On time, history and the river

A discussion between Arupjyoti Saikia, Mahesh Rangarajan, Joydeep Gupta and Claude Arpi, moderated by Uma Das Gupta.

Uma Das Gupta: My research on Rabindranath Tagore has connected me to the life of the river Padma that the poet had so cherished. Also, like a flashback, the subject evoked in me a bit of personal history. This was out of a close association that my family had with the Northeast. When I was a girl of ten to fifteen my father was in service with the North East Frontier Agency, or NEFA as it was commonly referred to. My father, late S.C. Ray, was the Agricultural Advisor to NEFA. In fact, he was one of a group of advisors in the NEFA administration of the 1950s. There was also a financial advisor, a legal advisor, and others. They were on deputation to NEFA from their respective state governments. Some of you would know that NEFA, at the time, was a totally restricted area. Families could never travel to the NEFA territory.

Two memories come to mind in particular. One is that of my father and the other advisors meeting for informal conversations about their work. They met sometimes in our home. I, therefore, saw and heard them quite closely and got a sense of what the region was like. For example, they all had to travel to do their work in airplanes. These were the Fokker Friendship airplanes of the Dutch Fokker Company. They were two-engine aircrafts with no doors to them, no doors because they were used to low flying and airdropping of essential items in this very remote northeastern region. This was how the dedicated group of advisors and administrators travelled once or twice a week to do their work in the northeastern frontier.

My mother used to worry about my father travelling on these airplanes. But there was no other way that they could travel there. The other thing that comes to mind is how my father would come back from the region very moved by the beauty he saw there. He used to say that there was very little that could beat the beauty of the northeast, its high mountains and heavenly lakes, its flora and fauna, all clearly untouched at the time.

A region that was so remote and unknown has deservedly come of age. We have at last come close to one another and become part of the same universe, as it should be. The festival literature has opened up so many vistas about which the other panelists will speak. There is so much more to learn from the subject even though Kishalay calls it a fringe festival.

Let me introduce the others on this panel: Arupjyoti Saikia, is a historian and Suryya Kumar Bhuyan Endowment Chair on Assam History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Guwahati; Mahesh Rangarajan, Professor of Environmental Studies and History at Ashoka University; Joydeep Gupta who is South Asia Director of The Third Pole; Claude Arpi, from France, journalist, historian and Tibetologist, who lives in Auroville.

 

Arupjyoti Saikia: I am really honoured to be a part of this panel to share something from my book, The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (OUP, 2019). I will briefly share some ideas that went into the making of the book.

I live not too far from the river from where I see the river every day, hear the sound of the river and feel how the river is majestic and different. While the river always intrigued us, we also remained nostalgic of the river, its waters, flows and panoramic views. But this view of the river began to change sometime back. This began to happen a decade ago, when massive popular protests in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh against the construction of big dams in the foothills of the eastern Himalaya put the river back into the centre stage of Assam’s political life. Those anti-big dam movements forced many of us to rethink about the river. Since then multitude of works were produced to describe the river. Interesting memorandums against big dams were also penned. On several occasions we have listened to, and heard those who want and did not want big dams to block their rivers. This was an extraordinary situation. But it also became clear that our understanding of the river still lacked deep historical attention. A biography of the river can be a partial answer to this.

This work can be partly supported by an increasing body of rich scholarly works on the river, its floods and also the surrounding agrarian landscapes. Geo-morphologists, hydrologists and climate scientists are producing exciting works on the river. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians are not far behind in this race to grapple with the question of the river. For instance, floods or the river’s intricate social history has received serious scholarly attention; several excellent dissertations have been written on the multifaceted life of the river. While these works have greatly enriched our understanding of the river, the river required a synthesis of all these. A biography of this wonderful river was possibly a good way to better understand the river. Let me take the liberty to read out a few excerpts from the book to explain this better.

The Brahmaputra is a remarkable river. The Brahmaputra is more an offspring of a natural past than that of human history. Geological events rather than human labour shaped its history. Until recently humans did not, indeed could not fundamentally change the river. Unlike many great rivers of the world like the Indus, the Yellow River, the Mekong, the Nile, the Yangtze, or the Rhine; the Brahmaputra is still largely untamed. The Brahmaputra is not chained; there are no storage dams to produce electricity like those of the Indus or the Yangtze. It has not been subjected to many hydro-engineering projects like those on the Nile or Mekong. There is no large-scale dredging of the river to excavate the river’s rising bed. Engineers had only embanked the sides of the river. Dykes are everywhere but the gushing floodwaters of the river break these structures regularly.

