The principal river that flows through Kolkata is known mistakenly as the Ganga or Ganges, while it is a distributary known and recognised as Hooghly. For my own learning, I intend to trace the course and the history of the Hooghly river, as without its study, any history of this city is incomplete. The Hooghly river rises in Giria where the Ganges splits itself into two distributaries – the Hooghly and the Padma with the latter flowing into Bangladesh while the former flows into West Bengal. The Hooghly is 260km long and is fed largely by the man-made Farakkha Feeder Canal rather than the natural river source at Giria.
Tracing the Ganga to Bengal
The Ganges is a transboundary
Asian river that flows through both India and Bangladesh and is the most sacred
river in Hindu religion. The 2,525 km long river rises in the western Himalayas
in the Indian state of Uttarakhand and flows south and east through the
Gangetic field of Northern India. The Ganga has two headstreams – the Bhagirathi
and the Alaknanda. While the Bhagirathi stream is considered to be the source
stream in Hindu scriptures, hydrology (the study of the quality and movement of
water) holds Alaknanda as the source stream on account of its great length and
discharge.
The main stream of the Ganges
begins at the confluence of these two rivers at Deviprayag in the Garhwal
division of Uttarakhand. Although many small streams comprise the headwaters of
the Ganges, the six longest and their five confluences are considered sacred.
The six headstreams are the Alaknanda, Dhauliganga, Nandakini, Pindar,
Mandakini, and Bhagirathi rivers. The five confluences, known as the Panch
Prayag, are all along the Alaknanda. They are, in downstream order,
Vishnuprayag, where the Dhauliganga joins the Alaknanda; Nandprayag, where the
Nandakini joins; Karnaprayag, where the Pindar joins, Rudraprayag, where the
Mandakini joins; and finally, Devprayag, where the Bhagirathi joins the
Alaknanda to form the Ganges River proper.
Along the way between Allahabad
and Malda, West Bengal, the Ganges passes the towns of Chunar, Mirzapur,
Varanasi, Ghazipur, Patna, Hajipur, Chapra, Bhagalpur, Ballia, Buxar, Simaria,
Sultanganj, and Saidpur. At Bhagalpur, the river begins to flow south-southeast
and at Pakur, it begins its attrition with the branching away of its first
distributary, the Bhāgirathi-Hooghly, which goes on to become the Hooghly
River.
Hooghly, Adi Ganga and Tribeni
Tribeni is a small town in the
northern part of Bansberia Municipality in Hooghly in the state of West Bengal,
India. It was an old holy place for the Hindus. The sanctity of the place has
been recognized for many centuries and has been mentioned in Pavana-Dutam, a
Sanskrit piece of the last quarter of the 12th century.
Tribeni is said to get its name
from the divergence of three rivers from the main stream of the Ganges – Hooghly,
Jamuna and Saraswati and was also known as Muktaveni in order to distinguish it
from Prayag in Allahabad which was known as Yuktaveni. The Saraswati flowed south-west
beyond Saptagram and the Jamuna – which is unrelated to both the North Indian
river Yamuna and to the East Bengal river Jamuna – flows past the northern
border of the modern-day Kalyani. It is believed that the Satraswati river
flowed into an estuary near present day Tamluk – then Tamralipta – and was fed
by the waters of both the Damodar and the Rupnarayan in addition to several
other streams before emptying out into the sea. Till the 16th
century, the Saraswati channel contained the flow of the main waters of the
Ganges.
The Bhagirathi proper channel
(named in today’s terms) of this divergence flowed through the present Hooghly
channel to Kolkata and then through the Adi Ganga past Kalighat to the sea. Adi
Ganga was known earlier as Gobindapur Creek and marked the southern boundary of
Gobindapur village. It was excavated by Edward Surman, who led a group to Delhi
in 1717. The nullah was deepened by Colonel William Tolly in 1773 and connected
to the Circular Canal. Thereafter, it bore his name. In 1775, Tolly connected
the Adi Ganga to the Vidyadhari. Since Tolly’s renovation the Adi Ganga has
remained navigable. However, the neglect of waterways in general and other
factors such as population pressure and unplanned urbanisation caused further
silting of Adi Ganga. It ultimately turned into a sewer channel for the
south-western part of Kolkata.
In the 16th century,
the main waters of the Bhagirathi which previously used to flow through the
Saraswati, now began to flow through the Hoogly channel. This resulted in the
upper saraswati being a dead and dry river while the Hooghly abandoned the
course of the Adi Ganga and partook that of the lower Saraswati. In his
Manasamangal, Bipradas Piplai has described the journey path of Chand Saudagor,
the merchant, as passing Chitpur, Betore, Kalighat, Churaghat, Baruipur,
Chhatrabhog, Badrikunda, Hathiagarh, Choumukhi, Satamukhi and Sagarsangam. The
description of Bipradas Piplai tallies to a large extent with Van den Brouck’s
map of 1660.
Some quarters ascribe the change
in the Bhagirathi flow and the virtual
drying up of Adi Ganga to the artificial link to the lower channel of the
Saraswati, whereby that became the main channel for oceangoing ships and the
Adi Ganga became derelict. This feat is ascribed by some to Nawab Alivardi Khan.
Others think that a tidal creek connecting the Saraswati and the Hooghly, near
the point where the Adi Ganga branched off was the cause. It is rumoured that
Dutch traders re-sectioned this tidal creek to let seagoing vessels come up the
Bhagirathi. In olden times, no river flowed from Khiderpor to Sankrail, as
testified by Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, but the Dutch traders were responsible
for creating the Hooghly-Saraswati river connection. Documents found in the
Rotterdam Municipality archives indicate the presence of toll collection points
along the connected waterway in the middle of the 18th century,
making this channel between Khiderpore and Sankail known as Katiganga.
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