After the Deluge

At the turn of monsoons each year, the plains of Bihar are the first to bear the wrath of the mighty Himalayan rivers cutting their way down to the region from Nepal. The swollen rivers, like dilated veins, spread across the land and swallow up its houses, farms, cattle, and, many a time, its people. While rains in northern Bihar carry a sense of foreboding, its community confronts its cyclical devastation and its aftermath with courage.

Eklavya Prasad’s exhibition, ‘Portraits of Persistence, and Enduring Communities of North Bihar’, had recently been mounted at a Delhi gallery. The photographs captured the untold resilience of the region’s people as they confront annual destruction. Each photo was a glimpse of the impact of floods on their daily life, and the intricate dimensions of the deluge and survival.

Prasad, who has been working in Bihar as a social development professional in the field of water and sanitation for the past three decades, says it was his first visit to the region that pushed him to capture these moments. National news channels go on an overdrive with ‘Breaking News’ on floods every year; Prasad believes it passes viewers by because they consume the news with apathy.

Prasad is also the managing trustee, Megh Pyne Abhiyan, that works on issues concerning resilience and adaptability amidst extreme weather conditions in Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand. He says, “out of those nine walls where the photographs were hung, there’s just one wall, which the media really covered.

It had a photo of how villages are flooded and how people are in that situation. I wanted to show that there are many more layers and floods are a complex phenomenon that occur in north Bihar every year. It is important for people to see and understand that, and deliberate upon it.”

No change

While the photographs at the exhibition focused on the changes the land undergoes after flooding, the photographer has also deftly captured the community’s adaptability—Prasad does not see this as a positive—to the dire situation. In one such picture, a group of schoolchildren were seen huddled together in a group playing a game while debris of bricks lay scattered on their right. “Perhaps it is due to this buoyancy of its people that no solid solution for the disaster has been found,” Prasad says.

“I had interacted with the flood-affected people in 2005, and I went to Paschim Champaran immediately after the 2024 floods. The state of those people kind of remained the same. The community is not only ignored but also taken for granted. The people also seemed to have evolved a way to survive. There’s no convergence from the perspective of creating a framework, which is important, as important as a flood-resilient habitat,” he says.

Migration, identity crisis

Oftentimes, the consequences of flooding are so crippling that many locals are forced to migrate for better opportunities and to start anew. A picture from 2008 in Supaul captured the panic in black and white; in it people could be seen hanging onto the gates of a meter-gauge train, thanks to the river Kosi having changed its course.

While people were seen sitting on the roof of the train, cycles hung from its windows because they had been harnessed to their grille bars. A young, dhoti-clad man and a woman covering her face with her sari were seen standing before the train, eyeing the land beyond, as if they were unwilling to move.

“They are forced to move to earn their livelihood. In a lot of my photographs, women are captured. It is because they are the ones left behind when their husbands migrate. But when they do move to bigger places such as Delhi, they go with high expectations, but due to their sheer numbers, limited resources and lack of space, they remain marginal,” Prasad points out.

With flooding and migration comes a crisis of identity, the photographer adds. When a river swells, it erodes the land people identify with, he says, referring to pictures depicting changing landscapes and eroded embankments.

“These are intense moments for people who need to migrate as a way of spreading out. They go to different villages, encounter different neighbours and new settings, which results in identity crisis. The impact of displacement on a person’s psyche is not talked about as much as the fact of the floods is,” he says. Prasad believes it is imperative that visitors to his exhibition in metros such as Delhi grasp the enormity of the crisis that hits Bihar during floods, and the naked poverty the state endures because of apathy. “They should feel that they should be doing more; not just for Bihar but any place that faces floods at such a scale needs their compassion. That’s what I wanted them thinking when they stepped out of my exhibition.”