Les rivières indiennes, un photo-reporter au rapport

Ahead of World Water Day, we celebrate the source of life. TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHS: Arati Kumar-Rao POSTED ON: March 20, 2015 12:00 am dans National Geography Inde Deep into western Tibet hangs a tongue of a glacier in the mouth of a mythical horse. And from the horse’s mouth drops a trickle. A trickle that weaves through the cold dry Tibetan plateau, clear blue at times, emerald at others, folding into itself other trickles, and growing… growing. This trickle, born Tamchok Khambab, wears a destiny unlike any other river on earth and will take on many names, and many more personalities on its long way home to the Bay of Bengal. The banks of the Yarlung Tsangpo River. Exactly 10 years ago, this week in March 2005, I caught my first glimpse of the Yarlung Tsangpo, the “Great River”, and stoked an old dream: to document ancient rivers, from source to sea. It would take me nine years to summon the will and the courage and plunge into making the dream come true — and begin my journey along this Great River, the Brahmaputra. I wandered in those intervening years, never far from rivers. Some flowed not over boulders and rocks, they swept silken smooth over lofty trees. Rivers of the sky, rainmakers. Vital to life on earth, these sky-rivers rise from the breath of forests and fall in shiny diamonds to join earth-rivers. Misty views from Malaysian Borneo. One particular morning in May 2010 stamps itself in memory. In the pre-dawn hours, I climbed the equivalent of the sheer side of a 20-storeyed building, up a climate tower in Malaysian Borneo and gasped. There, high above earthly binds, my legs tingling from the effort of the climb, my hands numb from clutching the vertical ladder, was a miracle. Old virgin rainforests below, shrouded in mist-pools, slowly waking, always working. Making water, making oxygen, making life. A stream in the Western Ghats babbles on. The power of water to replenish, the desperate need of all life on earth for this sustenance, the joy of an untrammeled stream, the coolth of your foot in it. I once turned over a rock near a stream and shrank back in alarm at the sight of a million centipedes slithering and shivering. Another time, I sloshed across a Western Ghats stream — this one, above — to find fungi that would put giant serving plates to shame. Snails, snakes, beetles, birds, moss, bladderwort, lichen, fungi, ferns, trees, green, brown, bright red, blue. Life loves water. Early morning. It was not for these discoveries that I found myself drawn to water-places, however. I wanted to listen. These past years of chasing rain, water, rivers, and streams has all been for the desperate need to listen and learn. To allow myself to relearn an ethic, a way of life that was no more. A patient life. An unhurried one. A life lived at a natural pace. A human pace. One we seem to have forgotten. Women of the desert, I promised myself at the beginning of 2013 that, as a photographer and a journalist, I would only do slow stories. I’d heard that people in the Thar desert were resurrecting an ancient method of rainwater harvesting. I’d heard that with no irrigation, they could feed thousands. Curious, I began to go there every month, and spend time with shepherds and farmers, watching seasons change in the desert and falling in step with the desert rhythms. I followed their lives from summer fallows through monsoons and into winter. This was a desert — sand, rock, a few bushes, fewer trees. No snow, no mountains. Yet, under massive dunes, at the height of a 48°C summer, wells were full. Sans much sky-water or earth-water, the dunes still trickled life underground. And yes, they could feed thousands with just a few inches of desert rain. All because they have an ethic, where they treat water not as a “resource”, but as life itself. A riverine landscape in shades of grey. Early in 2014 I pitched another slow-burn story that I felt begged telling. Rivers. They sustain hundreds of millions of people around the world and are home to a hundred thousand creatures. These veins of a land are also often ground zero for water-wars. Traditional riparian communities and denizens of the river butt heads with the new world as dams, diversions, canals choke, siphon off, and desiccate their lifelines. Voices get shriller and stakes rise ever higher should a river cross international boundaries. Kids play in the floods. In this war of needs and wants, who will prevail? At what cost? I had heard about 160 Indian dams that were going to come up on the Brahmaputra. The Chinese were planning their own on the Tsangpo. I wanted to go back to that river again and watch it all unfold. The mighty Brahmaputra. I began to document life in the Brahmaputra river basin, along the river’s wild braids as it wove through three densely populated, thirsty, energy-voracious countries. I wanted to see how denizens of the rivers — human and otherwise — cope with the changes. The sight of the Mighty One from the air — the photo above — rekindled in me that old flame. There was something about this river, older than the Himalayas, that compelled me to engage with him. The one overwhelming lesson I have learned over this past year in the Brahmaputra basin is that a river is so much more than water. So much more than a waterway. A river is a living, pulsing, morphing organism. And the Brahmaputra, in particular, is as old, wild, rich, and strong-willed as they come. He has the power to flood the basin with life. Thwart him, and he will just as easily douse breath out. The people who have lived here for aeons have known this. They have respected this. The river is their life. Fish in the river means a healthy river… Photos et suite du texte]]>