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Listen to songs for the river
Updated On: 26 September, 2021 08:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Guwahati-based Chandrani Sinha has documented stirring songs inspired by climate change refugees at the mercy of Brahmaputra, and they are now online for you to enjoy
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Moinul Bhuyan, 72, sings about his village Tarabari, which was washed away after the 1950 earthquake
As an environmental journalist, Chandrani Sinha has always gone where her story takes her. The rural hinterlands of Assam were rarely part of that conversation. So, in 2019, when the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) took the country by storm, Sinha decided to go the distance, to find out the stories of climate refugees, and how these laws would have far-reaching consequences for people, displaced and destroyed by the ruthlessness of nature.
Assam, as Sinha shares is, “extremely vulnerable to climate change”. Much of the state is in the basin of the Brahmaputra, “a river that has changed its depth and width many times in history”. Over the last few years, the river has responded, rather brutally, to climate change, and erosion has only increased, as most of the silt is trapped in dams upstream. Those living on the banks of the river have been at the receiving end. “While I was travelling on that assignment [in 2019], in the lower belt of Assam, I heard many people from the fishing community and even boatmen, sing songs, related to the river and their relationship with it. These songs were not just beautiful, but also haunting,” recalls Sinha, in a telephonic interview with Mid-day. The discovery led her to other riverine villages.
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