Samrat Choudhury, author of The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra

As One Gets Further Away from the Border, The Enthusiasm for Hard Borders Increases. It is Safe to Say That Most Indians Have Never Seen a Border in Their Lives

One’s treatment of a river depends upon one’s sentiments for it. Since Ganga was considered the holiest of all rivers, for decades people regarded it as a self-purifying body of water which would never get polluted no matter what they did. Brahmaputra traverses different legends, nations and religious beliefs. How does people’s equation with the river change with the change in the national boundaries?

That’s an interesting question. Well, the Brahmaputra doesn’t carry the same burden of holiness that the Ganga does, and it is also a lot less polluted, but the pollution of the Ganga is not really because of sentiments but in spite of them. Although the Ganga is considered holy, entire towns and villages mainly in Uttar Pradesh discharge untreated residential waste into it. The waste from lakhs of drains is discharged into the river. Additionally, industries, even ones that have effluent treatment plants, don’t run those plants. When it comes to saving on electricity bills, all the holiness of the river is forgotten. Naturally the water gets dirty. The Brahmaputra is less polluted only because there is a smaller population along its banks, and fewer industries, otherwise the same problems and attitudes exist. Holiness, unholiness and sentiment have less to do with the matter than good civic management and industries following pollution norms.

The communities that live along the Brahmaputra’s banks fear, love and respect it as a force of nature, call it Aane meaning mother in Arunachal and Mahabahu meaning mighty in Assam, but they usually don’t worship it. These feelings of awe, fear, love and respect seem to be shared by the inhabitants of riverine geographies across man-made boundaries. National boundaries are very recent and very imaginary, mere lines on maps. They are drawn perpendicular to the flow of the river in the case of the Brahmaputra, which is ridiculous since the Brahmaputra itself was the main artery of travel into what is now Northeast India for practically the whole of history, when there were no roads worth the name. The people living up and down the river across the Indo-Bangladesh border are mainly Bengali Muslims on both sides. Naturally, nothing much changes with the change of national boundaries.

The big differences in people’s equations with the river are not determined by national boundaries but by class, which also has an overlap with caste. Richer people, often belonging to traditionally higher castes, did not usually do the work of fishing, for instance. Nor were they peasants farming the floodplains. They lived on the best lands, which was the lands that did not sink under the floods, and they usually stayed a safe distance away from the river.

Rivers, like mountains, have been regarded as natural boundaries because of their obstacle-like characteristics. In an obscure military thinking, Brahmaputra was considered as an obstacle of sorts against China, perhaps owing to the 1962 experience. Does the river shape the perception of the people of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam differently?

The river itse