Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

RIVERS: JULY 01, 2001

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Timeless metaphor

G. N. Devy

When you stand in a river for the second time, is it the same river in which you had stood earlier? This is an old philosophical question which has no explanation that is logical as well as convincing. The question is formulated by philosophers to bring out the ceaseless dynamism of the natural phenomena. But it is also posed to state through a metaphor, the paradoxical relationship between eternity and change. No metaphor other than that of a river could have served this purpose as effectively, for it epitomises at once, all that is timeless and all that is ephemeral in the human existence.

Ajay Lall
Gomukh, the region where the Ganges originates.

It is a river alone that allows the human mind to grasp eternity through a direct and intimate physical experience. The celestial bodies are eternal; yet we can but see them without ever being able to touch them. It took man several thousand years of efforts to determine the exact physical locations of the planetary system. The moon came within our physical grasp only about a few decades ago; and the sun will remain outside it for all human time to come. But the rivers have been with us from the beginning of human memory. The music of their flowing has sung the cradle songs of human civilisation in every continent. And therefore rivers have been for man, a perennial symbol of the timeless.

Another reason for the importance of rivers in man's spiritual perception of the world is that they make no demands on human labour. Food and water are necessary for the survival of the species. But, in order to get food, animals have to be hunted, land has to be cultivated, the hunted and the gathered have to be roasted or boiled. As against this, rivers need neither be chased, nor cultivated. They offer water ready to drink round the year. Naturally, therefore, human beings have always thought of them in terms of kindness incarnate. And since rivers demand no labour from us in exchange for what they give us, they - together with air - have remained outside the network of economic exchange for a considerably long period in the making of human civilisation. The turning point came when, with the rise of nationalism, rivers started being perceived together with land as national property and therefore, exchangeable economic entities.

Considering the material importance of rivers in human existence and their total independence from human labour, it is not surprising that they are vested with an enormous spiritual significance. Temples are built on river banks, cities that have grown up along the banks are considered holy cities, pilgrimages are made to such temples and cities and river festivals are celebrated in different seasons. However, the spiritual significance of rivers is restricted to the purificatory and does not extend to the creational. It is interesting to note that no river is given the credit for creating the universe. That credit is reserved for the unseen or the abstract, either a godhead or an energy that is not materially manifest, such as sound. Rivers have to be content with washing the sins of human beings, allowing gods to bathe, or hosting abandoned children who will grow up to become great heroes. At best, the rivers can be populated with the creatures of our fantasy world such as fairies and snake-gods. One can say that in the kingdom of myth, if the skies are vested with the glory of the grand-narrative of creation and destruction of the universe, the rivers are painted with the colours of folklore. This is so mainly because of the material intimacy of rivers with human life. We drink river water, draw it for irrigation, have a ritual dip in it, or wade across through it to the other bank. Rivers are never invisible, never non-negotiable. They are present before us all the time; and their presence is even more substantial than that of mountains or land because of the fluid and dynamic material texture of their being.

The spiritual qualities associated with rivers are those of the mother, not of the father; they are feminine more than masculine. The rivers therefore form the soft lap and not the tough sinews of the body of myths constructed by the human imagination. Accordingly, our relation with rivers is intensely emotional. Songs of hunting beauty and tales of mystery, involvement and separation articulate this relationship. One may say that just as a part of man's spiritual being is shaped by looking up to the temple-towers, mountain-peaks and the skies, another part of that being is shaped by looking at the rivers flowing, alternating between the monsoon fury and the summer calm. It is more of the narcissistic part of the personality that the river-element controls, the altruistic being guided by the skies. It is therefore that in the story of Narcissus and Echo, the mythological hero is believed to have learnt how handsome he was by looking at his reflection in the clear waters of a river.

Probably the river that showed Narcissus his reflection has much to regret now. At the beginning of the 19th Century, Wordsworth could enjoy the calm serenity of the Thames welcoming the dawn. But a century later, T. S. Eliot found that the Thames was probably weeping to see the desolation surrounding it. The narcissistic tendency of the human race which initially triggered off the acquisitive urge has now come to entrap us from all sides in the form of a mindless devastation of nature. Rivers, even the mightiest among them such as the Nile, Amazon and Ganga, have been reduced to sewage and are rapidly becoming culturally inert bodies. The stench is rising so much that the delicate poetry and folklore surrounded by the mysterious are hardly meaningful to us.

In the Mahabharata, the Ganga has been the most fertile and benevolent mother, almost the breast giver to the human race. Today, we have turned it to a condition which reminds us of the story "Breast-Giver" by the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, which is about a much-pimped, much-tormented tribal woman. The plight of the smaller rivers is even worse. Most of them have come to be only seasonal rivers. Their job seems to drain the monsoon water and to remain parched during the rest of the year.

One had not heard of river water disputes till about the middle of the 20th Century. There had been wars for getting control over rivers as navigational routes in the countries that are land-locked on all sides. But the commodification of river water is a recent phenomenon; and this phenomenon is irreversible. Similarly, there used to be food riots in the past; but riots for river water are of a recent origin. And possibly, rivers and the distribution of their waters will become one of the most politicised of ecological issues. In the process, what will inevitably happen is that what traditionally belonged to the sphere of the divine will be taken over by the sphere of the State. There is, of course, no going back into history and myth. But, at least keeping the rivers alive and clean is the minimum that we must do to pay back our historical debts to the rivers that have given us over the millennia the love of mothers and life as goddesses alone can give.