The Long and Short of Rivers : An Indian Memory

There is a particular silence to a river before sunrise. On the Pamba in Kerala, the water carries the temple bells from Aranmula long before they are visible. On the Yamuna at Mathura, the bank holds the kind of stillness that only comes from centuries of pilgrims arriving before dawn. On the Brahmaputra in Assam, the silence is wider than the river itself, a silence that does not so much hold the sound as swallow it whole. Each river has its own dialect of quietness, and each one teaches a different kind of listening to whoever sits long enough beside it.

There is a grandmother somewhere in central Kerala who grew up beside a small river whose name only she still uses. She walked to it every morning of her childhood with a brass pot on her hip. The pot is still in her daughter's kitchen, dented at the rim where it had been held a thousand times. The river, when her granddaughter went looking for it twenty years ago, was no longer a river. It had become a series of disconnected pools, the channel between them choked with silt and plastic, the bank built up with concrete to keep the new houses from sliding in. When the granddaughter brought the news home, the old woman did not weep. She only said that the river had moved on. She said it as though it were a person who had simply chosen to live somewhere else.

This is one of the things rivers have done in India in the last fifty years. They have moved on. They have been dammed and diverted and channelled and quietly forgotten. The Yamuna at Delhi, once the river that fed the city and inspired its poets, is now an industrial drain that the Yamuna at Vrindavan would not recognise as itself. The Kaveri runs dry in stretches it used to flood. The seasonal rivers of Rajasthan, which once filled briefly with the monsoon, no longer fill at all in some years. The Ganga, which receives every Indian prayer for purity, carries pollution loads that no other river in the world is asked to carry. And yet the prayers continue. The brass pots are still filled. The diyas are still floated. The country has not stopped believing in its rivers, even as it has slowly stopped tending to them.

There is no single way to be near an Indian river. Some rivers ask to be walked along. The Ravi in Punjab is one of these, broad, slow, agricultural, with the kind of bank where a person can follow the water for hours and find themselves somewhere they did not expect. The Beas is another. The smaller rivers of Maharashtra in the Western Ghats invite the same kind of walking, though their banks are steeper and their water faster. To walk along a river is to learn its specific dialect of itself, the rhythm of its bends, the patience of its straight stretches, the small unexpected pools where it pauses before continuing. Walkers along these rivers carry, almost always without naming it, a small accumulating archive of what they have seen.

Other rivers ask to be written beside. There are stretches of the Ganga at Banaras where the sound of the water moving past the ghats has, for many writers across many centuries, been the most productive working surface they have ever known. The river does not interrupt. It carries the writer forward. There is something in the patience of moving water that gives the sentence the patience it needs to find itself. Entire books have been written on the steps of Assi Ghat with the river at the writer's feet, and the writing produced there is often better than what the same writers manage at any desk anywhere else. This is a phenomenon that the writers themselves rarely understand and almost never explain. They simply know that the writing wants to happen there.

Still other rivers ask to be sat with in silence. The Brahmaputra in winter is one of these. The river is so wide at Guwahati that the other bank disappears on most days, and the silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of something else, a low continuous breathing that the water seems to be doing, slowly, as it carries itself out of Tibet and into Bangladesh. People sit on the bank near Umananda island and do not say a single word for entire afternoons. The river does not require it. The silence is the conversation. Whatever they have come there to think about, they think about more clearly afterward.

What human civilisation has done to these rivers is a complicated story, and it is not only a story of loss. Yes, the rivers have been dammed, diverted, polluted, paved over, drained for cities. Yes, the rivers an Indian grandmother knew are not the rivers her great-grandchildren will know. But Indian civilisation has also built its greatest cities along these waters, written its oldest poems beside them, sung its most enduring songs in their honour. The relationship between the country and its rivers has not been one-directional. It has been continuous. And what is happening now, in the slow recovery efforts along the Ganga and the Yamuna, in the small revival projects on the Mithi in Mumbai and the Cooum in Chennai, is the beginning of a different kind of relationship. Not the worship of rivers, which the country has always had. But the tending of them, which it is only now learning to do.

A river is not only the water that runs through it. A river is also the memory of the water that used to run through it, and the people who walked to it, and the brass pots they carried, and the songs they sang as they filled them. When the water stops, the memory does not. The memory waits to be carried. Every Indian who has known a river, and that is, eventually, every Indian, has been given a small piece of this longer memory to hold. They are doing the grandmother's work, often without knowing it. They are remembering the rivers on behalf of the country.

This is what an archive is for. Not to record the rivers that no longer flow, but to keep alive the memory of what they were, and what they meant, and what they asked of the people who lived beside them. The water moves on. The memory waits to be carried.