The Braided River (Brhamaputra)

 

The common Hindi boast "Ghat ghat ka pani piya hai" (I have drunk the water of many ghats) now has some basis thanks to the author Samrat Choudhury, who set out on a journey to follow the Brahmaputra, drank the water of its tributaries and of the river itself, and took a dip in its water.

The Brahmaputra is also known as the braided river due to the multiple tributaries and vast channels that run parallel to this great river. The river changes its name and sex once it enters Bangladesh, From Barhamaputra (masculine) to Jamuna (feminine), merges with the Ganges, then becomes Padma, and finally plunges into the Bay of Bengal with the name Meghna.

Hydrologists call it a braided river. The term starts to make sense when you see the Brahmaputra, not from a bank, but from somewhere in the middle. Braids of water run into one another. Sometimes a channel seems to flow in a direction opposite to the channel next to it. The dance of creation and destruction is visible in the play between sand and water. The fine, silvery white river sand accumulates over time to form sandbars, which turn into lite islands. Then some subtle balance in the forces at work may shift the island. from one side to another. The water may start to nibble away, and it is possible that the island may disappear. Or it may not.

The Brahmaputra, it is older than the Himalays:

In the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, a sea called Tethys existed between the Tibetan and Indian land masses... which was later uplifted by a geological upheaval into the Himalayan mountain range. A corollary to this hypothesis is that in the prehistoric past the Tsangpo had actually flowed from east to west. The Brahmaputra is called an antecedent river, and a paleo-Brahmaputra is generally accepted by experts to have flowed in what is now the Tibetan plateau before the Himalayas rose. The tributaries of the Tsangpo, even today, allow east to west, which is opposite to the Tsangpo's current flow. The Cretaceous period lasted from approximately 145.5 million years ago to 65.5 million years ago. It followed the Jurassic period. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth; their extinction is believed to have occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period around the time when an asteroid hit the earth in the Yucatan peninsula in what is now Mexico, though it is not certain if the asteroid caused the extinction. The Himalayas had not yet formed at that time. The mountains are estimated to have started forming around 20 million years ago. Geologists estimate they achieved their great heights less than a million years ago. Before they rose, a river flowing south of the watershed that became the Himalayas may have 'captured' a stream flowing to its north - the ancestor of the Tsangpo - thus giving rise to the Brahmaputra. In Dibru Saikhowa, this is where the rivers Siang, Lohit and Dibang merge in the area around the massive river island, roughly 35 km long and 10 km wide, on which the park is located. The untidy tassels of water they together form is the Brahmaputra.

To think only the main channel is the river is folly; in fact, the whole combination of channels and sandbanks constitutes the river. The Dibru, too, is a part of it. So is the river channel we had seen on our first day out in Dibrugarh.The river is the sum of its parts, and much more. It has come to be that the Siang, which is the longest and strongest of its three formative tributaries, is seen as the Brahmaputra; but the part is not the whole. In terms of water volume, the Siang is at best about a third the size of the Brahmaputra. The Lohit, which meets the Siang on the northern shore of Dibru Saikhowa, is no minnow. And the Dibang in monsoon carries a surprisingly large volume of water, more than the Lohit. It is almost as big as the Siang in the rainy season. Many other tributaries that are great, powerful rivers in themselves, such as the Subansiri, Manas, Teesta and Kopili flow into the Brahmaputra, making it the phenomenon of nature that it is.

Let's review the actual route of the river from its Source to its destination :

The river that is bright and clear on the map, a somewhat tasselled ribbon of blue winding its way down from... well, somewhere around Dibru Saikhowa in Assam where three other ribbons of blue, representing the Siang (also known as Dihang), Lohit and Dibang, meet untidily to become the Brahmaputra. Its origins, according to all authorities, lie in Tibet, near Mount Kailash, at an altitude of around 5,150 m, where it starts life as the Yarlung Tsangpo. From there, it flows from west to east before making a U-turn (The Great Bend) and entering Arunachal Pradesh. There its name changes to Siang. The Siang then gathers more streams and flows down through the Arunachal hills towards the plains of Assam. At the foothills, it meets the Lohit and Dibang. Downstream of this confluence, it is the Brahmaputra. The Brahmaputra in turn flows through Assam, gathering yet more streams, before entering Bangladesh. Upon entering that country it undergoes one more change in nomenclature, this time accompanied by a sex change - the 'male Brahmaputra, for some reason, becomes the 'female Jamuna. The Brahmaputra as Jamuna makes its way towards an eventual confluence with the Ganga, known in Bangladesh as the Padma. This great river of many great rivers finally flows into the Bay of Bengal, after undergoing yet another change of name the Meghna. Its whole length is 2,880 km.

