





REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
Mark Twain’s travels in India are a source
of endless fascination. In 1986 he reached Agra where he discovered a ‘memorable
scientific discovery that in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water
is the most puissant purifier in the world.” What he in fact witnessed
was an experiment conducted where cholera germs were killed after just six
hours by immersion in Ganga. (More about this later)
Munni Sircar, a housewife in Kolkata, remembers
many customs relating to Ganga jal and its supposed medicinal qualities when
she was growing up in Kolkata. Her grandmother used to walk down to the Ganga
ghat close to their house, bathe and then walk back home and do her pooja
every morning, every day, whether in winter or during the monsoon. Little
Munni used to ask her why she had to go every day and bathe in the river.
Grandmother explained that, ‘If you bathe in the Ganga every day, it
will cleanse you of all sins. Not only sins but diseases also.’
‘So when you told me about this Mysterious
Factor X, I suddenly realized that people of my grandmother’s generation
really believed that. Even the pooja bogh, the food offered to the gods and
goddesses, used to be cooked in Ganga water because it was thought to be clean,
absolutely clean and pure.’
A man would be hired to go and fetch water from
the Ganga. ‘Every fifteen days this man used to come. It was his job
to go to the Ganga and fetch water and store and fill up that copper drum.
We kind of thought that whenever food had to be cooked for the gods or goddesses
or some kind of pooja, it has to be cooked in Ganga water.’
This is tantalizing stuff. Is there, could there
perhaps be some truth to the old belief that there is indeed something special
about Ganga jal - the water of the river? The obvious place to start is in
the Himalayas.
There are a lot of theories,
none of them backed up by hard science: wild plants, abnormally low temperatures,
radioactivity, velocity.
But they’ll soon be history anyway because
the Tehri Dam will effectively destroy whatever the Bhagirathi may be bringing
down. That leaves the Alaknanda, but no scientist seems very interested in
investigating that river and its myriad streams. Again, the lack of interest
is curious.
Besides, it’s all a bit moot anyway. Since 1854, the Ganga Canal has
siphoned off almost all the winter flow of the river at Haridwar. If there
ever was or still is anything special in the waters of the river it would
have long since been diverted at Haridwar for irrigation.
So end of story? Not quite! Enter one DS Bhargava
to upset the entire applecart.
‘Ganga has some special
properties that I call the Mysterious Factor X.’
Devendra Swaroop Bhargava is now a retired professor
of Hydrology from Roorkee University. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bhargava published
many papers in respectable international journals, arguing that Ganga has
special chemical and biological properties that allow the river to absorb
organic wastes at an astonishingly high rate due to a remarkable ability to
re-oxygenate itself. One that stuck in my mind was the claim that animal bones
submerged in a tank at IIT-Kanpur had been dissolved within three days.
His arguments and conclusions set me off on
a parallel yatra to find out if the broader claims that the waters of Ganga
purify men’s souls and prepare them for the next life, have some basis
in scientific reality. I don’t pretend to have discovered the Mysterious
Factor X, a title Bhargava and I made up together as a convenient shorthand
back in 2001, but I have uncovered enough to suggest there is urgent need
for some major research project to resolve a host of unexplained loose ends
that cannot be dismissed as ‘old wives’ tales’ or just ‘blind
faith’ with no scientific basis.
‘Ganga water does not putrefy.’
This is just the first of Bhargava’s astonishing assertions. Putrefaction
occurs when there is an absence of oxygen, causing pathogens (harmful bacteria)
to grow. This is what makes water stale and smell. Bhargava is adamant because,
‘studies show pathogens do not survive in Ganga jal.’ (This is
what Twain had observed at Agra)
In the 1980s, he carried out a simple experiment with two beakers of Ganga
jal. The first he boiled, then added pathogens once the water had cooled.
The pathogens survived and the water putrefied. The other beaker he did not
boil and the pathogens died. But Bhargava was unable to isolate and so identify
the substance present in either beaker. He therefore concluded that whatever
had been removed by boiling must be volatile in nature.
