Abstract
River of Love, in David L. Haberman’s words, is an ‘ethnographic and textual research’ (p. xiii) of the river Yamuna, set on exploring the theological figure of the river as mother goddess that is co-extensively, also the badly polluted, physical water body at the turn of the 20th century. The ‘ethnographic’ participant observation entailed pilgrimage with family members, bicycle expeditions, boat rides, travelling the length of the river many a times as well as interviews conducted on the basis of random and snowball sampling. The drift of the book remains within the interpretative limits of a ‘Yamuna theology’ that Haberman constructs, which broadly involves references to texts that span from scriptural excerpts (Rigveda to Puranas), Sanskritic reinscription (Yamunashtakam) to the Vaishnavite sectarian compositions (Yamuna Chalisa, Yamuna YashaPachasa and Yamuna Aartis), locating Yamuna within a Vaishnav cosmology of love. Given the scope of his material, in my view, there appears a great interpretative potential in thinking about the incestuous tuggings of Yamuna for her brother Yamraj. But Haberman’s positing of love and passion in opposition with the proddings of death and callings of righteousness results into the well-known story of nurturance, feminine supplications and ‘deep ecology’.
The introduction to the book presents a biography of the river Yamuna wherein Haberman locates the scientific–geological fact of the origin of river Yamuna through tectonic shifts and the slamming of the South Asian landmass into the Eurasian plate millions of years ago, resulting in the Himalayan range that became source of the said river (p. 3). Starting from the mountain source and flowing into Prayag, she meets a thin stream of Ganga and is known as Ganga from then on until it reaches Gangasagar. He further goes on to provide descriptions of informants’ beliefs about Yamuna’s origin and spread. In these anecdotes about people and places associated with the physical being of the river, she is primarily posited as mother of the devotees and as a goddess in the devi pantheon. It is this register that Haberman lucidly illustrates by showing how the river comes to have a signifying relation with respect to scriptural names, relations and meanings attributed by its devotees, acquiring a biography of her own, independent of the tectonic shifts and slammings into geo-plates. It is precisely this theme concerned with the name and the theological notion of the river that informs both the title of the book and the equivocation around Yamuna’s relation with love and death.
The following three concerns run centrally through the book: first, the proposition that the religious is socially and universally functional in the preservation of the ecological (chapter 1). Second, the positing of Yamuna as an aesthetic natural embodiment of a feminine form that is self-evidently worthy of all mythic interpellations, such as the beneficent mother, possessor of ‘liquid love’ and a life-affirming force. Of course, these properties of the river are posed against her cosmic brother, Yama, the guardian deity of death (chapters 2 and 4). Third, Haberman treats the environmental pollution of the physical river as a fact and a certain form of the Hindu Vaishnav sociality as a value that indeed treats the ‘immanent’ physical river as the goddess and is avowed to prevent her from ‘dying’ an imminent ‘death’. This line of argument is posited against the views of priestly practitioners who claim that the mother goddess is transcendent and unaffected by the pollution of the physical river (chapters 3, 5 and 6).
Most textual sources that Haberman finds on Yamuna’s mythology help him pose a repetitive model of cosmological kinship of the twins, Yamuna and Yamraj, born of the solar disc. Strangely, in the various retellings of the Vedic story of Yama and Yami, neither the informants nor the author wonder about the twins’ mother figure. The sibling bond, as Haberman mildly puts it, is not one of consanguinal amiability, rather Yamuna has ‘excessive passion’ for her twin brother Yamraj, with the sun running in both of their blood. Yamraj turns down her advances righteously and subsequently, the siblings go on to have differing careers in embodying the religious (p. 58).
Yamuna is identified as a reservoir of love and regeneration in contrast to the marauding of death represented by the brother Yamraj. Indeed, Haberman notes that a common saying with regard to Yamuna is: where Yamuna is, Yama is not (p. 57). This personification of love finds a heightened expression, when in the Braj region, Yamuna is seen as the ‘chief lover’ of Krishna. The personification apart, there is a tactile and physically immersive kind of participation of the practitioners of Yamuna theology through ritual actions. The ritual actions involve the usual assemblage of the holy dip, rubbing water over one’s head, offering rice, raw and cooked, camphor, crimson flowers, milk, incense sticks, the saree and the dhoti (chapters 2 and 3). The significance of these ritual observations by the practitioners oscillates between speculative demands of well-being to strict requests for miraculous help in recovering from illness and reigning hard luck. At this point, Haberman asks, what about the river’s health itself? How are the practitioners responding to that visible sense of pollution, if not the scientific data charting, diminishing dissolved oxygen and spiralling bacterial numbers? Is the river of love already then the river of death, in a strange turnaround?
The discussion on environmental pollution of the river finds an exhaustive mention of reports, as well as scientists’ and activists’ diagnosis of the situation. Haberman, however, aligns his academic interest in the notion of seva as an affective ethic that some activists committed to helping the ‘mother’ talk about. This, and not just the court rulings against erring state and non-state actors, is eventually affirmative for the author. This perspective helps him shift from the view that the river can take care of itself as a transcendent divine force. Equally that it is never going to be polluted in the first place, in the worst case, it would be merely ‘dirty’ (chapters 5 and 6).
River of Love is a lucid and comprehensive account of the river Yamuna’s ‘theology’ in relation to her physical state and observations by the practitioners of the Hindu way of life. However, one would have hoped for more on the link between love and death and not the overwhelming oppositional posturing of the two, but the book refuses to cross any liberal propriety.