ADMA 2025-2026

Shifting Sands: Footnotes along River Sindh

In late February 2022, I walked for ten days along a stretch of the river in central India as part of the Moving Upstream: Sindh Fellowship, supported by Veditum India Foundation and the Out of Eden Walk. The intention was to enter into a relationship with the river and its communities by walking, listening, and asking for directions, food and shelter along the way. I made drawings, notes and recordings of encounters with the river and its people. 

Now, with temporal and geographical distance from the initial encounter, I retraced my steps along the river through a deep re-engagement with the material archive and my own memories from the walk. Using essay comics as a narrative tool, I attended to our interactions around sand mining: how it shapes the river, the landscape, the people, and the walk itself. As I retraced my steps along the Sindh River with a pencil and paper, I found myself asking:

How does language shape not only our relationship to the world, but the world itself? How do patriarchy, caste, and colonialism legitimise extraction through language?

How does this kind of extraction show up in my own research methods?

How can comics help us listen? And how do they make co-authorship possible with people and the Sindh?

What do the interpretive, situated acts of transcription and comic-making share when (re)presenting a real event? And how can essay comics make that visible?

How does the body, in its doing, shape the research? What does walking set in motion?

Was I walking the river or was the river walking me?

Looking back at the walk, my teammate (anonymised) and I marked the start (Pachnada) and end points (Seondha) on our map, leaving everything in between to improvisation. But even this broad frame was not granted. After several detours, we realised that we weren't walking the landscape. The landscape was walking us.

In villages along the river that weathered catastrophic floods in August 2021, we were welcomed by farmers, activists, and residents. They shared how they have seen the river change. They have contributed the least to climate change but are impacted the most. They spoke of resilience in the face of floods, systemic abandonment, and extraction. These conversations revealed the deep interdependence between the communities and the river. I learned to let go of the words "lesser-known river", a phrase I had used in my fellowship application.

It is true that the river receives little attention from mainstream media for the scale of extraction it faces. And yes, many people mistake it for the Sindh in Pakistan.  But most of the people we met on the walk knew the Sindh like the back of their hands.   I imagine so do the Gend who swim her breadth,  the Nilgai who drink her water,  the Egyptian vulture who return to her every year,  and the Babool who reach down through their roots to her underground waters, and the rivers, Pahuj, Kunwari, Yamuna and Chambal, who meet her along their way to the Bay of Bengal. 

So I had to ask instead: lesser-known, but by whom?