Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture [Hardcover]

Stephen Alter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2001

This is an account of a journey taken in India. The destination is the source of the Ganges, the holy and most famous of Indian rivers. It is a physical journey, involving train rides across the vast plains and passages on foot far into snow-covered valleys and mountains. It is also a spiritual journey, taking a man deep into the heart and soul of the ancient religious culture of India.

Stephen Alter, who was born in the Himalayan foothills, crosses many miles, and several millennia, to search for the source of Indian religion. Along the way, as he reaches one holy spot after another, meeting grounds for pilgrims, remote towns, and forgotten temples, he delves into the myths and traditions of an antique land. He explores the tales of heroic derring-do, evil and good, and recounts the great stories of death, warfare, passions, and sacred wisdom that animate the vibrant history and religious traditions of India. As every pilgrim learns, a spiritual search involves travel but ultimately returns to the inner self. Sacred Waters is a richly told narrative of a beautiful land and of a man's interior journey, and is for readers everywhere who seek to plumb their own spiritual sources.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Garhwal, boasting the four sources of the Ganges River in northern India, must qualify as one of the most sacred stretches of land in the world, and novelist Stephen Alter transports us there in his travelogue Sacred Waters. Countless pilgrims make the same trip every year, but whereas they now travel by bus, Alter does it the old-fashioned way, trekking to each of the headwaters on foot. Since this is also Alter's birthplace and childhood stomping grounds, we couldn't ask for a better guide. He knows each species of plant, bird, and beast by name and tells the grand tales of Hindu mythology associated with the ancient terrain. Fluent in the local languages, he also makes us privy to his chats with pot-smoking sadhus, greedy Brahmins, simple nomads, and pilgrims that he meets along the way. Although Alter has the tendency to slip into the emotionless detachment of a journalist in his descriptions, there remains enough wonder at the power of the natural landscape and color in the fantastic myths to make Sacred Waters a trek worth taking. --Brian Bruya

From Publishers Weekly

In his latest travel memoir, Alter (Amritsar to Lahore) tracks the inexorable path of "progress" and various human responses to it. Progress is embodied in the roads and new dams that exist where before there were only footpaths for Hindus traveling to the "four main sources of the Ganga a journey known as the Char Dham Yatra." The once arduous mountain pilgrimage used to take devout Hindus up to four months, but now, in public buses or air-conditioned coaches, it might take a couple of weeks. Alter begins his journey on foot, traveling through the Himalayas, in whose foothills he was born. Seeing himself not as a mountaineer but as a pilgrim who "becomes one with this terrain," undertaking "tapasya," Hindu for surviving on "whatever the forest provides," Alter, writer-in-residence at MIT, describes political, socioeconomic and ecological changes in the terrain and people he encounters. One man calls a series of dams in Tehri "temples of the future," while another describes the same as "sacrilege, modern technology obstructing the inexorable current of a holy river." Well-versed in Hindu mythology, Alter (an atheist, himself) infuses the book with spiritual tales. It was the author's goal to evoke a fast disappearing way of life and topography, to show spiritual interests eclipsed by material ones. With vivid descriptions of the many people, villages, dharamshalas, shrines, ashrams and Indian customs so foreign and seemingly inaccessible to most Westerners, Alter achieves this end, portraying a landscape before it is effectively trampled by what is called "progress."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005850
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005857
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #654,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sacred Travel, October 28, 2001

By 

Saul Diskin (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (Hardcover)

Stephen Alter's marvelous book is reminiscent of fine nineteenth century travel writing in which the writer, in lucid, and sometimes poetic, style brings the reader with him to see and experience things most people never would otherwise. His credentials are impeccable: the son of missionaries who was raised in northern India, fluent in Hindi and conversant in other Indian languages and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of the region. A non believer, he traces the steps of an ancient pilgrimage, feeling the spiritual attraction of the place while wryly commenting on the religious hypocrisy he encounters along the way. For all of its gifts it is the writing that commends this fine book. For the author's wise and seasoned view of the world and understatement of the rigors of his journey I would compare it to Bruce Chatwin's, In Patagonia.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Introduction to River Ganga, July 14, 2004

By 

"KB" Kamla Srinivasan (SF Bay Area and India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (Hardcover)

Surprisingly, there exist very few good books on the rich myths, and natural history of the hill districts of Garhwal and Kumaon. Till date probably the best known figure from the region is Jim Corbett of the "Man Eaters of Kumaon" fame.

Stephen Alter's latest book titled, "Sacred Waters," is a beautifully written narrative of his journey to the sources of River Ganga (or Ganges) in the Garhwal Himalayas. For the Hindus, the Ganga is a sacred river.

Alter's book is a welcome addition to the few goods books that exist about this region. The book is a wonderful introduction to understanding the history of the region, and the central place the River Ganga occupies for many Indians.

The book is an interesting mix of natural history, myths and Alter's own personal experience of River Ganga, whose source is hidden in the beautiful and rugged mountains of Garhwal, often called as "Dev Bhoomi," - the land of the gods. Alter paints a fascinating picture of the changing moods and nature of the river as it bursts from the mountains and courses down to the dusty Gangetic plains, and into the ocean.

Alter is a second generation Pahari-American, who was born and brought up in the hills of Uttaranchal. Pahari means someone from the mountain in Hindi.