On Faith and Filth

The cover of Dirty, Sacred Rivers shows buffaloes breasting through muddy water, an arresting overhead view that takes a familiar sight and makes one appreciate it anew. The cover image and handsome production of the book lead one to expect that the contents will also bring fresh insight to the muddied, turbulent waterscapes of Southasia. Travelling the entire length of the Ganga, studying the river from a variety of angles, would Cheryl Colopy live up to the promise of providing an acutely analysed and eloquently written account of the Subcontinent's water problems?.When writing this review, I remembered one of my own encounters with a dirty, sacred river in the city where I live: the Yamuna. At the Jamna Bazar ghat in Delhi, I watched as a man stood in a boat midstream, flinging grainy pellets of food into the water with thousands of birds swooping down to pick them up and fly away. As he moored the boat, the man told me that these black-headed gulls had come from Siberia. He fed them every morning and evening in winter, spending three thousand rupees a day. For him, the Yamuna provided a place for fulfilling the religious obligation to feed itinerants and for expressing a love for lesser creatures..The river is the site of generous impulses as well as wanton indifference with dumping of untreated sewage and industrial pollutants in Delhi and upstream. As the monsoon season draws to an end, the Yamuna's true condition is revealed: dark and filthy, with floating plastics and refuse, and a pervasive stench. On the auspicious day of Kartik Purnima in October, I watched in disbelief as worshippers bathed in what appeared to be raw sewage..This is the paradox of sacred rivers in Southasia that has long puzzled visitors to the Subcontinent. How can reverence be reconciled with systematic abuse? Kelly Alley wrestled with this in her 2002 book set in Varanasi, On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River, but failed to grasp the nub of the matter: that the contradiction between the material and the metaphysical worlds is precisely what sustains faith. Mundane events and practices that seem to defy comprehension can be tidily explained by cosmological beliefs, be they about the power of gods or markets or revolutionary parties. So, while from a strictly rational point of view it doesn't make sense that people pollute the river they worship, by invoking a 'higher reason' – the power of the Goddess to shrug off this-worldly irritants and obstacles – they can cheerfully carry on putting faeces, corpses and carcasses, cadmium and lead into the water..Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia's Water Crisis Cheryl Colopy Oxford University Press, 2013.Filth and faith may appear to be irreconcilable to outsiders, but Southasians have a sophisticated, centuries-old worldview that lets them live quite comfortably with this paradox..Filth and faith may appear to be irreconcilable to outsiders, but Southasians have a sophisticated, centuries-old worldview that lets them live quite comfortably with this paradox. Nita Kumar, in her 1988 book The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880-1986, eloquently captured the dilemma this posed for her Western-educated Indian sensibility. On the one hand, she marvelled at the feats of imagination that the people of Varanasi displayed in their richly textured, deeply felt relationship with the Ganga, expressed through rituals of recreation like bahari alang, in which men strolled down to the river to drink bhang, move their bowels, massage themselves with oil, wash clothes and bathe. Yet she also noted her discomfort that this carefree pleasure was circumscribed by religion, caste and gender and excluded "the science of civic order, and of sanitation and waste disposal"..Kumar's empathetic, closely observed account of everyday life in Varanasi brings home the larger truth that dealing with contradiction is a universal human condition that takes different forms in different settings. Contradictions and conflicts in Southasia are invariably coloured by the region's distinctive cultural geography and history, its political economy and spiritual traditions. This is the terrain that Cheryl Colopy explores in Dirty, Sacred Rivers. Colopy is more optimistic than Alley or Kumar when it comes to the filth/faith paradox; she believes that a sense of the sacred "embodies science, an understanding of how things work, and their limits". Unfortunately, the book provides little evidence to support this belief in contemporary times, either at the metaphysical or practical level. What it does focus on more substantively is the other half of the book's title: dirty rivers. Or, as the author puts it, dirty, mismanaged and dubiously engineered rivers. The book takes the form of a "water policy travelogue" through the greater Ganga basin, from the high Himalaya to the Sundarban, documenting the myriad ills afflicting the river's ecosystem and efforts to cure