Sunil Sethi: River journeys and channel crossings

Imagine how dramatically India's interstate relations or ties with neighbours would improve if its languishing river journeys and channel crossings were revived instead of being allowed to perish

Old-timers fondly remember how, till the early 1960s, they would spend an evening at the Bankipore Club in Patna on the banks of the Ganges (apparently the high point of social life in Bihar) and finish dinner with cakes supplied by Flurys in Calcutta: desserts from the famous Park Street confectioner were regularly sent upriver by boat. Travellers' tales are full of such believe-it-or-not accounts of when the country's river and sea lanes were the major source of transport and trade. 

One of the wittiest accounts of going up the Ganges is left by Emily Eden, who recorded the journey in her copious letters home collected in Up the Country. Consummate artist and chronicler, she was the sister and hostess of Lord Auckland; a sharp-eyed spinster who sailed from Calcutta to Banaras in 1837, observing his gubernatorial progress from a "flat"- a long barge towed by a steamer - and a staff of 140 minions. "Certainly this boat must be drunk, she reels about in such a disorderly fashion. I wish I had my cork jacket on," she noted with waspish humour.

Amitav Ghosh, the novelist who was in Delhi this week and so much of whose stirring historical fiction (The Hungry Tide, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke) centres on India's waterways, from the mangroves of the Sunderbans to the rivers of Bengal, deeply laments their steady decline and gradual demise. "Our deltas are silted up, our rivers reduced to polluted seasonal streams and our river ports relegated to the pages of history. Who can imagine a river journey from Calcutta to Allahabad any more? Do the Bombay-Goa steamers even ply with frequency? Fuel-guzzling airplanes and congested highways have taken over. It is one of the biggest environmental tragedies of contemporary India."

Historically, India's waterways were more than lifelines in the movement of people and goods: they were strategic routes in exercising administrative control. The emperor Akbar consolidated his empire by building two of his greatest forts at Allahabad and Attock, superbly sited guard posts at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, Indus and Kabul rivers.

India's loss strikes me with growing resonance each time I travel overseas: from the Bosporus to the English channel, Europe's water lanes are flourishing highways of business and pleasure. The British columnist Simon Kuper, who works for the Financial Times but lives from choice in Paris, recently wrote a piece titled "Why Paris is the affordable London suburb". "Now that the Eurostar journey takes just two hours 15 minutes, I often drop my kids off at school in Paris, and later that morning have coffee with someone in London. I get most of London's joys without the pain."

Instead of Mr Kuper's high-speed crossing, I chose the overnight car ferry from the old naval town of Portsmouth to Le Havre in Normandy last month. It was a sunny Bank Holiday weekend and the two harbours wore the festive look of an Indian mela. Hundreds of cars and camper vans laden with the holiday paraphernalia of children, pets, bicycles and sailboats drove into the maws of gigantic vessels setting off for ports in France, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere. The number of European Union passengers passing through its ports is now estimated at 400 million a year; at 519 million tones, Britain now handles the largest volume of seaborne trade.

On board there were private cabins with attached loos as well as chair car arrangements, playrooms for children and bars and cafes for late-night revellers. At Le Havre, a 7,000-foot long cable bridge that is a beauty of engineering design, with cycle and pedestrian lanes, links the port to the picturesque coastal resorts of Normandy and Brittany. Below it, the Seine is a thriving highway of river traffic.   

Imagine how dramatically India's interstate relations or ties with neighbours such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka would improve if its languishing river journeys and channel crossings were revived instead of being allowed to perish.