At the crack of dawn, as the sky begins to shift from a dark violet to a warm golden-orange and the rosy periwinkles wake up from their night long slumber; a calm Yamuna can be seen reflecting the colours of the sky until the oars of a fishing boat send ripples through it. The white and blue paint of the boat through the years has plastered away to bare the deep creases of the wood like the lines on the forehead of its rower. Its oars have carved a groove for themselves on either side where they rest, he pushes down two nets into the Yamuna while the boat drifts through the waters. The life along the banks seems to have a gentleness to it despite the heavy movement on them. Women and kids can be seen filling waters in jerrycans and stainless-steel pots from the river while the sounds of tube wells coming to life as water gushes out of them into the fields of turnip and cabbage causing the birds to fly like the head of an arrow. An arrow with no body to guide it ahead, no shaft to prevent it from becoming unsteady. The Yamuna as it flows down from Pala gives an illusion of something similar.
By noon the water turns to its natural blue and sweaty fishermen could be found jumping into the river to cool themselves off and at the same time check their catch. Young kids of ten or eleven can be seen standing on the edge of the bank picking up pebbles and rocks as flat as possible to compete with each other on who can get it to skip the farthest as they throw them into the river. White smoke trails beyond the farms and thick shrubbery that grows along the river’s bank seems like thin long brush strokes on a blue canvas as preparations for the night’s dinner begin. On specific spots on the bank of the river adjoining the fields, huts of mud and clay with shiny tin roofs that stand as guard posts to the farms, women and older girls could be seen washing clothes. Younger girls and boys would be told to fetch water from the river while women and older girls thrash the clothes using wooden bats and scrub them using detergents letting the blackish grey water snake into the river foaming as it gets caught in the eddies.
By lunch, the fishermen pull the nets out of the river. The ones who own boats pull the nets back on to them assessing the day’s catch of fishes separating turtles and grass from it. It is now time to head back home. Boats are anchored to the bank and fishermen fling the nets on their backs as they light up a few bedhis or chew on red betel leaves while talking to their friends, discussing the day’s catch or the price of fishes in the mandi, about any new love interest or joke about a Bittu’s remembering his goofy episodes. The sound of this chatter and the flowing of river help drown the ones from their stomachs. There’s lunch to be eaten and fishes to be put in water so that they remain fresh before they are taken to the mandi. Mothers can be heard calling out to their kids as they cover their heads with a cloth upon hearing the voice of men. On the bank, the competition of skipping stones has intensified as kids race against time, betting on their luck that they won’t be spanked that hard when they return home a little late.
Girls already return back home by lunch time after having washed clothes. All that remains on the banks of Yamuna is a trail of footprints. Some alone, some muddled up with others and some filled by the greyish-black water that found its way though the footprints into the river, spiralling and moving along as the river continues to head towards the city. The Yamuna from Pala to Wazirabad stands as a stark contrast to the river that flows within the Capital City- Delhi. The only thing that stays the same on both sides of the Wazirabad Barrage is the name of the river. The Yamuna within the city seems to be stripped off of its cultural and historic connotation. From being a provider, a nourisher, a life force of sorts, Yamuna in the city gets converted into an oozing wound filled with pus. What not only carried but also enabled life to originate, grow and sustain both within and outside itself can be seen struggling to survive on its own. What happens to the river then when it enters the city? Does the meaning of Yamuna change wherever it goes? How does the river that is seen as a deity, as a mother become the dumping ground of the city’s waste?
As I sit and think about the Yamuna in Delhi, I am constantly struggling with the idea of Yamuna as something private and public. Is the Yamuna which I see the same as what a person from the slums beside the river would see, or a farmer who can no longer farm vegetables on its banks? Our relationship with Yamuna and what it means to us changes depending on the space that the name is being used in. Yamuna in a public sphere is the site of cultural and religious significance. It is part of that huge history, a history of a certain belief that the river holds a scared ground. It is part of a tradition where the river functions like a mother, nourishing, enriching, giving life; where it becomes the site of the confluence of culture and religion. The public image of Yamuna then is one that transcends the idea of time and yet finds a certain significance in every age. It is this image that we all share as a common thread that binds the river and the people together in the fabric of society be it the one in Pala or that of Delhi. It is this idea of Yamuna in the public sphere which we associate also with the pollution of the river where we even if it is for the briefest of the moments realize what we have done to the river. Upstream from Wazirabad, before the river enters Delhi, it is home to turtles, different species of fish, crocodiles and an abundance of aquatic plants and phytoplankton. But as it enters Delhi, the river starts to die.[1] It is in this context we are for the smallest of time affected when we read about contrast in aquatic life in the river of the city and that which precedes it.
