The problem
‘When I went to China several years ago I felt a touch of that great stream of life that sprang from the heart of India and overflowed across mountain and desert into that distant land, fertilising the heart of its people.’
– Rabindranath Tagore in his inaugural address at the opening of Cheena Bhavana, Santiniketan, 1937
IN his article, ‘Streams of Life’, Gopal Krishna Gandhi quotes Tagore and argues that the poet, ‘describes in a burst of imaginative veritas the counter-gravity flow of a civilizing Indian stream, for China to take into its heart.’ While the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra story is ‘one of the most dramatic encounters between river and mountain’, it also carries with it the drama of civilizations and imagination. The Brahmaputra, like its course is an improbable; it swings back and around, enters an impenetrable gorge, travels to the deepest chasm of earth and emerges as if from nowhere.
This issue of Seminar emerged out of a fringe festival, ArtEast
1, and is an imagination captured by the appealing plurality and breadth of this river. The river-imagination is not just watching the water flow; imagining the river is to discover new meanings and envision our environment and a find a new location for us within it.Virtually inaccessible, the Tsangpo gorge in south-east Tibet is the world’s deepest gorge and the riddle of the Tsangpo fascinated explorers over generations to set out and discover ‘Shangri-la’ and the ‘hidden falls’. It took an illiterate tailor with a prodigious memory, from Darjeeling in India, to eventually trace its source. The paradise was prophesied in Tibetan scriptures to lie in the depths of the gorge, concealed by the fabled ‘Falls of the Brahmaputra’. Beyul Pemako, the ‘Hidden-Land Arrayed like Lotuses’, became an obsession that inspired imaginations across the planet and established enduring legends. Explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries attempted to discover the fabled waterfall and to solve the riddle of an incredible 11,000-foot drop in elevation between the origins of the Tsangpo River in Tibet and the lower reaches of what becomes the Siang and then the Brahmaputra in Assam.
The waterfall remained an unresolved geographical mystery until November 1998 when Ian Baker reached the base of the falls in the depths of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Gorge, an area that had been, until then, literally a blank spot on the map of world exploration, concealed by sheer cliffs in a ‘gorge-within-a-gorge so deep it remains in perpetual shadow.’
This river finds its source in Mansarovar originating at 24,000 feet running east for 1000 miles entering a bottomless gorge and within a span of just 150 miles plunging to the womb of the earth taking a sharp turn to enter India. It is older than the Himalaya and geologically and mythically pre-Aryan. It is one of the largest rivers, an awe inspring body of water with hundreds of stories from the Vedas to the tunes of bhatiali and paar geet. If singer Bhupen Hazarika’s unending conversation with the river became his anthem, then Tagore’s most productive work has been on the Padma. So why then is the Brahmaputra not in the ‘Indian’ imagination? Why is it only seen when it breaks its banks flooding the plains?
The Brahmaputra with its many names unfolds a creative universe that challenges the imagination of the ‘mainstream’ making sure that those who have been pushed to the margins must get a voice. The first accounts of the gorge came from Mishmi and Abor tribesmen but who knows about them today? Who are they? They remain as invisible as the gorge.
Today, the Miyahs (a pejorarative word for Bengali Muslims in Assam), the people who literally inhabit the river, find themselves suddenly swept away in a whirlpool of vicious identity politics. For decades the political soundscape has echoed anti-Miyah, anti-Bengali, anti-Bangladeshi and anti-outsider campaigns. It has now reached a cresendo. Like the legend of Behula and Lakhinder located on this river, the unforgiving ‘son of Brahma’ is perhaps testing their perseverence but Hazarika would ask, ‘why do you flow so indifferent to the cries of millions on your banks?’ Hazarika’s mentor Paul Robeson would sing, ‘Ol’ Man River, He’ll just keep rollin’ along!’
In the backdrop of a contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam threatening to turn several millions stateless, the capricious course of the river again broke its banks in the monsoon of 2019. The Miyah, moving from one char to the other, must now be driven out at any cost and it is the consensus of the government, courts and Assamese civil society. The Hindu Bengali is also caught in it but may just escape given the majoritarian Hindu government’s inclination to amend the Citizenship Law and isolate the Muslims. Protests against the harassment and alleged human rights violations have been few and far too weak. The ultra-nationalists went as far as filing an FIR (First Information Report) in July 2019 against Miyah poets, a genre of poetry from the chars that raise questions on migration and identity. The river is swelling and his boat moored to the bank, Miyah boatman Kujarat Ali sings, Nodir Kul Nai…
‘The river has no bank, no edge.
Which bank should I leave and where should I go
Who do I ask?
The big river’s waters rock my boat…’
