A River Unbound

As a child I associated the word ‘freedom’ with the Bharathapuzha, a river that snakes its way from Tamil Nadu, bisects Kerala and pours into the Arabian Sea.  It was not that, as a child, I hadn’t seen other rivers—I grew up on the banks of the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, with tales of Narmada and Ganga that my father told me, and often rode trains that crossed the Godavari, Krishna, Kaveri, Tungabhadra, and many other large and small rivers. But those were geological phenomena in my mind. It was only the Bharathapuzha in Kerala who was witness to my freedoms as a child during summer vacations. What the river free was from exactly, I could not articulate then; looking back, I realise that it was not freedom itself—at least as we understand it—but rather it was a steady recognition that the river would always be there whenever I chose to return to it. The river embodied an assuredness, fullness of presence and, in the final reckoning, an emergent recognition that years were slipping by with nothing to hold on to. In the whirl and buzz of everyday life that made demands on everybody and rendered all servants to some vanity or machination, the Bharathapuzha appeared to my child-like mind as free from such caprice or coercion. Years later when I read philosopher JN Mohanty write about his childhood—“to grow up in such a place as Cuttack is to feel secure that nothing will matter in the long run”—I recognised that sentiment, that realisation that there are phenomena outside one’s own life which transform the ephemera of urban life into unchanging eternities.

The Bharathapuzha river—a redundant phrase courtesy the use of two languages, for ‘puzha’ is ‘river’in Malayalam—flows past my mother’s ancestral home, as it has done for millennia. In these parts of Kerala, near the town of Shornur, where Palakkad and Thrissur district meet and meander into each other, the river acquires a more intimate name, Nila. What was once a name used by poets and farmers, priests and oracles, it has now been appropriated by tourism resorts and alcohol bars on the banks of the river.  I suppose they too want to burnish their commerce with the cultural cachet offered by the word ‘Nila’—a name that is resonant in the Malayalam language.  But for tourists and migrants, ‘Nila’ is a word that helps reveal them as outsiders. It is often mispronounced for the retroflex ‘l’ sound has steadily vanished across many Indian languages—smatterings persist stubbornly, of course, like in ‘fal’ (fruit in Gujarati)—only to be replaced by the plainer ‘l’ that we use to say ‘letter’ or ‘love’.  But this retroflex ‘l’—perhaps the remains of a long-forgotten linguistic substrate—is surprisingly common in these parts, including in the very words ‘Kerala’ or ‘Malayalam’. Those who notice these differences let it slide and these details matter little to these resorts and bars as they struggle to find tourists and the thirsty.

During its journey from the tail ends of the Western Ghats to the Arabian Sea, other names have been bestowed upon the Bharathapuzha. Or more accurately, other smaller rivers and tributaries with different names come together to form the larger water body we now call the Bharathapuzha, resulting in a fiesta of appellations that betray the speaker’s provenance. Names like Thoothapuzha, Kunthipuzha, Kannadipuzha, Kalpathipuzha, Gayatripuzha, and, my favourite, the existentially hopeful ‘Shokanāshini’ or the destroyer of sorrows.  But the river itself doesn’t care about these human games of languages, nomenclatures, and semantics. It flows expansively and spills over, when the monsoons arrive, and by the end of summer, like many other rivers of India, it becomes a hardscrabble bed of rock and sand where overgrown weeds rise up and gang war between frogs and snakes breaks out into the open. The river, like India, even in this penurious summer state, becomes a welcoming ground for all—villains and virtuous alike—all the while as its capacity for floods is obscured for now.

By the standards of Indian rivers, to say nothing of the great world rivers—one can only marvel at the size of the Godavari or the myriad journeys of the Ganga and the adventures of the Brahmaputra—the Bharathapuzha is diminutive in length (209 kilometers) and expanse. For much of its journey, it is an elegant river, which neither inspires fear nor wonder but rather a fondness for it has somehow managed to coexist with humans and animals who live near it. Floods that were once regular phenomena now seem less frequent. Temples abound on its banks and yet the Bharathapuzha, unlike say the Ganga in the North or portions of the Kaveri in the South, has more often been seen as a cultural icon rather than as a religious one.  It lives in the imagination of poets and writers—from Thunchath Ezhuthachan in 15th century to MT Vasudevan Nair in recent times—as a progenitor of culture and a benevolent witness to generations. And yet, much like many an avowed secularist in Kerala, by the time it arrives at the ends of its journeys, concerns about the life hereafter come over it.  Near the village of Thirunavaya, a few miles from the Arabian Sea, the Bharathapuzha acquires a more sombre veneer. There, on the shores of a cul-de-sac, stands the Nava Mukunda temple which has become the site where Hindus go to perform their ancestral rites. Families arrive to remember those who have passed away, they offer their prayers, take a dip in the river and return to the hurly burly of everyday life.  For a few moments, however, the ghats of the Thirunavaya temple and the Bharathapuzha become witnesses to silence, stillness, and surrender. By the time the Bharathapuzha arrives at Thirunavaya, it has transformed from a deep, slender, and playful river into a wide-barreled torrent with dangerous undercurrents. The closer the river gets to the sea, the more its own originary manners metamorphose. The playful gurgle and leap when it is born from the mountains yields to the heaviness of life itself as it arrives into the Arabian Sea near Ponnani.

For over the past three decades, both sides of the river’s banks have teemed with signs of human presence, which include rubber plantations that attest to man’s cunning and will, and homes that are hidden during the daytime behind dense foliage. But despite this humid omnipresence of nature is everywhere. In the evenings, when an oppressive dark comes over, we can only intuit human presence from the aureole of tube lights in homes and mansion that shine, flicker and burn, as voltage rises and falls. The only other light after sundown is the pointillistic shimmer of fireflies that animate the dark for a few hours. Before long, the tube lights and fireflies are both done. All there is then is the immensity of darkness and the steady crackle and rumble of the Bharathapuzha as it prepares to pour into the seas.

Thinking of a river’s ‘freedom’, one cannot but come to the melancholy conclusion that, like all freedoms, this freedom too cannot withstand the glare of scrutiny. Where once stood trees and lagoons, unmolested, solitudinal, in their primordial quiet, where once flew pelicans and cranes in their elegant savageries—now towns and overgrown villages abound. Haphazardly lain concrete promenades, abandoned railway bridges, homes and garbage mounds appear and vanish. Every so often when the river brims over with monsoon rainwater, small boats make their way through the river’s non-navigable channels like mysterious sentinels that mark the end of one civilization and the beginning of the next. When I walk along its banks or drive along the Shornur bridge that runs over the Nila river, the sounds of human presence are omnipresent. The river is visible to me but I can no longer see it for what it is. The braying of private buses, the cackle of construction machines, men and women rushing to somewhere and nowhere—human activity is hard to ignore. If man were to vanish right this moment, these sounds of his vanities and frenzies would still hang in the air for a millennium or two, like the traces of arsenic in the remains of some pre-modern despot. The echoes of these sounds rise up and press outwards, like soldiers in some siege formation emerging from some defensive crouch, till all hell breaks loose as they eventually run into each other. Crashing, tumbling, eviscerating one cacophony with another to create a singular atmosphere that acts as a testament to human talent for sound making and more fundamentally for the human inability to sit still. This miasma of sound born out of human sentience swirls all around like the murmuration of starlings. It is fascinating, shape-shifting and the meaning of such encounters escapes me.

This blob of white noise, to which I contribute as well, is a form of intrusion that has no name. This sound cloud wanders above the waters and eventually seeps into the waves and stone, moisture and vegetation that somehow still manage to cling around the edges of the Bharathapuzha even in late summer. Half-naked women and young children bathe in its shallow pools. All along, the river’s waters snake past farmlands of coconut groves and paddy fields, we see evidence of the Indian state in unexpected ways. Tall concrete posts carrying electricity and their swooping wires follow the algebra of hyperbolic functions as they range far and become haunts for crows and sparrows. But the grounds on which these electric posts are placed are subject to the immutable laws of nature and geology. After heavy rains and monsoon winds, these tall concrete slabs begin to slip and slide only to eventually find a new repose at an incline. The bureaucratic annals of the Indian state deemed that these electricity posts should stand at a perpendicular, but the Indian reality undermines the hegemonic fiat. In the end, somehow, navigating through the miraculous and the mundane, electricity reaches homes along the Bharathapuzha which had been content to live in darkness for much of their lives. After electricity, other shape-shifting seductions of modernity trickle in. Outhouses give way to in-house toilets, plumbing and running water, evening prayers surrender to the demons of cable television. More recently, farming along the Bharathapuzha has largely ceased to be a central fact of human experience. Lest one thinks this is an immiserating description, it is important to note that hunger, which stalked my father’s generation, is by now a distant memory even among the unfortunate. Men and women live longer with access to doctors and surgeries. The young are better educated than their parents. All of this—freedom of body and mind—has come about thanks to the ambitions and follies of the gargantuan Indian state. An independent Indian state.

But freedom is not a transitive property. The freedom of the state need not translate to the freedoms of the individuals. This begs the question—if India is free, are Indians also free?

There are no easy or satisfying answers to this open-ended question on account of the capacious and shape-shifting nature of the word ‘free’. Are we talking about political freedoms to switch parties, vote freely, and critique government policies? Or are we talking about economic security and a life free of anxieties about the future? More intimate to our immediate senses, are we talking about the freedoms to exist in a society as an individual, especially as a woman, a member of the marginalised groups, or a free-thinking person?  For those of us, which is to say, nearly all of us, who live under the weight of the past, be it through traditions, rituals, and intergenerational commitments, there remains the vexing question of what follows this ‘freedom’ after abandoning one’s bonds to that omnipresent past—is it an act of renaissance or is throwing oneself to the inconstant winds of incoherence and dissolution of the self. If we expand our conception of who is an Indian to include rivers like the Bharathapuzha, our mountains and seas, our animals and birds, then we must ask the question of how progressively unfree they have become over the centuries during which their free-flowing presences has been vitiated, polluted, desiccated, and inundated with the detritus of our collective fervour for consumption. Thinking about freedoms in this manner forces me to rethink my childhood fancy that the Bharathapuzha is the freest of all beings I have known. Over time, the river has steadily traipsed into a form of unfreedom—an unfreedom that is invisible, slow-moving, and worth fighting against.

Bharathapuzha RiverFreedom issueGayatripuzhaKalpathipuzhaKannadipuzhaKunthipuzhaThoothapuzhaWestern Ghats