21 nullahs discharge around 850 MGD (million gallons a day) of sewage into the Yamuna every day, of which 67 per cent pollution is caused by the Najafgarh drain alone.[2] This fact remains a fact about the pollution of Yamuna in the public space of the river. It might make one wonder about how much is 850 MGD sewage that is being dumped into the river but it hardly sticks for long. Within moments our idea of Yamuna reverts back to that of the river in a private sphere, where its public presence is so evident that ideas of religiosity, sacredness and cultural significance get pushed somewhere back in a dingy corner of our minds while we don’t even realize when did we fling that bag of garbage which we carried from our home in order to dump it in the dumping grounds. Our relationship with Yamuna as a private space arises out of what the river inside the city means now. It no longer holds within itself the sense of movement, as that is robbed once the river enters Delhi through the gates of Wazirabad Barrage, and it is movement which defines life inside the city. As long as one is moving, one is alive. However, the Yamuna in Delhi is as close to stationary as it can be. It is thus the Yamuna of a private space that differentiates the way I might see the river as I cross it, looking down through the metro to that of a farmer growing flowers on its banks or of a fisherman turned rag-picker as the river is no longer capable of supporting life.
The Yamuna in the city reminds one of the history of Delhi as it can be seen today. A history that has been limited to the crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk, the cool breeze blowing through your hair while you admire the isomeric view of the Humayun’s Tomb and the oozing drains that run along the sides of the Red Fort. Yamuna before entering the Capital through Wazirabad retells the grandiosity of the city’s past. It is a space of movement, but one that has been pushed to the margins. The Yamuna that once flowed through the city of Shahjahanabad, through the canals that webbed the bazaars of the old city passing through a pond that reflected the pale moon hue which led to naming the place as Chandni Chowk (moonlight square) is nothing more than a fragment of its former self. With the dawn of a new Delhi, the river can be found struggling to make a space for itself. Each year during the monsoons she sings songs of remembrance of a past that the new city doesn’t mind to forget. Her waters well up as she slows down watching the Capital in a blur of nostalgia. Yamuna’s notes rise higher like the buildings in the city and yet find themselves drowned in the honks of cars, leaving behind a trail of ripples.
The dense concrete jungles that define the modern, urbanised, developed city of Delhi sprawl across the banks of the river like a parasite. With over 20 drains that poison the river every passing day, Yamuna has turned into a self-tightening noose from being a life giver. The river which was once known as the life line of Delhi now stands neglected; forgotten except on days of religious festivities like the Chatt Puja or other Hindu religious ceremonies when the black waters of the river are offered with milk, flowers, diyas, hair and leftovers from the ceremonies. Have the sites of nalas and storm drains carrying treated, untreated sewage become so common to our eyes that to make or even find any distinction between them and the Yamuna seems to be next to impossible? The gates of the Wazirabad Barrage resemble those of Hell, burning the blue river through eternity rendering it black, thick and lifeless. In an attempt to tame the God, we have befallen a curse upon ourselves, that has sucked of any possibility of life within the rejuvenator itself. We work on the rivers only to watch them turn into drains about which we then choose to forget. In a Faustian bargain of modernity, of portraying the Capital as one with tall buildings and countless industries, we have severed our lifelines.
The human race has always held the ambition of controlling the nature close to its heart. On our encounter with any possible resource in the planet, the first response to it is of thinking of ways it can be deployed for our benefit. One question that this raises to mind is the fact that is our brain though the hundreds and thousands of years of evolution been hardwired into exploiting whatever resource we find? The answer however, if there is any doesn’t seem to be to be as simple as a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’. Even in times when “survival of the fittest†was literally the key to live, I believe that what we lacked back then was the ability to harness the abundance of the resources that we had, thus actually leading us to live on that bare minimum of resources that we could harness. This however, is just a musing. I don’t know if the Anthropocene has been hardwired into the system of exploitation of resources or if it is a recent phenomenon. What I believe I know is that WE are the sole culprits, of where we’ve led our rivers, air, plant and animal life to. The ecological death of Yamuna within the 22 kilometer stretch from Wazirabad to Okhla in Delhi is a very small example compared to what our kind has unleashed on the planet.
References:-
[1] From https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/Delhi%E2%80%99s-waste-chokes-Yamuna-of-all-aquatic-life/article14587041.ece.
[2] From https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/Delhi%E2%80%99s-waste-chokes-Yamuna-of-all-aquatic-life/article14587041.ece.