Few rivers bear the burden of a civilisation’s contradictions like the Ganga. It is worshipped as the holiest of waters, even as its banks are lined with sewage and garbage. It is invoked as the purifier of souls, even as it fails to cleanse itself. In Siddharth Kapila’s Tripping Down the Ganga: A Son’s Exploration of Faith, the river serves as both a narrative device and a metaphor for faith in motion, shifting and sedimented, eroding certainty even as it deposits conviction.
Kapila is no pilgrim, nor is he an outsider marvelling at the exoticism of the subcontinent. His journey from Gaumukh to Gangasagar is neither a discovery nor a rediscovery; it is a reckoning. Over seven years, from 2015 to 2022, he retraces his childhood yatras, now as an adult sceptical of inherited belief and yet tethered to its echoes. His mother, a devout tax lawyer, haunts these pages as a figure of deep contradiction, at once rational and superstitious, whose faith he both interrogates and begrudgingly respects.
A travelogue of contradictions
The Ganga holds a special place in the hearts of millions, shaping the communities along its banks, guiding merchants through its waters, and witnessing the rise and fall of empires that defined its identity. Kapila’s journey begins where all such accounts must: at the river’s source. The glacial trickle of Gaumukh is deceptive in its promise, a place that suggests purity before the river is claimed by the multitudes. As he moves downstream, he encounters the contradictions that define religious India: sadhus who renounce the world while thriving on alms, Naga ascetics who embody defiance yet reinforce orthodoxy, Aghoris whose faith demands transgression, and Kanwariyas whose boisterous devotion merges the sacred with the chaotic.
What sets this book apart is Kapila’s refusal to adopt the easy lens of either reverence or derision. He does not romanticise the ascetics or dismiss the pilgrims. Instead, he observes, records, and engages, connecting his own skepticism into the stories without making it the story’s axis. Faith, here, is neither entirely absurd nor entirely transcendent; it simply is – a force as relentless as the river itself.
For all its personal undertones, Tripping Down the Ganga is acutely aware of the structures that scaffold devotion. Kapila also sees pilgrimage towns for what they are: enterprises in faith, sustained by a steady stream of believers and the industry that serves them. The commodification of divinity is unavoidable, whether in the corridors of the newly transformed Kashi Vishwanath or the makeshift bazaars that spring up around the Kumbh Mela. Yet, he does not lament this reality; he dissects it.
His engagement with the politics of religion is similarly unsentimental. He acknowledges the creeping transformation of Hinduism from a personal, chaotic practice into a state-sanctioned spectacle.
The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, for instance, is examined not just as an infrastructural project but as a deliberate recalibration of religious experience from intimate ritual to managed tourism. Similarly, he does not flinch from the contested spaces of belief, from the uneasy Hindu–Buddhist tensions in Bodh Gaya to the omnipresent spectre of Ayodhya that hovers over contemporary Hindu nationalism.
At its core, Kapila’s book is less about religion and more about the nature of inheritance. His mother’s faith is the fulcrum around which his own belief pivots, challenged at every step yet impossible to dismiss. She is not a caricature of blind devotion; she is a woman who embodies the contradictions of India itself: a practitioner of law who places stock in astrology, a believer in rituals who demands evidence for everything else.
Kapila’s own reckoning with faith is not a neat arc, either. He does not arrive at a resolution, nor does he seek one. The river remains the book’s defining metaphor; belief is neither static nor linear. It bends, it accumulates, and it carries with it the debris of past convictions and the sediment of new understanding. Some banks erode; others are rebuilt.
The river as argument
What makes Tripping Down the Ganga compelling is its refusal to surrender to easy anecdotes. It does not pander to the reader’s expectations; there is no grand revelation, no moment of sudden conversion or outright rejection. Instead, Kapila approaches faith with the only tool that withstands its shifting tides: inquiry. His prose is unadorned yet incisive, carrying the weight of observation rather than judgment.
These stories from the banks of the Ganges take us to a world where the river is not just a backdrop but a living, breathing entity, an omnipresent character. It is revered as a goddess yet treated with casual disregard, worshipped for its purity while choked by the very hands that seek its blessings.
The Ganges bears the weight of history, the burden of faith, and the detritus of modern neglect. It flows with the prayers of millions, carrying both their salvation and their waste, a sacred lifeline and a dying waterway at once. It stands at the heart of ritual and mythology, but its voice is drowned in the cacophony of politics, commerce, and pollution. The Ganges looms large in the collective consciousness, but if rivers could speak, perhaps this one would ask: How long before devotion turns to accountability?
We all dream of a Ganga that is pure enough for ritual sipping in Kanpur and navigable for large commercial ships from Kolkata to Allahabad (now Prayagraj). Yet, at a time when we remain indifferent and unaware of the damaging effects of reckless modernisation on our rivers and mountains, this book also brings us face-to-face with the harsh realities on the ground.
By the end, neither Kapila nor the reader arrives at a definitive answer on faith. But perhaps that is the point. Like the Ganga, belief is never truly still it is an argument in motion, a current that both shapes and is shaped, a question that refuses to settle.
In acknowledging this, Tripping Down the Ganga does what few books on faith dare to: it leaves room for doubt. And in doing so, it becomes something far more honest.
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is the curator of the Banaras Literature Festival.
Tripping Down The Ganga: A Son’s Exploration of Faith, Siddharth Kapila, Speaking Tiger Books.
