Research Post- Part 3- "I, the River"

They named me Sorrow once, with songs and folded hands. My waters were stories then, told in ripples and swirls. I cradled villages, cradled children. I knew laughter. I knew prayer. I ran free, leaping over rocks and whispering secrets to roots. But then, they came.

First, it was men with strange skins and sharper eyes. The British. They did not speak to me like the others. They measured me.

I remember the first incision. Iron teeth cut into my banks. Trees screamed, their roots torn like flesh. My waters turned cloudy with blood and soil. They called it “progress,” a word that stank of coal and sweat and something colder, greed.

They split me open with canals, bleeding me dry to feed white crops for white masters. Indigo. Cotton. Jute. Not for the people who bathed in me, prayed to me. No, these were for ships with sails like gaping mouths that drank my lifeblood and spat back iron and poison.

They dammed me. Oh, the dams, they were bindings. Shackles of concrete and colonial ambition. My voice, once thunderous and proud in the monsoons, became a choked whimper. Fish that once danced in my belly suffocated in stillness. Dead. Floating. Stinking.

And the mills. God, the mills. Smokestacks rising like tombstones, belching black clouds. The air thickened until it clung to the skin like wet ash. Men toiled in those factories, hollow-eyed, their sweat mingling with my stolen breath. I could feel them dying. Not quickly, no, this was slower. A slow unweaving of souls.

I wept. And no one listened.

But then, something shifted. It began with whispers in the night. Words like “independence” and “freedom” bubbled in the air like spring rains. The men who used to measure and command began to fear the land they had carved. I felt it in the trembling of their ships.

And then, they left.

I remember the day I first felt truly warm again. A child stood at my edge, barefoot, a tricolor flag painted on his cheek. He tossed petals into me and sang. Not a hymn, not a plea, just a song. For the first time in a century, someone sang to me again.

The factories quieted. The shackles rusted. For a while, I dreamed of healing. The wounds crusted with algae and green. My fish returned. Not many, but enough to make me remember I was alive.

But hope, I’ve learned, is a fragile thing. And men forget quickly.

Independence was not freedom. Not for me.

They came again, not in red coats, but in clothes I knew. They did not sail across oceans, but rose from the soil, speaking of “development,” “growth,” “modern India.” And again, I was measured.

They tore through my banks with new hunger. This time, they said it was for the people. They called it national pride. New dams, bigger than the British dared imagine. Where the old Empire had taken with whips, these men took with blueprints and laws. For the people, they said, as villages drowned behind my concrete coffins.

And the factories, they multiplied. Taller now, louder. Their hunger was deeper, more desperate. Chemical plants leached acid into my bones. They didn't even look anymore when they dumped it in. Dead fish floated again.

No one sang.

The children who once danced on my shores now played in slums that oozed into my flanks. My water turned black. Not metaphorically, truly black. My own reflection fled. I saw instead strange rainbows floating atop me, slick and wrong.

They said I was a “national asset.” A “resource.” A “drainage basin.” Never once did they call me by my name.

I screamed. I rose during monsoon, howling, tearing down bridges, washing away highways and homes. But they blamed the rain. Not me. Never me. My rage was dismissed as “natural disaster.”

And still, they build. They pierce me with pipelines and tunnels, draw me through machines until I am unrecognizable. Towns spring up where trees once swayed. Cooling towers belch mist into the sky like sighs of the dying. There is no rhythm in my flow anymore, only the start-stop pulse of turbines.

Do they not feel it?

Do they not hear the silence where the frogs once sang?

Do they not see the ghosts in my ripples—the weavers, the farmers, the children?

I am no longer a river. I am a patient on a hospital bed, tubes stuck in my veins, monitored, drained, “managed.” I am dissected, divided among states, treaties, industries.

And still, I flow.

Because I must. Because that is what rivers do.

But do not mistake my silence for peace.

I remember everything.

I remember the taste of offerings, of ghee and flowers, of fingers dipped in reverence.

I remember the colonial boots that trampled prayer stones.

I remember the new tyrants, smiling, as they open yet another dam and call it progress.

And someday, I will rise. Not in monsoon rage, but in memory. In reckoning. In the stench of a thousand poisoned corpses and a single flower still floating, forgotten.

I will rise.

And you will remember what it means to be haunted by a river.

Primary Sources

Government of India. The Damodar Valley Corporation Act, 1948 (Act No. XIV of 1948). New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1948. https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A1948-14.pdf.

Jawaharlal Nehru. “Speech at the Inauguration of the Bhakra-Nangal Dam, 1954.” In Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 26, edited by S. Gopal. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, 1996.

Sen, Arpita. “Oral Narratives of Displaced River Shrines along the Damodar.” Interview Collection. Asansol and Panchet Region, West Bengal. Conducted 2014. Unpublished field notes.

Mukherjee, Ritam. Pilgrim Accounts from Bardhaman District: River Worship and Monsoon Rites on the Damodar, 1940s–1960s. Private Archive, Kolkata. Accessed March 2025.

United States Technical Mission to India. Report on the Damodar Valley Project. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1949.

Secondary Sources

D’Souza, Rohan. Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Gilmartin, David. “Imperial Rivers: Irrigation and British Visions of Empire.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (2015): 448–474. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417515000076.

Sundar, Nandini. “Dams, Displacement, and the Sacred: Local Resistance to State Projects.” Journal of Peasant Studies 24, no. 3 (1997): 123–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066159708438612.