Video: The Runaway Goddess: Sacred Waters in an Era of Climate Apocalypse

Full transcript:

ANN D. BRAUDE: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 1: The Runaway goddess, Sacred Waters in an Era of Climate Apocalypse. October 13, 2022.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Welcome. It's so good to see you in person. It's so great to be able to gather and have this wonderful food. Thank you to our team for serving us lunch, and thank you so much for gathering for this Women's Studies in Religion Research lecture.

Just before I introduce today's lecture, I just want to mention that two weeks from today, at the same time in a different place, I believe in the Braun room, we will hear from Rahina Muazu who will be speaking on Awra women and gender-- the gendering of space under Islamic law.

So we will skip over some continents two weeks from today, but today we're so pleased to hear from Tulasi Srinivas. She is a Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at the Marlboro Institute for interdisciplinary studies at Emerson College. And she's also a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. And someday we're going to have sisters at those societies, and she'll be the first one.

Her research interests include anthropology of religion, anthropology of globalization, food and gender, secularism and violence, transnational processes, economy, money, and indigeneity, as well as ritual studies, anthropology of wonder, which I think you invented that term? Yes. Which is now something we all want to explore.

She also looks at ecology, life, and flourishing food and drink, materiality, visual culture, and postcolonialism, which makes me kind of exhausted to think how you can address all those topics. But she has done so in many, many articles and her six published books, including most recently The Cow in the Elevator, an Anthropology of Wonder, and Winged Faith, Rethinking globalization and Religious Pluralism.

She's held a number of prestigious fellowships on multiple continents, and we are honored that she has made the Women's Studies and Religion Program her research home for this year. And has chosen HDS as the place to pursue her next project, about which she will speak to us today-- The Runaway Goddess-- Water, Gender, and Caste in a Climate Apocalypse. Tulasi.

[APPLAUSE]

TULASI SRINIVAS: What a generous introduction. Thank you, Ann. I feel like a fraud.

[LAUGHTER]

ANN D. BRAUDE: Try again.

[LAUGHTER]

TULASI SRINIVAS: But [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] in my home language of Canada. Thank you all for coming. I am profoundly grateful to Ann Braude for her generous introduction, but her generous, welcoming spirit at HDS and at the Women's Studies Religion Program.

For Tracy Wall, without whom the program wouldn't run. Her efficiency, her making everything easy, even though they seem insurmountable obstacles to a scholar like myself.

And I want to thank Diana Eck who has been formative in my understanding of India. Frank Clooney, and now Martha Selby who has joined Harvard, for their generous friendship and support over many years.

So what I'm going to talk to you about today is a book manuscript that's just beginning to come together in my head, so forgive me if you've heard some of this before or if you find it-- it's formless at this point, sort of coalescing. But that's what I look forward to in the introduction-- for you very smart people to ask me smart questions that force me to think.

I'm going to speak about a small corner of India, my hometown of Bangalore in South India. It's no great theater, no sacred waterfall, no pilgrimage place. It's not an important site for Hinduism. It's not a religious site of any kind, in fact, it's merely a place that I love and where I belong.

Bangalore is known to the wider world as the place for biotech and information technology knowledgeware of all kinds. It is the place where one-- where calls from the United States get routed when you need a mortgage application or transcription of health notes.

And I feel that trying to describe and understand the climate crisis as it is felt in Bangalore is amongst the most important life work that I can do. I'm convinced that to help understand the depth and complexity of the climate crisis, its moral tones, we have to tell stories of our little corners of the world that we love to make sense of the deep violence of this crisis.

For facts abound. They've been dogging us for decades, but we cannot make sense of them. Perhaps the stories of our worlds that we have lost or run the risk of losing is the powerful motivator. We may need to take action and come to terms with it.

Part of the problem in dealing with climate change is not just the fractious politics, but also a problem of the imagination, as I understand it. In the language we have for describing the perils of climate change, anthropologists use the term the Anthropocene to describe the current era where human intervention, industrial life, neoliberal economics have bequeathed to us an unsustainable system.

While the Anthropocene is a descriptive term and usefully critical of the enlightenment project of progress, it distills the feeling of precarity and dread of our current era. It uses technocratic post-humanist discourse, and analysis, and language. Paradoxically, for me, and problematically, using the term the Anthropocene and the language that attends to it leads us merely to a climate of grief and apprehension, but never beyond.

So we lack the language and the ability to apprehend the scale and the depth of the problem. The apocalyptic imagery of climate change makes us look away in fear. We live comfortably numb, as Nietzsche would say, in a nest above the abyss.

But if we are to survive beyond this apocalypse and fly beyond the abyss to think and work our way through it, we need to think beyond this technocratic language to rouse our passions to get at the feelings of joy, of abundance, of care, and of hope.

