Waiting for the Ganga dolphin
A dawn on the river at Bhagalpur, in the only sanctuary in the world for the blind dolphin of the Ganges.
In this story
- Bhagalpur — Silk city, and a river full of dolphins
- Vikramshila — Nalanda's sister university, on a bluff above the Ganga
You don't see a Gangetic dolphin so much as notice where one was. A grey back breaks the surface, a huff of breath, and it's gone — they come up for two seconds every minute or so and there's no way to predict where. The boatmen call it 'soons' and point before you've seen anything.
The Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary runs for sixty kilometres along the river from Sultanganj to Kahalgaon. It holds perhaps two hundred animals — half of what the whole species had thirty years ago. They are almost blind, hunting by echolocation in silt-brown water, and they've been here since the Ganga first ran.
Hire a boat at Barari ghat before sunrise. The river is enormous here, a kilometre of flat water with sandbanks and fishermen's huts. In an hour you'll see a dozen surfacings, maybe a mother and calf. Bring a long lens and low expectations; the picture is the river.
Afterwards, drive east to the ruins of Vikramshila — the other great Buddhist university, the one everybody forgets — and back to town for Bhagalpuri tussar silk at the weavers' lanes in Nathnagar.
