The river speaks, listen: Water’s ways

Each river has its own temperament, vocabulary. Upset nature’s delicate balance — as we have, recklessly — and see the devastation that unfolds

R Umamaheshwari

Updated At : 08:14 AM Aug 31, 2025 IST

Water always has its say — greed is not the course it follows, the language it understands. PTI

Once Gautama, the Buddha, advised Tissa (the bhikkuni): “Don’t let what can hold you back overwhelm you; when you are free from everything that holds you back, you can live in the world without the depravities that ooze from within.”

And I wondered, what if one replaced the rivers today with Tissa? What if, as the Buddha advised, the rivers were indeed freeing themselves of everything that came in their way as they moved towards their ultimate destination with gay abandon, exuberance and freedom to flow? What if the “depravities” were the innumerable manifestations of greed tearing at their bosoms, their waters, sand-beds, and even rocks and pebbles, that held them together?

An elderly fisherman of Kakinada (on the southeast coast of India) had told me years ago, “Actually, if you see, we are all living on a lanka (Telugu word for the islands formed on river banks); the sea is all around us. And all rivers shall go to the sea.”

He also told me that no amount of holding in dams and barrages can ever stop a river from “meeting her sea”.

In a folk tale from Lahaul (as recorded by Shravan Kumar, ‘Janjatiya Lok Kathayein’, 2020), a group of young boys wanted to attend a feast on the other bank of river Chandra. The cham, a makeshift bridge to cross over, had broken down, but they decided to cross over by forming a human chain during the night when the river ‘sleeps’. However, while crossing, one of them remarked, “How much do you think we will eat at the feast?” In excitement, his friend raised his hands and said: “This much!” And lo! The human chain broke and they were all swept away by the gushing river waters. This folktale is about human greed, so apt for today.

Hindi poet Omprakash Valmiki wrote in ‘Maa Aur Nadi’ (2011):

Nadi, itihas, aur vartamaan, dono hain

Maa ki tarah

(The river is both the past and present,

like the mother)

As for poet Rajesh Joshi (‘Paani ki Awaaz’):

Paani ka hi jadu tha

Ki paani ki awaaz bhi paardarshi aur

taral lagti thi

Bahkar samudra ki taraf jaati aawaazon mein

Pahaad se utarkar aane ki awaazein

bhi shaamil thi

(It was but the magic of water that its sound seemed both transparent and clear. Inherent in the sounds of water flowing towards the sea were those of water descending from the mountains…)

Himachali writer SR Harnot, in his short story ‘Nadi Tadapti Hai’ (which later became the famous novel ‘Nadi Rang Jaisi Ladki’ — ‘A Woman, The Colour of River’), speaks of the free-spirited river and her bond with the elderly woman Sunma thus: “Woh nadi dadi Sunma ki aankhon mein behti thi.” (That river used to flow in the eyes of grandmother Sunma).

And goes on: “…Bahut se rang the usmein. Anginat udaanein samaahit thi… Nadi ka pauranik naam Shatadru tha. Prachalit naam Satluj… Kitni pyaari lagti thi woh behti hui… Woh jahaan se guzarti, dharti mein yauvan bhar deti… Shaant thi, vegmayi thi. Devi thi aur maa bhi…”

(She had many colours within. The river’s ancient name was Shatadru; but Sutlej became her popular name. How beautiful she seemed as she flowed, showering youthfulness to the spaces she flowed past. She was peaceful. She was turbulent, too. She was a goddess, and a mother, too).

He writes that once she is confined within a dam, the river seems almost dead. “Once the dam gates open, the agonising, hungry cries of the river waters just remain submerged within and die.”

As for me, I learnt years ago of a feminine person, Godavari, who would ‘come’, ‘stay a bit’, and ‘leave’ — as floods were articulated in the Telugu language of people along the banks of Godavari in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The same people today speak of two kinds of waters: the backwater and the natural ‘river’, post-Polavaram dam’s construction. I understood the difference between political-commercial waters and a natural river.

Through subsequent journeys alongside the Sutlej, Beas, Parvati, Pin, Spiti, Chandrabhaga, Siul, Baira Siul and other rivers, rivulets, lakes and streams, besides glaciers, snow passes, natural and forced waterfalls from rocks, I see larger connections between every form of water there is, each intrinsic to the being of rivers. Dissection or decimation of any one of these forms has a devastating impact on monsoonal flows.

I see also the beautiful interplay between the clouds above and the river and its many feeders below. It could not have been more strikingly reflected than through my recent travels in Chamba’s Churah and Pangi valleys, watching the sheer diversity and fragile balance between temperaments of wetlands and spaces interwoven with the Ravi, Baira Siul, and Chandrabhaga rivers.

How subtle yet obvious are the relationships! Water speaks in many languages, but one needs the heart to stop a while, and listen. Water gushes out through rocks, glaciers feeding various streams, wetlands breaking the monotony of green meadows — every aspect seems to be one synchronised ballet.

“The mountains that Himalayan rivers rush through are also in motion; they too are a process, though they seem the most stable of objects… In time the mountains will dissolve from the work of the rivers and rains and winds, the handmaidens that are delivering them back to the ocean from which they were once uplifted,” Cheryl Colopy writes in ‘Dirty, Sacred Rivers’ (2012).

Recent riverine devastations are the cumulative impact of certain ‘mythologies’ that have imprisoned our mountain and river systems. River beds are continuously mined at different stretches. And the tourist gaze of indifference is the same for a river, as it is for a glacier, or a meadow.

Many years ago (perhaps it was 2009 or 2010), I watched a commercial for a private engineering company where a group of engineers struggles over a problem as a lake obstructs the design, and the boss remarks, “Where is the problem? Let us shift the lake!”

Lest one forgets, I end with an older news report on a statement that reflected the way we are headed, oblivious to the anguish of water, glaciers, rivers, and mountains. At a town hall event at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was convinced that cities of the future would be settled around optical fibre networks, and not rivers.

— The Shimla-based writer is the author of ‘When Godavari Comes’

The river speaks, listen: Water’s ways

R Umamaheshwari

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