In Person: The Everlasting River by Dayananda Nagaraju and Niranjan NB

Dayananda Nagaraju and Niranjan NB’s project The Everlasting River (2024), presented as part of Food Matters at the 9th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival from 15-22 December 2024 in Goa, is an invitation to reflect upon the civilisational significance of the Kaveri River. Framed along three axes, namely the river, the labour of rice cultivation and the culture of rice-producing communities, the exhibit consists of a documentary and an installation of gunny sacks filled with seeds of paddy. The materiality of the paddy is often forgotten as the knowledge of processes of production become increasingly divorced from consumption. By foregrounding such issues, the artist-planner duo provoke viewers to ask: Where does the food we eat come from? In what ways is food integral to culture-formation and ritual practices, and how are these inextricably linked to the nature of the life-sustaining Kaveri River?

The exhibit is the first of a three-part series in which they aim to trace the Kaveri River along its length from the Western Ghats to Mysuru and finally where it joins the sea in Tamil Nadu. The documentary draws on Ponni (girl child in Kannada) as a metaphor for the fact that at the place of its birth in Kodagu, the Kaveri is still a little girl. As she grows and traverses further south, becoming increasingly responsible for feeding the nation, she continues to nurture those around her. However, in the Western Ghats, the commercialisation of coffee and government investment in cash crops have led to a shift away from rice cultivation, posing the risk of the loss of community.

For Nagaraju and Niranjan, the river forms the backbone of their work and life. In this edited conversation, they speak with us about their motivations, process, the complexities of water scarcity and government policy, as well as the unfair market-driven mechanisms that determine the value of rice. They also discuss the increasing unsustainability of rice cultivation as a livelihood for farmers and the consequential shift toward service sector jobs in urban areas as well as the implications of such outward migration for food security and cultural traditions of rice-growing communities. Drawing upon the culture theory of rice, they insist that for rice-cultivating communities, world-making—from myth, ritual and the understanding of life and death to material bonds of everyday food preparation and labour practices—is framed in relation with paddy. What, then, are the tangible and intangible forms of material memory and aspirations that enable a return to the land and community-based knowledge and practices? 

Dayananda Nagaraju is an artist and a farmer. His art practice revolves around the conversation on food insecurity, farmers plight, and loss of native practices. His works have been showcased in renowned galleries and his last solo art curation, Kanaja, was well appreciated in Bengaluru.

Niranjan NB is an urban planner and has been engaged with think tanks as well as research and advisory organisations. His research focuses on adapting to climate change through nature-based solutions and combining different forms of storytelling to convey messages of sustainable living.

(Featured image: Installation view of The Everlasting River [2024] by Dayananda Nagaraju and Niranjan NB at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa. Image courtesy of the author.)

Recorded on 16 December 2024.

To learn more about the 9th edition of SAF, read Aparna Chivukula’s essay on Damien Christinger’s exhibition Ghosts in Machines (2024).

To learn more about artists exploring the significance of cultivating communities and their culture, read Vishal George’s essay on Aditi Maddali’s film Songs of Our Soil (2019) and Shranup Tandukar’s review of The Sovereign Forest by Amar Kanwar in collaboration with Sudhir Pattnaik, Sherna Dastur and the organisation Samadrusti at the Nepal Art Council (2024).

To read more about artists working with riverine ecologies, read Ankita Ghosh’s review of Hari Katragadda’s solo show Lost River (2024) and Sujaan Mukherjee’s essay on Madhuja Mukherjee’s Kolikatar Nakshi-kotha (2023).