Indian river, protected by a curse, faces the modern world

[Omaha Steve]

X post in Environment.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150222/as--india-the_rivers_curse-64a888722d.html

By TIM SULLIVAN

BHAREH, India (AP) — For centuries, it was a curse that saved the river.

It was a series of curses, actually — a centuries-long string of unrelenting bad news in this rugged, hidden corner of northern India's industrial belt. There was an actual curse at first, a longheld belief that the Chambal River was unholy. There was the land itself, and the more earthly curse of its poor-quality soil. And above all there were the bandits, hiding in the badlands and causing countless eruptions of violence and fear.

But instead of destroying the river, these things protected it by keeping the outside world away. The isolation created a sanctuary.

It is a place of crocodiles and jackals, of river dolphins and the occasional wolf. Hundreds of species of birds — storks, geese, babblers, larks, falcons and so many more — nest along the river. Endangered birds lay small speckled eggs in tiny pits they dig in the sandbars. Gharials, rare crocodile-like creatures that look like they swaggered out of the Mesozoic Era, are commonplace here and nowhere else.

FULL story at link.



In this photo taken Monday, April 28, 2014, flames rise from the cremation pyre of an elderly woman on the banks of the Chambal River near Bhopepura village, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The fears that shaped this region go back more than a thousand years, to when sages said the Chambal (the term refers both to the river and the rugged land around it) had been cursed and villagers whispered that it was unholy. In a culture where rivers have long been worshipped, farmers avoided planting along the river{2019}s banks. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)