Bhargava didn’t carry out his field experiments
in the Himalayas, but in the plains, and not once but all the way down from
Kanpur to Varanasi! So whatever was or is present in Ganga either can survive
Haridwar and the Ganga Canal or else has a completely different origin! Nothing
to do with the source of Ganga in the Western Himalayas - he doesn’t
rule out the foothills which recharge the river between Haridwar and Kanpur
- or the great tributaries: Gandak, Ghaghara or Kosi which flow down from
the Nepalese Himalayas. But since these huge rivers enter Ganga east of Varanasi,
whatever Mysterious Factor X they could contain would have had no effect on
Bhargava’s experiments or his other conclusions.
‘It has to be something it picks up along
its course.’ Bhargava’s going so fast one Sunday morning I have
to struggle for oxygen myself! ‘In other words something in its own
river bed?’
‘Yes, something unique to Ganga.’
Bhargava notes that if left alone most rivers
have a surprising ability to purify themselves. They are able to replenish
themselves with oxygen and so break down most of the organic waste dumped
into them. But Ganga can also purify itself ten to twenty times faster than
its neighbour the Yamuna.
Bhargava says Ganga has these extraordinary
self-purifying abilities, specifically ‘because of its high content
of dissolved oxygen (DO), extraordinary high rate of re-aeration, long DO-retention
abilities, and the very fast assimilation of the putrefiable organic matter
that has been discharged into the Ganga river.’
Ganga can therefore absorb a lot of human and
animal wastes. Bhargava in fact claims the river removes fully sixty per cent
of all organic matter in the first thirty to forty minutes, while other rivers
take days. ‘There is something in Ganga that kills pathogens twenty-five
times faster than any other river!’
In our first conversations in 2001, Bhargava
had suggested temperature was an important factor, but when challenged in
2004 he agreed that doesn’t really hold up because whatever he discovered
happens in the plains. Here there’s really no significant difference
between Ganga and any other north Indian river. They’re all shallow,
essentially flat, - so the current is sluggish at best; are baked by the unrelenting
sun; and receive extraordinary increases in volume of water - and hence oxygen
- once a year from the annual monsoon. Size is also not a determining factor
because Ganga is by no means the largest river in south Asia.
A lot of what Bhargava has
long been saying - often in the wilderness because his papers have been published
almost exclusively in the West - makes sense. Obviously, whatever is present
in Ganga jal cannot come from Gaumukh because it is present as far south as
Varanasi, and it is organic because it dies when boiled.
In many ways he’s replicated and confirmed
a seminal paper by ME Hankin, the Chief Medical Officer for Agra, that was
published in 1896 by the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Then as now, the Institut
Pasteur was the authority on bacteria. Although English was his native language,
Hankin’s study was indeed first published in French, and only subsequently
translated back into English.
For several years I could not find a copy of
Hankin’s original. I was dependent on Bhargava’s summaries, in
print and in person.
Hankin had observed that ‘what protects
the Indian people from getting infected with some water-borne disease in spite
of their drinking (for religious rites) even the sewage-contaminated Ganga
water, has been a question that has been baffling the minds of environmental
technologists, scientists, and physicians, for a long time.’ This, Bhargava
argues, is because people develop immunity over time, although I think that
answers only one part of the question and doesn’t take into consideration
either his or Hankin’s observations.
This is Bhargava’s abstract of Hankin’s
thesis:
“Dr E. Hanbury Hankin’s research
of the nineteenth century relates to the disinfecting/antiviral power of the
Ganga’s water. Hankin (1896) reported that cholera microbes did not
survive for long in the Ganga’s waters. He conducted his studies on
the Ganga at Varanasi, where he collected samples below the cholera-infected
dead bodies that had been thrown into the Ganga, and found that the cholera
microbes died within a few hours of their contact with the Ganga water.”
He then goes on to summarize Hankin’s
tests, which he himself would essentially replicate a hundred years later.