And if we accept this framework that I'm offering, then I suggest what is necessary is a pivot away from knowledge and to wisdom. From immediate technocratic solutions to an indigenous wisdom rooted in care as long-term repair. I'm going to come back to this idea of repair.

I'm using what Elizabeth Povinelli has called the anthropology of the otherwise, which I render as both the wisdom of the other and the wisdom of that which is considered apart, separate, marginal. So how might the otherwise be rendered manifest ethnographic? How might it serve this project?

Here we need to remind ourselves that ethnographic descriptions, like all cultural translations, necessarily involve an element of transformation, or you might say disfiguration. As an anthropologist of religion, I can see both. Far from mapping one discrete social order onto another, it's less deliberative and reflexive, and leads to what Ana Tsing has called productive misunderstandings to perform comparisons not just between contexts and realms, but also within them.

So it begin not with dubious assumptions that we take people and things more seriously, as anthropologists say, and others are able or willing to do, but the ambition and ideally the ability to see otherwise. And to elicit from it shapes and forces that offer access to what might be called the dark side of things. And to lead us through this dark side to an ontology of repair, which might constitute in its practice what Michael Jackson has beautifully called an existential ethics.

Religion obviously is deeply implicated in my quest. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim argue that an environmental crisis of existential complexity and scope is the result of certain economic, political, and social factors, and Pope Francis would agree. In fact, his Laudato Si says as much.

Tucker and Grim say religions need to be re-examined in light of the current environmental crisis. This is because religions have to shape our attitude towards nature in both conscious and unconscious ways. Religion provides basic interpretive stories of who we are, what nature is, where we have come from, and where we are going.

So what people do about their ecology depends upon what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. And it is with the radical hope of a pivot towards repair and love that I tell the story of water in Bangalore through the story of its lakes. These lakes were a part of my childhood memory of the city. It's a sacred geography to me.

These lakes are bathed in their reedy waters. I've caught the glimmering sun on their waves. I've netted tadpoles in them as a child. I've unwittingly swum in them as I hauled my friends out when they fell in. I've gathered lotus blooms from them. I've lost my heart at their banks. I participated as an adult in lakeside rituals, but now I weep for them.

Well, this is the story of one burning lake and a runaway goddess. On February 17, 2017, the water burned. The two-mile long Bellandur lake in the North of Bangalore caught fire. Smoke billowed from the water's surface, carrying the putrid smell of raw sewage and acrid chemicals across the village at its shore called Iblur.

A dense white foam had covered the lake for several years, thick as shaving cream, soft as pillows, and the gray surface of the water could only be glimpsed when the froth broke up. The pre-monsoon winds that swirled through the city blew a soapy froth into the streets, where it covered vehicles and pedestrians alike in a stinging cloud of suds. These white suds were lit from within with orange and blue flames, and occasionally a sharp cracking sound like the rasp of a lighter could be heard.

The temple to Kateriamman, a wilderness goddess of the lake, had been engulfed in the toxic suds. The outer walls of the shrine had been blackened. In a compelling yet tragically unaired interview shot that day, a woman named Gauri, a middle-aged Hindu Thigala woman-- Thigala is the caste; it's a horticulturist caste-- a resident of the Iblur village at the banks of Bellandur, stood at the still smoldering lake shore.

She said she had grown up near the lake in a traditional horticultural family. She spoke powerfully of her memories of the once verdant landscape of the clear waters of the lake, teeming with fish and birds, green trees weighed down with fruit and flowers in the orchards nearby.

She recalled a carefree childhood in the village as a schoolgirl. She spoke of the underground stream that bubbled beneath the temple. She evoked the Hindu poetic myths of this region, in Sanskrit term the sala purana, the myths of sacred place, where the water of the lake was sacred and life giving.

But then, gesturing despairingly to the fiery lake behind her, the shore littered with plastic bags, feces, and dead fish, and other refuse, she said, this lake is burning. The sala purana has become a terrifying tale by Anika purana. She coughed and cried, this water burns. My lungs are on fire. The wilderness goddess Kateriamman is now absent-- She used the English term-- raped by these developers. Maybe she has run away from this hell.

The fiery toxic sludge in Bellandur lake that Gauri laments indexes a growing urban region that reeks of corruption and contamination. Where sewage and industrial pollutants are allowed to be dumped into the water every day in an erratic yet constant attempt to decimate the city's lakes.

The loss of water is a potent question for a religion like Hinduism, where water is thought to be an originally pure, divine fluid, a gift and blessing of the grace of the gods. For Hindus and many others, water Is sacred, the origin of all reality. Its primordial. It's the stuff of the universe. It's celestial. It offers a sense of loosened possibility, of birth, rebirth.

