Between Kosi and Bihar: ‘Trapped! Between the Devil and Deep Waters’ by D K Mishra

To study a river, one needs to think like a river – meandering, playful and capable of diversity in form. However, the bureaucrats and engineers who are assigned the task of dealing with Southasia's watercourses seem to work best with numbers and structures. They are used to thinking in straight lines. When they encounter a river, they are able neither to understand nor to speak the river's language. Finding it hard to adjust their way of thinking, they prefer to mould rivers into straight lines, like their minds – linear, blinkered and uniform. Trapped! Between the Devil and Deep Waters, chronicling the Kosi River of Nepal and Bihar, authored by an engineer, has been launched at a time when the linear thinking behind the mega-projects of river management lies fully exposed, in the wake of the Kosi embankment breach of August 2008.

Unlike many other river narratives written in different continents, this book is not so much an eco-biography of the Kosi. Rather, it is a meticulously researched and thoroughly detailed historical account of human tampering with not only the river's flow, but other aspects of the river as well. It draws its authenticity more from historical fact than from a theoretical discourse on river cultures. The politics of river management is skilfully unveiled, making this chronicle an eye-opener for the uninitiated. As one reads on, the story of the Kosi unfolds simultaneously as a story of Bihar. The Kosi's tragedy here explains much of Bihar's tragedy, and answers several questions pertaining to the state's chronic under-development. And so, as much as politicians and bureaucrats have tried to separate the Kosi from the people of Bihar by way of embankments, this book presents – albeit perhaps unwittingly – the story of the people of Bihar and that of the river as one and the same.