Man, in his short engagement with the river, succeeded in partially trying to tame the river and its floodplains. The Brahmaputra still flows through a predominantly agrarian setting. Today, the river and its environment are seen as the last bastion of nature and solitude. The river has not yet heard the voices of grouting machines and stone crushers. Few rivers in the world could be fortunate to be untouched by the power of dredgers, dynamite, mathematical formulas, dams and locks. To a large extent the Brahmaputra remains free and unchained. The river is still greatly embedded in the idea of wilderness and it essentially remains a rural river. Despite constraints imposed by the dykes, the river miraculously escaped the tyranny of technological modernity. This has ensured a relatively stable ecosystem. Everyone, until the mid-20th century, looked to the river for sustenance and inspiration. The river was displaced from this seat of pre-eminence both due to political as well as natural events like the 1950 earthquake. Till then the river enjoyed a pre-eminent position in Assam’s life and popular narratives.

Across the globe, many rivers’ fortunes have already been rewritten by their rulers and engineers. Those engineers forced the rivers to undergo fundamental changes, straightened their channels and regulated their flows. For instance, in the Rhine, flood control and channelization changed the river’s flow regime and sediment load pattern. These changes also exposed the river to uncertainty. Here too, despite many years of human will to subordinate these rivers, they refused to bow down. Some rivers’ limbs and arms were severed from their floodplains resulting in severe consequences. Industrial pollutants flowing through these rivers disfigured their ecology. Rivers became the source of wars and intense rivalry. Humans also stamp their own templates to them. Humans enchained many of them. Other rivers across the world act as political boundaries and also imposed cultural differences.

The Mississippi, Yellow, Volga, Columbia, Rhine, Nile, Yangtze and Mekong have all endured powerful human imprints. Further a field, scholars have mapped contests and competing visions of these rivers. The interplay of the role of state, of experts and rivers has found space in other works. There are works on how energy and work bring humans and the river together. In his work on Germany, Blackburn argues he is not writing a history of the river as seen by itself, but as one of human ideas, practices, contests and visions of what to make of the river. We also know how the engineering and administrative decisions of the 19th century on the European rivers led to rapid industrialization but equally, profoundly degraded the rivers’ environment.

Experiments on the Nile show how this led to unplanned disasters as canals enabled the spread of schistosomiasis. Canals on the Ganga helped spread deadly malaria in the 19th century. The Mekong defied French, then US engineers. Nature is multihued, complex, and not so amenable to linear interventions. The rivers in Southeast Asia are no exception. The best example is that of the Mekong Delta. Here too the intersections of politics and nature figure in modern nation building processes. Luckily, the idea of water and river, being seen as two discreet dimensions of nature, is also being challenged. By the end of the 20th century efforts were on across the globe, for instance in the Rhine, to restore those lost natural endowments, but with limited success.

The Brahmaputra has hardly been given a central role in the histories of South Asia. Unlike many rivers of the world, it has not been the subject of political and historical narrative. Have historians been unfair to the Brahmaputra? Astounding as it may be to acknowledge this fact, it might actually be true: that the most overwhelming, overpowering and majestic river flowing through the Indian state of Assam still remains an outlier to its many and varied historical imaginings. Perhaps to immediately assuage ourselves we could claim that the mighty Brahmaputra – the fluvial spine that connects the mountains, hills, valleys and flood plains – is too imperious a force to be discussed for modern history writing. That this powerful river’s triumph is so complete over us that it comes alive only as myth and folklore, and in stories of common people, poetry and song rather than in the dry narrative of archival fact and the dull prose of cause and effect. Even more telling, we could argue that historians have remained too much on land and too firmly behind the embankment and therefore cannot think like amphibians.

While historians have thus far missed a clear view of the Brahmaputra, we might still recover a new sight by reorienting our gaze. It is time to take a boat to the middle of the river to observe the land and wherever the currents are not that strong, perhaps a swim across some reasonable depth or even getting our feet wet in the shallows, before we rethink a different history for Assam. But it is too alarming an idea and requires many tricks. To reacquire our humility before the Brahmaputra, we have to begin, above all else, by recounting as carefully as possible the many types of histories about Assam that have failed to mingle their narratives with these great waters that always surround us and make ideas about Assam possible.

The Brahmaputra is Assam’s principal geological force. Within a complex nature, the river occupies a pre-eminent and idealized position. The river is at the centre of different geographies and also interconnects hills and plains. While these geographies may bear diverse ecological features, the river neatly interconnects these discreet ecologies to make it into one single unit. The river, in turn, becomes a force to produce intertwined histories of lands and waters or plains and hills. If the river fused varied ecology, cultural spaces and political territories, it also weaved together communities and fauna lying scattered across these landscapes. That unchained river created space for both humans, flora and fauna. Not only did the people creatively adjust to the river’s great recuperative powers, millions of these ordinary men and women remained tough survivors of the river’s grand ferocity.

The river itself is a source of inspiration to withstand its ferocity and harsh treatment that it meted out to its residents. People worshipped the river because of its destructive power but equally reaped benefit from it. It often played a significant role in shaping and changing the course of human actions. The river integrated Assam with faraway places. Since ancient times, it acted as a geographical passage for the exchange of goods produced in the floodplains, hills and other places.