‘Hankin inoculated cholera microbes in two beakers - one containing
Ganga water and the other containing sterile distilled water - and noticed
that the microbes died soon (in less than three hours) in the beaker containing
the Ganga water, whereas no great change took place in the living concentration
of cholera microbes even after 48 hours in the beaker containing the distilled
water.
“Hankin, however, noticed
that the Ganga water lost this strong disinfecting property after it had been
boiled in an open container. For some of his observations... it is noted that
the Ganga water, even if not heated, will, in less than three hours, kill
any cholera microbes that may have been added. However, the same water, if
heated, lacks this power. Hankin therefore attributes the disinfecting property
of the Ganga to the probable presence in it of some volatile material (Hankin,
1896).”
Hankin’s conclusions are the same as Bhargava’s.
The only difference is that Bhargava concludes that the Mysterious Factor
X exists in the river bed itself. It makes sense. It accounts for why he can
replicate his test right the way down the river to Varanasi. For the rest,
one must travel further down the river, wait and see.
Two weeks later at his ashram
in Bilhaur, south of Kannauj, Swami Ramesh Chanda Das seems to confirm Bhargava’s
theory.
‘It is gandhak - sulphur - and that’s
why no germs can live in this water or pollute the water. Gandhak is found
in the river bed.’
‘Why do you think no scientists have yet
discovered it?’ I’m a bit sceptical.
Ramesh Chanda is not!.
‘Whatever is said in the Veda scriptures,
we consider that the truth. I don’t know why the scientific people are
not getting their information from the Vedas and other places. It is written
there, this sulphur is the only thing which is keeping this river’s
water unique.'
Ramesh Chanda’s argument is
dashed the following week by AC Shukla, a professor at Christ Church college
in Kanpur.
‘Yes, there are sulphur springs in Ganga.
But sulphur kills off everything, the good as well as the bad. And there is
something in Ganga that is very beneficial called bacteriophage which would
be killed off if sulphur was really present in such massive quantities. So
I don’t think the Mysterious Factor X can be sulphur.’
‘What is a bacteriophage?’
I’ve never heard the term before. Dr Shukla is economic with words.
They’re precious things, not to be wasted in useless verbiage. He takes
a sip from his tea before addressing my question.
‘Ganga is unique because of this bacteriophage.
It comes from the Gangotri glacier and flows downwards. This bacteriophage
has the capacity to totally kill off bacterial pathogens. This phage grows
so vast and so rapidly that it can spread throughout the entire length of
Ganga from Gangotri to Ganga Sagar in just twenty four hours!
‘Twenty four hours? Twenty six hundred
kilometres? That’s phenomenal!’
‘The growth of this killing virus is very
rapid. It comes up in the water, it grows and multiplies and then vanishes
automatically in twenty four hours time.’
Presumably leaving no trace. Here today, gone
tomorrow and Ganga has been swept clean of disease. Extraordinary!
So have scientists been able to identify this
bacteriophage?
‘Yes, it’s called bacteriophage
Gangeticum.’ He says that a Canadian researcher (Shukla doesn’t
know his name, but I now know it has to be the French-Canadian Felix d’Herelle)
identified this bacteriophage in the mid-twentieth century. But what existed
then can no longer exist today because there will soon be no more continuous
flow of Ganga out of the Himalayas. The Tehri dams will be the death of Ganga’s
extraordinary self-purifying capacity.
Dr Shukla is adamant that water from the Nepalese
Himalayas, which feeds into Ganga lower down through the great Gandak, Ghaghara
and Kosi, cannot by definition carry this special bacteriophage. It can only
come from Gaumukh and Bhagirathi. At the time it seems stupid to ask why.
He dismisses Bhargava’s theory that the
Mysterious Factor X could exist in the river bed throughout the plains. I
explain that Bhargava has found Factor X from Kanpur to Varanasi and in the
last twenty years.
‘That’s impossible, because the
flow is no longer continuous. If you interrupt the flow of the river at Tehri
or Haridwar then the phage can no longer travel down the river into the plains.
