River Mythologies Tell A Different Story

V Rajaraman http://spirituality.indiatimes.com
With most of the world's rivers under threat from pollution and global warming, it would be instructive to revisit our traditional perceptions of rivers as life-givers and sustainers.
Spiritual tradition enjoins us to remember in our daily prayers the sacred rivers Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu and Cauvery as a thanksgiving to Mother Nature. In ancient times people held rivers in awe and endowed them with mystical origins.
The turbulent Ganga was brought down to earth by Lord Shiva and to humble the pride of Ganga knotted her in his matted locks. The Cauvery began its flow from a 'kamandala' that sage Agastya kept by his side while meditating. Vinayaka, taking the form of a crow, tilted the vessel and the water that spilt from the vessel became the wide and sprawling river. This is one among the many Puranic versions of the origin of the Cauvery.
The Cauvery since that timeless mythical day has been flowing through the plains braving the vicissitudes of history. In the process, under the patronage of administrators from the ancient Chola dynasty to recent times, the river has engendered glorious traditions of art, music and literature. The cultural heritage which Thanjavur and Mysore have inherited could rival that of any other in the world.
The trinity of Carnatic music, Thyagaraja, Shyama Sastri and Muthuswami Dikshitar, belong to the Thanjavur-Cauvery delta. The mighty temples that dot the banks of the river, many of them masterpieces of architecture, still bear eloquent testimony to what the Cauvery did, not only in fertilising the soil but in nurturing the mind and soul of man.
The tradition continues even today though mutilated by opportunistic interpretations of modernity. The Cauvery watches it all with sagely dispassion from Coorg where she originates in the cool and dense shades of the green mountains and flows into the eastern coast where she meets the blue waters of the Bay of Bengal.
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are at loggerheads over the sharing of the waters of the Cauvery. "Politics is too much with us", as poet William Wordsworth once bemoaned. A little philosophical reflection is necessary to subdue frayed tempers and nerves. Do we belong to a river or does the river belong to us?
I wonder if there would have ever been the glorious Egyptian civilisation if the waters of the Lake Tana in Ethiopia and those of Lake Victoria, much south of Egypt, had been stopped from flowing their respective courses into the Nile Valley of Egypt. And what if China stopped the mighty Brahmaputra flow through the gorges of the Himalayas into the plains of north-eastern India?
'Never ask the origin of a sage or the source of a river' is a familiar adage in India. Rivers are known to rise as though from nowhere, change their course unpredictably or just go into subterranean oblivion like the mythical river Saraswati which continues to baffle geological speculation.
To arrogate claim over a river or its waters is to ignore its unpredictability, its vagaries, its potency for destruction as much as our failure to understand its blessings. At the substratum, a philosophical recognition or, still better, a perception of the river is necessary to understand how best to harness its waters; in short how best to use its waters for the benefit of all, for the common good.