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

As these images of worshippers swallowed by foam began circulating again past week, I recovered myself reasoning of Riversong, written by Robert Macfarlane, a “‘broadside ballad’ which protests the dilatory decease of rivers successful the UK and astir the world”. Macfarlane calls it “choral work”, and describes the creation by Nick Hayes that runs astir the lyrics arsenic “a single, sinuous travel of river-beings, quality and more-than-human: Dipper, Otter, Swimmer, Stonefly, Bulrush, Alder, Cormorant, Scarlet Elf Cups, Heron, Eel…”: “River’s opus is ebb and flow, travel and ebb — / Deep excavation and shallow bed,/ Salt and fresh, eddy, current/ Spiral, lingua and blue, bluish torrent — / River rises arsenic outpouring and root / River pools arsenic water and loch / River plunges arsenic autumn and unit / For River is the way that walks./ But they gave the orders/ and turned the waters/ To descend and sump / stink and dump, from elevation to sea;/ Suits and boardrooms/ made ghosts of gods / Turned River’s songs to elegies.”

The words moving astir the rim of the framework — “Clyde and Chelmer, Cam and Calder, Dipper, Otter, Trout and Stonefly, Bulrush, Eel, Swimmer, Alder, Lea and Severn, Thames and Wye” — are, arsenic Macfarlane clarifies, “imagined arsenic River’s ‘undersong’… Substitute the names of your ain rivers and river-creatures determination to marque a caller undersong”. Macfarlane, whose book, Is a River Alive?, is owed to beryllium published aboriginal adjacent year, wrote this “song” to request “a wide close of nationalist access” to rivers successful the UK: “It’s hard to emotion a stream you tin ne'er meet; hard to attraction for h2o you tin scarcely see. Central to reviving our rivers is reviving our quality to link with them, successful imaginativeness and successful body.”

Rahul Ranjan, successful his caller essay, ‘Sadhu activism: Rights of rivers and facets of spiritual environmentalism successful the Himalayas’, looks astatine rituals and practices that person kept rivers live successful the Indian subcontinent. While acknowledging the 2017 Uttarakhand High Court ruling that recognises rivers arsenic “legal persons”, helium turns our attraction to the relation of sadhus and ashrams specified arsenic Matri Sadan that person helped support riverine ecologies. One mightiness consciousness that a cardinal authorities that, by self-definition, derives its authorities from its knowing of Hinduism, would privation to support its rivers (the Ganga and the Yamuna are mentioned a fig of times successful the Rig Veda, successful lawsuit 1 needs reminding), but, clearly, that hasn’t happened.

I deliberation of the smaller rivers, peculiarly two, with whose names 2 of the top Bangla novels statesman — Titash and Ichhamati: Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (Advaita Mallabarman, 1956) and Ichhamati (Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, 1950). “But each the rivers are not akin successful quality and essence. How they behave with radical differs and however radical behave with them differs too, the radical who unrecorded beside them and the radical who unrecorded distant from them but usage them,” writes Mallabarman (in Kalpana Bardhan’s translation). Ranjan’s effort takes maine backmost to these lines, astir however antithetic our stream policies mightiness person been had they travel from “people who unrecorded beside them”. I besides deliberation of Bhabani, who, successful Bandyopadhyay’s novel, finds “bhagwan” successful the elements, successful the river: “The field, the river, the chaotic foliage and greenery, the rhythm of seasons, birds, evenings and moonlit nights each had brought to him specified exquisite ananda, arsenic though a caller Upanishad was being composed wrong his ain heart” (Rimli Bhattacharya’s translation). Will governments let rivers and the aerial and nights a life, their older lives, truthful that “a caller Upanishad”, a caller Riversong, tin beryllium composed wrong our ain hearts?

Roy, a writer and writer, is subordinate prof astatine Ashoka University. Views are personal