The Brahmaputra is a unique river not only for not being tamed like many other big rivers elsewhere, but for its fragile and complex geological, geomorphological or hydrological features. The river’s material compositions remained more powerful than human actions. The river basin has a long history of high rainfall, and a long wet season. The monsoon and the Himalaya influence it more than any human imagination. What comes close to the river’s ecological features is that of the South East Asian environment. The river’s environmental features have taken place over a long period of time – what French historian Fernand Braudel used to refer to as longee duree – and this needs to be understood for examining the human-river interaction fruitfully. The ecological features of this region are such that any minor human induced environmental change will have both a long-term and short-term impact, and thus affect human life. At the same time, the river’s ecology is also deeply influenced by life outside of the river. The river acts as a conduit between the hills and the floodplains and any disruption can cause serious threats to its residents.

If there was dynamism all along the river, the humans’ tryst with it became more eventful in the floodplains. This floodplain landscape underwent many layers of fundamental ecological transformations in the past through human actions. Notwithstanding this human intervention, rhinoceros survived in the floodplains because of the synchronizing role that the river played between the floodplains and highlands.

There were moderate human imprints on the river. The people living along the Brahmaputra engraved cultural patterns into it. Human labour created the idea of the modern Brahmaputra: boats and steamers plied against currents, fishermen struggled with currents to catch fish, washermen washed dirty linen, people bathed, the dead were cremated, pilgrims travelled down it to reach out to Indian holy places. Timber carried by the river was used to construct houses far away from the river; tea travelled to distant global markets. Only parts of the river’s long course are filled with concrete houses, pathways and markets. The Brahmaputra’s banks are still covered with grasses, trees and temporary houses. The river does not have a stable bank line.

This bright picture might not always hold true. Hips of sands stopped the movement of steamers. Its chars are born and regularly disappear. Only a few remain there for longer periods. Attempts to disentangle the river from its floodplains produced disastrous results. The river’s relationship with the landscape underwent great changes because of the dykes. The physical texture of the river underwent a transformation because of those dykes. The floodplains experienced some of those dramatic changes. The cultivation of jute single-handedly further transformed this landscape. The river hardly remains a natural river. But stray ideas of a straightjacket to the river’s braided beds to a single channel, remained a distant dream. The river refused to be tamed. In that sense, the river could be an unlikely candidate for an environmental history project.

My book offers a long history of the Brahmaputra starting with histories of the river much older than modernity in its various guises; claims that geology, more than human endeavour, shaped the river well into the twentieth century. The book draws attention to a relatively untamed river despite a long history of human coexistence with the river. The book, however, tells how adaptation by fishers, boat people, farmers, and shepherds, and river creatures that might originally date to other geologic periods, subtly altered the river, just as human and non-human life also changed it by accommodating the power of river flow, the material it transported, and the way it redesigned the adjoining landscapes.

That said, the book springs from two simple ideas. One is that the history of the river requires treating natural and human history in a coequal fashion, without privileging one over the other. The other is a visualization of riverine environmental history as inseparable from the environmental histories of mountains and plains that are the source regions and companion terrain of the river as it descends through the land into the sea. These two issues are highly relevant to conceptualizing environmental history through complex ecological relations in which human ecology is part of the web and more or less determines outcomes for the larger web of life. The book further claims that human reshaping of the river and its extended ecological relations is more evident at the end of the twentieth century, as various forces plan to further re-engineer the river and its landscape.

While writing, and framing this book, I have had to draw from a wide range of sources including the literature and poetry on the Brahmaputra. The river comes alive in literary records even as it appears marginal in the historical records where the focus in modern times had already shifted resolutely to land. Both these kinds of records are valuable in constructing a river biography. For instance, the measurement of the river – its flows of water and sediment became a powerful way to know the river and its character and temperament. These modes of perception and assessment of the river as a set of properties and forces emerged with the cameral sciences and their spread into the working of modern states. Many of the ways of knowing, helped by these new perspectives, focused attention on the shifts in the course of the river and its probable causes.

The floods of 1954 set the agenda for flood control and river basin management schemes, increasing expense and ambition. And now, the nationalization of the Brahmaputra and the lessons of sixty years of failure and aggravated disasters from these river engineering projects of nation building, are being ignored. The river is being re-imagined as a storehouse of hydroelectric power and new re-engineering projects are underway. The river, assisted by a growing number of regional skeptics, exercising democratic agency, seem poised to fight this newest onslaught.

By the turn of the 20th century, grand plans were in place to build dams on the river and its tributaries. In 2017 India’s national planners had proposed a dam upstream of the Brahmaputra to produce 10,000 megawatts of electricity. Will the river and its floodplains outlive this onslaught? My book examines this question – an environmental history of the river written from the perspective of the life of a major river that is old, unruly, and historically an agent in both landscape engineering and in the crafting of different livelihoods. The river will continue to inspire scholars to think about the relationship of humans and nature in a more compelling manner.

 

Mahesh Rangarajan: My sense is that the timing of The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra could not have been better. Living at a time of epochal changes across the world, it is regular for leaders to tell us that we are in a new era. In India, in Assam, we are of course in a new India and a new Assam, or so we are told. And one of the dimensions of this newness, which I must emphasize, is that we take entities we are familiar with and remake them.

