Miniature painting maps of Alaknanda and Ganga from the Kalakriti Archives - printed on canvas, pasted on 300 GSM polypropylene; Hand-folded and assembled, metal framing and supports, nylon wires, electric motors and pulley mechanisms, Arduino boards and programming circuits ;

The legend goes that Ganga is supposed to be a celestial river which landed on this planet, and the force of it would have caused damage to the world so Shiva took it on his head and let it flow through his dreadlocks gently down the Himalayan slopes. The geological logic for this is that the Himalayan peaks are snow-capped and glacier-locked, and the many small rivulets descend its steep slopes with much force, flowing out and slowly assimilating to become streams and then rivers. This is why they say the mountain is like Shiva, and these streams flowing down are the dreadlocks and become river Ganga, which came from the skies – which is metaphorically true because snow falls from the skies.
It is this symbolism which has created the legend of Ganga, and it is considered to be the purest water, acquiring a certain mineralogical quality by flowing through a certain terrain. My grandmother used to say that Ganga water can be something very special, not only because she believed it, but scientific lab tests have now proved it. It is the Himalayas which do something to this water.
The legends and the mythology are a dialectical expression of what the river means to people, its sanctity. We in the cities with 24 hour tap water in our houses and apartments neither know nor care about the source of the water. If we were, we would be connected to a river, like a child is to a mother. This is true everywhere in the world where rivers birthed civilizations, their ebb and flow shaped cities at their banks - whether it is the Nile in Egypt, Danube in Europe, Volga flowing through Russia and Central Asian countries, Mississippi in America or the Amazon in South America. They are not treated as just water bodies. They are living, breathing entities. They have personalities of their own, moods, emotions and eccentricities. To truly love a river is to be an ecologist in the truest sense of the word.
A river is a live process and this is true for the river Ganga in India too. With these beautiful historical miniature painting representations of the Alaknanda and the Ganga from the Kalakriti Archives, we seek to create a visual experience of the gentle flow of the river as it nourishes and weaves our civilization together through millennia, a river that descended from the heavens, and connects the earth to the sky.