Water ways

An exhibition to Thirst after 

Our 2018 TOI litfest and my recent volume for the tricentenary of Mumbai’s mystical Parsi well were both titled Waternamah. This week I again immersed myself in  the ‘story of water’. ‘Thirst’ is the Wellcome Collection’s latest London exhibition. Spread over Aridity, Rain, Glaciers, Surface Water and Ground Water, its historical artefacts, present-day videos and future scenarios  show that freshwater is at the centre of  a  crisis that goes way beyond climate –  indeed way back into antiquity.

If WWIII was predicted to be over water, the oldest exhibit features the first recorded such war  – a tablet on Sumerian epic, ‘Gilgamesh and Aga’  (composed around 2000 BC). King Aga enslaves the subjects of King Gilgamesh of Uruk to dig wells for his own city and, if refused, threatens to cut off Uruk’s supply upstream on the Euphrates. Rivers have continued to be politicised by those who have the ‘upper’ hand. Unsurprisingly. Over 70 per cent of the earth’s surface may be water but only three percent is fresh; two-thirds of it is locked in ice caps; and our cavalier disregard is perilously depleting what’s available. 

Thirst isn’t just physical. The text accompanying the first exhibit, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta/ Raqs Media Collective,  tells us ‘Across South Asian philosophy, the word is associated with craving, aspiration, longing and desire.’ The exhibition keeps presenting their darker manifestation, shared loss, but also human resilience. All three coalesce in Gideon Mendel’s wall-wide, ominously silent video, Deluge 2007-2024, looping images of people from five countries across continents struggling through waist-high waters. 

We see how nature strikes back, punishing human hubris in assuming divine rights to all Earth’s resources. But nature sometimes benignly also gives back. We read how ‘The Sinai peninsula saw unusual sustained rainfall during the pandemic after decades-long drought. Local wormwood, Artemisia Judaica flourished, and was found to treat the symptoms of the Covid variant, Omicron.’ The same space showed how artist and wildcrafter Lofa Aziz introduced biomimicry, ethnobotany and citizen science to Bedouin youth who already had deep generational knowledge of their land, giving them new agency  in preserving natural heritage. 

Our own efforts to save the Ganga could take heart from the ‘sacred activism’ ritual at the source of Beirut River last year. Individual fragile threads were braided into a strong ‘prayer belt’, symbolising the power-infused connection between  individuals, communities and nature. Dare one hope that our own fragile Ganga-Jamuna culture could be thus revived?  

Indeed, ‘Thirst’ resonated with me in so many ways. The Raqs trio presenting third-century stepwells of Rajasthan and Delhi, ‘their watermarks inscribing a history of thirst …carrying a memory of each step taken in search of freshwater’. Didn’t it also etch the feminization of poverty? Like rivers flowing into a common ocean, we are bound in the  global commonality of urban discord over water. In my first years in Bombay, in TOI’s evening paper, ‘Fight at Common Tap’ vied only with ‘Pydhonie Panwalla Stabs Paramour’. It’s not very different today, even in parts where exorbitant tankers replace  fractious faucet. Why, only India? The very day I visited ‘Thirst’, a London tabloid  Phew!ed over the city being spared prolonged water shut-offs in 2027 thanks to last-minute funds for a reservoir.

Not just with omnipresent monsoon waterlogging. Every coastal city can connect with the Malaysian fisherfolk despairing over catch-rich mangroves dying from the pollutants spewed by a nearby Chinese factory. 

Move over, mosquitoes. Humans are the vectors of water-related killers jeopardising not only our own existence but all life on the planet. ‘Thirst’ advises a strong gulp of restraint.  

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Alec Smart said: “Preamble says ‘sovereign, socialist, secular’. How about ‘sacrosanct’?”

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