Water Lessons from the Past

How do you define a landscape? Do you define it by your memory of the place, the politics or its terrain? 

 Ravi Agarwal looks around the attentive audience and adds, “There is no definite way to define a landscape and that’s the message of this artwork.” 

The artwork he refers to is from his project ‘The Desert of the Anthropocene’. The work shows an overlapping image of a diary entry and a satellite map. 

One layer is a personal account of the place and the second layer shows you its topography - both ways of defining its landscape. The contrast of the two subjects is a constant theme in Ravi’s work. 

An artist, an environmental researcher and a writer, he likes to have an interdisciplinary approach of art and science. Ravi was a part of Science Gallery Bengaluru’s first exhibition-season SUBMERGE where he gave a public lecture on the relevance of traditional water systems. 

He started the talk by talking about how we define a landscape and how it is the first step to analyse the transformation of water bodies in the Thar Desert. 

He spoke about how the Indira Gandhi canal was initially built to green the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. But in reality, it actually led to the disuse of ingenious and resourceful traditional water systems such as the khadin, bagh, tallab and baoris.

The canal snakes through 650 kms of the Thar Desert and its presence has carved new agricultural lands in the past 45 years. In the beginning the locals clung to their livestock and were reluctant to farm. However, farmers from Haryana migrated immediately as they saw an opportunity for cheap agricultural land. This motivated the locals to also pursue farming. 

But the harsh truth is that the canal water is only for farming. The locals still depend on traditional water systems for drinking water. The Ravi ends on the note, “Why does the canal ignore the traditional systems? Why don’t the mechanical engineers understand their relevance?” 

An audience member named Sasha said, “I am currently studying interior designing and I found the lecture very interesting. I loved the use of colourful graphs and maps to represent the ground reality.”

Another audience member Dhara Mehrotra, an artist who works in the field of microbiology, said, “Thar desert has become a potential research area for me thanks to Ravi’s lecture today.” 

By CM Manasvi, Mediator