As David Moss, the noticed British eco anthropologist of South Asia says, the relationship between water and a society is as complex a historical, sociological, and regional situation as any that can be imagined. Water is a sacred substance, refreshment, life, death, power, and change And mindful that different aqueous phenomena such as rivers, or lakes, or rain, or irrigation systems, glaciers, all require their own anthropology and their own accounts.

But Stefan Heimreich at MIT has given us this beautiful way of thinking about seawater. And he says that water was always thought of as atheoretical. It's just natural, but it is very good to think with and drink.

Indeed, as William James so profoundly noted in his likening of our consciousness to a stream, water in its flow has long held our imagination, as good to think with as a metaphor, as a way to start-- as an object of study.

In The Runaway Goddess, my book in progress during this year, I begin with Guari's lament to signify and signal to this catastrophic attenuation of local water resources in my hometown of Bangalore, to ask the question, if water is life, what is a life without water?

And the attendant questions, how is water and access to it gendered, how can we think of a traditional understanding of water in new and informative ways, given the apocalyptic times we live in? What can we make of the Hindu sacred imagination in an era of climate apocalypse?

When my ethnography began in 2012 and continued through the pandemic, I just didn't know what to do. I couldn't go to India. I turned to WhatsApp and Zoom. The contagion has been longer in Bangalore. From 2012 to 2016, nearly everyone I knew in Bangalore had what they called a viral, extending from chikungunya through dengue, which they hit the city hard, to bronchitis, and culminating in COVID.

This age of contagion has re-awoken contagion goddesses and wilderness goddesses like Kateriamman, rendering them useful. More pujas are done at these temples than for decades, but doing ethnography during this pandemics meant that my interlocutors were constantly ill and constantly contagious. WhatsApp proved to be my savior. It's free, and because of the cheap availability of cell phones in India, everyone I talked to, regardless of how poor caste-marginalized they were, had a cell phone.

And so I could interview them. I could ride along with them. I could see things that they were seeing if I just ask them to turn their phone. It proved to be a technological companion. So this ethnography is in part owed to the inventors of WhatsApp.

Kim Fortun makes the case that ethnography should play a crucial role in building something new, not merely describing what is. Working in the gaps between established fields and categories, she says, ethnography can help "bring forth a future anterior that is not calculable from what we know now, a future that surprises, something beyond codified expert formulas."

In keeping with Fortun's vision, my project attempts to think beyond this formulaic into the future of ecology, but before I dive in, I need to undo two threads that I wound to together in my work. The site of Bangalore is a place of water, thirst, and how Hinduism is implicated in eco collapse. So I'm calling this the Thirsty City of 1,000 Lakes.

My hometown of Bangalore was known as Kalyan Nagra, the Lake City. It had 1,000 small lakes. It was a swampy lowland, a riparian wonderland, a wetlands, rivers, streams, and rills that overflowed with life. The Bellandur lake was the largest water body in the city to the north, and all drinking water was dependent upon it. This lake is discussed in archival documents of the colonial era as a stage for liquid ritual events at the wilderness goddess shrine on the South Bank of the lake.

More than just metaphors to Bangalorians, these sacred lakes, particularly to Hindus, were feminine sentient guardians of the city. Bangor's lakes were given as grants to temples and monasteries by enlightened medieval rulers, both Hindu and Muslim, in perpetuity, seen as a gift for 21 generations. As long as the sun and moon endure, is what the edicts tell us.

But in modern India the lakes became public property, government property, and slowly became used not for drinking, but for leisure, with concrete pathways along their shoreline. In the 1970s, there were 285 lakes in the city, but the violent alchemy that polluted our sacred waters took less than a few decades of economic liberalization to kickstart, and you can see in the slide the literal shrinking of Bellandur lake between 2000 and 2013.

By the early 2000s, Bangalore was home to the successful information technology boom known as the Silicon Valley of Asia. Its population doubled between 2000 and 2020 from 6 to 12 million, and rapid urbanization and expansion between 1973 and 2016 caused a decline of 88% of the city's vegetation. Water bodies declined from 285 and 1980 to less than 80 today. Lakes are infilled, and the land beneath them, precious, expensive, has been gifted to institutions such as hospitals and universities to build their campuses.

One expected outcome is, of course, the attenuation of water resources, and so the city is perennially thirsty. You can see how the shift occurs between 2000 and 2020, how the lakes disappear. So every day Bangalore has to pump 1.4 billion liters of water, which fail to meet the city's needs.

The problem is most of the city's drinking water comes from a deep gorge of the river Kaveri, more than 60 miles away, and it has to be pumped uphill into the city. In 2016, the city pumped 1,400 million liters of water at a cumulative cost of-- believe this or not-- 800 million USD. And then 40% of this water is lost to theft and leakage.

