First Ganga Aarti on the Thames keeps the lamps on the Greenwich bank

Thousands of people stood on the Greenwich bank of the Thames on Sunday evening for the first Ganga Aarti held in London. Chinmaya Mission UK organised the event with the Totally Thames festival, as part of the mission's 75th year. The setting was the Old Royal Naval College. The title on the programme was Ganga Aarti on the Thames: A Ceremony of Light.

The aarti used the large multi-tiered oil lamps, chanting and music familiar from Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi and Har Ki Pauri in Haridwar. One rule was fixed in advance. The ceremony stayed on land. No lamp, flower, oil or offering went into the Thames. A mission spokesperson said the lamps would remain on the bank so the river was left undisturbed, and that the same rule covered waste and single-use plastic on the site.

Brahmacharini Shripriya Chaitanya, resident teacher of Chinmaya Mission UK, said communities have long gathered on the Ganga to offer light in thanks for the river and for what sustains life, and that the Thames ceremony was meant to carry that same act of thanks. Senior Hindu priests and representatives of British Hindu organisations attended. Organisers also framed the evening as an open gathering for people who do not share the ritual.

Totally Thames has run since 1997 as a festival of the river's heritage and environment. Pairing it with an Indian river rite is new. The practical constraint is English water law and the Port of London Authority's rules on what may be put in the tideway. Floating diyas, common on the Ganga, would have been a pollution and navigation problem on a working river that still carries freight and Clipper boats. Keeping the fire on the bank solved that without emptying the ritual of its central gesture, the raising of light toward water.

Chinmaya Mission lists more than 350 centres. The London branch presented Sunday as a possible annual fixture. That will depend on Greenwich, the festival and the river authorities. The 75th anniversary gave this year's permit a clear occasion. A second year will need a quieter justification.

The visual contrast did the work the speeches described. Wren's painted hall and domes behind the lamps. The Thames at flood tide in front. Canary Wharf across the water. For the British Hindu families who came, the point was simpler. A rite they know from India now has a London date and a London river, without asking the Thames to take offerings it cannot absorb.

Monday is Hindi Diwas in India, the anniversary of the 14 September 1949 Constituent Assembly decision on Hindi in Devanagari as the Union official language. The Greenwich aarti was not a government event and was not billed as a Diwas programme. It sat next to that calendar by accident of the weekend. The connection a reader can fairly make is only this: the Indian official year and the Indian religious year both found a London stage in the same 24 hours, one on a Greenwich towpath, the other in Navi Mumbai and Houston.