There is a time-space connection. This may have happened fifty years ago,
but conditions have totally changed today. Fifty years ago, you could put
a few drops of Ganga jal into polluted water and it would kill all the bacterial
growth. It has been recorded.’
So there are all these tantalizing
theories that seem to cancel each other out. I’ve hit a brick wall.
Then I receive an email out of the blue from a colleague.
‘I’ve just met
an Indian scientist and he’s got something very important to tell you
about the Mysterious Factor X and Ganga,’ she wrote.
A rapid exchange of emails and a few days later
I was talking on the phone to Dr Jay Ramachandran, the founder of Gangagen,
a biotechnology company named in honour of ME Hankin’s discoveries,
with research laboratories in Palo Alto and Bangalore. Ram, as his friends
call him, has done enormous work on bacteriophages. Dr Shukla had introduced
me to the word. But it was Ram who made it real and could answer all my impatient
questions.
On the phone he explained: ‘Bacteriophages
are literally bacteria eaters. They can destroy a virus such as cholera before
it’s even got out of bed. If you study them under an electron microscope,
they look like those moon lander spacecraft. They have long legs that attach
to the bacteria host. They penetrate and destroy the chromosome and multiply
exponentially. In thirty minutes one hundred phages become ten thousand, and
so on.’
Now go and look at the three diagrams on the Gangagen Website.
Instinctively, Indians may
always have known about phages. Ram reminds me that many temples have a little
tank outside where people wash themselves and some of them have developed
a reputation as curative powers. ‘This could be due to phages.’
Ram also sent me the original French and English
texts of ME Hankin’s papers from 1894-96. I could finally read for myself
what Bhargava had been talking about. But there are still many unanswered
questions. Most of my scientific colleagues in the United States are very
sceptical. Why have they never heard about bacteriophages? Most of them assume
Ram must be claiming his discoveries would kill all diseases in Ganga, from
skin rashes to low-grade intestinal infections.
A little history: in 1917, the French-Canadian
scientist Felix d’Herelle, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris,
was asked to investigate the outbreak of dysentery which was afflicting soldiers
fighting in the First World War in northeastern France. He quickly found that
the dysentery was caused by the shigella bacteria. He cultured the bacteria
to study their growth and noticed that sometimes clear areas could be seen
on plates of bacteria. He recognized the significance of the clear areas (plaques).
Something was killing the bacteria. D’Herelle wondered if he could use
whatever it was as a treatment to cure the dysentery.
He took samples of a patient’s stool,
filtered out the bacteria, spread the mixture out on glass plates, and lo
and behold one morning the plate was clear. The bacteria had vanished. There
was no trace left. D’Herelle had a moment of epiphany: ‘What caused
my clear spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a
virus which is parasitic on bacteria.’
This was the pre-antibiotic
era. Unless one had natural immunity there was no way anyone could survive.
So when d’Herelle published his paper on how he had cured dysentery
in a whole village with bacteriophage treatment, it drew a lot of attention
and literally dozens of companies were formed to sell phages.
For ten years, bacteriophages were all the rage.
D’Herelle’s success stimulated commercial production of phages
for treating a broad variety of bacterial infections both in Europe and in
the United States. D’Herelle came to India, and phage therapy was tried
with impressive results in Punjab and Assam. The number of cholera deaths
plummeted. But few doctors in India or elsewhere understood how bacteriophages
actually worked, that bacteria could indeed also build up resistance, ‘capture’
phages and turn them back on themselves.
Then in 1934, the American Pharmaceutical Society
published a less than ringing endorsement. It concluded that phage therapies
were inconclusive. Simultaneously antibiotics became widespread. Antibiotics
were inexpensive, easy to produce and could be used to fight any bacteria.
The British in Assam next abandoned phage
therapy for different but no less revealing reasons. The health authorities
in India wanted to make proper sanitation their top priority. So any therapy
that reduced the emphasis on the need for better water and sewer systems was
seen as threatening. I think a lot of professional scepticism in the West
today still reflects that view. Ironically, phage therapy continued to be
used and developed successfully in the Soviet Union, right up to its collapse
in 1989.
