VARANASI, INDIA -- It was more than 50 years ago when Veer Bhadra Mishra’s dhoti kurta lost to the lathe. His teacher in the machine shop at Banaras Hindu University’s engineering school took one look at the flowing dhoti wrapped around his student’s waist and the loose kurta, a traditional Indian shirt, hung from his shoulders. He imagined them flapping near the spinning gears of the lathe machine and told Mishra he couldn’t work in the shop unless he was in proper pants and a shirt.

“So I said that I was not going to go to the engineering school,” he recalls, laughing now at this youthful stubbornness from the vantage point of his 68 years. After a week of gentle convincing by his mother and a family friend, Mishra returned to the machine shop, this time dressed in new pants and a shirt.

Mishra has spent the years since then moving between the world of the dhoti kurta and the lathe. By inheritance he is the mahant, or head priest, of the Sankat Mochan temple, one of the holiest temples in the holy city of Varanasi (formerly called Banaras). By training he is a professor of hydraulic engineering, recently retired from the faculty at his alma mater Banaras Hindu University (BHU). At the intersection of his role as priest and his work as an engineer he found his true calling: cleaning the sacred water of the Ganga (or Ganges) River, a calling that has brought him into the world environmental movement, put him on stages with leaders of countries and earned him a spot on Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Planet” list.

Today when he receives guests, Mishra, a small man with a moustache and full head of white hair, does so wearing a dhoti and kurta. He sits in a building that once belonged to Tulsi Das, a legendary 16th century poet and his family’s spiritual forbear. Sankat Mochan temple is built on the site where it is believed the monkey god Hanuman appeared to Tulsi Das 500 years ago. The building, perched over the river, also houses the offices and research laboratory of the Sankat Mochan Foundation and Clean Ganga campaign.

Mishra’s job as mahant recently pulled him into the headlines. On March 7, bombs erupted at a train station in Varanasi and at Sankat Mochan temple, killing 20 people. By the next day, figures associated with the Hindu nationalist wing of Indian politics were trying to use suspicion that the attacks were carried out by Muslim extremists to build capital for their agendas. When a leader of one of these groups attempted to enter the temple the day following the blasts, Mishra forbade it, telling Outlook India that politicians were “practicing politics on the bodies of the dead.”

Priyankar Upadhyaya, a professor and coordinator of the Malaviya Centre for Peace Research at BHU, says that such posturing by Hindu politicians always puts Varanasi Muslims on the defensive. “Every time they have to come out and defend themselves against Hindu nationalism,” Upadhyaya said. “The onus is on Muslims to say that they’re Indians.”

Mishra says that religion is being misappropriated in Indian society. “Those who are in power, those who run this country, I don’t know what they have in their heart and their mind,” he said. “Religion is exploited in so many ways that are not good.” While Mishra’s refusal to allow the blast at the temple to be used for political gain was an ideological stance, it was also a practical one. Some politicians demonstrated near the temple, “but by god’s grace, we could stop that in the temple, and it was not exploited. Otherwise there would have been a riot in Varanasi.”

Mishra comes from a traditional Hindu family, and speaks of Hindus like himself as “practicing Hindus” as opposed to “fundamentalist Hindus.” He is the seventh mahant in his family, a position that is passed between generations from the father to the eldest son. When his father died in 1952, Mishra found himself a mahant at the age of 14, “even before I knew what mahant meant,” he said. One thing that it meant was becoming acquainted with the Ganga. He learned the practice of saying prayers at the river’s edge and submerging himself in the river, taking the holy dip that now begins every day.

Becoming mahant at this early age might have meant a life spent entirely in sacred service to the temple, and Mishra is still unclear about the steps that led him to a secular education. He was the first person in his family to get a college degree. When he talks about going to study engineering at BHU he speaks with a sense of wonder. “I don’t know why this happened,” he says. He can’t remember the logic that took him to engineering school, but he sees God’s hand in the fact that it finally led back to the Ganga.

After graduating from BHU he started lecturing in the university’s engineering department and would later become chair of the department. When he first started teaching and was introduced as the mahant of Sankat Mochan and a BHU professor, the next question would be if he was a professor of philosophy or Sanskrit. During his teaching career, which stretched from 1961 to 2001, Mishra’s days again found him traveling between the traditional Hindu world and the secular world of the university. In the mornings he would descend to the Ganga to do his morning prayers, teach during the day, go to the temple in the evenings, and then return home to prepare his lectures for the next day.