I recall the very historic elections of 2004, which for me as a student of history was very important. One of the images and symbols which was evoked by one of the very important political formations then, was that India needed a modern Bhagiratha. Bhagiratha was the person who, in epic legend and lore, brought Ganga down to the earth. The Ganga here, of course, was a symbol which was reviewed. The Ganga was a river which was respected. The Ganga was an entity that was worshipped, and the Ganga was the giver of life. I could not but help recall a song sung by many called ‘Ganga Amar Ma Padma Amar Ma’. The notion of the river as a harbinger of life is being remade. This remaking is about very large human interventions which channel the flows of the river. The channelling of river flows in the 19th and 20th century was about building embankments to reduce floods. Whether they succeeded or failed has its own history. This is an important part of the book.

From the 1920s, we have entered a new era in South Asia of large dam building. There were dams earlier which we know from the works of people like Kathleen Morrison, who has written remarkably on the check dams of Vijayanagar, some of which incidentally are still standing 600 years on. But those are dryland reservoirs; they transform the seasonal flows into perennial flows in peninsular India, where all the rivers were seasonal. But when one looks at the snowmelt rivers of the Himalaya, these great rivers like the Indus, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, it is important to keep in mind that we are living through epochal changes.

Some years ago, one of the major campaigners against dams brought out a remarkable book in which he totalled the number of dams that are proposed to be constructed along this entire range of mountains from the Hindu Kush through the Himalaya to the sub-Himalayan tracts, the various smaller promontories in South Asia and going on towards the headwaters of the Mekong. At a time when there are such large projects of hydro engineering that have geological and ecological consequences and consequences for the various entities that live within and around the rivers, and for the people who live along the river, downstream and upstream, and for the lands, such a book is all the more vital.

In recent years, there has been a lot of thinking about the role of an environmentalist. Are his histories of the environment about the environment or are they about what people think of the environment? To paraphrase from a very fine book about the Rhine, The Conquest of Nature by the great British historian of Germany, David Blackbourn, he begins this book with a question. He asks, ‘Maybe if you put a question mark, is nature a subject of conquest? When do you decide to conquer nature? Is there a moment or does nature strike back?’ The very idea of conquering nature has, within it, a lot of assumptions about the power of technology, the power of humanity, and a very different kind of attitude to the river as an entity.

Blackbourn poses a very interesting question, and I think one of the strengths of the manuscript when I read it, and has become an even better book now, is that it wrestles with this question. How can any human being pretend to know how a river thinks, even if we were to assume that the river is an entity? Blackbourn takes the easier way out, and I am not going to tell you how the river thinks. I am going to tell you what people thought about the river. What did people think about the river? Now I think we are at a very interesting moment, because in the last 25-30 years there have been excellent histories of rivers. Alan Mikhail has taken the great river, the Nile, and shown us the attempts over the last 200 years to transform the Nile. Even the most successful attempts, the building of the great dam of Aswan, was in its own sense, a step that sowed the seeds of greater failure because it cut-off the flow of silt which kept the delta of the Nile fertile.

It also led to the spread of bilharzia or schistosomiasis, a deadly disease spread by snails and it helped in the growth of malaria, none of it which was intended to be felt by those who went on and conceived of all these great dam projects. In a similar work today by David Biggs on the Mekong, he argues that the Mekong has actually not been conquered. There have been attempts to conquer the Mekong but the reason you cannot conquer the Mekong is because we don’t know the Mekong well enough. The ideas of engineers, and with the greatest respect to them, are about the cusecs of water, how fast it flows, how big the dam will be, where the turbine will be put and how much power it will generate. But there is much more to the river after all than the waters and the rate at which they flow.

A river, as ecologists continuously remind us, is a living entity but not in the literal sense. We are now speaking of hard sciences and we may have different sets of beliefs about the same body of flowing water called a river, but the river is also an entity with different life forms. Looking at my notes of 25 years ago, I was privileged to spend a couple of long evenings with one of the great conservationists who worked on the Brahmaputra, a man very important in conservation in Assam, the late Sanjoy Deb Roy, who was the Field Director of the Manas National Park. The man is credited by many for having found breeding populations of two animals regarded as extinct, the hispid hare and the pygmy hog. Sanjoy Da explained to me that if you went back to the 1920s, the Brahmaputra had around 1000 river islands. These river islands, each of them, had resilient populations of the hog deer, the swamp deer, wild boar, and in some cases, rhinos and tigers. He said that almost all of these islands have now been cleared. They have been cleared for the cultivation of jute or rice. I remember wondering then when we would get not a historian of fauna, which is what he was, but a historian of the land use changes along the Brahmaputra.

