Travelling through the bank of rivers often evokes a poetic charm. The meandering river, its serpentine movements are folded in stories – changing chapters as it breathes through the landscape of city, towns and kasbahs. Each story uncovers a unique riverine spirit. In other words, rivers are fraught with reflections of shared experiences with humans and non-human worlds. It registers the memory of pain, horror, joy and the harvest. In the long dry summers, fields long to meet flood as much as it yearns for the retreat. Rivers are the core of becoming and unbecoming. Rivers are memory. This blog simply suspended in thinking about how rivers are implicated in sharing grief, horror and failure of humankind in the wake of Covid. It reflects on how lives lay bare dead and, once cremated, becomes sediments flowing along the banks of the river. These sediments are not a chronicle of death and infection. It is a microcosm of how the cycle of life and death becomes a form of witnessing for riverine memory. 

As bodies soar for last rites, rivers and their ghats have also become sites of pain and loss. The ghats that were once lite with diyas floating on dry leaves; humming noises of riddles from ceremonies and lasting seasons of fireworks – are now frequented with mounting dead bodies. This is not unusual to a life of a river – for it has witnessed far worse. But there is something colossal about this time, this despotic, unforgiving time. It draws us to pain both at distant and close by removing touch, a most primal rendering of human expression that is arrested in the grip of this virus. Pain, we know, is not profound nor ordinary – it is an experience that renders you defeated to the present time, now. It freezes you like a leaf of a tree in long winter. You wait until this pass. Acceptance of pain is often encoded in the alliteration of ritual to mourn. These “ritual also requires community, repetition, shared memory” to shape. Covid has suspended this primal affective form. But many who are grieving their loss at the ghats are also sharing it with rivers – one that is flowing through fluvial trails. The flow of rivers at this moment has fractured the artificial boundaries of nations that are so frail and weak that it fails to partition our pain. The river is uniting us in this passage as we mourn, here, now and across, as one in moments that makes us human again. 

 On the banks of Bagmati

                                                        (Bagmati in Darbhanga. Photo by the author)

Defined by the remarkable cultural history of belonging and pride, pollution and environmental movements, Bagmati, a river that emerges from Kathmandu and flows through Bihar, also represent the tapestry of life and death. It archives the moments of victories, and more recently, the pollution as rivers struggle to breathe free from the plastic and effects of climate change. Writing on the river, Anne M. Rademacher shows us how Bagmati is defined by the anxiety of restoration as well as the complex process of cultural practices – making it a riverscape where “urban nature and urban social life are mutually produced, reinforced, and ultimately, changed”.[i] Bagmati basin runs between two elder sisters (Kosi and Gandak) basin, spiralling through the fields of Bihar – harvesting crops to feed riparian and seasons of a flood that displaces them too. It brings the unrequited source of livelihoods from hills to plains for riverine lives. But the river is never one thing. Changing chronicles in the wake of Covid is daunting. Spectre here is death. 

Banks of Bagmati has recently drawn itself to international media as horrific sites of death. Covid-19, a virus that has ravaged the world in the past year – is now moving fast from the city towards the underbelly of the rural landscape. Nepal, a Himalayan country that managed the caseload last year, seems overwhelmed this time. On 4th May, Nepal reported 7,448 new cases, with 37 registered deaths – becoming the highest infection and death rate since the pandemic. The caseloads are exceptionally high, with vaccines running dry and hospitals seeing a surge of patients. Many critics have taken to media for holding the government responsible – accusing their failure to control the returning migrants from India. It is believed that India’s second wave is responsible for the surge in Nepal. Hundreds of pilgrims from Nepal had attended the Kumbh – a religious gathering in Uttarakhand, which is now, as experts call, the biggest super spreader in the history of the pandemic. 

Having porous borders and shared religious culture have led the Sadhus and priests to flock for taking a ritual dip in Ganga Snan during the Kumbh. Most mask-less and with no social distancing, the returning Nepalis are testing positives. Amongst others, Pashupatinath electric crematorium, which sits on the banks of Bagmati, is running double in capacity alongside the open crematorium. The scale of death is so colossal that Nepal had to seek the assistance of their army for cremation. Makeshift pyres are lit up as bodies form a queue for their last rites.  

A similar, far widely reported, and quite painful registers are emerging from India. The presence of virus – now pervasive – is mushrooming through the underbelly of the country that invests poorly on health infrastructure. India now accounts for the highest cases registered cases and deaths per day in the world. With vaccination running slow and a government that lacks political will, Indians are fending for each other. In an interesting piece, Arundhati Roy has called this crisis in India a case where “the system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed.” In this background, Indians are fending for each other. A range of social media – not government, neither the politicians, people are standing for each other. Care has emerged as the most ethical form of solidarity. 

A snapshot of how rivers emerge in this crisis, Bihar is a state in view. It is a state with a population of over 100 million and remains one of the poorest in terms of health infrastructure. On 7th May, it recorded 15,000 registered cases with over 60 deaths, and the currently active cases are close to 1.6 lacs. It announced a state-wide lockdown the same day. With migrants who are structurally rendered subjects capable of being thrown to the fate of time, and as they return from cities, most of whom are landless – are now faced with an unprecedented pandemic. The plight of stranded/moving migrants in India is so profoundly corporeal that it renders the narrative of inequality ineffective as a tool of description. It reflects on the denial of humanity so deeply implicated in a system that still considers some as the surplus and outsiders.

In this wake, small towns such as Darbhanga, which accounts for close to 4 million people, witnesses death rallying across the bank of Bagmati. The same river here and upstream, across the porous borders, are now drenched in the grief of people who have been failed by the system. Narratives of deaths emerging from Covid is different. Most dead are said to have “khansi sardi” (cough and cold), a regional lingo that reflects on administrative failure to create medical literacy about the Covid. In doing so, people in small towns and villages – much like their folks in cities are left to help each other. However, the travesty is inescapable from the Caste that forms Indian societies – one where casteism simmers at the same pace in urban or rural.   

Close to this description of the death count is the setting of the last rites. Bagmati cuts through the town into core areas of tehsils that are surging with cremation. The river is a witness to this process. Far from the crematorium, ghats across the stretch of Nepal to Bihar are witness to the failure of the political establishment. While some are managing to find space on the ghats for cremation, others are now seen floating. Endless deaths as they become ashes, floating dead and drawn into the river also emerges in visuals – startling at our face as a moral failure.  They will also serve as a witness of memory against forgetting. As sediments, one day, when history will be in the trial, they will emerge as an approver.

For now, when the scale of deaths is so colossal that the remaining strength that lay in recovering is already consumed by another. This makes it impossible for people across the lines of loss to find space to mourn and bereave. We do not, at this point, have a language to capture the loss – a continuous one. The failure of the political establishment is a fragment in the moral universe of injustice and denial of humanity. In this passage and until we catch the breath literally, rivers and ghats share our grief – waiting for the life to return. 

  [i] Anne M. Rademacher, Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu, Duke University Press.

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Rahul Ranjan is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at OsloMet University.