PROSE
The ebb and the flow
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`In popular lore, rivers are easy shorthand for the maternal, the nourishing, the munificent... But in their physicality, rivers aren't entirely benevolent... the struggle to control riverine bounties is echoed in the synonym for "opponent" — rival.'
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TOO often, rivers gush through the realm of the semiotic. In popular lore, rivers are easy shorthand for the maternal, the nourishing, the munificent. Stroll through the aisles of a music store in any Indian metropolis and the fusion section is likely to yield at least a dozen albums titled Sangam: unmelodious attempts to effect a confluence of East and West are all too easily whitewashed by riparian cliché.
But in their physicality, rivers aren't entirely benevolent. The contentiousness they can arouse is so intense, the struggle to control riverine bounties is echoed in the synonym for "opponent" — rival.
Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings, edited by Amita Baviskar, surges through both terrains, the metaphorical and the material, to etch out an aqueous map of the subcontinent. The rivers reflected in the volume's pieces and poems don't only quench our thirst and irrigate our fields; they sustain the myths that fuel our very idea of India. But there's no fake sentimentality here. Baviskar's selections recognise that rivers (especially when they're dammed) can destroy familiar landscapes as energetically as they invigorate them.
Perhaps because of the nature of the subject, writing about rivers occasionally tends toward the profoundly ponderous and, indeed, a couple of the pieces in this collection sag under the weight of their cosmic ambition. But, for the most, Waterlines floats along with delight and insight, swirling through fishing stories and river legends, meditations on bridges and recollections of terrible floods.
The Ganga, by far the most prominent aquatic feature of India's psychic and physical topography, springs up repeatedly through this collection. "The river does not stand for...anything greater, beyond itself; it is part of a living sacred geography that Hindus hold in common," writes Diana Eck, in her penetrating essay, Ganga: The Goddess Ganges in Hindu Sacred Geography. "The Ganga is one goddess we cannot consider apart from the land in which she flows and the pattern of symbols that this land embodies."
The symbolism of the Ganga also forms the backdrop for Nita Kumar's incisive study on the sensuous relationship Benaras's male residents have established with the river. Among the other selections that are washed over by the Ganga: Rabindranath Tagore's The Ghat Story; Stephen Alter's Kavar, which movingly tells about the millions who make the annual pilgrimage carrying pots of Ganga water from Hardwar to the Garh Mukteshwar Shiv temple, more than 100 kilometres away; Barbara's Stoler Miller's translations of Bhartrihari's verses; and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Songs of the Ganga. Meanwhile, the annual monsoon displacement of the residents of the diara — the flood-prone lands in Bihar that lie precariously between the Ganga and its tributaries — is the subject of Mukul Sharma's searing Diara Diary.
In recent times, though, the Narmada seems to have emerged the most-discussed Indian river. As the Sardar Sarovar dam grows, the Narmada has come to symbolise the perils of the high-technology road to development that India has chosen for itself — and the vigour with which common folk have rejected that path. Their struggle has inspired a spate of films and writings — the most prominent among which has been Arundhati Roy's essay, The Greater Common Good. But, in an idiosyncratic, intelligent choice, Waterlines pays tribute to the Narmada with an English Quaker missionary's sketch about the ritual Narmada circumambulation and his reminisces of friends from the Dhimar caste who live on the river's banks. Geoffrey Waring Maw, who lived in Madhya Pradesh's Hoshangabad district from 1910 to 1949, writes with glee about such quotidian details as a bountiful melon harvest and the best way to scare away crocodiles while bathing in the river. (Ms. Roy makes her appearance with a dark passage from God of Small Things.)
Anand Pandian's An Ode to an Engineer, meanwhile, is a quirky recounting of the enduring legacy of Colonel John Pennycuick, who was responsible for the construction of the Periyar dam in Tamil Nadu at the end of the 19th Century. In addition to being celebrated in song and verse, the good Colonel (or at least an approximation of his name) even has a cybercafe dedicated to his memory. "For the people of the Cumbum Valley," Pandian writes. "...the engineered river channelled not only water but also compassion."
But Baviskar's own contribution, Cutting Off a Lifeline, is a passionate warning against such interventions. Invoking Patrick McCully's book Silenced Rivers, Baviskar points out that "the essence of a river is that it flows; the essence of a reservoir (formed by a dam) is that it is still". Dams block the spread of nutritious silt, kill a vast range of species, displace tens of thousands of people and rupture their vital links with the land and the water.
As the Indian government contemplates a grandiose scheme to interlink many major rivers to possibly control floods and drought, it's worth heeding Baviskar's counsel. "Rivers are so easily abused: pollution chokes them, embankments divorce them from the land," she writes. "But while rivers can be cleaned and embankments dismantled ... a dam destroys forever. Surely the fate of our rivers, our lifelines, cannot be sealed with such dreadful finality?"
Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings, edited by Amita Baviskar, Penguin India, p.224, Rs. 295.
NARESH FERNANDES
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