Gauri stood in front of the Kateriamman temple, wreathed in smoke from the burning lake. She coughed, and then she spat blood. We live in this world of filth, she said. The lake has been trashed. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] look at it. What hell [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] is this? How can we live here now?

The lake is a ruin, as Gauri suggests, but ruins are interesting in that they reveal a temporality of decay, as Tim Edensor says, derelict sites and a fluid state of material becoming, they can reveal the stages and temporalities of decay. This is a toxic community, financially, and ecologically, and emotionally.

When I visit the Kateriamman temple with Gauri, fishermen arrive, drawing up the coracle boat from the lake, complaining about the dead fish. After they left with their families, carrying away the bananas and flowers they had brought from the deity after they had been blessed, the priest settled down for a chat.

He said he took over the Kateriamman Temple several decades ago. The Bellandur tank was an open recharge lake. He added that Kateriamman was the goddess of the edge. He said [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] on the edge between land and water. As the goddess of the wilderness, she could stay in the karu, the forest, or the kiryat, the tank, but not anywhere else. Today, he seemed to suggest, she sits on another edge, the edge of total eco collapse.

I personally observed the destruction of the water bodies of Bangalore from 2000 to 2018, having lived and grown up in the city. As water scarcity rolled through its neighborhoods, all the women would line up, waiting long hours to catch water. A global water crisis is looming. Places like Bangalore will be ground zero for it. It is likely to adversely impact 600 million people, most of them women.

A second outcome that is rarer, but nonetheless catastrophic, is urban flooding.

This is Kateriamman, the wilderness goddess, and this is her temple, and you can see the development all around her.

The second outcome, which is rarer, but nonetheless catastrophic for Bangalore, is urban flooding. This past monsoon season that ended a month ago, many Bangalore middle-class Bangalorians had to buy private boats to navigate the flooded streets. The question of climate justice with regards to thirst and floods is obvious and looming. Changes in water lines indicate an unraveling of worlds.

As life on the planet is unraveling in ways seen and unseen, our unconscious behavior is obviously inflicting violence upon other populations, human and wild, and this great derangement, to quote Amitav Ghosh, where the unthinkable often happens is understood in Hinduism as Kali Yuga, the last great epoch in which the run-up to the end times begins to spiral. The world will end in pralaya, the cosmic flood.

As you all know, water is an originary fluid in Hinduism, both in the mythic mind's eye and in the theological texts. Vishnu, the imminent and all-pervasive, floats on a watery sea known as the ocean of milk. And the center of the multiverse on his snake bed, known as Ananta Shesha, ananta meaning beyond infinity, symbolizes eternity. So he is both imminent, all pervasive, and beyond eternal.

Water, known as ap in Sanskrit, Is said to be primordial. It is articulated in the Rig Veda and the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] as part of the world where there was originally water without light. The gods of the waters are many. Apas Indra. Varuna, the god of the sky and upholder of rita or natural law, and Parjanya, the god of the rain cloud.

Now, the Rig Veda says, in the world there was darkness, surrounded-- wrapped around by darkness. I'm translating as I go. It was darkness, wrapped around by darkness, and all around was dark water. But assimilated into the everyday, water's alterity is made more potent, but more manageable. It used to be the idol of the gods, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] to drink a sacred water, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] and to purify the world at large, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

In Hindu myth too, the idea of life is given by water is central, and here water is female and fecund. In cosmology is a revered fertile femininity of Hindu riverine goddesses such as Ganga. The goddesses together known as Sarita, that that gives life. Ganga, Yamuna, or in the case of Bangalore the Kaveri.

Water is the secret fluid from which the eternal and all pervasive emerges. For Hindus, as David Haberman so eloquently points out in his work on the Yamuna, and Jack Hawley has brilliantly articulated in his work on tirtha and his work on Varanasi, what on Earth is female for [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] and it's central to the Hindu construction and understanding of sacred geographies.

Rivers marked the boundaries of South Asian civilisations. They mark the boundaries of our imaginations, and yet the rivers in India are marked by sewerage outfalls, and the Ganga by dead bodies, human and other. And Haberman suggests that Hindus then see the physical pollution of the river as accumulation of the many sins that human beings carry with them.

The fishermen, as they point to the trash lake in Bellandur on the side with decisiveness, this is the evidence of Kali Yuga, the era of sin and fraud. Soon, they say, Lord Shiva will start to dance the tandava, the dance of the end. He will beat his drum, they say, and start to dance. How soon will he dance, I ask. They laugh and they say, not soon enough.

If with climate change, water scarcity and catastrophic floods become reality in India as it is predicted, it would seem that the Hindu sacred imagination offers an apocalyptic imagery and vocabulary to understand it. As to what is revealed when the world began to unravel, as Terry Tempest Williams has suggested, they enable us to trace the entangled nature of undoing, and yet becoming.

And then, thinking of unraveling, it's important to ask, what are we disentangling? And for me, the knotting and unraveling becomes a method to unknit our assumptions, our Eurocentric assumptions. For that I returned to Bellandur.

Gauri's son Mahesh, and this is the caveat, Gauri's son Mahesh works for a water pirate known by the name Iqbal. Early one morning, a huge chocolate brown water tanker with yellow lettering, Sri Ganesh Water Supply, stood in an open field. And Mahesh, with his floppy hair and irritated expression, stood atop the tanker, pushing a large hose into the barrel. The hose was attached to a borewell, a cylindrical shaft that punched deep into the Earth into the heart of the aquifer on which the city of Bangalore sits.

A pump whined, and Mahesh sat back and lit a bidi, a cheroot, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, and lazily blowing smoke into the air. After four bidi's worth of time, Mahesh got back into the cab of the tanker, gestured to me to get in, and began his drive through a neural network of newly tarred roads in the new suburb of Whitefield, actually an extension to the suburb.

He honked his horn frequently to pass through the congested streets, thick with fancy cars, BMWs, iron carts, stray dogs, and Uber drivers. Turning into the parking lot of a Fortune 500 software company that will remain unnamed, Mahesh opened the spigot valve of the tanker, allowing gallons of Iblur water to gush into a concrete cistern deep underground.

Like the city of Los Angeles, Bangalore now lies in an arid plain. In 2018, an approximate 8,000 souls enter the city every single day. These newly-minted Bangalorians live in housing estates, apartments, sprawling into the rural hinterland, ingesting villages, gobbling rural land, extending the city's footprint by 20 miles every single year. The city is metastasized into a dystopian metropolis. It gobbles up groundwater every day.

Borewell operators say they need to dig 1,000 feet. In 2000, I interviewed them. They said they dug 200 feet and got pure waters. Now they dig at 1,000 feet, almost as low as the river Kaveri. As the water table in the aquifer sinks, the lakes dry up. Gravity drains the lakes to fill the aquifer. More than half of Bangalore's water supply now comes from these tankers, with no supervision, a privatization scheme, an extraction privatization scheme that goes unchallenged by the city government.

The story of Bangalore's galloping water mismanagement resembles Jack Hawley's recent articulation of the AAR, of the water of Vrindavan, where we can see a sacred river degrading. It raises the question of whether we can nurture nature, or whether apprehension and dread that the multiplying problems of climate change has outstripped our capacities to describe. How can we meet these challenges, if we can't describe them?

A thought unbidden comes to me as I ride with Mahesh. Perhaps drowning-- pralya-- is not the end, perhaps thirst is. But just as I lost hope, the question of repair pivoted into view. At dusk, at the edge of another lake in a paddy flat in Balakirev village, I met Kim Palma, an elderly woman of the Povi caste, who dug wells and lakes for a living, traditionally a woman's task, though in the past century increasingly controlled by men.

She sang a song to the water. She said, to every place, to every place, to satisfy our thirst. To survive, we need water, oh Mother Ganga. You are the mother to this world. You are the mother to this world, oh Ganga. You are our mother.

She told me how her mother could not drink at the wells and lake she built, for fear of polluting them. And today, how many of our caste members are indigent, their work dismissed whilst repairing the stone walls of the canals that led to the lake, singing songs, begging the water to come and to stay. She said, these waters are living beings I birthed. No one cares for them anymore, not even the crook who owns this land. I come here to fix these channels. I care, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] I look after them.

All the medieval tanks are on Bangalore. The lakes that I thought were natural were dugged or dammed by a caste of Dalit, the well workers, known as the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] or the Povi. Though previously they lived close to their places of work, in the early 1950s, the Povis were given a colony on the outskirts of Bangalore known as Povi Palia, where many of the community now live.

Jo Ali's work on Dalit communities, particularly sanitation communities and water communities and how they were ghettoized by colonial government followed through by modern India, is really central to understanding how this movement from the center of the city out to the outskirts this changes the relationship of middle class Bangalorians to water resources.

Self-titled Dalits, Povi-- what Dalit means the crushed-- they were previously known unfortunately as untouchables, literally those who cannot be touched as their bodies carried the dangerous contagious pollution of the casted status. Dalit politics of dignity demands for indigenous recognition have rocked India's Savarna upper castes and led to a divided society, and become very politicized, as they should be, but in the wrong way.

Dalit suicides and much hand-wringing and defensiveness among Savarna groups follow this group. As an upper caste woman myself, I do not wish to engage in further violence by ventriloquising Dalit voices. So Kempamma and her son Ramakrishna speak for themselves in my work. Well diggers all over India are often from Dalit castes, Kempamma tells me. And historically, and in some cases even today, Ramakrishna says, are prevented-- he uses the English word-- from drinking water from the wells they dig due to caste-based concerns around their bodies.

Povi martyred the Bhaavi, he says. The Povis make the lakes. Kempamma says poetically. She explains there are two kinds of Povis. One who matters, those that build mud check dams like herself, and [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] in Tamil, those who are stonemasons who build lined wells, like this one.

When the borewells came into Bangalore, such as those at which Mahesh filled is tanker, in the early 2000, the Povis become bigger, she said. In an area where there were 5,000 workers, an area that I've studied in the anthropology of [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] called Meleshwaram, every house had a well, and the povis would walk to certain houses, patronize them to clean the wells every year. And this is how they made their livelihood, clean the water with lye, clean the edges, repair the stone walls.

But once the borewell operators were privatized, who had machinery, came in, these wells became disused, and the povis became bigger, she says. These 5,000 houses in Maleshwaram, now they use Kaveri water. They have piped water, or they use a borewell. Earlier there used to be huge wells in these houses. We would go and draw water from them, and clean them. Now who wants to make that effort? They just connect the borewell pump line, and then they use the water.

And look around you. Everywhere, what you see? Concrete, tar, drains. There is no place to collect this water. Where will it go? It has to go back into the soil for it to come back up, she says. She actually said it much more poetically than English can translate it. She says the Earth swallows the water. It comes back up, almost a gifting of the water from the Earth.

Ramakrishna, Kempamma's son, is now the spokesperson for the Povi community. He's taken on a sort of semi political role, and he described the waters as people. He says, we are people who find water for everyone, but we live in chronic thirst. He tells me the story of his grandfather and grandmother who dug and cleaned wells for their living, dirty, hard, and dangerous work in the red clay of the Deccan.

They were paid the princely sum of 1 lakh rupees a few years prior, to clean out the disused wells of a monastery in Mysuru. They spent a week cleaning the well, sleeping in the stone courtyard at night. When they finished, they lashed the water with acidic lye that burnt their hands to make it potable, and the head abbot paid them. But once he paid them, Ramakrishna said, he escorted them firmly from the monastery to ensure that they did not touch the water, to pollute it by their casted touch.

The Anthropocene is blind to the way Kempamma works, it's blind to the way Ramakrishna thinks, and it's blind to the way we modify and manage landscapes through ritual and other practices, at great social cost. Sensorial-- Dalit expression, the Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde writes, is an experience of the revelation of the personal and the political. I think we should add the ecological to it as well.

Setting indigenous practice as dialectic to Sanskritic textual understandings is one of the really important things I'm trying to do in my ethnography. To argue that Dalit well-digging castes who have been lost in modern India, their loss is an endemic violence that we commit to future communities. It is linked to the fundamentalist and masculinist Hindu narratives that are nationalist, but never local.

It would seem that the infrastructure of impotence and corruption, the toxic kidnapping of Hinduism by Hindutva apparatchiks can only be challenged by a feminine indigenous ecological imaginary, located in repair as an act of love that Kempamma spoke to me about. Kempamma's knowledge, her wisdom in enacting this poetics of repair is a vital ethical karmic task.

In thinking about our relationship to prithvi and the Earth, which the otherwise makes manifest and central, personal relationships in love and devotion is action, she says. This I believe is the concrete lever of change.

So in conclusion, Gauri's eulogy for Bellandur invites us to follow Kempamma to ask what dirty yet pure water is seen as being and doing in contemporary Hinduism. How can Hindus in the creative complexity of how they value, define, express, and practice their Dharma approach the age of climate crisis?

Do they merely say, well, this is Kali Yuga, which is a rationalization of untenable, unthinkable behavior as life on the planet unravels in ways seen and unseen? We unravel the natural consequences that these larger narratives of our behavior inflict on us.

Kempamma then sang a song as I left. All the lakes have dried up. Frogs have conceived, but you have not come, oh Ganga. Ponds have gone dry. Crickets have conceived. Why have you not come? Why not?

While Tikula women like Guari and Povi women like Kempamma offer us a model of collective ethics that attaches moral agency to an act of repair, it opens up a new kind of understanding of our existence. We have to understand places as persons. We have to understand the act of repair as natural, and then we can see nature itself as an anchor for social justice. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thank you so much Tulasi, that was really such a new way for us to think about the limitations of the Anthropocene and the way that we have managed to recenter ourselves, even in critiquing human intervention in the environment. So thank you so much.

And we also have an online audience today.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Should I sit down or should my answer to questions--

ANN D. BRAUDE: No, don't sit down,

TULASI SRINIVAS: OK.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Will you answer questions for us?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yes, I'm happy to.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Yes. I'm going to move to the back of the room--

TULASI SRINIVAS: OK.

ANN D. BRAUDE: --where our online audience can ask questions. I apologize for having failed to greet our online audience at the beginning, but we're very happy that you are participating remotely. We do have some time. We have about 20 or 30 minutes for discussion of this really stimulating conversation. I am so grateful to be introduced to these places as persons, and I really feel that you did introduce us as--

TULASI SRINIVAS: My home.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Yes. Thank you for taking us there and for inviting us into this very difficult--

TULASI SRINIVAS: Difficult. It's difficult to have a conversation. It makes you very-- to sit in dread and discomfort is really hard, but then Kempamma offers us a way out, it seems. And I have to think more about that way out and how to articulate it better. She articulated beautifully, but-- Yeah.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Yes. Yeah, well let me ask if there are questions from people who are present? Yes, there are. Can you introduce yourself, please, if you don't mind? Yes. I'm going to take this question first, and then we'll take the gentleman in the back there.

AUDIENCE: My name's Andrea. I'm a student here, and I'm just curious, having studied international development before-- thank you. I'm just curious having studied international development before and having read a little bit about the caste system in my bachelor's program, how this might affect other women in the community perhaps, or in the area that are not from the Dalit caste? Did you find that other women were affected as well?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Well, let me address that both granularly and in a larger perspective. Gauri is not Dalit. She's Tikula, so she's within the caste system, and she's clearly affected.

What has happened-- let me preface this by saying I trained as an architect and worked as a development consultant for many years. I think development, it's a brilliantly positive word for basically-- in India at least-- a continued extraction by the 1%. And as we have found to our cost, globally land developers tend to be amongst the most blissfully dismissive of legal constructions, and they are hand in glove with politicians for this extraction.

But my own considerations of development aside, let me answer your question. What has happened to a large number of rural migrants is with the development of these cities as center points in India, or they have been migrated. As I said, 8,000 people migrated into Bangalore, and what kind of jobs do they get?

They are largely-- the ones who are schooled in English language or something might get service jobs. The women work in beauty parlors or they might work in small shops. Rural labor that is not cosmopolitan or doesn't have those skills, at least early, get conscripted into construction labor. That is the most difficult and hard labor one can do.

And so these cities grow at a phenomenal pace. Many of these apartments are empty. They're just bank accounts into which-- people buy them in the hope that they increase in value. So I see a real downside to development.

On the other hand, of course, if one goes to the government of India website or one goes to many NGOs, they see development as actually very useful. It has lifted, many people out of poverty, and that's true. To a large extent, that is true.

The kind of-- as India joined the neoliberal economy in the late 1980s and 1990s, the plethora of goods and services that are available in these cities are unmatched all over the world. Certainly, there's human labor available. Our population stands at 1.4 billion, growing every day.

It's a culture that values children, and therefore this population increases, and a large proportion of this population is poor and marginalized, so ripe for the kind of politics and extraction that development presages.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, my name is James, and I work with technology at FAS. And I wonder what your view is on the role of technology in help solving the ecological crisis?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yeah. Thank you for that, James. It's a very important question. Let me say I'm not anti science, don't get me wrong, and I'm not anti technology. I couldn't give this talk without technology. I couldn't do my field work without technology, but I see myself less pro technology and caught in the webs of it, as we all are.

I think unless we set-- a tool is only as good as what you use it for to me, and unless we set the agenda of what we are using this technology for, it becomes-- I mean, look at the way we use social media. It's not the most enlightened way.

And so I think that the goal setting has to come from a passion, and then, sure, the technocratic solutions will all follow. The solar panels, the solar batteries, the way we manage water, that will all follow, but we have to undo our attachment to technology.

I mean, in the 70s, if any of you were around, I remember as a child people talk about dams as the future in China and India. They built these huge dams, ruined the ecology because we didn't know any better. What did the Indigenous people do at that time? They did the Chipko movement. They hugged the trees. Chipko means to adhere.

The women hugged the trees that were being cut down for these dams, saying that these trees are our livelihood. They were ignored. Development-- technocracy was the mantra. That proved to be fatal, proved to be really damaging. So I think, yeah, in retrospect, we're very good, but not very good about being circumspect, and not very good about prospect, but very good in retrospect

[LAUGHTER]

Yes?

ANN D. BRAUDE: Thank you. I'm going to take a question from our online audience from Greta Banerjee who asks, can you re-articulate the, quote, "way out" as you see it currently?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Rita, I-- that's what I'm trying to figure out, actually. That is what this year is for. I'm trying to think about how this poetics of repair can produce a way out. And it's kind of hard because it relies on a wisdom that is rapidly being lost, and therefore it has to be archived, curated, taught to future generations. It has to be valued.

So there's a real problem in that enactment, but I see that as a counterpoint or counter image, the otherwise, to the understood, naturalized rhetorics and politics of development.

