Although the Ganga River has attracted the attention of historians, anthropologists, and hydrologists, Sudipta Sen’s book breaks fresh ground in South Asian historiography. By using the Ganga as a central organising trope of the narrative and synthesising a vast body of sources in several languages on the pasts of the river and its valley, Sen gives a synthetic overview of the long-term history of the north Indian plains. This path-breaking work, written in a flowing narrative style and adhering to chronological and thematic arrangements, brings the environment and geography into an active conversation with the history of the Ganga and its valley. The book is the fruit of more than a decade of painstaking research distilling the data from geology, archaeology, anthropology, the Vedas, the Buddhist Jātakas, the Brahmanas, the Purānas, and the historical archives of the early modern and modern periods. It bears the stamp of the author’s ripe erudition. Sen begins by introducing the deep structural history of the subcontinent, invoking the Kali Gandaki River, a tributary to the Ganga that furrowed its course through the Himalayas well before the world’s youngest mountain ranges were fully formed more than a hundred million years ago. The antiquity of the Kali and veneration of shaligrams – ammonite fossils found in the river’s deep gorges – a form of the god Vishnu who, according to Hindu mythology, emanates in purest, fluid, and natural form as the Ganga, sets the tone for the symbolic importance of the aquatic natural elements. Such long-held mythologies form the basic premise that led Sen to ask the puzzling question at the outset of the book: “How did the Ganges come to assume such a central place in the civilization and culture of the Indian subcontinent?” (p. 3). While culture, myth, and religion played an essential role in elevating the river as a celestial embodiment of the goddess Ganga and a fluvial pathway to heaven, Sen writes that the river is also a living monument of the “richly layered human landscape” (p. 11). Knitting together the river’s mythical and historical pasts, another more tangible filature is the “long-term convergence of climate and ecology and the cumulative consequences of human activity” (p. 13) that throws up the paradoxical contemporary existence of the river as most sacred, yet gravely polluted.

The book is neatly organised into nine densely packed chapters that follow the thematic and chronological order. The first two chapters sumptuously introduce the importance of this sacred river for the pilgrims, the devotees, and the consumers of myths and fables and of the healthful and disease-dispelling Ganga water. A captivating account of the Himalayan pilgrim trails, the long-held sacred river confluences, and the admirers who penned some of the most beautiful hymns of the Ganga is interspersed with the author’s own trek along the high altitude, mountainous sacred sites at the source of the Ganga that Sen calls “a metaphysical threshold” (p. 18). Enchanted pilgrims, their traditions and practices at several prayāgs – the confluences of rivers including the one at Allahabad – and at other pilgrimage sites such as Haridwar and Banaras were largely unfathomable and harshly commented upon by many materialist and progress-minded Western critics such as Aldous Huxley, who saw such spirituality as “the primal curse of India” (p. 24). Yet others like Rudyard Kipling gave a discreet treatment to the pilgrims and renouncers like Purun Bhagat who could easily trade the world and their high social standing for the ascetic life, prompting Kipling to comment that “as a man drops the cloak he [no] longer needs,” Bhagat was doing something “no Englishman would have dreamed of doing” (p. 23). Connected with the theme of pilgrimage and piety, in chapter two, “Ganga Descends”, Sen succinctly analyses the myriad renderings of the stories about the divinely mediated descent of the Ganga found not only in the epic and Purānic sources, but also the dynamic evolution of the myth in some of the medieval vernacular textual sources (pp. 62–68).

In the third chapter, “Digging out of Prehistory”, Sen explores the deep history of the Ganga valley, human settlement, domestication of flora and fauna, harnessing of pottery and iron technologies, and the emergence of the first cities and kingdoms. The author argues against the idea that the emergence of agriculture constituted what archaeologist Gordon Childe called the Neolithic Revolution and marked a decisive break from the Mesolithic past. Siding with the geographer Carl Sauer, Sen writes that the rise of agriculture proceeded sideways along with hunting and foraging. Indeed, in the Ganga valley, the foragers and hunters supplemented their food by flirting with rudimentary agricultural practices. However, the issue is not the beginning of agriculture, but rather the scale and magnitude of economic transformation in the Ganga valley during the late second and first millennium BCE. While agriculture was central to this unprecedented change, it cannot be explained without taking into consideration a broad set of questions related to the external stimulus provided by the migration and migratory routes of the Indo-Aryan speakers. These questions relate to their encounters, exchanges, and intermingling with the earlier settlers – both the aborigines and the settled migrants. The incremental migratory push towards the verdant and water-rich central Ganga valley and its fertile prairie soils and the migrants’ creeping colonisation of the semi-arid environmental niches particularly suited their economic and strategic needs. Similarly, the role of the traction power of the cattle and horses brought in by the migrants and the use of the Sanskrit language for organising the knowledge of agricultural seasons and rainfall cycles further catalysed the early historical processes, thereby leading to the rise of cities and kingdoms. Along with agriculture, the exploitation of iron technology, the social and political contexts of systematic surplus extraction, and long-distance trade were other crucial drivers that transformed the central Ganga valley during the first millennium BCE.

