Go with the tide

Nigel Tisdall falls for northern India aboard a luxury river cruise on the country’s greatest sacred river

- Nigel Tisdall

THANKS to lockdown, everyone has a side-hustle now, but this is nothing new in India. Arriving at the riverside village of Matiari soon after dawn, I find its lanes resounding to a feverish hammering. In tiny backyards, craftsmen are busy turning scrap metal into gleaming brass utensils, from handbells to wedding-size biryani platters. It is an impressive cottage industry that manages to be squeezed into the morning before everyone heads off to the day job, working in the many fertile fields that border the Ganges.

Travel on the subcontinent is a cavalcade of such engrossing scenes into which one boldly plunges, from stinking fish markets to glittering maharajah’s palaces. Although some can be challenging, respite always follows, be it in a lush hotel garden or cool air-conditioned vehicle. In our case, sanctuary is provided by the good ship Ganges Voyager II, a purpose-built three-deck river cruiser that offers a week’s round-voyage from Kolkata up the Hooghly River, one of the many veins of the Ganges as it flows into the Bay of Bengal. But before setting sail, we enjoy a look at what was formerly Calcutta, India’s Imperial capital until 1911, visiting wildly contrasting memorials to the two women that dominate its story—Queen Victoria and Mother Teresa. It is worth adding extra days to explore this seething city rich with Raj memories, from grandiose High Court buildings to tumbledown cemeteries honouring British colonists prematurely consigned to ‘the mansions of everlasting bliss’.