Where did he see the creature ? Rivers up close and personal
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There was a time when there was a river in everybody’s life. Cultures developed alongside rivers. Rivers sustained farmlands; they were home to a variety of fish; they were conduits of commerce and cultural exchange. People followed waterways, from canals to great rivers, to build businesses, communities and new lives. Rivers were revered and feared. The river was a playmate to a child to splash about or joy for a woman after a hard day’s work. A river could also be the unpredictable elder who inspired awe. Flooding at many times turned a harbinger of life and prosperity into a raging torrent that destroyed human lives and ruined crops, leading to food shortages and starvation.
But people learned to live with such vagaries. They learnt about its ebbs and flows. They tried to avoid places where its raging waters would strike, and settle where it would be at its nurturing best. They learnt to make use of the silt left by its floodwaters and to avoid the sand which harmed their crops. But even then rivers flooded, changed courses and wreaked havoc. People learnt to take that in their stride, sometimes with wit our folklore is replete with.
Over the past 150 years or so, this connection has been severed. The change happened sometime during colonial rule. Colonial water planners and water engineers introduced the idea of tapping rivers. Colonial intervention transformed seasonally inundated floodplains into sites for irrigation, involving construction of barrages and weirs. But colonial understanding of hydrology could not come to terms with the idiosyncrasies of Indian rivers. Replete with sand and sediment, most of them refused to flow between banks. Unfortunately, our planners did not take note of this failure of the colonial state when they devised plans for Indian rivers.
At the same time, the people also lost the spiritual connect with rivers. There is probably a river in each of our lives. But it is distant. Today many grow into adulthood without having seen a river in its full glory. Many of the mighty rivers have been reduced to a trickle.
A lot of us still venerate rivers. In fact, the number of pilgrims thronging the sites associated with big rivers, the Ganga, Yamuna and the Brahmaputra, seems to be growing. But there is a discord between such ritual veneration and the ways we treat our rivers. Every pilgrimage adds to the burden of trash on rivers. Many of our rivers have turned into veritable sewers. Some of them are toxic cesspools. We have even lost rivers—we are a generation that has turned flowing fresh water rivers into rivers of sewage and garbage. Today in official documents these rivers have been renamed as drains. There cannot be a bigger loss, a bigger travesty.
In this Independence Day special, we bring this collection of writings to celebrate the river—what it was in our lives and what it must be tomorrow. India’s independence is meaningless if we cannot save our rivers.