Book: Submerged Worlds and Other Amazing Stories of India’s Mighty Rivers
Author and Illustrator: Vaishali Shroff
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
Type of book: Paperback
Length: 248 pages
Recommended Age: 13 years onwards
This review has been written by my husband, Manu.
I have always thought of rivers primarily in geographical terms — the Ganga, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, Narmada and so on, flowing across maps, defining landscapes and supporting cities and farms. Vaishali Shroff’s book, Submerged Worlds, made me realise how incomplete that picture is. A river is also history, livelihood, culture, memory and, increasingly, a measure of how badly we have treated the natural world.
The book grew out of the author’s encounter with the Tehri Dam in Uttarakhand, where she saw the top of the old Tehri clock tower going underwater. This led her to investigate the villages, homes and lives that had disappeared beneath the reservoir. That idea of “submerged worlds” becomes much larger than the literal villages that have gone underwater. It also refers to livelihoods, traditions, ecosystems and stories that disappear when we alter a river beyond recognition.
What I particularly enjoyed is that the author doesn’t spend pages giving us lists of tributaries, lengths and drainage systems and how they have changed. Instead, she tells us stories. Some are historical, some ecological, but all of them deeply human. There are stories about the Ganga and Brahmaputra of course, but also about lesser-known rivers and communities. Majuli and its Mising community, the rivers of Mumbai, the Luni, the rivers of Meghalaya and Mizoram, the disappearing Saraswati and the submerged settlements of Tehri are among the many subjects that give the book its remarkable range.
The strongest part of the book, for me, is its treatment of the relationship between rivers and people. We often talk about dams, highways, riverfronts, mining or urban development as if they are simply infrastructure projects. The author shows us the human cost. When a river is dammed or a floodplain is built over, it isn’t just water that is being redirected. People may lose homes and livelihoods, communities may be displaced and ecosystems may be permanently altered.
The book also takes us into some uncomfortable territory: pollution, sand mining, disappearing river channels, encroachment of floodplains, excessive urbanisation and the effects of large development projects. The discussion of Mumbai’s devastating floods is particularly effective because it makes us question whether cities have forgotten that rivers and natural watercourses exist in the middle of all the concrete.
I also appreciated that the book does not create fear due to environmental disasters. There are stories of people and communities trying to protect rivers and find ways of living with them sustainably rather than merely extracting from them. The book talks of both the urgency of the problem and the possibility of positive action, without being pessimistic at any point. This balance between realism and optimism makes the book especially effective for young readers. giving them hope, for the future.
The writing is one of the book’s biggest strengths. The author manages to discuss subjects such as glaciers, watersheds, river ecology and environmental degradation without turning the book into a science textbook. Her own illustrations add to the charm. It is clearly written with younger readers in mind, but I don’t think adults should assume that it is a children’s book! There is enough history, environmental politics and human drama here to keep a reasonably serious nonfiction reader interested.
What stayed with me after finishing Submerged Worlds is a rather uncomfortable thought: we are remarkably good at treating rivers as resources and remarkably poor at treating them as living systems. We worship some of them, build on others, pollute many of them and divert still more, often without thinking about what happens downstream. Shroff doesn’t pretend that a book can solve these problems. What she does, quite effectively, is make the reader notice them, and provide them hope that something can be done about it.
If you enjoyed this review and wish to know more about our submerged worlds, you can order the book from Amazon (kbc affiliate link),
CLICK & ORDER NOW!Disclaimer: Amardeep and her family are part of the #kbcReviewerSquad and received this book as a review copy from the publisher via kbc.
