The descent of the Ganga is why a river in India is not a metaphor. Sagara's sixty thousand sons are burnt to ash by a sage's glance, and only the touch of the heavenly river can free them, so their descendant Bhagiratha performs austerities long enough to persuade Brahma to release her and Shiva to break her fall in his matted hair. The story supplies the theological basis for water rites — that the Ganga carries the dead onward — and it is why cremated ashes go into her, why Haridwar and Varanasi exist in the form they do, and why she is addressed as Ma. The Indian state has spent decades and enormous sums on cleaning her with limited success, and the collision between her ritual purity, which is held to be inviolable, and her measurable pollution is a running argument among Hindus themselves. In 2017 the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga a legal person; the Supreme Court stayed the order.