Poems on Yamuna: Her modern myth is in the making

Her modern myth is in the making

born to a story of a flickering play 
between the sun & the clouds, 
a myth of being the twin sister to death 
passed in whispers 
through cultures in floods & fertility, 
she is now a river of reminiscence, sister to the city of amnesia 

whose sky a blow of smoke, 
sun a spit pool, 
she feels its end is near, 
theirs are tied, 

its body with hands all over her, 
colour-dyed, skin dead, blood wet, fighting its own, 
its destiny slipped like a foamy soap,
small sins and misdemeanors
rinsed in progress, 

there's no visible source to it all, 
only a movement, a thumping rush through her throat, 
that depresses like inverted flyovers, falling lately,
ribs & pelvic hugging,

she lies behind the city
in wet ashes, her world is a big urn 
where dead myths are swimming across like ghost fish 
devouring each other mouth first 

Rachit Sharma

River Yamuna carries the stories of thousands of years of civilisations in its currents. Ancient Sanskrit narratives on the river embed images of royal landscapes and societies that existed around it. 

In Puraṇic literature, the Yamuna is Surya Putri (daughter of the Sun), twin to Yama, descending from Mount Kalinda’s southern face. Braj accounts place the river at the centre of Krishna’s defeat of the serpent Kaliya, said to have saved local cowherds, cattle and riverside vegetation from fatal poisoning. In their devotional traditions, she is revered as Krishna’s eternal lover as well as a goddess of love who perfects a devotee’s affection and transforms it into passionate devotion. In Himalayan oral history, Bandarpunch (Monkey’s Tail) marks the mountain where Hanuman is believed to have cooled his burning tail in the Yamuna’s glacier-fed waters after the burning of Lanka. 

These myths turn the river into a living cultural geography that continues to influence how the river is understood today. But, with the invisibilisation of the river in Delhi, as the poet stands to witness, this intimate identity of the Yamuna also runs the risk of receding into the darkness. 

Today, most of the capital thrives without remembering the river’s proximity to their lives. People have lived in the city for decades without ever visiting its banks, seeing only its frothing form on primetime television. Many can’t even the name it spontaneously when asked where the taps get water from. But the news of the river’s water levels breaching the warning mark temporarily travels fast.

The very design of the city enables this erasure of a major waterbody from the public memory. Continuous concrete structure forms a barricade between the residents and the flowing water, with many ghats tucked away behind narrow lanes. One only gets fleeting views of the river from high-speed vehicles on flyways, sometimes while leaving the city.

It is almost as if the city has not grown around the Yamuna or along it, but despite it.

Apart from religious rituals or purpose-bound activities like boat rides for reel-making, pre-wedding photoshoots (largely restricted to the Jamna Bazaar area) and birding events in winters, the river mostly occupies a functional role in the lives of most citizens.

Of course, there are people who have built their lives right on the banks, but they face the same invisibilisation and slow violence that threatens the river itself.

This distancing is not just physical but deeply embedded in how Delhi imagines itself — a disconnect that sociologist Amita Baviskar has explored in her study of the Yamuna’s place in the city’s cultural and spatial consciousness.

She highlighted the “awkward existence” of the Yamuna in Delhi in her article, What the Eye Does Not See: The Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi. The river, she pointed out, doesn’t fit into the structures of ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ through which urban residents tend to view public spaces.

It is neither the manicured parks of cities or the vast swathes of forests or farmlands of the villages, thus failing to be associated with nature. And it hardly features in their community or cultural imagination.

In Delhi, Yamuna becomes a ‘non-place‘, she writes. The identity is diametrically opposite of the one ascribed to rivers by French anthropologist Marc Auge. He identified rivers as an “anthropological place”, where human relations blosson naturally, facilitated by the very character of the waterbody.

But the Yamuna has been reduced to a ‘non-place‘ in Delhi, just like highways and airports that are spaces for “circulation, consumption and communication”. The latter are built for fast mobility and minimal contact with the surroundings. and those we only engage with for their function, Baviskar pointed out, who added:

As the river is invisibilised by design, its wounds patched over by buildings and bridges and its blemishes magnified, any hope for the recovery of its strength and identity withers.

Jacinta Kerketta, a poet and journalist from Jharkhand’s Oraon Adivasi community, whose work often confronts environmental loss and dispossession, captures the disappearance of rivers and forests from landscapes and memory.

The river, the mountain, and the bazaar

It was a Sunday, and I

Holding little Posterity by the hand

Set out for the village bazaar.

Coming upon a narrow path

Amidst dry and withered trees,

I said to little Posterity,

Look, ‘t is where the village river used to be.

A deep furrow in the ground ahead,

Swallowed all the mountains, I said.

Suddenly, struck by fear she held me tight,

A graveyard, vast and sinister, lay in sight.

I said to her, do you see?

‘t is where the barns of your ancestors used to be.

Little Posterity ran on – We’re here at the bazaar!

What would you like to buy, the shopkeeper asked.

Brother, a little rain, a handful wet earth,

A bottle of river, and that mountain preserved

There, hanging on that wall, a piece of nature as well.

And why is the rain so dear, pray tell?

The shopkeeper said – This wetness is not of here!

It comes from another sphere.

Times are slack, have ordered just a sack.

Fumbling for money in the corner of my sari,

I untied the knot only to see

In place of a few folded rupees

The crumpled folds of my entire being.

The poem is part of a new series titled ‘Memories of Yami’ by Rachit Sharma, poet and founder of Dillipoetry.