Opinion How do you care for a river if you never see it?

As these images of worshippers swallowed by foam began circulating again last week, I found myself thinking of Riversong, written by Robert Macfarlane, a “‘broadside ballad’ which protests the slow death of rivers in the UK and around the world”. Macfarlane calls it “choral work”, and describes the art by Nick Hayes that runs around the lyrics as “a single, sinuous flow of river-beings, human and more-than-human: Dipper, Otter, Swimmer, Stonefly, Bulrush, Alder, Cormorant, Scarlet Elf Cups, Heron, Eel…”: “River’s song is ebb and flow, flow and ebb — / Deep pool and shallow bed,/ Salt and fresh, eddy, current/ Spiral, tongue and blue, blue torrent — / River rises as spring and source / River pools as lake and loch / River plunges as fall and force / For River is the path that walks./ But they gave the orders/ and turned the waters/ To sink and sump / stink and dump, from hill to sea;/ Suits and boardrooms/ made ghosts of gods / Turned River’s songs to elegies.”

The words running around the rim of the frame — “Clyde and Chelmer, Cam and Calder, Dipper, Otter, Trout and Stonefly, Bulrush, Eel, Swimmer, Alder, Lea and Severn, Thames and Wye” — are, as Macfarlane clarifies, “imagined as River’s ‘undersong’… Substitute the names of your own rivers and river-creatures there to make a new undersong”. Macfarlane, whose book, Is a River Alive?, is due to be published early next year, wrote this “song” to demand “a clear right of public access” to rivers in the UK: “It’s hard to love a river you can never meet; hard to care for water you can scarcely see. Central to reviving our rivers is reviving our ability to connect with them, in imagination and in body.”

Rahul Ranjan, in his recent essay, ‘Sadhu activism: Rights of rivers and facets of religious environmentalism in the Himalayas’, looks at rituals and practices that have kept rivers alive in the Indian subcontinent. While acknowledging the 2017 Uttarakhand High Court ruling that recognises rivers as “legal persons”, he turns our attention to the role of sadhus and ashrams such as Matri Sadan that have helped protect riverine ecologies. One might feel that a central government that, by self-definition, derives its politics from its understanding of Hinduism, would want to protect its rivers (the Ganga and the Yamuna are mentioned a number of times in the Rig Veda, in case one needs reminding), but, clearly, that hasn’t happened.

I think of the smaller rivers, particularly two, with whose names two of the greatest Bangla novels begin — Titash and Ichhamati: Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (Advaita Mallabarman, 1956) and Ichhamati (Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, 1950). “But all the rivers are not similar in appearance and essence. How they behave with people differs and how people behave with them differs too, the people who live beside them and the people who live away from them but use them,” writes Mallabarman (in Kalpana Bardhan’s translation). Ranjan’s essay takes me back to these lines, about how different our river policies might have been had they come from “people who live beside them”. I also think of Bhabani, who, in Bandyopadhyay’s novel, finds “bhagwan” in the elements, in the river: “The field, the river, the wild foliage and greenery, the cycle of seasons, birds, evenings and moonlit nights all had brought to him such exquisite ananda, as though a new Upanishad was being composed within his own heart” (Rimli Bhattacharya’s translation). Will governments allow rivers and the air and nights a life, their older lives, so that “a new Upanishad”, a new Riversong, can be composed within our own hearts?

Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor at Ashoka University. Views are personal