He begins his account with a brief natural history of the Brahmaputra and the mythology surrounding it, before delving into his travels along the course of the river, from Gelling near the Tibetan border to Goalanda in Bangladesh where the Brahmaputra or Jamuna — a river of many names — meets the Ganga. The first section of the book deals with the Lohit, Dibang and Siang rivers that combine near the Dibru Saikhowa National Park to become the mighty Brahmaputra.
Here, an important point Choudhury raises is how excessive anxiety in India about Chinese dam-building activity along the Siang called Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet may be misplaced since the Brahmaputra acquires much of its volume from rain fed streams in Arunachal Pradesh and other tributaries in Assam.
Choudhury does a great job of foregrounding the people he meets instead of making the book about himself.
So is the river channel we had seen on our first day out in Dibrugarh. The river is the sum of its parts, and much more. The Lohit, which meets the Siang on the northern shore of Dibru Saikhowa, is no minnow.
And the Dibang in monsoon carries a surprisingly large volume of water, more than the Lohit. It is almost as big as the Siang in the rainy season. Many other tributaries that are great, powerful rivers in themselves, such as the Subansiri, Manas, Teesta and Kopili flow into the Brahmaputra, making it the phenomenon of nature that it is.
The term starts to make sense when you see the Brahmaputra, not from a bank, but from somewhere in the middle. Braids of water run into one another. Sometimes a channel seems to flow in a direction opposite to the channel next to it. The dance of creation and destruction is visible in the play between sand and water.
The fine, silvery white river sand accumulates over time to form sandbars, which turn into little islands. Then some subtle balance in the forces at work may shift from one side to another. The water may start to nibble away at the island. It is possible that the island may disappear.
Or it may not. Perhaps a bit of grass will start to grow on one of the countless sandy islands. Perhaps the tall kaash grass will take root. Sand may slowly start to turn into soil. A seed may float in from somewhere, and grow into a tree. One tree may turn into many trees. Animals and humans may come to settle. Then, one monsoon day, the river may rise, and lay waste to it all.
It may start eating away the island, until no more than a sliver of a sandbar remains. And the cycle of creation and destruction starts again. Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Contribute Now. It was this thing that had major and minor channels, all of shifting and varied names and identities.
It would have to be tracked down. A band of light was clearly visible. I had never seen it before. Hathi Pathi: the Elephant Path in the sky. The only other sound was that of water lapping against the hull of the boat.
There was nothing to see; it was pitch dark. Someone was walking about in the narrow passageway outside my cabin. London — Google Scholar. Jogendra Nath Sarma 1 Email author 1. Personalised recommendations. Cite chapter How to cite? ENW EndNote. Buy options. The vast amount of sediment deposited each year in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta has ramifications for sea level rise.
According to one recent study , the increasing weight of sediment piling up in the delta causes the land surface to sag downward.
The authors found sediment loading adds 2 to 3 millimeters of subsidence per year , an amount comparable to the rate of global mean sea level rise. Story by Adam Voiland. View this area in EO Explorer. Image of the Day Land Water. The course of the Maniqui and other small rivers in the Amazon Basin can shift dramatically in just a few years.
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