One of the strengths of this book is that it begins with geology; how the Brahmaputra came to be what it is today. A very fascinating truth, the Brahmaputra did not flow in its present route joining the Ganga. It flowed by a different route joining the Irrawaddy, and this was millions of years ago. There were no human beings around to witness it. We know this through the work of geologists. But when we come to the present day, the recent decades of change have been very profound. There is a remarkable crocodilian which many people may not have seen, called the gharial. I will date the gharial by referring to a creature you all have seen on your screens, the Tyrannosaurus rex. The Tyrannosaurus rex by Michael Crichton, because of literary license is transformed into a Jurassic creature.

A very intelligent review by a paleontologist said it is not a Jurassic creature, but rather, a Triassic creature. It is even older than Jurassic. I am not a geologist, but it is very very old. The T-Rex doesn’t exist except in bones in the museums. The gharial still exists and is a deeply endangered specie today. There are very few gharials, and those gharials which have been bred and released back into rivers such as the Ganga or the Chambal are in trouble because the rivers are drying up. They are drying up because of dams which are cutting off swift flowing water, vital for the life cycle of the gharial. It is fascinating for me to find, through the research of Professor Saikia, that in the 19th century, gharials were even more common in the Brahmaputra than the freshwater crocodiles. They were killed.

We went to this place along the river near IIT Guwahati a few weeks ago, and he showed me a spot, where according to the British records, it was killed. We know only because the person who killed it, skinned it, took it to the collector, claimed a reward. How do you measure and give rewards for killing gharials and crocodiles? It is quite simple. The British administration spent a lot of time solving these problems; you measured it. So the more the number of inches the gharial was, the more money you got. Therefore, this is a river that has been deeply stretched in terms of its ecology. It has been stretched by the extermination of the megafauna that lived around it, the clearing of a lot of the vegetation around it and the extermination of much of the fauna within it.

When we look at the remaking of the rivers such as the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Ganga and the Mekong, we may also wish to remember that one of the remarkable features of Asia is that it is home to so may freshwater species of dolphins. As students, we had to memorize the names of rivers. I think it would have been much more interesting if we had been told that each of these great rivers had its own varieties of dolphins, almost. Sometimes, two kinds of dolphins can come together. There was the Indus, the Ganga, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong and the Yangtze. The Yangtze dolphin became extinct a few years ago. There is a remarkable book about it called The Search for the Yangtze Dolphin. No prizes for telling you; at the end of the search, they found the Yangtze but without any dolphins. So, the Yangtze dolphin is the first freshwater cetacean to become extinct. It did not become extinct only because of direct prosecution. It became extinct due to unintended causes; the remaking of the Yangtze River left no space for the dolphin. This raises a question that goes beyond the Brahmaputra, which is remarkable because it has the Irrawaddy dolphin. And I am happy to report that on one of my trips to IIT Guwahati some enterprising students put us into a boat, and for a few seconds we saw this remarkable dolphin jump back into the river.

The notion of the river being unquiet – there are two ways the river could be unquiet. Unquiet because of this cycle of life that animates it. The Brahmaputra is incomplete without a creature such as the Irrawaddy dolphin or the gharial and all of these creatures. But it may also be unquiet because there are sets of people, humans. There isn’t one human history; there are many human histories. History is contested. It is not the story of dates and not a tired old story about which king came to power, who poisoned whom, who fought in which battle, who had more horses, etcetera. It is also the story of human aspirations, not only about each other but also about the land and the waters that surround us.

So much of our story in Asia is such that you cannot disentangle the story of the land from the story of the waters. The story of the Brahmaputra becomes a story of the riverine plains, the plains and the valleys around it and the hills near it. The story after the 1820s has been one of relentless transformation – a transformation with the establishment of the tea gardens in the upper areas. Huge areas were cleared of forests, large numbers of labour were bought in extremely forcible, I will not say slavery conditions, but certainly conditions almost amounting to indenture. Therefore, with the creation of the tea gardens, there was also a huge boom in the production of jute. To meet this boom, a new labour force was brought in.

You are all aware of this big debate about the changing demographic composition of the Brahmaputra valley. But part of the changing demographic composition is because labour was required by the people who were then powerful, to replace those fields of tall grass prairies and tall grasslands and wet savannahs, with jute fields. Of course, when they would grow jute, they would also grow rice because they had to eat. Therefore, in more recent years, we have this larger story of huge investments and infusions of capital.

We also have something, which Professor Saikia has written about elsewhere, that is the discovery of oil which was to become an explosive political issue in Assam politics by the 1950s. A book such as this can help us get a sense of perspective. One critical point is that one has to go beyond thinking of land and water simply as a source of wealth. The question of what it is worth can be answered in many ways. But some of those answers simply cannot be quantified in terms of profit and loss accounts and if I may be permitted to add, in terms of electoral dividend and for the harvest of votes.

In recent years, it all probably began in 1985 with the Ganga Festival which was inaugurated by the then prime minister. There is also a Namani Brahmaputre festival. I found the Namani Brahmaputre festival fascinating. The cultures of the Brahmaputra were being contested in several of the public events being held on its banks because the food culture of the North Indian plains, the Ganga plains, was being imposed on the people participating in these events. These were places where the festivals of worship included dishes of fish, but they were told that they could not eat fish because it was not part of our culture. I think this is not only a debate about culture; it is also a debate of how you relate to the river. The consumption of fish on that occasion was a form of paying respect to the river. It is not about exploiting the river but about associations with the river.