A river is not a canal. It is a living, organic entity. It changes with the seasons. It ebbs and flows. The word for the river's rise is 'jwar', and its fall is called 'bhata, and these words are inscribed into the geographies and cultures of the riverine lands. Its ebb and flow are the life pulsating through the land. In the rains, up in the green forested hills of Northeast India, the earth rejoices in songs of water. Its gurgling, splashing sounds, as it makes its way down towards the Brahmaputra, soft but insistent, are everywhere - and in every little trickle, there is, in a sense, the Brahmaputra. It is a time of rejuvenation and rebirth - a time etched into the human geography of the land as fertility rites, such as the Ambabuchi Mela at Kamakhya celebrates the menstruation of the goddess.

Fluidity is the very essence of water. It is the nature of the river to be fluid; it has no fixed name, no address, no unchanging course. You can call it the Tsangpo in Tibet and the Siang in the hills of Arunachal, the Dihang in the plains, the Brahmaputra after, the Jamuna in Bangladesh, the Padma after it merges with the Ganga, and the Meghna at the end before it loses itself in the Bay of Bengal. You can call it what you will - because those are but mere local names, and they have no fixity. I can show you a Yamuna in north India too, that was once a river like the Jamuna in Bangladesh. They are names on maps, a human invention that came into being scant centuries ago after the river that is older than the Himalayas had lived, in one form or another, for a few million years.

At the birth of the river more than 1000 km upstream where the braids of the Siang meet those of the Dibang and Lohit. The place where the Brahmaputra is formed is inexact. It had not been easy to find the river itself, gigantic though it is, because I had been looking for a reality that reflected the neatness and order of lines on a map. I was looking for three streams of water called Siang, Lohit and Dibang meeting at one point, after which there would be one big stream, Siang plus Lohit plus Dibang, called the Brahmaputra. It was of course stupidity. There is no such point. The Brahmaputra is not a single big stream made up of three smaller streams.

The map is never the territory. Somewhere in the vague recesses of my memory, there is a story, perhaps read ages ago, of a man who wants to draw the greatest map of all time, the most detailed ever. He eventually draws a map as large as the earth itself. Even that map would be inexact, for it would be in two dimensions, not three. To accurately model the earth in all its detail would need another earth. "This is China,' we say, and this is India, and downriver from here is Bangladesh.' The river doesn't know, and it doesn't care. When an earthquake causes a landslide to muddy the waters of the Tsangpo in eastern Tibet, the fishermen in Goalpara lament their falling fish catch. When China and India plan dams and river diversion or interlinking projects, farmers and fisherfolk in Bangladesh anticipate devastation.

The devastation of flood visits the riverine lands every year. There are floods in the floodplains of the Brahmaputra in Assam and further downriver in Bangladesh. A company called The East India Company, naturally interested, like all companies, in maximizing revenues, had marked some of these lands near the river as wastelands and eventually put them to use for paddy and jute cultivation. It was great for the economy, but the river doesn't know or care that there are now permanent human settlements on the lands that are part of its annual monsoon home. Of course, we are powerful, we can dam the river. We just don't fully know what harm that will eventually do to the cycle of life in the lands through which it flows, and to the ocean into which it flows.

To see the river in its entirety is to see the connectedness of nature and love the intricate workings of the cycle of life - that cycle which pulses with the seasons, and the movement of water from sea to mountain and back to sea. We may dam the river on land, but if we wish to survive as organic beings, we cannot dam the great river in the sky that flows with the monsoon clouds. From the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal, it is all one unity, and the smallest fish that spawns in a wetland of the Kaziranga in the Brahmaputra's seasonal floods is as much a part of it as the largest elephants that head up the Karbi Hills to escape the rising waters. The Brahmaputra is not a canal. It does not flow between two neat banks. Its untidy braids, channels of history and commerce, witness to the ebb and flow of empires, are the architects of the surrounding landscape of nature and of humans.

Waters, peoples, languages and cultures have flowed into one another along the entire length of the river for thousands of years. Many streams of humanity have flowed in to become braids in the cultural mainstreams of the riverine lands by the Siang, Brahmaputra and Jamuna. Industries that shaped the economy have emerged from global interactions along its banks; Assam tea became Assam tea with the contributions of forgotten Singpho chieftains, Chinese growers, British planters, men and women of the tea tribes, and Calcutta merchants. Time and movement have added variety even to the river itself. Take the water hyacinth, for example. No sight is more emblematic of the river's flow than a clump of this plant bobbing downriver with the current. It seems an ageless sight, a part of the Brahmaputra's landscape. It is a plant from South America that came to India with ships in the British colonial period, and survived all attempts to exterminate it. Like its South American cousin, the potato, and the chilli plant from Mexico, it has flowed in, across space and over time, and become ancient in its new home.

"Mahabahu Brahmaputra' is, as Bhupen Hazarika sang, the pilgrimage of great confluences. You cannot know the river without knowing flow.