‘Today the boot is on
the other foot. There’s a “perfect storm” brewing,’
Ram told me in his office in a Bangalore suburb.
‘More and more people are developing resistance
to antibiotics. I saw it myself at AstraZeneca.(he used to be CEO for their
Asian operations. It’s becoming increasingly uneconomic to develop new
drugs. So I think phages are the way of the future. They’ve been keeping
bacteria in check for three and a half billion years!’
In person Ram puts me to shame. At age seventy, he’s
tall, fit and bears a striking facial resemblance to the Austrian classical
music conductor Nicholas Harnoncourt. For many years his mandate at AstroZeneca
was to develop therapeutics for tuberculosis and malaria, two of the most
serious diseases in the developing world.
‘So I was very much involved with infectious
diseases. And what I saw convinced me that antibiotics are not the solution,
that we have to look for alternative therapies.’ When he retired he
simply kept on working because he was so worried at the growing ineffectiveness
of many antibiotics.
Ram confirmed that what Hankin had discovered
back in 1894 were indeed bacteriophages in (both) Yamuna and Ganga. Bhargava
had never said much about Yamuna.
‘First of all you have to remember that
all this happened over a hundred years ago. He was working in very primitive
conditions although he was pretty convinced that he was doing the right thing
by the standards of the day. He was using the latest equipment - ceramic filters,
that Louis Pasteur had developed to filter out the bacteria and debris. He
then took a culture of cholera-causing bacteria, and when he added water from
the Yamuna and Ganga he observed that within three hours, the bacteria were
dead.’
“Hankin boiled the river water and then added the
pathogens. They survived and multiplied. How come? Because the bacteriophages
had been killed off by the heat. Although phages are remarkably heat resistant,
above a certain temperature their structure simply breaks apart. There was
nothing left to kill off the bacterial pathogens.
“Hankin instinctively realized that both rivers contained
something that killed cholera bacteria, although it would only be identified
as a bacteriophage twenty-odd years later with the invention of the electronic
microsope. Ram says bacteriophages are micro-viruses rather than bacterial
anti-bodies and are present everywhere on the planet. In fact they are the
most abundant entities on the planet. It is estimated that there are ten raised
to the power of thirty one - an astronomical number - bacteriophages on the
planet. And in fact the bulk are in the oceans. If you go to any ocean and
take a millilitre of sea water you will find between one to ten million bacteriophages.
There are phages for all bacteria.
A cholera phage can only attach to a cholera bacteria, an E. coli phage only
to that specific E. coli and so on. They simply bide their time until they
can sense that bacteria. But when they do, all hell breaks loose. The moment
the phage gets into the bacterium it multiplies exponentially. In a few hours
you can have billions of bacteriophages but almost no more bacteria. They’ve
fled. Bacteria are always looking for something or someone to feed on, so
those that survive will disengage, move away to comparative safety, until
sooner or later the appropriate phage finds them out again, and the whole
process starts all over again. This is why there’s usually a state of
low level truce with bacteria kept in ecological control.
‘Why can’t we see bacteriophages
in the water?’
‘It can hang around in shady waters for
years, but you won’t notice it because there is no host. It will only
express itself when there is a bacterial host.’ So the bacteriophage
doesn’t disappear after twenty-four hours, as Shukla had stated. It
simply becomes dormant.
One of the major problems in using phages as
therapeutics has always been this extraordinary specificity. The phage that
will kill cholera will not kill shigella dysentery even though they are both
diarrhoeal diseases. And one that kills shigella will not kill typhoid, and
so on. The challenge is to perform the diagnosis of the infection properly,
and then match the right phage to that infection.
Unfortunately, this specificity simply wasn’t
understood back in the 1920s. The physician had to properly diagnose the infection.