them..Though it falls short on the kind of insightful analysis that made Patrick McCully's 1996 book Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams a classic, Dirty, Sacred Rivers is quite informative about the ecological processes underlying South Asia's current and impending water crises. In particular, it draws attention to the Himalaya as a "third pole", its glaciers and snows as enormous a vault of freshwater as the Arctic and Antarctic caps. With reports of glaciers melting because of global warming, the future seems to forebode catastrophic floods and droughts from Nepal all the way to Bangladesh. Colopy treks to Tsho Rolpa Lake at the bottom of Trakarding Glacier to take a first-hand look at engineering efforts to prevent the attendant threat of Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), which can devastate large areas downstream. After reading this account, which includes a daily diary of her two-week-long journey, one learns in the next chapter that experts like Dipak Gyawali, renowned water scholar and practitioner, regard predictions about melting glaciers and GLOFs as alarmist. Gyawali also points out that climate change creates more extreme weather events such as cloudbursts – the one in Uttarakhand this year, for instance – and monsoon landslides that block streams close to densely populated areas from which impounded water can burst through with devastating power. Priority should be given to studying these phenomena and putting in place mechanisms to limit their destructive potential. This, according to him, is the most important aspect of climate change to affect the Himalayan region. Instead of following this lead, the author goes back to describing another trek to look at the receding Ngozumpa glacier. Much can be gleaned from the book about climate change and Himalayan ecology, but it leaves the reader rather confused about how to organise this data and understand its significance..Colopy is on surer footing when she writes about Kathmandu, the city where she lived for several years. She describes the ancient system of hiti, step wells that draw water from shallow aquifers, and the customs of community maintenance that developed around them. The accompanying religious rituals express a reverence for the elements fused with a fine-tuned understanding of ecological processes. Ironically, these forms of knowledge, which are now retrospectively certified as 'scientific' by modern Western parameters, almost disappeared during colonial times, sidelined by centralised, capital-intensive technologies that were considered superior. The Centre for Science and Environment in its 1997 report, Dying Wisdom, documented the wealth of water harvesting techniques practised in India; Anupam Mishra, Gandhian and gifted writer, described the ingenious means by which water was conserved in pre-colonial India in his superb 1993 book Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talaab (The Lakes Still Hold True), and in the desert state of Rajasthan in the 1994 volume Rajasthan ki Rajat Boondein (Radiant Raindrops of Rajasthan). Some of the deteriorating hitis in Kathmandu have been revived by neighbourhood committees, an initiative that reflects a welcome trend across Southasia, reversing centuries of neglect. Even though the scale of these efforts is nowadays dwarfed by the hugely expanded demand for water, they represent a crucial step away from depending on large schemes that bring water from far away, often by depriving and displacing other people..This emphasis on self-provisioning, managing through user groups, and being self-financed would seem laudable if it did not fit so neatly within the neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the ADB..Colopy describes another attempt at community management of drinking water and sewage by the tiny town of Dhulikhel, but this example raises more questions than it answers. Dhulikhel is presented as an admirable local initiative, funded and managed by willing residents. This is contrasted with the dominant "expertise-led, finance-dominated, technological, centralized, and bureaucratic" paradigm. However, Dhulikhel's water supply is funded with money and technical assistance from Germany and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Its management committee is elected from those who own private taps, which makes one wonder about poor people who rely on public sources being left out of the decision-making. Bel Prasad Shrestha, the charismatic leader who mobilised people and negotiated with the government and donor agencies, says that, "Waiting for 'God or the government' will not get them water. If [people] are thirsty and they need water, they can pay for it and then they will have it. Unless they do this they won't get water." This emphasis on self-provisioning, managing through user groups, and being self-financed would seem laudable if it did not fit so neatly within the neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the ADB.