LIVING WITH THE RIVER

In this episode of Living With The River we are in conversation with Devadeep Gupta, an artist from Assam who works with visual mediums like photographs and films in his works. We discuss some of Devadeep's work surrounding the river Brahmaputra, and the evolution of his sensibilities with respect to the subject matter and the mediums used for the same. Parts of our conversation meanders into our perceptions of the city of Guwahati, we question the existing standards of beautification and the place/responsibilities that we as people living next to the river have in this process.

Debashish Nandi, a filmmaker and photographer based out of Assam shares his work and inspiration in this episode of Living with the River. He emphasizes that 'if you want to work with nature, you have to work with people'. He traces his journey into filmmaking from paper to people. He finds the medium more effective and expressive in giving the people their own voice in narrating their stories to him. In the episode we explore his journey so far, his work with Green Hub, a youth fellowship to engage and empower youth in conservation education, action, climate sustainability and social change through the visual medium and of course his interactions with the River.

In this episode of Living with the River, we are in conversation with Sonal Jain. Sonal is an art practitioner based out of Shillong and she is also one half of the Desire Machine Collective. She has been engaged in creating prolific bodies of work exploring the relationships between ecology, humans, and the machine- in one instance, by quite literally creating her project on a ferry, an object occupying and negotiating the space between land and water. This discussion is an attempt by me to place Sonal's work into my previously existing vocabulary and, therefore, much of the conversation circles around her encounters with the river, the meaning of collaborative work in her projects, and the negotiation of identity in the North East. But as one progresses further into the interview it will become clear that these strict measurements of the breadth and depth of her work are not sufficient and one needs a free-r vocabulary to speak about a work which negotiates so many subjects- land, water, time, space, memory, and geography, and through so many different mediums- through performance, the use of technology, through film and sound. Guest: Sonal Jain Host: Vedika Pareek, Radhika Goswami Sound: Aditya Kapoor Visuals: Pranjeevan Adhikary, Siddhanth Purkayastha

Shilpika Bordoloi is a Movement Artist who works as a performer, choreographer, director and teacher. She is the founder of Brahmaputra Cultural Foundation and runs two performance and community venues: NOI centre and Bhumi Centre in Assam. She also works as a visiting faculty at NSD, NID and other schools of dance, theatre, design and Yoga. In our conversation with her, she talks of her continuing project Katha Yatra which resulted in her performance piece 'Majuli'. She explains that the piece is a physical representation of her feelings of Majuli, the largest river island in the world situated in the Brahmaputra. The conversation is interspersed with her log book excerpts from her visit to the place for the first time as a movement artist. Ranging from indigenous preservation practices to hazards of over-development the conversation though situated in a place ties in different timelines of her life with the river.

Char refers to the shifting river islands in the Brahmaputra river, and chapori refers to the constantly eroding riverbank as the Brahmaputra and its tributaries change their course owing to annual flooding. Natural calamities aren't the only threat facing the people of the char-chapori areas, they also live in dread of finding their names excluded from the National Register of Citizens that is being finalized since 2016. In our conversation Poet and Phd Scholar Shalim Hussain we explore what it means to be a Miya Poet who is deeply invested in preserving and reviving the status of the Bengal-origin Assamese Muslims—a people referred to as Miyas in Assam. He takes us through his childhood experiences of living along the river, what inspired him to write his first poem and the philosophical vestiges of the same. We discuss the movement behind Miya poetry and its importance and impact in the current times and end the conversation with what his memories of the river are. The conversation is sprinkled with interesting anecdotes from his life, and his poetry which allows us to take a peak at the workings of his mind more closely.

We are in conversation with Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman. Currently, he is a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS) and holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati. He specialises on border studies in Northeast India and transboundary water sharing and management issues between China, India, and Bangladesh, and is deeply committed to grassroots based alternative community work and development models. In this episode, Mirza speaks to us about his experience as a researcher on this frontier river, and the associated challenges of this work. He speaks to us about, what he calls, a riparian responsibility of the government as well as citizens who live next to this river to cause minimal harm to the water body. We talk about the catastrophic nature of floods in the region and the role that human intervention has played in it, and finally, his vision for an interdisciplinary future of research on this meandering river. Through this conversation we also uncover, in some ways, the pull of the river and what made Mirza start and continue this work on the Brahmaputra.

Living with the River is an audio podcast through which we want to bring the image of the river with our storytelling and conversations and give a sense of the vastness of the river and the lives of the communities that have settled along its bank. The possibility of nurture and destruction both lie within the river and the people it affects. We seek to provide the means to our audience, who have never seen the Brahmaputra and who live lives far removed from the communities that this river nurtures, to have the means to access these communities, their ways of life, and the meaning attached to this river. The constant presence of the river shapes the sensibilities of the people who interact with it, and very concretely affects their understanding of time and space. Activities and festivals are dependent on and tip toe around the river's own plans. We seek to have conversations with people who have centered their scholarships and work on the Brahmaputra. We seek to find mediums of understanding and explaining the life around the river in a manner and through a medium which is accessible to an audience that is linguistically and physically removed from the region. It also aims to provide people from this region an engaging way of interacting with the river and its many tales.