, forty miles offshore in the Bay of Bengal, made by two Europeans in the winter of 1963-4”, to cite the elegant introduction to the edition at hand.

I have long wanted to share with sympathetic friends the absolute gems scattered throughout Newby’s extraordinary account, glittering with humour and wit, with some impatience, yes, but a great deal of humorous tolerance, too, towards a difficult terrain and even more difficult communication problems (verbal as well as logistic).

The irreverence (too cynic sometimes?) of the Englishman is only too apparent, but, to be fair, there is a lot of compassion and unstinted tribute to human kindness, too. And all throughout the volume, the grandeur and majesty of the mighty Ganges herself is palpable.

A small nugget of humour, then:

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Around the beginning of the journey “Through the Bhabar”, below Hardwar, the Newbys settled to rest for the day on the river-bank after another arduous leg of boating. Let us hear the rest in Newby's own words:

“A fish leapt in the river and sank once again with a dull plop. Bhosla was supposed to be the expert on fishes, but as he was not a forthcoming sort of man the process of finding out what sort of fish it was was (sic) a tedious one.

“Mauli Hai?”

“Nahin!”

“Kotha Hai?”

“Nahin!”

“Rahu Hai? Tengena Hai? Lachi Hai? Saunl Hai? Gaunch Hai?”

“Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin!”

“Blast! Bam Hai?”

“Hai!!”

“Elephants come here in the rains”, Karam Chand said helpfully, sensing my exasperation.