Ganga in His Hair

Long ago King Sagara set a horse free for a great sacrifice, and the horse disappeared.

He sent his sons to find it. He had sixty thousand of them, and they searched the way an army searches, loudly and without patience. At last they found the horse grazing quietly beside a sage named Kapila, who sat deep in meditation and had no idea it was there.

"Thief!" they shouted. "He has stolen our father's horse!"

Kapila opened his eyes.

That was all he did. Where sixty thousand princes had stood, there were sixty thousand heaps of ash.

Their souls could not rise. The elders said that only one thing could free them: the water of Ganga, the river that flowed in heaven. If she ever touched those ashes, the princes would go up to the sky. But Ganga had never come to earth, and for generations nobody could bring her down.

Then came Bhagiratha, a king of the same family, who decided that he would be the one.

He gave his kingdom into other hands, walked into the mountains and stood in penance. He stood through the heat and through the snow, year after year, asking for one thing.

At last Brahma, the creator, came to him.

"You have earned it," he said. "Ganga will descend. But think, Bhagiratha. A river falling from the sky is not rain. The earth cannot take that blow. She will crack it open. Only one being is strong enough to stand under her, and you will have to ask him yourself."

So Bhagiratha began all over again, and this time he prayed to Shiva.

Shiva did not make him wait as long. "Let her come," he said. "I will take her on my head."

High above, Ganga heard this, and she was not pleased. She was proud of her strength. Catch her? She would come down with her whole weight, she thought, and sweep this mountain god off his feet and carry him away.

She fell.

Shiva stood on the peak with his feet apart and his face turned up, and the river of heaven crashed down on him and vanished. She had landed in his hair. His matted locks were a forest with no paths, and Ganga, who had meant to flatten him, wandered round and round inside them and could not find her way out. She was lost in there for years.

Bhagiratha waited at the foot of the mountain, looking at dry ground. Then, because there was nothing else he knew how to do, he prayed again.

Shiva smiled, loosened one lock of hair and let her out, gently now, in a few thin streams.

Bhagiratha climbed into his chariot and drove ahead, and the river followed him down from the mountains and across the plains like a calf behind its mother.

Only once did she forget herself. She washed straight over the hermitage of a sage named Jahnu, and the furious sage drank the whole river in a single swallow. Bhagiratha had to beg yet again. Jahnu relented and let her flow out through his ear, which is why one of her names is Jahnavi, Jahnu's daughter.

At last she reached the sea, and the place where the ashes lay. The water touched them, and sixty thousand princes rose to heaven.

The river is called Bhagirathi after the king who would not give up. And Shiva has been called Gangadhara ever since, the one who carries Ganga, for she still flows from his hair.

The Bhagavata Purana keeps the king, the penance and Shiva's hair. What it changes is the beginning. Where did Ganga come from before she was a river of heaven?

It answers with another story. Once Vishnu came to earth as Vamana, a small brahmin boy, and asked a mighty king for a gift: as much land as he could cover in three steps. The king laughed and agreed. Then the boy grew. He grew until his first step covered the whole earth, and with his second he reached up through the sky.

His foot went higher than the sky. It rose until it struck the very top of the universe, the shell that holds everything in, and the shell cracked.

Outside that shell, says the Bhagavata, there is water, the pure ocean that surrounds all the worlds. Through the crack a stream of it came pouring in. It ran over the toes of Vishnu, and from that touch it took its holiness.

That stream is Ganga. For this reason she has an older name than any of the others: Vishnupadi, the one who flows from Vishnu's foot.

From there the story joins the one you know. She flowed in the heavens for an age. A king named Bhagiratha stood in the snow and asked for her. She fell, and Shiva caught her in his hair and let her down softly to the earth.

So in this telling the water that people cup in their hands at Haridwar or Kashi has made a long journey. It came from outside the universe, passed over the foot of Vishnu, and rested in the hair of Shiva, before it ever touched the ground.