So can we have cultures of livelihood, cultures of nature that are less, rather than more, in conflict with the life cycle of the river? Can we, in trying to make peace with the river, not be surrendering to it? I am not suggesting there should be no protection from the floods, or that there should be no attempts to look at hydropower, but can we devise ways that are less exploitative and more mindful, not only of what we are doing but what the consequences might be? I will end with David Blackbourn, who made a very important point, and I think Professor Saikia has a very philosophical position on it.

Blacbourn argues one of the reasons you cannot think like a river is that the impact of a river can be unintended. But I think humans can think about possible unintended consequences of our actions. I refer for instance, to the embankments that were built to protect people from floods. In many cases, the embankments in the long run worsened the situation of floods. They exposed more people to floods than were being exposed to the floods prior to the flood. How we think of rivers in different ways is fundamental to how we can think of ourselves in different ways. In that sense, this is a profoundly, deeply, and in some ways a very fascinating political book. It is certainly about going out in the river, sitting at the riverbank, sitting on the island, dipping your feet in the river and swimming in the river. It is also about contemplating a different kind of future because in some ways that is how histories are. Histories are not just about the past; they are also about the battles for the future. And what better way to go into battle, however nonviolent we hope it will be and should be, than with the perspective, the enriching and deeply vibrant perspective of life as is outlined in this fascinating book.

 

Claude Arpi: I have to admit that I have not been to Assam often. I had a darshan of the Brahmaputra only three or four times, so I cannot speak about this river with the authority of my fellow panelists. But the few times that I have seen the river, I was really touched by its calm, its majesty, and its width. Now, to speak after Professor Rangarajan is also very difficult because he has puts everything in the right perspective.

As pointed out earlier, my mind is of a political rather than poetic bend; I am not a poet or even a historian. I usually see events or developments more from the political and geo-strategic angle. So I can only tell you about the dams that the Chinese have built (or will build) in Tibet; I must however add that India often does the same thing (or is planning to do the same thing) on the Indian side of the McMahon Line. Arunachal Pradesh plans to generate some 50 or 60 gigawatts of electricity through hydropower plants.

Most of the politicians in Arunachal Pradesh today have become rich thanks to the MoUs signed a few years ago to set up these plants. In a previous Assembly election, 11 MLAs were elected unopposed. You may wonder how they got elected unopposed to a Legislative Assembly? It is very simple. Thanks to the dams, many local politicians have become rich and managed to get elected ‘unopposed’. I know of some MLAs and ministers who were very poor, just had a charpoy and a few plastic chairs in their home; but when the next elections came, they declared hundreds of crores of assets in their affidavits. How in those five or ten years did they manage to get so many crores? The answer is, because of the dams.

The human aspect bought out by Dr Rangarajan is often forgotten; it is an important aspect. Mahesh spoke about wealth, human wealth; unfortunately, the Chinese often do not consider this aspect.

In this context, it is a pity that many in India have forgotten about the Indian Frontier Administrative Service (IFAS). It consisted of a bunch of remarkable officers like Col Yousuf Ali, Maj S.M. Krishnatry, Col Pran Luthra or Maj K.C. Johorey, who worked for years and years under the most difficult climatic and material conditions in border areas; for them, the human aspect always came first. Interestingly, they would always submit lengthy reports. They would write hundreds of pages about the people, about the rivers, the mountains, the villages and the local customs. Today, it is very difficult to access these reports but I am sure that the present IAS officers never write more than a few lines about the areas under their jurisdiction. The IFAS records are an invaluable record of the history of these areas and they provide valuable information on the rivers flowing in the North East.

The Yarlung Tsangpo: At first people did not know that the Yarlung Tsangpo was the same river as the Siang and later the Brahmaputra. I discovered this in the archives, when I came across an interesting map where the cartographer had marked, with a dotted line, the river between the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet and the Siang in India. Nobody knew until Kinthup, called a ‘pandit’ by the officers of the Survey of India at Dehradun, went to Tibet and floated logs which were eventually found down the river; he had discovered that the Yarlung Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were the same river. This was at the end of the 19th century.

The seismicity of the area: Those who plan to construct dams on the Subansiri or the Dibang, or the Chinese who want to build dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo, should seriously think about the seismicity of this area and about the earthquake, which occurred on Independence Day in 1950. In India, it is known as the ‘Assam Earthquake’; the epicentre was in Tibet in the Lohit Valley, near Rima. The Dalai Lama’s memoirs mention that he was then a fifteen-year-old kid when one day in Lhasa the sky suddenly became red. The Tibetans thought that some military exercises were being held in the suburbs of the Tibetan capital. Others saw some sort of fireworks in the sky, though Rima was located almost 400 km away. Robert Ford, the British radio operator working in Tibet (he was later imprisoned by the Chinese when they invaded Tibet), also mentions this in his memoir; he was then in Kham province of eastern Tibet and he described the scene. It appears that the course of the river (the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahamaputra) changed; the earthquake measured 8.6 on the Richter scale. I have a picture of a railway line in Assam which shows the destruction wrecked by that earthquake. These areas are not less seismic today as they were in the 1950s Therefore, whoever plans small or big dams should think about this.

