Description

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An enchanting portrayal of rural and urban northern India along the banks of her holiest river, stretching from the Bay of Bengal up into the Himalayas. The pilgrimage took seven months. Dennison Berwick writes, "I wanted to make a great walk, to set off with no prospect of ending for months. I wanted to see the land that had fired the British imagination for generations. I wanted to travel at the pace of rural India, where four out of five Indians live, and to walk in the footsteps of the peasants. And why the Ganga? I was searching for answers to one question: How could a river also be a goddess? For millions of Hindus, the river Ganga is the physical expression of the goddess Ganga; bathing in her waters is both spiritual ritual and necessary ablution. We have learned so well in the West to separate sacred from secular that the very notion of their being indivisible, like the Ganga, seems absurd. However, the Native Indians of Canada have a saving. 'Never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins, ' and this was something I took literally. I was determined to wear village clothes, eat local foods, adopt local customs for washing and toilet and as much as possible speak the language. I felt that meeting India's people and walking through her villages and beside her most sacred river was the only way to learn about the country. Perhaps then, I thought, I might begin to understand something of the relationship between the Ganga and her devotees and might find answers to my question.

About the Author

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Adventure has been in his blood since he was a small boy living on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales in northern England. After leaving school, he hitch-hiked alone from Cape Town to Cairo and visited Afghanistan in 1976, before the Russian invasion. He emigrated to Canada in 1980 and in 1983-84 walked the entire length of the Ganges, India's holiest river, raising money for Save the Children Fund. The journey took seven months and was the subject of his first book, "A Walk along The Ganges". From 1985 to 1991 he travelled extensively in the Amazon in a canoe, carrying little more than a rain canopy, mosquito net and a hammock, and wrote about the experience in "Amazon". During these travels he met and stayed with Yanomami Indians in a remote area in the north of the forest and chronicled their fight to survive in his book "Savages, The Life and Killing of the Yanomami". In 1995 he built and operated Still Life Retreat in southern Ontario, Canada, and edited and published two editions of the "Canadian Retreat Guide". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1984. He now lives on his 32-foot steel sailboat "Kuan Yin" and is currently retracing the extraordinary voyage in 1811 of an Inuit sea captain and Moravian missionaries along the coast of Labrador into Ungava Bay in northern Canada. Books by Dennison Berwick: STAYING HOME, How to Get Away Without Going Away SAVAGES, The Life & Killing of the Yanomami AMAZON A WALK ALONG THE GANGES