He had to know if it was cholera or shigella or some other type of diarrhoeal
infection, Montezuma’s revenge or whatever. And then find the appropriate
phage to treat it. This was a very difficult proposition. Even today it is
complicated, in those days it was practically impossible because they didn’t
have the right tools, specifically the electron microscope, which had yet
to be invented. So the inappropriate phage was often applied to the wrong
bacteria. Predictably, it failed to do the job.
The development of penicillin effectively ended
the use of bacteriophage. Penicillin was and still is the miracle panacea
because it’s a broad spectrum antibiotic. The physician can therefore
say ‘ahah-infection-fever-penicillin.’ So most physicians simply
said forget about phages, we’ll go with antibiotics. Doctors also didn’t
understand that phages can only kill bacteria. Back then, for example, doctors
wanted to use phages to kill herpes. But herpes is a virus. So failure and
discredit of the bacteriophage for more than fifty years. Until today, when
doctors are quickly encountering massive bacterial resistance to antibiotics
that have cost a king’s ransom to develop. Hence the re-emergence of
the lowly bacteriophage.
All rivers contain phages. There’s nothing
special about Ganga. Hankin found phages in the Yamuna at Agra. Bhargava reported
he had found this Mysterious Factor X at Varanasi and Allahabad. So the theory
they are somehow unique to Himalayan waters or to below-normal temperatures
is a red herring. Because bacteriophages exist throughout the entire river,
damming or diverting the flow of the Himalayan Ganga at Tehri or Haridwar
will probably have no impact on their presence, and therefore on the ability
of Ganga to purify itself.
But any radical alteration in the state of the
river, such as massive chemical pollution, or a complete breakdown of oxygen
due to algae or other vegetal growth could have very negative consequences.
The persistence of bacteriophages is undoubtedly affected by temperature and
direct sunlight. It’s reasonable to assume that a significant increase
in salinity or another chemical change could also be disruptive. The trouble
is we just don’t know how or what.
The bacteria which phages
feed on can come from human sewage, or from human bodies when they bathe.
The human body in water in fact acts as a catalyst. The higher the concentration
of bathers the more food for the phages to feast on. So wherever there are
major bathing festivals (the various Kumbh Melas) and high numbers of bathers
(Varanasi, Allahabad) phages will flock.
‘When you have a Kumbh Mela, I really
believe that phages help. When sixty million people bathe in a small area,
huge amounts of bacteria are rinsed off from their bodies. Suddenly the bacterial
concentration is very high. Even though the phage concentration is initially
very low, the chance of the proper bacterium meeting a phage is very likely.
Having found out its prey, the phage will multiply and the whole area suddenly
becomes rich in phages. So a few days after a Kumbh Mela you should find a
lot of phages there.
Music to my ears! The 2003
Ardh Mela at Nasik (on the Godavari river) confirmed Ram’s hypothesis.
‘Six million people bathed there. We took water samples and found about
eight or nine different phages in that water,’ just about what you’d
expect when several million take a ‘holy dip’ together.’
As more people bathe in Ganga, the river seems
to acquire greater powers of self-purification. Environmental purists would
be horrified, just as the British in Assam health authorities were horrified
at the idea of downplaying sanitation as their number one health priority.
To some it may also sound like an open invitation
to encourage people to dump untreated sewage into Ganga. No one is advocating
this. But maybe one doesn’t need to get quite so hung up on expensive
and complex sewage treatment plants that are heavily dependent on electricity.
Settling ponds and bacteriophages seem a low-cost and effective alternative
to high-tech methods - using nature to repair the damage man has done to the
environment.
An environmental science colleague in the United
States is worried that if the bacteria are wiped out then all the phages must
also be killed. He bases this on what happens to wildlife. But Ram says the
analogy is wrong. My colleague is confusing ecology and microbiology. Phages
bring the bacteria back down to within acceptable levels. They don’t
eliminate them entirely. There’s no need. The phages can take a breather
until the next alert. When the bacteria are back within acceptable levels,
the phages have done their work.
