In the swirling currents of artist Hari Katragadda’s ‘Lost River’, life and death by the Ganga

The Ganga is celebrated in myth, venerated as a symbol central to the Hindu religious imagination and ritual life. It is also one of the planet’s most toxic and dangerously polluted rivers. Vast amounts of industrial effluent and human waste are daily poured into its waters, whether in the sacred city of Varanasi, with its riverbank cremations and untreated sewage, or upstream in Kanpur, with its tanneries and glue factories. The human cost of this poisoning of the environment is borne by the vulnerable subaltern communities, both hereditary and conscripted, whose livelihood forces them to work with, or in, the river. Chief among these communities are the Doms or funeral specialists of Varanasi and the workers in Kanpur’s industries. Stigmatised and marginalised by the prejudices of caste apartheid, they are also routinely exposed to health hazards.

These are the ecological and social scenarios into which the artist Hari Katragadda has waded, during the last few years, with profound empathy and a quiet courage. For his debut solo exhibition, which I have titled Lost River, we have gathered together four of his works or bodies of work, all based on the cyanotype technique. While the appellation of “lost river” is more properly associated with...

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