A CLIFF TOWERING OVER MUDDY WATERS, bearing a large crack, is photographed multiple times and the images are arranged in a composite grid. The water appears to be placid in the first few frames. At first glance, this sequence in Zishaan A Latif’s work seemed unnecessarily repetitive. As my eye moved from left to right, across the near-identical images in the first row, I found myself questioning the photographer’s intention. As I made my way forward in the sequence, this time from right to left, the images gradually began to reveal the incident that had been captured—the edge of the precipice started to bend, the crack began to widen and the water started to froth. The cliff was collapsing. Moving down the grid, the disfiguration became more and more evident, reaching a crescendo midway, as a large chunk of land fell into the water. By the time I reached the last frame, having moved in alternating directions in every row, the change was evident: a significant portion of the cliff had disappeared. The river carried signs of the disintegration, and I realised that Latif, and now I, had been witness to the landmass coming apart.
Latif’s first visit to Majuli, a river island in Assam, in 2015, was on an assignment for Asian Paints that involved documenting colours on the island to help develop a new palette. During his two days there, he felt that a “physical, social and cultural shift, which had been taking place for a long time, was palpable in the air.” But it was only on his next trip, two years later, and on six subsequent visits, that he was able to connect this to the island’s topography, which was being rapidly altered because of erosion. “The ghats continue to shift overnight, and on every subsequent trip I made following April 2017, I noticed a clear wearing away on the edges of the island,” he told me. “I have seen the ravenous Brahmaputra gobble away parts in a frenzy.”
Assam sees severe annual floods. These affect over thirty thousand families in Majuli; destroy lives, crops and homes; and erode the surface of the island. Although it is the largest river island in the world, parts of Majuli have fallen into the Brahmaputra, and its landmass has reduced by half. Latif attributes the island’s destruction to other causes as well, including badly planned dams and the building of embankments at the wrong places—implementations that fall short of their intended effect, since they do not complement their natural surroundings. “One of the most mature ways to study the natural occurrences of Majuli,” Latif said, “is to think of what Jamini Payang, a weaver from the Mising community, told me during an interview: ‘Nature has its own course. We cannot hamper its progression and regression, as we need to work with nature, not against it.’”
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