Six sacred waters.
Read about each one, then choose the river you grew up near.
Ganga
Har Ki Pauri, Haridwar, Uttarakhand
Where the Ganga leaves the mountains
The gateway ghat, and the kund where a drop of the amrit is said to have fallen.
Haridwar is where the Ganga comes out of the hills onto the plain, a long way down from Gaumukh. The name is read two ways, Hari-dwar, the gate of Vishnu, and Har-dwar, the gate of Shiva. Both are kept, because the town is the doorway to Badrinath in one direction and Kedarnath in the other.
A working bathing ghat
Do your snan hereRead about this waterThe other five
Five more waters, each with a page.
Triveni Sangam
The Sangam, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh
Two rivers you can see, and a third held in faith
Tirtharaj, the king of tirthas, where the Ganga and the Yamuna run side by side before they mix.
A confluence, reached by boatRead
Do your snan hereYamuna
Vishram Ghat, Mathura, Uttar Pradesh
Krishna's own river
Vishram, rest. The ghat at which Mathura's parikrama of its own ghats begins and ends.
A working bathing ghatRead
Do your snan hereGodavari
Ram Kund, Nashik, Maharashtra
Gautami, the river a sage brought down
The kund at Panchavati where Nashik gives its dead to the water.
A working bathing ghatRead
Do your snan hereShipra
Ram Ghat, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh
At Avantika, where time is reckoned
The oldest bathing ghat of the city that keeps Mahakal.
A working bathing ghatRead
Do your snan hereKaveri
Talakaveri, Kodagu, Karnataka
Ponni, at the spring it rises from
The spring the Kaveri rises from, inside a temple tank on Brahmagiri. A ghat is further down.
A temple tank at the river's sourceRead
Do your snan here
What you find at every water
The same four things at all six.
The river's flow
Modelled river discharge at the grid cell covering that reach, from the Copernicus global flood model, published once a day. It is a model rather than a gauge, and each value is ranked against that same cell in this week of the year, 1997 to 2025.
The sunrise
Sunrise and sunset read at the ghat's own coordinates. Haridwar's and Nashik's are half an hour apart.
The muhurat windows
Brahma, pratah, abhijit and godhuli, worked out from that ghat's own sunrise.
The snan
Three minutes on your own screen with that river at the state it is in, and your own sankalp in your own words.
Which water to choose
Start with the river you grew up near. Choosing fresh? These four help.
- For your first snan
- The Ganga at Har Ki Pauri, or the Shipra at Ram Ghat. Both are working bathing ghats with a daily evening aarti, and both carry figures that move with the season.
- For remembrance
- The Godavari at Ram Kund, or the Sangam at Prayagraj. Ram Kund is Nashik's asthi visarjan tirth. At Prayagraj pind daan is conducted by the Prayagwal purohits, who hold that right by descent.
- For Braj
- The Yamuna at Vishram Ghat. In the Braj tradition the Yamuna is Krishna's own river and is addressed with affection, and that changes the words that are said.
- For the source itself
- Talakaveri, the spring the Kaveri rises from, inside a temple tank on Brahmagiri. Its figure is a few cubic metres a second rather than a few thousand.
Choose your water. Sit with it tomorrow.
Three minutes, at the hour the panchang names, with the river as it runs that morning.
Begin your snan