River and the corruption of memory

Abstract

With a focus on three films about rivers in Bangladesh, Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (A River named Titash), Padma Nodir Majhi (The Fishermen of Padma) and Chitra Nodir Parey (Beside the Chitra River), this article considers how the corruption of a river, that is, the entropy and decay immanent to it, produces the conditions of possibility for the corruption of social relations within the context of riverine lives. These filmic meditations serve as the springboard for considering the limits of ‘adaptation’, increasingly mainstreamed in policy discourse and development projects to redress the ravages of global warming and climate change, and that increasingly target the lives of Muslim farmers who live on chars (silt islands) that accrete and erode within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. The article explores how the focus on adaptation to climate change, while producing preparedness for a looming future, carries within it the destructive potential for the corruption of chaura inter-relations and the further corruption of their memory of co-existence with Hindus/fishermen and the elision of issues of historical injustice. Taking a river’s point of view within the milieus of the films and the chars enables a perspective, necessarily fleeting, on how the politics and policies of climate change stand to short-change the present and the past.