Which is why there are never
any cases of mass epidemics at bathing festivals such as the various Kumbh
Melas or Kartik Purnima or Makar Sankranti. Western common sense and hygiene
insist there must be. But there never are because phages have killed most
of the bacteria within twelve hours. ‘The devastation is exponential!’
as Ram says.
At Varanasi, the Sankat Mochan Foundation laboratories
report E.coli levels millions above permissible World Health Organization
levels. And yet there are no resultant pandemics. Skin diseases, stomach disorders,
but no devastating epidemics. This might well be the reason why.
Today, Gangagen has built up a library of over four hundred and fifty phages.
Ironically, Gangagen gets many of them in the raw sewage collected from hospitals
in Bangalore. ‘Human shit is a wonderful thing because it contains most
of the phages we need to treat common epidemics like cholera, typhoid, gastro-enteritis.
We shouldn’t try to banish shit from our lives, if it contains the very
microbacteria that prevent us getting sick.’
I find it strange that so few Indian scientists
seem intellectually interested in phages. Fragmentation of scientific knowledge?
Ignorance? Jealousy? Ram thinks all of the above. Many Indian scientists simply
separate out science from their religious beliefs. They accept and pass on
to other subjects. Ram says: ‘I have known many particle physicists
who will not move to a new place unless the stars are in the right position.
They simply accept this is how it has to be. Once the astrologer has reassured
them they can go back into the lab as if nothing has ever happened. Total
divorce between the two.’
The bacteriophage is undoubtedly a part of the
Mysterious Factor X. But it’s not the entire explanation. Bacteriophage
is indeed Bhargava’s ‘disinfectant’ that kills cholera and
dysentery germs. They’re not however unique to Ganga. The extraordinary
high rates of re-oxygenation that Bhargava identified may be. But they are
two completely distinct phenomena. Bhargava’s mistake was to confuse
and collapse them into a single phenomenon because he had misread a badly-printed
copy of a hundred year-old journal in French.
Hankin writes that his discoveries were made
in the Yamuna, in Agra where he was Chief Medical Officer. He could see bodies
literally rotting on the banks of the river. So he carried out his series
of simple experiments with samples from Yamuna and at local wells. Hankin
also took comparative readings in Ganga, but at Allahabad. He saw with his
own eyes that the cholera germ was present in epidemic proportions at Agra
and at Allahabad. He nowhere writes that he observed cholera at either Haridwar
or Varanasi. Bhargava simply misread the French. This is where much of the
problem begins. Bhargava assumed Hankin has carried out his experiments only
in Ganga and came up with his startling - and false - claims for Ganga jal.
Bacteriophage explains why there are no pandemics
in Ganga. But the true Mysterious Factor X, the quality that Ganga possesses
that no other river does, is perhaps its extraordinary rate of re-oxygenation.
Bhargava found Ganga has a rate many times greater than Yamuna. The question
is why? Nobody to my knowledge has even attempted or hinted at a plausible
answer. Neither temperature nor velocity offer a remotely convincing answer.
It’s back to something in the actual river bed.
If Bhargava hadn’t gone
on to document the extraordinary re-oxygenation rates of the river and its
ability to dissolve organic matter fully twenty-five times faster than any
other river in India or elsewhere in the world, he’d probably be just
a footnote in scientific papers. But he did discover these attributes! And
they argue that there is something other than bacteriophages in the water.
The river does have some extraordinary rejuvenating powers.
Miah M. Hussainuzzaman, a young geomorphologist
I met in Kanpur in December 2005, mentioned he was researching for arsenic
in the area. ‘How did it get here?’ I wondered.
‘Probably brought down thousands of years
ago, lying dormant ever since. Then other chemicals - maybe man-made, maybe
totally innocuous like oxygen - interact with it. The original material suddenly
stirs, changes its nature. It’s called geochemistry,’ Hussainuzzaman
casually explains, then goes on to more esoteric subjects.
But my interest has been piqued. Bhargava’s
eyes would have lit up - something in the river bed. The germ of another theory
has been sown!