Day 97 Disquiet Dog
No Peace or Harmony Here
This handsome black dog, quietly overseeing the evening’s kite flying and litter-picking from his perch on the stone ghats in Varanasi, became a short-lived model for my artist wife, Fiona, one evening. Most days, in Varanasi and every other place we visited, we made a point of finding somewhere peaceful to sit for even just 30 minutes as the sun was setting. I would simply watch the fascinating interactions between people, and between the dogs too, as they went about their business, while Fiona would add a new drawing to her sketchbook, attracting a crowd of admirers who all wanted selfies with her. This pup, however, clearly did not understand his role as an artist’s muse and wandered off shortly after she started her drawing of him.
The boatmen who had befriended this dog and fed him biscuits whilst they drank chai and chatted about life every evening told us, after much coaxing, the name they had given him, but it is a little too offensive to write in this blog. I don’t wish to unintentionally offend anyone and, from what I gather, the name can be pretty insulting, so I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to what his moniker was. At night, G Dog, as I shall call him, chooses to sleep on one particular boat. Each evening he makes his way from the shoreline, picking his way over the numerous wooden boats moored chaotically along the edge, heading for the one that belongs to his friend. Under one of the roughly-sawn bench seats was a little space with an old cloth and that was G Dogs’s home for the night.
These boats interest me. They are, according to our good friend, Sonu, who comes from a great family of boatmen, always built the same way and even he didn’t really seem to know why that was. There is no finesse or grace in these vessels. From a distance they may look like sleek river-going craft but a quick inspection shows them to be made of a patchwork of chunky planks of roughly-sawn wood, nailed together and painted thickly with a bitumen-like substance to prevent the wood from rotting and to fill the gaps left by the rough construction.
The boats used to almost always be powered by man. There was, and still is, a whole slice of Indian people who are known as boatmen and, although some might consider it a lower caste, they are rightfully very proud of their heritage and history. Interestingly, I did not know that a person’s name in India could reflect their job until I was chatting to another Indian friend of ours and I mentioned the name of our Varanasi host, Sonu Manjhi. He immediately knew Sonu was a boatman because it is literally a translation of his surname. These boatmen, living and working along the Ganges in Varanasi, have been rowing up and down and across the river for centuries, until relatively recently. As with so many things these days, their job is changing significantly; following the path of modernisation and money.
We have known Sonu since 2019 and he was always a very cheery and upbeat chap. He runs a small and basic guesthouse very close to the river and his whole ethos revolved around spirituality, peace, yoga and his pride for his city. Today he is a deeply troubled person and it’s very sad to see. The river and city he has lived in his whole life is ‘progressing’ at a vast rate of knots in a direction dictated by the local government and the race for wealth.
Even as visitors, we notice huge and undesirable change here. Tourists are actually useful recorders of shifting baseline syndrome. An occasional visitor – such as myself travelling to India once each year – could notice changes that a resident might not simply because the changes are gradual and unnoticed. However, the differences in Varanasi are so obvious that everyone sees them. The rapid transition from row boats to powered boats is one of the biggest of these. Each evening in Varanasi we would join Sonu and his friends, and G dog of course, and sit upon the plank of wood they used as a bench whilst drinking chai and chewing the fat. As the only woman in the group they were always sure to give Fiona the little luxurious section of the seat that had an old cloth draped over it. Their topic of discussion was always the same — the excessive number and type of new boats on the river.
There was an accident last year where a large boat collided with a small one and the government made the knee-jerk decision to simply stop all boat traffic for weeks whilst they investigated. This was a massive blow to the hundreds of boatmen who were not part of the issue and relied upon their boats for income. Now these accidents are happening more frequently and it is only a matter of time before someone is killed. You can watch the river for half an hour on any given day and you will spot a collision or near-miss.
As far as anyone there could tell me there had always been a tradition of learning to row a boat safely, starting from a young age. Sonu was a child when he first began to navigate the river, learning his craft in between games of cricket inside the huge deserted hotel that is now the five-star Brij Rama Palace. You steadily built up experience and learnt the nuances of the currents and the river traffic. Now, it seems, anyone with deep pockets can buy a boat and set sail. Why, you might ask? Because it is very lucrative.
Even the friend’s rates Sonu charged us for a two-hour ride cost around the same as a night in his apartment. These days many of the boatmen are quite wealthy, relative to other people in the city, and the huge numbers of Instagram-obsessed, newly wealthy, Indian tourists they are attracting are driving the industry. The interesting thing is, Indian tourists, whose numbers now seem to have overtaken foreign tourists, are far more likely to demand a motorised boat than a human-powered one. The boatmen are simply following the money which, sadly, is leading them, and the river, further and further away from the peace and spirituality the ancient city of Varanasi was rooted in.
The problems of this huge and fast rise in motorised boats are many. Noise pollution is perhaps the most obvious. From dawn until dusk, the rapid woodpecker knocking sound of a hundred small engines burrows into your mind until, ironically, you go and seek peace in the roads above. The humid river air traps the smoky pollution from these most basic of engines across its entire surface, adding a few toxic chemicals to the wood smoke from the cremation fires. Then there is the deathly beautiful mirror-like sheen of spilled fuel that is now mingled with the discarded flowers gently lapping the lowest stone steps of the ghats where people bathe and animals drink.
Despite the boats being officially regulated, in reality nothing is done unless there is a fear of it becoming a spectacle in the newspapers. The government is keen to boost tourism and, according to our boatmen friends, they turn a blind eye to most of the rule-breaking. It seems that the temptation of money overrides any of the religious teaching that the city has based itself upon. Everyone here, it seems, is willing to sacrifice peace, harmony and respect for the river they worship in exchange for their slice of tourist money.
There are still some rules that cannot be broken, however. During our last visit there was uproar because someone had filmed a crew member of one of the larger, government sanctioned, electric tourist boats urinating over the side and directly into the river. Then, the very next day, another large boat was spotted emptying its toilet directly into the water. Everyone knows that the river is heavily polluted and has raw sewage flowing into it from any number of sources, but the sheer audacity and disrespect of actually using the holy river Ganges openly as a toilet has quite rightly caused great upset. For the first time leaving Varanasi, I am not sure I will return again. The city I have grown to love has changed so much, driven by greed that’s fuelled by poorly managed tourism.
Be sure to watch the video below with the sound on.