More recently, on 17 November 2018, the Indian press reported that the waters of the Siang were black and started questioning the Chinese about it. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, took about three-four weeks to explain that it was because of a large landslide which had taken place and that many people had to be displaced; this shows again the instability of the region.

Interestingly, I found in the National Archives a letter from an officer of the Ministry of External Affairs addressed in the 1950s to Apa Pant, who was then the Political Officer (PO) in Sikkim. Some Indian officials and the PO had received information that the Chinese were planning to build dams across the Brahmaputra in the Tibetan region. Pant mentioned that the Chinese had these plans ever since they came to Tibet in 1951. The dams planned today by China are not a new thing. While China started planning to dam the river long ago, India has begun much more recently, probably after the politicians found it an easy way to get rich.

What worries me is that when China has a plan, it usually pursues it till completion; sometime it may be kept in a drawer, but eventually it will see the light one day; it may be modified taking into account prevailing conditions, but it will eventually materialize. It is what happened with the railway line from Shanghai to Lhasa that was inaugurated in July 2006. The plan originated during the time of the Nationalists; Sun Yatsen envisioned laying a railway line up to Tibet, though China was not technologically ready at that time. Similarly with regard to dams – it may remain a dream for decades.

I have been closely watching what is happening in Tibet, particularly during the last 20 years (I started writing about damming and diversion of the Brahmaputra in 2000). At that time the diversion was technically not possible, but since then the infrastructure has improved tremendously. One of the panelists spoke about the Great Bend and its mythic aspect – at that time, it would take weeks to reach places like Pemako or Metok (the county bordering India). Since 2013, there is a tunnel and tens of thousands of Chinese tourists regularly visit Metok, north of Gelling and Tuting in Upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh.

There are plans for two different projects: one is a mega dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo, the other is the diversion of the Brahmaputra; in some cases both come together. Many plans have been made for the diversion, some completely crazy. There was one by a former PLA General who had worked on a scheme starting in a place closer to Lhasa. A more serious one appeared in 2013 when the Yellow River Conservancy Commission posted a detailed plan on its website. But this sort of scheme is very difficult to implement. It is also true that there is a lot of academic opposition in China. Many scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are opposed to it; they say that it is not feasible or implementable. But today things have changed; the infrastructure has improved tremendously, partly due to the tourist boom. Last year, seven million tourists visited the Nyingchi area which borders Arunachal Pradesh. To cater to these visitors, one needs infrastructure, roads, hotels, and more. All this could eventually be used as the basis for building the dam.

The latest scheme appeared last year in the social media. It was prepared by Wang Hua, a professor at Tsinghua University who planned for 600 km of diversion valued at 65 billion US dollars. Wang wants to bring the water of the Yarlung Tsangpo to Xinjiang. During the first stage, the water would be sent to Qinghai province.

Just as life in Assam is centred on the Brahmaputra, the Chinese civilization is centred on the Yellow River. If the river physically dies, it symbolically means the death of a part of the Chinese civilization. People have been dreaming about this diversion for decades. What makes Wang Hua special is that he is a contemporary of Chen Xi, who is a member of the Politburo. They were together at Tsinghua University in the early 1970s and President Xi Jinping was on the benches of the same university at the same time; they know each other well. Xi Jinping is supposed to have been shown the project and it is claimed that he called it a ‘good project’.

Of course, there are political and strategic implications, particularly with India. If something happens on the Yarlung Tsangpo, like a diversion of the river, India will take it seriously. Therefore, China has been careful, and for the time being, the plans remain in the drawer. China is a very pragmatic nation. Beijing will calculate both the benefits and disadvantages of diverting the river. Ultimately, their decision will be based on practical pros and the cons.

One of the major issues is the pricing of the water. To divert water is extremely costly, even if the water were to arrive one day at its destination – its price could be five times the general average cost per liter of other water supply. Can China afford this? There are two ways to go about it; either the government decides to subsidize the water, in which case the local government debt will increase and China already has a huge problem of debt in its provinces. If it is not subsidized, then the local people will have to pay. Will they agree? Further, at the origin of the diversion (in southern Tibet), the populations will suffer with less water, and though only few Tibetan people live there, it could be a problem. In the case of the Yangtze, where millions were displaced, it was problematic. All these factors will have to be considered before deciding whether to go ahead with the diversion.

