Suicide is generally condemned by the Hinduj Dharmashastra texts but there are some exceptions in the Smrities, epics and Puranas. One exception prescribes religious suicide at either Prayag (Allahabad) or Kashi (Varanasi). It is written in the Padma Puran that "A man who knowingly or unknowingly, willfully or unintentionally, dies in the Ganges secures on death heaven and Moksha (release from the cycle of rebirth)" and in the Skanda Purana it says, "He who abandons his life in a holy place in some way or the other does not incur the sin of suicide but secures his desired objects."

The account of the Chinese traveller Huan Tsang, who was in India between AD 629 and AD 645, indicates that in addition to scriptural sanction, there actually was a tradition of traveling to pilgrimage centres and committing religious suicide in India. He wrote that people would arrive daily at the confluence off the Jamuna and Ganges river at Prayag to drown themselves in the sacred waters there. In more recent times, as per the instructions in the Brahma Puranas, lepers' suicides were common near the great fort in Allahabad until the British authorities forbade them in the 1810s.

To understand the Hindu wish to die on the banks of river Ganga or to have one’s ashes to be poured in her waters, it is essential to know the myth of the descent of river Ganga.

The story goes that there was once a king called Sagar. He did not have any sons from his two wives. He prayed to Lord Shiva for a son. Shiva granted him his wish but told him that one of his wives will bear sixty thousand sons but they would all die. However, the one son born from the other wife would continue his race. It seems that king Sagar was very happy to have sixty thousand and one sons.

Some years later, king Sagar performed the Ashvamedha Yagya – a ritual by which a horse was let loose for a year and the territory it roamed around unchallenged would become part of king Sagar's kingdom. The horse roamed around the earth for almost a year, covering great swathes of land. Seeing this, Indra, the king of Gods, got jealous and he stole the horse and hid it in the ashram of the ferocious sage, Kapila Muni. King Sagar ordered his sixty thousands sons to look for the horse. They found the horse in Kapila Muni's ashram and attacked the sage and called him a thief. The sage felt insulted and roused himself to fury, burning the sixty thousand sons of king Sagar into ash. But after, King Sagar's grandson, Amsuman, was able to extract a promise from Kapila Muni that if the waters of the heavenly river Ganga flowed over the ashes of Sagar's sons, they would go to heaven.

None of Sagar's heirs were able to persuade the goddess Ganga down from heaven. Until Bhagirath became king he meditated and pleased the Gods. Lord Shiva agreed to break the force of the mighty river Ganga through his matted locks and released a gentler Ganga on earth. And so it was that the sacred waters of Ganga touched the ashes of king Sagar's sons and helped them attain heaven.

Ever since the Ganga has been the path to salvation and heaven for all Hindus – the spot for death: According to the Mahabharata, "as amrita (nectar) is to the gods, so Ganga water is to the world of men."

But the significance of the Ganges as a place to die holds true even for the most secular of Hindus: When Nehru died, he had written into his Will, " My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiments in the matter. But I have been attached to the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga."