Human imagination is drawn into reverie by many natural phenomena, among them fires, cloud patterns, solar and full-lunar appearances and dis appearances, the rhythmic pounding of ocean surf on rocks or a broad sand beach. There is also fascination in the seasonal changes of a great river. T. S. Eliot began a poem1 with such in mind:
I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river
is a strong brown god.
With its source near Nasik only fifty miles from the Arabian Sea, the 900-mile-long Godavari River cuts a diagonal course across the Deccan pla teau before it delivers sumptuous brown waters into the Bay of Bengal. At the beginning point of its delta near Rajahmundry it may in full flood be well over two miles wide. To appreciate the true character of the Godavari, how ever, it should be studied in all of its seasons. In bursting monsoon depths it shakes the surrounding earth like the ferocious goddess it is known to be, great brown folds of water overlapping and tearing away chunks of the levee that are carried scores of miles to end up on the floor of a delta that has broad ened this way for hundreds of thousands of years. The roar of rushing water sixty feet deep is as awesome as the sight. Little boys who cannot swim spot great trees or branches hurtling downstream and hurl themselves with more guts than foresight from the levee on “Godavari-horse” palm pontoons. They arm-paddle out wildly, and if they do not drown, intercept and steer potential firewood to a shore many miles down this monstrous water chute. But the seasonal rhythm always turns to its opposite, the dry period when a stream becomes so docile that cows may saunter and cow-paddle from bank to bank6 vedic voices
where hundreds of new sand islands have appeared. These lanka islands, as they are called in Telugu, are settled by fishermen who erect mud-and-thatch dwellings; raise tobacco and vegetable crops; keep chickens, pigs, and goats; and after sundown light oil lamps that appear from distant levees as a new
born Milky Way across the silent river. The washing-all-away season will cer tainly follow, but for now, Godavari land is free for the taking. The great river meanders eastward, then southeastward for most of its journey across the Deccan until it emerges from the rumpled Eastern Hills at the Papikondulu, the “Sinful Hills,” a curious name for a gorge of breathtak ing beauty and star-rich night skies at the southernmost rim of the Northern Circar range. Here the river drops south onto the alluvial plain that separates the Telangana plateau from the sea and in just thirty miles it reaches the apex tip of the delta. Down at the delta’s base on the Bay of Bengal coast, the spread of riverine drainage from a tenth of India’s land is nearly a hundred miles. Atlas cartographers usually illustrate three or four broad streams between Rajahmundry and the sea. Local perception, however, declares a region of seven rivers, mythically labeled for the seven rsi, the famed seers who first intuited the Vedas and whose descendants comprised the seven founding Vedic lineages, namely, Visvamitra, Jamadagni, Bharadvaja, Gotama, Atri, Vasistha, and Kasyapa. Few people can name more than a sage or two, but many tell of encounters with these rsi progenitors who still grace—or haunt— the delta with their presence. Sometimes they are glimpsed briefly in the mist that rises from the river before dawn, no more remarkable to locals than Irish folk who claim that a seal now and then emerges from the sea to live among them as a young woman. Several ahitagni bathe daily in a stream they call the Kausika, Kusika being another name of the rsi Visvamitra. And it is the broad Vasistha that separates two zones featured in this study, East and West Godavari Districts.
Of course, virtually all the great rivers of India are known as goddesses and the Godavari is no exception. Goddess Godavari stands aboard a makara, a crocodile-like raft, looking watchfully down from the walled levee at Rajahmundry, as if on guard against her own excesses. Until the 1970s there were indeed crocodiles in this part of the river.2 She is conflated not only with goddesses Gautami and Ganga (as the south Indian “extension” of the north Indian Ganges) but also Veda Mata, Mother of the Vedas. Either way, seven male sages on one hand, or the feminized collection of their insight on the other, the great river calls attention to the Vedic mystique.
At the heart of the delta, a sort of cockeyed triangle within a triangle, is Konasima, a prize canal-rich zone bracketed by the Vainateya and Gautami branches of the Godavari, blessed with some forty-five inches of annual
The Godavari Delta 7
rainfall. Vengi, a historic name for the fertile stretch of Andhra coast between the Godavari and Krishna deltas, drew the earliest settlements to southeast India, and Konasima became the nucleus of the northerly delta. This is the setting of this book, a lush area, a million irrigated acres of broad wetland rice paddies and coconut palms, the two major crops, as well as sugarcane and betel on irrigated tracts and on dry land cotton, peanuts, pulses, sesame, tobacco, mango, citrus, cashew, jackfruit, areca, and banana groves laced with turmeric, tapioca, betel vines, chili peppers, and other managed plants.
Its reputation is the zone where everything grows plentifully, luxuriously, a cornucopia, and for folks coming from crowded urban lanes it is an arama, a pleasure garden. Today the roadways are lined with nursery displays selling flowers, shrubs, trees, and planters to visiting townsfolk, more and more of them in the private cars of the new millennium’s affluent middle class. Paddy fields, with two or even three crops a year, are always visible and rice is anna, “food.” If one has not eaten rice in each meal one has not eaten. Carefully guarded and numbered coconut palms, with a nut-producing life of seventy to eighty years, grow fifty to an acre and every farmer cultivates them for a steady income from meat, milk, oil, and husks beaten into coir or used for fuel. “A coconut tree is more reliable than a son,” is a familiar Telugu proverb.