Tripping Down The Ganga : A Son’s Exploration of Faith

As a schoolboy in the early 1990s Siddharth Kapila began accompanying his devout and intrepid mother on numerous yaatras to sacred sites along the Ganga. In 2015 now a more sceptical young man he decides to visit them on his own. And over the next seven years as he journeys from Gaumukh the source of the river in the high Himalayas to Ganga Sagar where it meets the Bay of Bengal he realizes that he isn’t simply exploring his mother’s faith—the faith of tens of millions of Hindus—but also his own.Up in Gangotri he meets renunciant babas who share with him their life stories and their meagre food. In Kedarnath a sadhu tells him how the Shiva temple miraculously survived the devastating floods of 2013. At Badrinath he attends a family friend’s marriage to Vishnu to undo a defect in her horoscope. Walking from Haridwar to Rishikesh with the kanwariyas many of whom have travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot he sheds his disdain for these young men often accused of bullying and aggression. In Allahabad—now Prayagraj—he tries to parse facts about the Naga sadhus from legend as he watches them perform astonishing feats of strength. Ancient Varanasi offers diverse experiences from a bhang-induced revelry on Mahashivratri to conversations on the occult with Aghoris who tell him why they sometimes feed on the dead. In between he visits Bodh Gaya where he prays to Shiva at the Mahabodhi Temple dedicated to Buddha.Moving back and forth in time Kapila reflects on the politics—and economics—of religion the hypocrisy and bigotry of some of his fellow pilgrims the opportunism of some sadhus and the integrity and compassion of others. And he reflects too on the resilience of people’s devotion the great diversity of Hinduism and the mighty pull of the Ganga which keeps bringing him back to itself no matter how hard he reasons against the faith of his birth.As much an entertaining travelogue as an introspective memoir Tripping Down the Ganga is an unprecedented book on the everyday Hinduism of believers and non-believers alike.