30/06/2025
The Gully and Hathi Nahar
Every year before the rains, our team of khandwaliyas led by Devendra and Vinod, armed with pick-axes and shovels, rakes and trovels, carry out the laborious task of cleaning up the Gully.
The Gully doesn't just run inside the park. What visitors see is a small sliver, its last stretch, the final section of a long transect carved through a large rocky catchment before it opens out into Ranisar talab. Much of it lies outside on govt land, and it's that unregulated section that needs sweeping and cleaning every year. Shattered glass, eroded stone, twigs and stumps, throwaway items of all kinds, sometimes dead animals. Most of all, plastic.
The gully is over four centuries old. Since then, every monsoon, raindrops falling on this land have softened the rockscape, flushed the plants-scape, and replenished the mindscape (of generations of desert folk) before gathering--for a brief moment--as a seasonal stream cradled by this handmade aqueduct. The stream is exactly as old as the gully-it birthed the same year the gully's last stretch was hewn. All its flows of centuries past are etched in the gully's eroded, steep rock-face, its scent memorized in the gully's nooks and corners
The gully gives water a way, and water gives the gully meaning.
Rainwater seeps through cracks, saturates soil, wets roots, streams over boulders, meanders, sheet-flows, cascades. The land is the rain's canvas, and the canal its final stroke, where it 'signs off'. And for a brief while after the intense gush, the gully holds the residual stream-water in embrace in its many puddles.
Water belongs here, wholly, and even though it's a monsoon visitor, it calls all the shots on this land.
Plastic, on the other hand, is new, its familiarity with the gully only a few decades old, at best a century. The gully does not know where and how far, how to, carry this lifeless matter. Plastic clogs, chokes. It does not seep, flow, nourish, or speak the language of this land or its people. An alien material made in a far-off place by a handful of industry-folk, thrust into the hands of clueless local folk who do not understand its processes of making and un-making.
So it's chucked away, left entirely to the devices of 'nature'. The ephemerality of the gully is marred by the perenniality of plastic.
Every year the gully must be un-clogged, painstakingly, so that the gully's most endearing visitor can flow unfettered down its most familiar path. The long-standing relationship between the stream and gully now needs a restorative hand, and it is provided by the descendents of the very people who birthed this relationship more than 400 years ago
