Is River Ganga the Only Holy River?

I am sort of revisiting my post of vintage 2009 and another one posted about a month ago. In the recent one, you see youngsters (only boys and adult men, except for one lady accompanied by a man, her husband maybe) frolicking in what appears to be a swimming pool – in reality a check dam type of construction to reduce scouring around the piers downstream of the bridge across River Kollidam. That scene arrested my attention as to how people (mostly those living on the banks of the river or maybe in its flood plains) find ways to enjoy life. I tried to stress the aspect of “finding happiness where you are”

About a week ago, one day and after a gap of two days, on two successive days I went to a similar location on River Cauvery (I live in Srirangam –  an island town, in a way garlanded by two rivers – a strip of land that is about 30 km long and no more than 3-4 km wide at the maximum).  On the first day, the check dam was truly checking the river, not allowing it to overflow its top. 

The flow over the weir is almost nothing and the gates are just at the level of the weir top. No fault of the river, but the catchment areas were not blessed with rain.

 Then, it happened. The catchment area of River Cauvery, at least in Karnataka, went from bone dry to making the river almost breach its banks. It would have if not for the alertness of authorities. They seemed to have opened the gates of the Krishna Raja Sagar dam (locally called Brindavan Garden), and there was  good amount of rain downstream of it too.

This is what I saw when I re-visited it after a few days. The check-dam was overflowing, but not by much (yet, it could get dangerously high, this overflow without the frolickers feeling it). And the following photographs repeat what you saw in the later post linked earlier above. Professionals may call it a weir (a dam with a low-head – water level upstream does not rise too much, and typically there could be a few gates across the deep channel of the river), but I guess readers of my post will not bother too much about it.

One thing to note: When water flows above the top, there is not a significant amount of separation between the dam profile and the water flow (the foamy top along the weir). When the waterflow increases, even this separation could be subdued (due to the pressure head of the overflow). In a large dam, like the Krishna Raja Sagar dam, the profile of the spillway is very carefully designed and executed such that at no level of flow there will be an effective separation.

In fact, in the manner of loose correlation, the famous failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has been researched and the cause was concluded as “vortex shedding”. The key word here is “shedding”. The vortices formed on the webs of the plate girder separated from the web. This, I believe is what is called separation of the overflow water over the spillway profile. This parallel I have drawn might grate on professionals, but I am being honest – I am saying merely that we can create a loose parallels, none being the loser.

Almost closing the post, I post below two more pictures taken from the river bank) showing bathers/swimmers.

In so many ways a river adds to life. Every old civilisation must have developed from a small group of people leading a life supported by a rivulet, a stream, a small or big waterway, like River Ganga, a tributary, a contributary …. Not all such flowing waters are perennial; yet, there are many rivers around which a group could and must have started to grow, and civilization develops. If you see “Earth at Night”, you would notice that what I have said has at least some truth to it. One can trace the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges, the Cauvery, the Yamuna, the Jamuna (Bangladesh), the Mississippi, the Danube, the Euphrates and the Tigris …because along the river, communitities developed and perhaps even coalesed into society - organization.

To conclude, I am not saying River Ganga is not holy. Rather, from the viewpoint of civilization each and every flowing water body and even standing ones like lakes, is holy because of its role in the rise of development, sui generis, almost.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 P. S. (2024-08-01)

Kindly refer to the segment emphasized in Bold-Italics in the blog post. Yesterday I visited the site but the access to the Bathing Ghat was closed because the flow above the weir was higher; and, most importantly, just as I had imagined and speculated, the "foamy top along the river" downstream was conspicuous by its absence.

Yes, I am proud that what I speculated (through a string of thoughts overlaid on the logic of what I had studied five decades ago) came thorugh for me. 

Raghuram Ekambaram