SUPERHUMAN RIVER: Stories OF THE GANGA
Superhuman River: A Biography of the Ganga is an account of a source-to-sea journey I took over eight years (discontinuously!() from the river’s Himalayan source to where it meets the sea in the Bay of Bengal and Bangladesh. It was published by Aleph Books in New Delhi in 2020. Originally an essay commissioned by Triple Canopy called “The Age of Dissolution,” the book was commissioned by an editor in New Delhi at a transitional time in my life. I was a few years out of a Yale masters’ program in Global Change Science and Policy, and five years into my tenure as the founding program and curriculum director at Dalai Lama Fellows. I knew that I wanted to have a child, and that reconnecting with my estranged father would be a key part of how I’d test whether I was ready to become a parent. So, I accepted the offer, and, with funding from the Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellowship, I started traveling downstream with my father, who lives in India. Together, we built a new relationship, and traveled into Bangladesh, where some of my ancestors originate. Understanding and reconciling with my roots, and realizing that my dad most likely has undiagnosed neurodivergence, allowed me to forgive my parents and build the family I’d always wanted.
In 2025, Aleph Book Company returned the rights to my book to me. You can view the pdf here. Please Venmo me a suggested donation of $5-$30 if you’re able.
PODCASTS
Be Here Now Network interview with Mirabai Bush: Devotional Ecology and the Ganga
Musafir Stories Interview with Saif and Faiza
PRINT INTERVIEWS
Hindu Business Line “Healing the Ganga Can Start in Your Kitchen.” Oct 23, 2020
Dispatch.in “I Wanted to Shift the Narrative on Climate Change and Its Impacts by Writing About A River that has Fascinated Foreigners and Indians for Millennia.” Aug, 2020
PRAISE
"A remarkable account of a remarkable place--Bidisha Banerjee has provided the fullest account I know of the stresses, strains, and graces of this most beloved of rivers."
--Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and co-founder of 350.org
"Bidisha's journey to India to discover the spiritual heart of Hinduism and how it merges with scientific/practical/technical expertise can make a huge difference in our environmental future. It required humility, humor, discipline, courage, common sense, endurance, commitment, openness to new ideas, and devotion."
-- Mirabai Bush, co-founder of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and author, with Ram Dass of Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying.
“Two things drive Banerjee to pen this book in the first place — her childhood memory of splashing about in a bucket and imagining the bathwater as the Ganga itself and the sharp dissonance she felt on learning that the river could dry up and disappear imminently.
Written as part travelogue, Superhuman River enmeshes myths, religious fervour, history, geography, politics and ecologies surrounding the Ganga. These are not presented in isolation, within delineated chapters, but merged together in a lucid narrative, allowing a deeper understanding of the existing societal and riverine links along the lifeblood of the Indian subcontinent. The different points of Banerjee’s journey downstream from the river’s source become the settings for investigating larger questions about the river’s meaning, ownership and sustainability.
Banerjee’s writing is candid and creates landscapes that are easily envisioned. Her thoughts are expressed with clarity and humour, be it the uplifting taste of fresh glacial melt at Gomukh or the lingering queasiness after a sip of Gangajal from its polluted Kanpur stretch.”
—Priyank Pravin Patel, Asst. Prof of Geography at Presidency University, Kolkata in The Telegraph
