Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,” the Scottish poet and mountaineer Nan Shepherd wrote in contemplating the might and mystery of water. “Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads,” Olivia Laing observed nearly a century later as she launched a lyrical existential expedition along a river. Bertrand Russell, too, saw in rivers a metaphor for how to live a fulfilling life.
For the Indian tribal artist Subhash Vyam, who grew up in a small Gond village without running water, wholly dependent on the mercy of nature, the water of rivers is not a metaphor — it is life itself, suspended between sanctity and survival.
Vyam draws from his personal story a moving universal invitation to reflect on our relationship with water, as individuals and as a civilization, in the unusual, exquisitely illustrated book Water (public library) — another treasure from the South Indian independent publisher Tara Books, devoted to giving voice to marginalized tribal art and literature through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on books handcrafted by local artisans in a fair-trade workshop in Chennai, producing such gems as The Night Life of Trees, Drawing from the City, Creation, and Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit.
Vyam’s story, translated into English from the Hindi oral narrative by Tara Books founder Gita Wolf, is part autobiography, part folkloric parable, part meditation on the most pressing geopolitical and ecological questions humanity is facing today — income inequality, sustainability, environmental justice, our responsibility to nature as citizens and as a species.
Looking back from his current life as a migrant worker in the city, Vyam begins by recounting his early life in the village where he was born, at a time little more than “a cluster of houses”:
We were poor and worked hard, but most people didn’t go hungry. We foraged in the forest, caught fish, kept cows and goats, and grew a few crops. We had enough to eat, provided the harvest was good.
But we didn’t have money to spend, and we lived from one day to another.
[…]
We had to work hard, but we had space and lived closely with trees, plants, animals and birds… and I think we understood their ways.
But one crucial element continually darkened this hard-earned contentment: water. Without plumbing and a water source, the village was entirely dependent on rainfall — for putting food on the table by sowing and harvesting crops, for drinking, cooking, and bathing. They supplemented the rains with water from a lake a couple of kilometers away — the girls and women of the village would trek to it and carry the water home in enormous heavy vessels. Vyam sometimes accompanied his sisters on these expeditions, both trying and joyful in their way. He recounts:
I remember how happy I was as a child when I took our cow to bathe in the lake.
The summer months, when the lake dried up, were especially difficult — the girls and women would walk for hours to fetch a tiny bit of water, which would barely last a day before they had to set out again.
Over the years, people in the village came up with ways of…
The post Water: A Stunning Celebration of the Element of Life Based on Indian Folklore appeared first on FeedBox.