Praani ki Kahani
Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.
[This Note had originally gone out on September 11th, 2025]
निर्माण (nirman), making.
Water is the original maker. It raises villages, ports and pilgrim towns, and when it turns it can unmake them just as easily. It carries soil and seed, ash and rumor, songs and the dead. Prayed to and profaned, a place of bathing and of warning, it keeps the score of pleasure and quarrel and grief. Everything that flows learns from water. If we speak of more-than-human justice, here is a claimant with standing: the river’s right to move, to flourish, to breathe its floodplains, to arrive clean and leave clean.
In Atreyee Majumder’s book manuscript - Love Among the Ruins, Vrindavan gathers at dusk for the Yamuna aarti; flames circle, flowers drift, a mantra crosses water. Through this sacred geography runs a struggling, murky Yamuna, held in worshipping awe and in apathy alike. Around the bend wait SUVs and hotel signs, real-estate boards and plastic garlands, so the aarti becomes a frame for an injured river. To listen here is to hold devotion and damage together and ask what justice for water might require of a city that lives from it. How does faith survive in embrace of and conflict with apathy? She asks of the gods.
Dr. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist of South Asia and a trained lawyer whose work braids religion, urban life, and ecology. She writes on Bhakti, water and infrastructure, and the fraught meeting of law and more-than-human worlds. She is Associate Professor at NLSIU, Bengaluru, and co-chairs the B.A. (Hons.) programme. For this week’s edition, an extract from her book manuscript, Love Among the Ruins, is the offering.
Offering For the Week
I can hear the do-tara. Imagine making music out of a lithe fruit-skin fossil, and two strings. A saffron-clad gaunt man with matted hair smeared with mud, sits on the ghat for alms, near me. He sings in a nasal voice. I used to put fifty rupees at the feet of the singer-ascetics and listen to them sing, sometimes record them. I have stopped now. I’d rather sit at a distance and listen. I abandoned structured interviews somewhere in this journey. I didn’t want to ask people to talk about their gods and their faith and capacity for rendition of such faith into musical or other expressions in an almanac called ethnography. I did not want to be an ethnographer in Vrindavan. I didn’t quite understand my exact role there. I was wandering in and out of temples, and ghats, and rituals, and showing up wherever there was good music being played as raag seva (musical service for the gods), and having mundane conversations with people that can’t really be called interviews.
In the dead of the night, the city quietens and the tourists head back to their ambitious lives in SUVs. A man sings the Mahamantra. Hare Krishna Kare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. Hare ram Hare ram Ram Ram Hare Hare. His voice rings loud across the horizon. Sleep is overrated. But the power of night’s quietness is not.
Vrindavan called me. Krishna called me, to be precise. I didn’t know why and how I was to respond to his call. Vrindavan seemed like the logical answer. So, I showed up in the Bhopal Shatabdi at 6am from NDLS in 2019. On the aarti ghat, I saw the performance of what I thought was remarkably attractive as a ritual – Yamuna aarti. The endless repetition and reproduction of the aarti at dusk everywhere made this same scene routine and unremarkable to me in the years to follow. It was Valentine’s Day, 2019. India lost 40 CRPF personnel in the Pulwama attack. Big hoardings on the ghat affirmed faith and pride in the Indian nation-state and declared its might to the world and gods above.
A man called Ganga baba who wore his hair in a bun at the back and a bright, decorated dhoti sat near the fire that was being prepared on the ghat. Women sat close to him in rows. Their exposed bellies didn’t seem to be daunted by the biting, winter air. They floated flowers in little silver-paper containers into the river. They affirmed their faith in the Yamuna Rani, or Shri Yamuna ji. He chanted mantras. They looked on in fervour and awe. Children fidgeted. I felt anxious to sit in those rows. It gave me a bit of vertigo to look down at the river from the height of the ghat. The cold wind blew across the river through the bodies of the devotees.
This was a script of environmentalism folded into ritual. The aarti riverside ritual, I later learnt, was performed only at Hrishikesh before and has now spread across the bank-landscapes of the deeply injured rivers Ganga and Yamuna that flow through the Gangetic plain.
Across the next five years, I watched Ganga Baba performing the Yamuna aarti at the same spot; his bun and bright dhoti haven’t changed too. Nowadays I watch him while sitting on a boat in the river. Face-painted devotee-tourists take river selfies at sunset. Fake flowers hang sullenly from the wooden stands of every boat. Some pink, some red. They make for fun frames with which to photograph the afternoon river.
Vrindavan grows into a melancholic geography. I walk in and out of temples, through crowds, constantly self-conscious and wary of monkeys and heaps of plastic waste. The river Yamuna shines in the post-monsoon period. It grows murky as the water level shrinks at the onset of summer. As I zoom out of the frame of sacred geography, I look around onto the walls pasted with advertisements carrying mobile phone numbers of up-and-coming gurus, and their upcoming events. Most are commentary events on the Shrimadbhagvatam. Alongside, there are phone numbers of real estate brokers, and then there is the name-sign of Shri Radha or Radharani. The outskirts of Vrindavan are turning rapidly into attractive real estate. It is only a short ride away from Jaipur or NOIDA, and hence, it would make sense for middle-class devotee tourists to invest in a weekend pad here, replete with all the facilities. There is now a Radisson and a Best Western Hotel in the outer quarters of the city. And yet Shri Radha cries out in agony as a madwoman across the wallscapes of Vrindavan.
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