In the following chapter, “Rise of the Warring Kingdoms”, Sen gives a rich account of the chiefdoms, oligarchies, kingdoms, and city-states that populated the river plains and notes that the political and economic ferment was most noticeable between the present-day cities of Allahabad in the west and Bhagalpur in the east. Clearly, this stretch of the river valley can be taken as an intermediary environmental zone between the relatively arid marches to the further west and south and the humid zone to the north and east, where the resources of both these contrasting, yet complementary, zones converged. The geographical salience of the region exerted lasting effects on material, cultural, and political formations, ultimately leading to the rise of the Maurya Empire that pushed further east to lay claim to Samatata and Tamralipti in the Ganga delta. Chapter five, “Guardians of the Middle Country”, discusses how the oldest animist and spirit traditions found their way into the Buddhist practices around the veneration of trees, stones, nāgas (snakes), yakshas (nature spirits), and totems and matured into the sanctified relics, reliquaries, and graven images carved into the stupas and worshipped in Mahayana Buddhism. The iconography of the goddess Ganga and pilgrimage to the riverbanks that emerged prominently beyond the Shunga and Kanva Dynasties and during the Gupta Empire period owe much to these long continuing cultural practices. They are discussed in great detail in chapter six, “The Goddess of Fortune”. As a female deity depicted on the coins of the Gupta emperors, Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and Ganga, also linked with fertility and plenty, became intricately linked with the symbols of imperial sovereignty. This political conception of the Ganga and the ritual use of the Ganga water in the coronation of the kings became a hardened practice in the successive regimes, and over time, assumed a far wider geographical currency. In the next chapter, along with a lucid synthetic overview of the imperial rivalry for supremacy over the Ganga valley between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, Sen discusses how the Ganga, river plains, cities, and kingdoms forcefully entered into the political imagination during this turbulent and fluid period.

Chapter eight, “The Making of the Agrarian Heartland”, is a fine tribute to the environmental history of the Ganga valley. Sen succinctly analyses the forest clearances, extension of agriculture in the fertile valley and the Ganga delta, and the fiscal and administrative arrangements during the Turko-Afghan regimes and the Mughal Empire. Although Sen discusses some of the strategic forts such as Allahabad and Chunar, the fact that the Mughals could hold onto their empire as long as they controlled the overland and river routes from their strategic forts and garrison towns is less apparent. For the decline of the Mughal Empire, Sen seems to be clinging to an old argument about Aurangzeb’s bigotry and the destruction of Hindu temples at Benares. However, we know that the later Mughals did not pursue Aurangzeb’s bigoted policies, but the slide in imperial fortune continued unabated. In the last chapter, Sen gives an admirable account of the ecology of the Ganga delta, the Sundarbans, the trading and raiding activities of the Portuguese, the opening of the river and valley to the European trade and commerce, the extension of European rivalry in India, the East India Company’s political supremacy in Bengal, and the subsequent management of the prized possession. According to Sen, the devastating famine of 1769–70 that killed millions in the lower Ganga valley “paradoxically, destroyed the old land revenue order” (p. 326), giving the company free rein to revamp the revenue and taxation structure. In the epilogue, Sen highlights the environmental degradation of the Ganga and aptly warns that the ongoing neglect could well lead the river to the path of the Yellow River, which dried up 400 miles inland from the delta (p. 353).

By telling the river’s history and intertwining it with the valley’s incredible material, cultural, and political pasts over several millennia, Sen draws attention to the existential crisis that looms over the future of the most cherished Indian river, the environment and ecology of which face perennial assaults. The book has successfully brought the Ganga River and its ecology to the centre of a discussion about the environmental degradation caused by human caprice and the misplaced priorities of the technocratic and development-oriented nation-state. The book has also prepared the ground to investigate further the role and function of the Ganga from a much wider, global perspective. The river had become a conduit between the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean and the Mughal heartland and holds the promise of explaining the decline of the Mughal Empire by considering its logistical limits in controlling the riparian highway. This book makes a remarkable contribution to South Asian historiography, notwithstanding some production-related typological errors, and will be of great help for scholars, general readers, environmentalists, policy-makers, and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students interested in South Asian history.