Notes on the Geography of Northern India: Roorkee Cemetery and Hardwar Ghats

Just happened to be passing through, was startled by the cemetery, and had to stop at the nearby bathing ghats.

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Roorkee, where the Ganges emerges from the Himalaya, was the logical place for the British to put an engineering college: after all, it's the locatiosn of the lheadworks of the Ganges Canal. Stands to reason that Roorkee soon had a cemetery.

Overgrown.

Here's one that's accessible. Students dying of cholera, 1875.

A student pushed into fatal exhaustion.

Could an engineer have had a hand in this one?

Yes, indeed. The epitaph might have read, "Stayed On."

A few miles away, bathers have come to the sacred water.

Hard to tell, but it's very cold.

And swift, which is why the posts are there.

The water itself is silty. Or, as a bather says, "very dirty but very pure."

Back a couple of blocks in the crowded city, there's an opening for visitors' cars.

Very dirty but very pure?