Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xix, 316 pp. [16] pp. of plates. (Maps, coloured photos.) US$25.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-878617-7.
Victor Mallet has written a fine book about all things Ganges. Across 18 well-written chapters, Mallet details the social, cultural, and environmental significance of India’s most famous river, both past and present. He ventures into the myths and legends that surround it, its key importance in popular religion and culture, the stories of the people whose lives it sustains, the animals and superbugs that inhabit it, and not least, the pollution that now threatens to kill it.
Mallet is not the first chronicler to have been attracted by the myth, magic, and mystery of the mighty Ma Ganga. Indeed, scholars, travellers, journalists, scientists, devotees, and adventurers alike have been drawn to it for centuries, and have written about it extensively. Mallet draws on much of this earlier literature as he adds new layers of sediment to the evolving narrative of the Ganges. His investigative journalism into the multiple stressors that besiege the river from all sides is particularly commendable, and the bleak picture he paints of the state of one of the world’s most important rivers should be read as a call to action by the people entrusted with the responsibility to manage India’s natural resources judiciously.
Many of the early chapters in the book, as well as some of the closing ones, offer clear and concise analyses of the politics of environmental destruction in plains north India. On his travels along the Ganges—from its origin at Gaumukh in the north to its dispersal into the Bay of Bengal in the east—Mallet discovers a landscape marred by environmental degradation on a grand scale. Climate change and the destructive impact of large irrigation projects have combined with toxic industrial pollution, the havoc wreaked by excessively water-hungry farmers, and the demands and follies of a steadily growing population to threaten the very existence of the Ganges. Environmental activists fight a brave but lonely battle, largely to no avail. Saving the Ganges, Mallet asserts, is a pursuit driven by the enthusiasm of the few, rather than the masses (84). To make matters worse, the landscape of environmental degradation that Mallet criss-crosses is also one of corruption, bureaucratic inertia, and dysfunctional governance (95; 143; 243). One grand government scheme after another, launched to clean the Ganges with much pomp and circumstance, comes to naught as money is siphoned off along the way and infrastructure is left to decay: “So many Ganga meeting, so little Ganga action … So many millions wasted,” as one interviewee laments (53). This trope of the lethargic, inefficient, and corrupt state as the root cause of much evil is a familiar one in both popular discourse and journalism on contemporary India. In this case, it appears to be for good reasons.
Prime Minister Modi looms large in the book. As a journalist, Mallet both met and interviewed the incumbent (xvii), and he writes with insight and a well-balanced mix of hope and scepticism about Modi’s grand plans for cleaning the Ganges. He quotes Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar insisting that the Modi government would clean the river so quickly and efficiently that the Ganges would not be an issue in the 2019 general election (246). Kumar was only 50 percent right: the Ganges was certainly no election issue in 2019, but this wasn’t because it was any cleaner than in 2014. Rather, whatever nascent environmentalist tendencies existed within government had been eclipsed by the shrill but much more potent rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism, which won a second term for Modi. Saving the Ganges is likely to be an infinitely more complex manoeuvre than, say, demonetizing most of the country’s currency or amending the constitution, and one wonders whether Modi 2.0 is up to the task.
The book is well written and easy to read, even for a non-specialist audience. But it is hard to summarize and even more difficult to review. On the one hand, Mallet gives us an unputdownable account of the Ganges, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His ability to translate his grand tour of north India into lucid narrative is unsurpassed: he deftly uses the elegant pen of the seasoned reporter to bring people and places to life. On the other hand, it is at times hard to figure out how the individual chapters are meant to add up to a larger, coherent narrative. In the brief introduction, Mallet presents his overarching ambition in several different ways, but the most important one seems to be to write about what is happening to the Ganges and what needs to be done to save it. Mallet is at his inquisitive best when he does precisely this, but if this is the central mission of the book, several chapters (especially in the latter half of the book) tend to stray off topic. Or perhaps the topics covered are simply too diverse to be successfully integrated into a more coherent narrative. To some extent, all 18 chapters can be read as stand-alone pieces, and while this gives each chapter a nice sense of closure, it also leaves the reader with a somewhat fragmentary impression. One wishes that Mallet—or perhaps his editors at OUP—had been just as meticulous when stitching the book together as the author was when he carried out his research. A longer, more substantial introduction laying out the book’s central argument and story line, the addition of a conclusion, and the weeding out of much of the informational redundancy we encounter along the way would have helped. Nonetheless, there is much to learn from River of Life, River of Death, and it is to be hoped that Mallet will repeat his journey down the Ganges in a decade or two to update us on the fate of this extraordinary river.
Kenneth Bo Nielsen
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway