Treading Water

Piya Srinivasan

I spent my childhood in Guwahati, a town on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Not being Assamese and growing up in the 1990s among a community that was fiercely protective of its ethnic identity, I learnt to adapt. I learnt the songs, the smells, the regional inflections that give a group of people dominion over a city’s economic and cultural resources. But the feeling of being an outsider stayed with me. I only felt a true sense of belonging when I stood on the banks of the river.

My cultural memory of the Brahmaputra, discovered through the songs of the region, was benign and generative: a river of legend, folklore, myth, sustenance. The river was my first experience of something larger than the life I had lived. It did not demand that I perform belonging. Indeed, the town seemed to change its nature on the riverfront that ran parallel to the river, a stretch assigned to leisure, recreation, and contemplation. It held a kind of generosity that other public spaces in the city did not concede. Water did not insist on allegiance. When I was older, I would go up to one of the highest points in town from where the river looked like the sea. The limitless horizon was a metaphor of possibility, life, movement.

Approaching June, the water levels of the Brahmaputra would rise above the danger mark and flow beyond the banks, into the city. To be thrilled by this occurrence was only possible from a place of safety, most often a car. It took me some time to realise what the river took away. My memory of a benign river prone to occasional exciting outbursts would be destroyed when I became aware of the realities of large-scale displacement of riverine communities during the annual floods in Assam[i]. The land that water took away would then emerge in a different location on the river, a geographical formation called chars, riverine islands formed through silt deposits. Much of Assam – known as a ‘waterscape’[ii] in ancient texts due to the Brahmaputra’s numerous tributaries crisscrossing the state – would become unrecognisable under the sheets of muddy water that submerged its low-lying areas.

Natural disasters are one of the largest reasons for human migration[iii]. People wading through waist-deep water, carrying their children, livestock, and belongings wrapped around their heads to drier land is a common sight in India. One day a person has their family around them, their cattle, their small patch of agricultural land, their homes laden with belongings, children’s schoolbooks, toys, their identity cards, their ephemeras. The next day it’s all gone, washed away.

At college in the national capital, I would wring my hands in despair at the news of the annual devastation caused by the Assam floods. It was around this time that I became painfully aware of the hierarchy of outsiders in Assam, especially communities that lived in the state’s char-chaporis and faced various marginalisations. These displacements created another register of people: migrants and immigrants. An entire strand of political discourse has been built around ideas of illegal immigration in Assam, enacted through social, political, and economic exclusion. Floods and riverbank erosion do not respect pincodes and create critical forms of adversity for char dwellers whose property and livestock are routinely washed away by the river, weakening already fragile economic bases and compelling people to migrate.

Distress migration also becomes a form of exile. These migrations are negotiated mostly via exploitative labour networks, and migrants who work in the unorganised sector often experience xenophobia, cultural alienation, and receive little or no institutional support in their destination cities. Homelessness and loss of livelihoods due to adverse ecological processes is also mixed with the risk of being declared stateless for many char people due to the National Register for Citizens (NRC) exercise[iv] in Assam.

These forced migrations are micro-reverberations of the blood-soaked exodus of 1947. Water exoduses inexorably shape communities, identities, geographies, and ecosystems. Water is a repository of stories and a medium of infinite temporalities. Perhaps the mystique of water lies in its intricate histories: not only of the movement of capital, goods, medicines, and spices across trade routes but also as a pathway of imperialism and conquest, revenue extraction and transportation of slaves and bonded labour, and the trafficking of migrants and refugees who continue to be borne along its currents. These histories and quests remain alive under its surface, illuminating the contradictions of water as both life-giving and death-dealing.

Water becomes, then, a medium to understand life stories. My desire to explore what belonging and exile might mean prompted my journey as a researcher in search of a language to address my own deep, undisciplined feelings. Researching disaster management processes in the Sundarbans in West Bengal, where I live and work, unearthed ways in which water is inextricably linked to ideas of home. The Indian Sundarbans, as a coastal mangrove delta, is home to water conundrums as an outcome of specific hydro-morphological conditions that have been exacerbated by rising sea levels. Its 4.5 million inhabitants face an extreme level of vulnerability due to the region’s increasing ecological fragility, especially in the last decade. Revenue generating activities like fishing, crab collecting, and agriculture are regularly lost to the rising tides.

The Indian Sundarbans is also home to the vanishing island of Lohachara, which in 2006 had a population of around 10,000 people and is one of the first inhabited islands in the world to disappear. Another island that has lost more than one-third of its landmass to rapid erosion is Ghoramara. I think of Dukhi Shyam Mondol[v] who migrated about 45 years ago from Ghoramara to Sagar, the largest island of the Indian Sundarbans, and spoke to us about losing his home to river erosion. ‘During [Cyclone] Yaas (2021), the water current engulfed our home. We couldn’t occupy our home for two months. When we moved here, the water current wasn’t as strong. The river has transformed. Now the waves have become larger than life and keep breaching the embankments that cannot contain them,’ he says.

The increasing instances of water eating away land has everything to do with the avaricious and inexhaustible appetites of man that have precipitated global warming and sea-level rise. A conversation with Panchanan Dolui[vi], a resident of another island called Mousuni, reveals that he has shifted homes three times within the island, each time attempting to move further from the edge. He has seen the river swallow vast tracts of land, repeated embankment breaches and no repair work. 'But where do we go? There is nowhere to go.’ Rehabilitation is an uncertain promise with prime land in the Sundarbans already occupied. Clearly, the water crisis also draws attention to a land crisis. The Sundarbans has seen several waves of outmigration since Cyclone Aila of 2009. Aside from cursory mentions in policy reports and documentaries, the lament of the displaced goes unheeded. In the hierarchy of vulnerability, the truly marginalised, discriminated, and dispossessed come last.

It is no secret that in a world of rapidly changing environmental indicators and increasing temperatures, water will be the tableaux around which our lives will be arranged. There are scientific estimates that parts of Mumbai, a city dredged from estuary, mangrove, and marshland, will be reclaimed by the sea by 2050. There are similar predictions for Kolkata, expected to be severely affected by the frequency of cyclones (Cyclone Amphan is a case in point) due to the warming of the Bay of Bengal. In the animated short film Wade (2020), the Sundarbans has gone under and the sea has reached Kolkata. The film depicts the clash between a group of climate refugees and a group of Royal Bengal Tigers that emerge from the floodwaters of a submerged Park Street. Both are unmoored, set adrift by climate change. The tigers are an eerie reminder of a time two centuries ago when mangrove forests extended up to Calcutta and tigers roamed the city. The film’s prescience is in small details such as the (anti-refugee) writing on the wall(s). Its dramatic rendering of the man-animal conflict in an apocalyptic landscape brings home our own dystopian presents.