Life of Rivers, 2011

In 2011 we were commissioned to make a piece of work by the National Maritime Museum in London, using footage from their film archives, as part of a series of programmes titled ‘Traders Unpacked’ which they had organised to mark the opening of a new gallery in the museum, on Britain’s trade with Asia. The programmes were curated by Sara Wajid, among others. They sent us two films—assemblage of footage really–both from the 1950s, on rivers and boats of what is now Bangladesh, East Pakistan then. One film was shot by the Basil Greenhill (1901-2003), who was a scholar of rivers and seas and sailing vessels and served as a most proficient director of the NMM from 1967 to 1983. He worked as a diplomat in East Pakistan in the 1950s and out of that stay came the book, Boats and Boatmen of Pakistan, and this footage of boats, boatmen, fishermen, rivers and shores. The other string of footage came from someone by the name of Corlett (whose identity we could not trace; even the museum could not give us any detail). The character of this footage was quite different from Greenhill’s—larger vessels, ships, harbours, the river going towards the sea, more industrialised rivers and so on. Corlett’s film was silent, but the images seemed to suggest all this, Greenhill’s had a voiceover, which was so soft that that film too sounded silent.
After we got the footage, we began our research in Kolkata first. Later we went on a trip on the rivers of Bangladesh in October. Finally Sukanta, the films person, edited and wove the footage into a narrative which we decided to call ‘Life of Rivers’. He also created a soundtrack for our film using mostly our own field recordings and his personal recordings of ambient sounds and some bits of an older recording of the famous singer of folk songs, Ranen Roychowdhury. In 2010, Sukanta had digitally remastered Ranen Royshowdhury’s home recordings on audio cassettes, most probably from the seventies, for a CD released by Lokosarswati.

We went to the rivers of Bangladesh in search of sounds for our film. We went to the Padma, Meghna, Sitalaksha. Our friends told us stories about rivers and boats and boat race and different kinds of songs associated with rivers—shari, jari, bhatiyali, bichchhed, Manasar gaan. They also told us about fishes, fishing and ghosts who love to eat fish. In Boats and Boatmen of Pakistan (published 1967), Greenhill wrote: ’During the south-west monsoon and for months after it is finished, East Pakistan becomes a world of water. It is this fact which has given peculiar characteristics to the human life that is lived there. . . it is a quiet world of still evenings on lonely islands in great rivers when the only sound is the sighing of a dying breeze among the swamp grasses. . . this world has songs and poetry of its own.’ Between the rivers Greenhill saw and our own, there are huge gaps. We rode a ship through the night, but did not hear any sighing breeze. No fabled boatman was singing his timeless and shoreless bhatiyali. Instead, a fishing boat went by and someone was playing music on his mobile phone. The rivers are not silent anymore, Sukanta said.

In an essay in the Baul Fakir Utsav journal, Arshinagar, in 2012, Moushumi has written about their journey for songs and stories of rivers.