I) Artist’s note on Alien Waters ravi Agarwal (2004-2006) The river. The city bears witness to itself. The river is in the margins. It is very dirty, filthy. The city does not need it any more. Its future is pre-configured, the river is dead. It will now be cleaned. Not like a life giving artery, but a sparkling necklace, adorning a new globality. The city is turning its back on the river even as it reconfigures its topology. There was a time when the river was its ecology. The city and the river shaped each other. Now the relationship is only with land, which the river holds in its belly. Violent. Thousands of poor thrown out, for the new stadiums, temples, bridges and pathways. Uncertain futures. Death, the predominant Hindu relationship to life in the cycle of rebirth has a timeless resonance as ashes are immersed in the waters. But what will the rebirth be? The self. The self. Seeking to recover a relationship in the new alienation. The river becomes a muse and metaphor for a search, within and without. Yearnings. Integral to an imagination of the self and the outside. The first bird seen on the riverbank thirty years ago came back and changed my life. Regaining personal ecologies as a photographer/activist. My organic body now extended by the inorganic body of the city. Water on a filtered tap. The river is alive, throbbing in my veins. The unresolved questions of spirit and sense. Wherein lies my reality? The engagement with the triad of the self, the city and the river, becomes a reclamation of the self. I photograph even as I experience other human abandonment. I go back, again and again, endlessly, searching. II) Context of Work: Alien Waters Artist’s Note The river, the city, the self... Today, the city bears witness to itself. The river is on the margins, a befouled repository of the city's filth even as it witnesses the immolations and receives the ashes of the city's dead. The river is dying, yet its future is pre-configured, since the city's future is being reconfigured. The river will now be formally, officially, 'cleaned'. It will be reborn, not as the life-giving artery it once was, but as a sparkling necklace to adorn a new globality. At one time the living river was intimately bonded to the city's ecology. Now the only relationship is about the land that the river holds in its belly. It is a violent appropriation. Thousands of poor dwellers evicted, flung into the unknown to make way for the new stadiums, monuments, plazas, bridges and flyovers of the contemporary urban. The 'developing' city abandons the river even as it asserts and remodels its topography. My recurring engagement with the Yamuna took place between January 2004 and June 2006. Over this period I visited and revisited the river several times a week, walking along the banks for long distances. I realised how imperceptibly the healing current of the river had soaked into the interstices of my environmental work and my fragmented urban existence, drawing me to itself morning and evening. Despite the river being black with sewage, I never saw it as dirty. Rather, it seemed timeless, beyond life and death, beyond all judgements, beyond all claims, beyond all contamination. This river flowed in my veins, immersing me in some undefined space where, amid the waters' murmur, all I could do was be still and sense the wings of the first wagtail I saw on the riverbank thirty years ago beating once again through my awareness... Along with this silent communion I also had many actual conversations, mostly with those who lived along the river and depended on its survival for their own, while the city's insatiable hunger for land that would be 'developed' kept relentlessly encroaching, uprooting, displacing. I also took pictures, for the camera has never really left my side since I first gripped it at the age of thirteen. To fully understand the processes involved in the cleaning of the 'dirty' river meant decoding the city's politics, the clamour and corruption, the rhetoric of various campaigns. I read, wrote, researched, analysed, probed, to try and find out why the river was dirty; why there was only 'debris' along its banks, either in the form of poor people and their persistent habitations, or garbage and toxic effluents; why the city's new, voraciously-created wealth engendered more and more filth; and why we forget that we are all born to die. I have no answers. But this work has helped me to better understand the questions, as well as my own anxieties abound them -- against a backdrop of vicious municipal politics in operation, putrid water, priceless land, dispossessed (non)citizens, the forthcoming Commonwealth Games that demand location, city planners enmeshed in schemes of massive financial and infrastructural investment, visions of profit, and 'public' debates armoured in the inaccessible language of scientific assessment. It is less easy for me to understand why for all those months, even as I acknowledged other human abandonment, I continued to haunt the riverbank with such fidelity, endlessly in search, focusing, fixing, framing. Ravi Agarwal Delhi, 2006
