Purity and Pollution

The people of India hold differing meanings for the words purity and pollution. Many rivers in India are sacred and there is marked disagreement between arguments that defend a river's sacred purity and warnings about river pollution. Hindus believe that rivers and mountains are sacred and powerful. This is why many sacred places are by rivers or are on mountaintops. Purity is a part of a more holistic process of cosmic order and balance within which humans should strive to live harmoniously. Sacred rivers purify the minds and the souls of those that they bless. Snan or ritual ablution works to clean physical dirt and absolve religious impurity through the presence of or association with spiritual power. This creates an interlocking relationship between ritual, spiritual purity, and physical cleanness.

Pollution denotes the form of environmental degeneracy that is the subject of scientific and official government worldviews. The terms purity and impurity stand for the moral, bodily, and cosmic states tied to the religious concerns of Hindus. The notion of waste or dirtiness is an important part of the Hindu view. The Hindu understanding of material waste, defined by the term gandagi, must be interpreted in its own terms, as something somewhat different from the scientific notion of environmental pollution.