Recently, there were two big landslides in this area, one in October 2018, the other in November; the former was close to where the Chinese are planning to lay the railway line (between Nyingchi and Chengdu), which will eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the most difficult portion of the railway between Sichuan and Tibet. The Lhasa-Nyingchi section is a relatively easy section and the major work has already been done; it will be completed in two years. However, the other part between Nyingchi and Sichuan is technically extremely difficult. Fifty per cent this part will be through tunnels and bridges, one of these tunnels will be 52 km long.

Again, let us not forget that the area is very earthquake prone and landslides often occur. Last year, Beijing got a hint of what could happen from the landslide that took place in October. Some 30,000 people had to be relocated and China had to build a new road (with a new alignment). The same thing could happen on a larger scale if a big dam is built.

Another landslide was reported a few weeks later. It took place near the Great Bend and 10,000 people had to be relocated. In March 2019, when the National People’s Congress met in Beijing, President Xi Jinping and most of the national leaders spoke about the environment. If the Chinese leadership is serious, then it must take the fragility of southern Tibet into account before committing to build dams. Whatever I have said for China applies to India because an earthquake will not recognize the McMahon Line!

One politician asked me why I was worrying about dams on the Brahmaputra on the Indian side; he said that politicians have got what they wanted after signing the MOUs, and hence most of them are now anti-dam; it might be partially true. Let us hope for the best – that common sense will prevail.

 

Joydeep Gupta: I would like to remind you of one particular myth of India as it relates to rivers. There are only two male rivers in Indian mythology, in Indian literature. The rest of the rivers are ‘nodi’, female. There are only two that are male, the Indus and the Brahmaputra. These are the two male rivers, as conceived over millennia, because they were tough to tame. They are far more capricious than the other rivers. The Brahmaputra, as Professor Rangarajan pointed out, is a river that in terms of geology predates the South Asian portion of this landmass coming and hitting the rest of Asia. It used to flow into the Tethys Sea before South Asis came and hit Asia and ended up with the formation of the Himalayas. It has a history that we cannot even imagine. Today, our problem is the planners of India, of China, of Bangladesh, of Bhutan, the four countries that are on the Brahmaputra basin, are all looking at the river with a very narrow 19th-20th CE perspective. It simply does not work today and that is the problem that we have with the river.

The problem we have is that people who are in positions of power are trying to define the river and therefore, trying to control the river in a way which is against ecology, nature, people and everything you can think of. Claude just mentioned the four dams that the Chinese are building – one almost done, one ready and two under construction. There are many more, like ones slightly downstream on the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. And these are at an even earlier stage of planning and construction. In most cases, all that has been built are the approach roads, and you can already see the results. You can also see that the traditional flood irrigation or the flood pattern of silt-based farming is completely breaking down not only in the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam but also downstream in Bangladesh all the way to the sea. The moment you stop silt, you stop the productivity of the soil downstream. It is as simple as that. Silt is being stopped to some extent before the Great Bend by the Chinese dam builders. Some more on the Siang, the Subhansari, the Dibang by all the dams that are being planned. And we must remember that the Brahmaputra floods are a part of its nature – it is in the nature of the river to flood. People are used to it.

When the Brahmaputra used to go back after flooding, it would leave behind a very rich silt which people used to farm on. Now, you go to Dibrugarh and see what happens after the flood. Every farm on the riverside is filled, not with silt but with sand because the silt is being stopped upstream. You already have this situation with the current levels of interference with the river. Much more is planned and I think it is very important for people sitting here and people not sitting here to give a second thought or even a third thought and think about what is being planned. The entire Brahmaputra Basin is the basis of the interlinking of river schemes. The water is supposed to come all the way to Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Are there actually water surplus places in Assam? We hear enough about the floods in Assam, do we hear enough about the droughts in Assam?

Quite apart from the engineering problems of interlinking rivers, one must think about water balance itself. Fundamental problems are being created. There is also another scheme that is being planned. This is the National Waterways II all the way up the Brahmaputra, from Dhubri to Dibrugarh. A lot of money is going into it on the assumption that it will carry a lot of industrial goods. I have not been able to figure out what industrial goods it is supposed to carry. If we are going to use the waterways to carry tea, it is not going to work because it will simply take too long. We will have to carry longer lasting goods. Transporting timber would mean more deforestation up and down the Assam Valley. I think these are basic questions that we need to look at and think of.

Like most civilizations around the world, we are a riverine civilization. We are completely dependent on our rivers and if we monkey around with them to this extent, we are going to be in serious trouble. The problem is basic and needs to be handled at a very basic level. Civil engineering students today are told that a river is a water pipe. That is fundamental to them and hence they look at the river only as a pipe of water to be moved this way and that way. The fact that a river carries silt and life in it, and that the people on the banks are dependent on it, are simply not taught to students at any level. Some very fundamental changes are needed. While we celebrate this ‘unquiet river’, I would be very happy if we could make a start with these changes.

 

* Transcribed by Akshita Chembolu, Jindal School of Governance and Public Policy, and Ashima Sharma, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication, from ArtEast 2019 panel discussion on Time, History and River at the India International Centre, New Delhi.