Slowly Down the Ganges

This frequently hilarious account of the author's boat trip down the Ganges River has it all: bureaucracy, a prickly spousal travelling companion, bizarre Hindu cultists, and dry streambeds loaded with basketball-sized rocks. Oh yes, there is also the heartland of classical India's Hindu culture unrolling along the shore, with the author's slightly quaint but extremely well-informed interest in the military history of the Raj (as well as reminiscences of his own exploits there years before) thrown in for good measure and some trips down side streets. Newby is one of the great travel writers, I prefer him to Theroux or Chatwin, he is down-to-eart, funny, and endlessly game.

I read this book after I'd spent a month in India and I found it LOL funny. There's no great insights here, no V.S. Naipual style reflection or analysis, it's just a tale of two Colonial-era Brits determined to travel the 1,200 mile length of the Ganges by boat in 1963/64. But if you're a westerner who's ever spent an extended period of time trying to get around inside of northern India, I suspect you'll find this book as amusing as I did. So in that sense it captures some of spirit of the place, though perhaps it's only amusing if you've experienced first-hand the chaos that is India. It's probably not a good choice if you're looking for a traveler's introduction to "modern" India.

During the 1950s and 1960s there were several travel books written on India, whose tone were in general (many cases rightfully so) caustic. While Naipauls 'Area of Darkness' had the pain and disgust of seeing his country of origin in shambles, and Joseph Campbells 'Brahman and Baksheesh' had the disappointment of his lack of success in seeing theory in practice , one wonders about motives of Eric Newby in writing this book. Imagine the irony of a former member of a plundering army coming back, enjoying the hospitality of the same region, lamenting about how bad everything is. Throughout the book, he almost has nothing good to say about the culture, religion, beliefs or the traditions that make Ganges sacred to a billion people . The only people he warms up to are those of his own religion, and other natives who praise the Raj (perhaps he misses the Indian sense of hospitality to visitors , to make them feel at home, even if they dont actually mean it).
But the book is hilarious where it doesnt get condescending, probably belongs to a bygone colonial era, where trashing heathen beliefs would get you a book deal. I give it 3 stars for the pure spirit of adventure involved in the travel and for his devoted wife who puts up with lot of chaos in a foreign land.

I am a long-time fan of Eric Newby since stumbling upon his 1956 book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. I actually fell off the couch laughing. In addition to the adventures of the trip, Newby offers an inside look at Afghani geography, history and culture in a very readable form. Gently Down the Ganges, by comparison, I found monotonous and dreary, almost whiny. I strongly recommend Newby for his self-deprecating, dry "British Traveler" wit but cannot recommend Gently Down the Ganges as the best of Newby.

Unlike his grounded colleague, the river traveller can indulge his bent for distraction only so far. His route is more or less fixed; certainly his destination is final. And so it is to Eric Newby's credit for eliciting from this journey 300 pages worth of erudite and witty observances, for it is essentially a procession of waterborne shuttles, one ghat to the next, punctuated only by the occasional onshore foray, the function of which mostly being to secure boat and crew for the succeeding leg. I suspect, though, that Newby could glean 300 pages from a dinghy ride in a swimming pool, and that that too would be immensely readable.

The archetypical harrassed traveller, at every turn events conspire to defeat or, at the least, humiliate Newby. The atmosphere of the journey is established during preparations which smack of the comical: "I had even bought an immense bamboo pole from the specialist shop in the bazaar as a defence against dacoits whose supposed whereabouts were indicated on some rather depressing maps which G. [their sometime native companion] had annotated with this and similar information, in the same way mediaeval cartographers had inscribed `Here be dragons' on the blank expanses of their productions." In any case, these maps proved unserviceable. Because of hostilities with China, Indian Defence Regulations of the time (1963) were so stringent that it was impossible to buy large-scale maps of India of any kind. (At any rate, many maps of the Ganges are unashamedly indecisive of its course owing to the shifting alluvial bed.)

Typically, arrangements that had been made in advance proved to be anything but arranged. The vessel intended to provide passage through the upper reaches of the Ganges was discovered to be in such a state of disrepair that use of it in a bathtub would have endangered lives. Attempts to procure another led Newby on an endeavour which he describes thus: "What we were doing in this instance was the equivalent in Britain of waking a fairly senior officer of the Metropolitan Water Board at a quarter to seven on a Winter's morning, in order to ask him to wake a yet more senior official and request the loan of a boat from one of the reservoirs in order to go down to Southend." Of course, the acquisition of another vessel appeased their troubles only momentarily.

The journey proper was fraught from the outset: "It is difficult to describe the emotions that one feels when one is aground on a twleve-hundred-mile boat journey within hailing distance of one's point of departure." When not stranded upon a shoal Newby is confounded by the various tributaries shooting off this way and that. About this he consults the only man in India worse off than he: "There was only one person to ask the way from, an old man sitting alone on the shingle, but he was not very helpful. `I don't know where I am,' he said."

When defeated by such circumstances Newby must, to advance his journey, venture ashore and seek out assistance. This demands the infiltration of the interminable mores of Indian society, a kind of mystic bureaucracy under which the populace shuns reason in favour of the myriad allegorical incarnations of the pantheon of mythic figures. He says of making even the most innocent inquiry: "But I knew that this was not the kind of question that can be asked in India - it was too logical and would therefore cause grave offence." He shortly arrives at the conclusion: "In India it is possible to win every battle but the last one."

During such battles Newby often retreats to his arsenal of introductions, formal letters written by state officials and the like, the ace up the sleeve of the traveller at tether's end. Not surprisingly these missives of officialdom are met by the Indian everyman with bemusement or else total indifference. His choicest letter, that from the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is singled for particularly devastating apathy.

Newby's travelling companion, his wife, the long-suffering Wanda, is rendered something of an enigma in SLOWLY DOWN THE GANGES. Apart from delivering Newby from the dire gastric consequences of provincial Indian foods ("Wanda had produced [white radishes] artfully from a mysterious-looking bag.") her reason for being appears mostly to be for materialising at inopportune moments, usually the apex of some maddening asperity, in order to scorch the occasion with some withering remark. This surely had Newby tearing at his hair, but the narrative is infused with a rich vein of self-deprecating humour because of it. (Their courtship, which was borne of hardships much graver, is recounted in another of Newby's titles, `LOVE AND WAR IN THE APINNENES')

Newby's own wit is deliciously dry. Unlike many contemporary travel writers he does not over-reach for a laugh or rely on out-and-out ridicule. However, his capacity for a descriptive turn of phrase is tested here. Certainly there are scapes that would arrest the senses of even the most impassive observer - shores lined with crazed sadhus and puja-devoted villagers, a river strewn with the pungent remnants of funerary pyres - but there is little variation on this theme for 1200 miles. And if the scenery is unchanging, then the characters - those folk along the way who lend a travel narrative its colour - are positively inanimate. Newby does admirably though, adroitly drawing from the cultural abyss the idiosyncrasies and personality interplay of guides and boatmen.

And so, his route may be fixed and his destination final, but Newby never fails to appreciate the telling advantage he holds over his grounded colleague: "The only consolation about being lost on a river is that if you go on downstream you are bound to arrive somewhere different, unlike being lost in a forest, where you are quite likely to end up where you started at the beginning of the day."

****1/2 stars.

(Contrary to what you may read, this book is anything but "insipid". Nor is it "lacking in prose, dialogue and structure." It, in fact, revels in them.)