For Mishra, the Ganga represents where these two worlds combine. He describes the world of scientific thought as being one bank of the river, and the deeply spiritual world, one alive with a limitless pantheon (“I would say there are as many gods and goddesses as people who live in India.”) as the other bank. And, he says, they are both equally important. “A rationally trained mind and a committed heart; I am blessed with these two things. If I were only a believer in Ganga, then I would say, I’ll shout at you if you say the Ganga is polluted. And if I were only a scientist with the data we have, we would write a few papers in American Society of Civil Engineers.”

It was with the rational mind of a scientist and the committed heart of a practicing Hindu that Mishra began to think about how the Ganga River could be cleaned. In 1982 he started the Sankat Mochan Foundation and its Clean Ganga campaign. The campaign originally worked to raise public awareness of the river’s pollution with various events in the streets and lecture halls of Varanasi. Since its founding it has moved from being an awareness-raising organization to an environmental monitoring group. It has also been a critic of what it sees as the failure of the first phase of the government’s $100 million Ganga Action Plan, which implemented technology unsuited to the realities of Indian infrastructure and weather. This included treatment facilities that were rendered inoperable during the months of monsoon rains the country has every year.

In 1993, at the end of the first phase of the government’s cleanup plan, the Clean Ganga campaign established a research laboratory to measure the health of the river. What they found was not good: water sampled at various points on the bank of the river revealed that the level of some pollution indicators is 300,000 times what is classified as safe for bathing. Mishra estimates that nearly 95 percent of this pollution is from raw sewage being dumped into the river at 30 points in Varanasi. The existing sewage system is basically unimproved from the one the British put in nearly 90 years ago, even though the population of Varanasi is seven times the size it was when the original system was installed.

The Clean Ganga campaign has openly opposed the government’s idea for the next phase of the Ganga Action Plan and put forward an alternative, far less-costly solution designed by an environmental technology company in Berkeley, California. This plan would cycle wastewater through a system of settling ponds that accelerate the natural cleansing activities of algae. India’s central government won’t approve this plan and private companies won’t agree to fund it without the government’s blessing. In the meantime, the campaign also continues to push awareness-raising locally and internationally and Mishra continues to lecture on the effort to clean the Ganga.

Although a mahant lecturing on aspects of water purification and bio-oxygen demand may seem counterintuitive, Job Kozhamthadam, a professor of physics and the founder of the Indian Institute of Science and Religion in Pune, India, believes that the culture’s intellectual tradition lends itself to such cross-pollination. In an email, Kozhamthadam wrote: “In India, scholars do not see much tension between science and spirituality. One reason is that the Indian tradition is predominantly syncretic, often focusing on commonality. We have a tendency to overlook minor differences.”

While the Sankat Mochan Foundation’s Clean Ganga campaign struggles to find funding, Mishra is also unsure about his legacy as mahant of Sankat Mochan. Mishra has two sons, one an engineer living in Varanasi, the other a neurobiologist in Delhi. He doesn’t think either is inclined to take on the role of mahant. He chooses his words carefully when talking about what mahant means today. “Mahant, now it is not very…who cares for mahants and sadhus [Hindu mystics]?” Mishra says. “There is no commerce, no career involved in it. It is a mission that I am carrying on my shoulders. I hope and wish and pray that this responsibility is taken over by somebody who also does it as best as he or she can.”

A certain broad-brush approach to Hindu theology begins with a trinity: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva, the god of destruction. When asked about this cosmology, Mishra takes issue with this understanding of Shiva, saying the god should be thought of as bringing joy to life’s decay. “We know that this whole creation and all of us, we are not permanent, we are decaying and one day everything has to come to an end,” he said. “It is a shallow pool of time for us in our life. That is the inherent characteristic of our creation in this world. So we have to be happy, we have to be enthusiastic.” Even when he’s talking about conflict between religious groups, the degradation of the Ganga or the uncertainty of his family legacy, the smile that tugs at the corner of his eyes never totally leaves.