Dark Coloured Waters: A river memoir turns conflict into layered memory

Danesh Rana's journey along the Chenab blends memoir, conflict, history and culture, revealing the many stories carried by one of the subcontinent's most evocative rivers

The Dark-Coloured Waters: A Journey Along River Chenab

By Danesh Rana

Published by Juggernaut

328 pages ₹899

 

When you live on the Indian subcontinent, a river can never simply be a functional water body or resource. It insists on being more: A lifeline, sometimes a death sentence, but always an archive of stories. These thoughts gathered like silt on a riverbank as I immersed myself in Danesh Rana’s book The Dark-Coloured Waters. 

The author is a senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer from the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories) cadre, who was appointed as Inspector General in the Central Reserve Police Force as recently as 2023. To a mind used to putting people in boxes, a résumé like this hardly screams literary craftsmanship. 

The tonal dissonance is hard to miss when he writes about planning operations against militants with “the song of the river perfectly gelling with Bob Dylan playing on loop”. The scene looks dreamy, almost like a novelist showing up at a writing desk to channel their creative juices, until you are jolted by the realisation that operations involve plans to kill militants. 

Yet the book reveals frequently that Mr Rana harbours interests beyond law enforcement, intelligence gathering and counter-insurgency operations. He writes about religious syncretism, environmental concerns and love legends with clarity and flair. His prose is interspersed with lines from poems and folk songs, reminding us that there is always a kernel of tenderness in places that are reduced to conflict zones in the popular imagination. 

Mr Rana’s relationship with the Chenab goes back to childhood summers in Kashmir that provided relief from the hot and humid weather of Jammu. The book is filled with evocative descriptions of road trips in an Ambassador — packed with books, clothes, badminton racquets and cricket bats — that would “trundle along the riverside”. He and his siblings would stop at dhabas to eat. But the river also evoked awe and fear, especially when it got murky, fierce and unstoppable. 

It is crucial to understand how Mr Rana’s career trajectory influenced his feelings about the Chenab. He is from the 1996 IPS batch. “In the late 1990s, militancy spilled over to the deep forests and higher reaches of Ramban. To tackle the bloodshed, the town, which was part of the Doda district, was made into a separate police district,” he writes. In 2002, he was posted as Superintendent of Police in this district, and a forest guesthouse on the riverbank became his official residence. He planned those operations here, with the river singing below. 

Mr Rana’s intimate knowledge of the conflict teases out some of the book’s most powerful insights. He challenges the widely held belief that all militants who disrupted law and order in Kashmir were Muslims. He notes that Hindu men who joined terrorist ranks between 1998 and 2002 “took Muslim codenames but rarely converted to Islam” and were “not married to any faith or ideology of jihad” but enthralled by the power that came with a Kalashnikov. Some surrendered; others were killed. This is a bold assertion, and carries weight precisely because of his credentials. 

The picture of life around the Chenab that emerges from the book is somewhat like a patchwork quilt. One reads about the excavation of Buddhist sites, hydroelectric power projects, joint Hindu-Muslim patrolling teams, films shot in the Chenab Valley, Israeli tourists lured by high-quality cannabis, and bodies recovered from the river’s perilous and unpredictable waters. 

“For criminals, there cannot be a better crime scene than the Chenab. A felony committed here leaves minimum evidence: no fingerprints, no maps, no chances of forensic investigations and, in most cases, not even a corpus delicti,” notes Mr Rana, who was the Inspector General of Police for Jammu Zone from 2015 to 2017. In Doda, he adds, “whenever someone goes missing, most eyes turn to the Chenab”. This includes people who end their own lives out of sheer despair. 

When Mr Rana was in Kullu in 2018 as an election observer for the Himachal Pradesh Assembly, he witnessed the confluence of rivers Chandra and Bhaga—Chandrabhaga—which later becomes the Chenab. That was at Tandi, eight kilometres from Keylong, the district headquarters of Lahaul and Spiti. He was shocked to see that the boisterous river of his youth had turned docile. 

After the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated into the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), and the Union Territory of Ladakh. Two years later, a Presidential Ordinance merged the J&K cadre with the AGMUT pool. Mr Rana served as Additional Director General of Police in J&K from 2021. His candid reflections on these years would be illuminating but they might see the light of day only after he retires from service. 

The epigraph is a verse from the Rig Veda, followed by a quote from Pakistani author Haroon Khalid’s book From Waris to Heer. These choices make Mr Rana come across as someone who can separate the Pakistani people and landscape from their state, which has used terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy against India. This is, undoubtedly, a book worth reading. 

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The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic. Instagram/ X: @chintanwriting