The river has played a big role in evolution of modern urban sites

River Hooghly is an archive of imperial histories, enmeshed in regional stories of labour, livelihood and politics. A muddy, aqueous terrain upstream of the Bengal Delta, the Hooghly, was the main channel through which the Ganga flowed into the Bay of Bengal until the 17th century, after which the course shifted significantly eastward.

It is also known as Bhagirathi-Hooghly, a name that is an apt reflection of this microcosm of myth and science. The first part acknowledges the myth of King Bhagirath’s efforts to bring the Ganga from heaven. The other half is a reference to the reeds called hogla that grow widely along this tidal basin.

The river forms the easternmost and primary distributary of the mighty Ganga. It once nourished the medieval ports of Tamralipta (present-day Tamluk) and Satgaon (or Saptagram), and the later colonial settlements of Bandel, Chandannagar, Serampore, Rishra and, last but not the least, Calcutta. Although most of its 260 km (starting from Giria near Murshidabad) spans rural Rarh Bengal, the river has played a significant role in the evolution of modern ‘urban’ sites. It has contributed to the growth of one of the first metropolitan cities in the country --- present-day Kolkata.

My fieldwork focuses on the ‘ghat spaces’ along the Hooghly. To study how ghats signify unique river-city relationships, I pursue a framework of ‘hydrosocial relations’ based on the work of Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds in 2014. The two scholars proposed the hydrosocial cycle framework that explores the entangled nature of water-society relations.

To capture the different forms of everyday engagement on the edge of the water, I walked along the ghats between Barrackpore (north of Kolkata) and Budge Budge (south of Kolkata). I documented the daily practices of people both during busy and quieter times. There are three aspects unique to this edge -- the extractive economy around brick production using the river’s silt (in the Batanagar-Budge Budge stretch); commerce around the ghats, including sales of ritualistic commodities (at Sovabazar and Nimtala Ghat), and flowers at Asia’s largest wholesale flower market (at Mullick Ghat, Howrah), and different forms of leisure across the different ghats from north to south.

The communities thus include brick kiln workers, flower sellers, priests, men running the ferry service and loaders at the wholesale market – mostly a constituency of working-class men and women from lower castes and also non-native communities.

In the course of my field exercise, two things became evident to me: one was the distinct nature of the active urban edge of the river comprising ‘city-makers’. The city-makers, through their labour, help in the everyday running of the city. Secondly, there was a clear tussle between whether to project ghats as fronts to the city or as its decaying backyard.

There has been a steady decline in the importance of the ghats with the growth of the city and the proliferation of transport systems beyond the historical Hooghly waterway. Government programmes to revive the ghats involve capital-intensive measures that threaten to erase the existing interactions between the river, the city and the livelihood of people entangled in it.

Unfortunately, this accompanies the silent erasure of the everydayness that persists today. Through this field exercise, I was convinced of the need to rethink the river’s edges as non-binary fringes between land and water, which acknowledge the ephemerality of flows and fluxes of people and their daily activities. We need to understand the nuanced realities of ghats as essentially workspaces lying at the intersections of caste, class and gender. So, unless we look beyond rivers, to the multiple spaces and scales that they nurture, our plans would be limited, faulty and only disrupting landscapes.