It's not at a scale that can succeed, by any means, but I have an intuitive sense that is-- at some level, the care and repair is the answer. And I just noticed how as a society, middle-class societies all over the world have lost the art of repair. Try repairing an iron. It is impossible. They'll tell you, it's more expensive to repair. Throw it out and get a new one.

When did we start doing that? That shows a lack of care, and it shows that rubbish is fine, right? Rubbish that we take in and consume, and rubbish that we throw out. It seems that we are uncaring of what we leave behind. That strikes me as at the root of the problem. That reparation in the political sense, and repair are less valued. That strikes me as a moral thrust.

But I'm babbling on because I'm unclear of how to answer that question. And if anyone has solutions, I would love to hear because I think solutions, soluble water, it's a brilliant metaphorical place for me to land. But thank you Rita, for the question, brilliant question.

AUDIENCE: First of all, thank you so much. This presentation hit me really personally.

I'm just spent the last 21 years in Los Angeles. I'm from Southern Oregon where Los Angeles steals water from. Our lakes are-- I've watched them get lower every year. My personal family home burned down in fires in Oregon, which is in part because the city I was living in was draining the forests that I grew up in, so--

And I came to environmental activism, putting myself in front of police on the streets as a result of practices of building relationships with bodies of water as people, so I was really excited to hear.

And one of the projects I produced in that work was a booth called A Listen-In to have people be heard in their climate grief. So for weeks I sat particularly listening to teenage girls and their grief. And it was very intense, and it ultimately led to needing to step away, like being consumed by that grief.

So I'm wondering like when I hear the story of the woman watching the lake burn, there's deep grief in that, but there's also then something beyond. So I'm wondering, what do you see in these people in how they're bringing in grief, and then trans-- like what's the-- is grief part of-- how do you see grief? Like when does grief stop us from imagining what's next, and when is grief generative?

TULASI SRINIVAS: That's a interesting question.

AUDIENCE: Maybe you don't know, but I'm wondering if--

TULASI SRINIVAS: I don't know when grief stops. I think it's constant, but the need to survive makes us set it aside and go on. But I think that-- I think grief is enormously generative, and let me not say-- a lot of NGOs, et cetera, in India are working with this problem, doing phenomenal jobs, but many of them are seeking technocratic solutions. How do we revitalize waters, et cetera.

Many software engineers actually have given up their jobs to clean up the lakes because they recognize the problem that it caused, that is endemic to Bangalore now. And that's brilliant work. Like one guy has cleaned up like two or three lakes single-handedly, practically.

And so I think that the mobilization-- the grief needs to lead to mobilization, that all of us see the problem at hand. That's hard, that all of us recognize the problem because I know I'm lazy, and I have my own concerns, and they're very limited.

And, yeah, I don't know when grief ends. I think that we just tend to ignore it to propel ourselves forward.

ANN D. BRAUDE: You're getting some very tough questions.

TULASI SRINIVAS: I am. I am.

ANN D. BRAUDE: Really, I want to just give you a chance to take a breath because to answer some of these questions is a huge burden that we're placing on you. Let me take a question over here from another research assistant.

AUDIENCE: So I'm going to ask this, and then I have to run to go prep my teaching, but-- after you answer, of course-- but I mean, this is really more-- it's not such a targeted question.

But as you were talking about this, myself having grown up in New Orleans, so another place where climate apocalypse is upon us. Just having visited Chicago, and there was a big New York Times article last year about the water problems in Chicago. I wanted to kind of-- obviously you're looking at a very specific place, right, and bringing-- trying to illuminate this place as a person, as you said.

But I was also wondering about the comparative aspects, and I wanted to push you to answer about how this fits in with a larger global story as well as with its contingent local circumstances?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Right. That's a brilliant question, Jordan. Thank you for that, and thank you for pushing me because that is what I want to write a piece on.

The local is the global. I mean, it's a microcosm. And Bangalore is my hometown, and so I feel strongly about it. But you could look at Los Angeles where I've worked, and you see-- you look at the Colorado River, you look at farmers in Arizona, you look at London. Did you see the brown lawns of London this summer? I mean, it was unimaginable 10 years ago, London that get so much rain is on the edge of having a day zero of its own. Look at South Africa, look at Beijing. We are all on the edge of this.

If you don't drink water for about three hours, you know how you feel. You know how your skin feels. You know how your hair feels. You know how irritable you get. So imagine a world where water is gone. And water is the first thing we look for when we look for life, yeah? We send these space missions and all that, and the first thing they say is, there's water. There might be the capacity for life.

And yet we seem unable or unwilling to look at this square in the face. It is an existential crisis for all beings, us most importantly. And yet, we drink our plastic bottled water. We think it is an unending resource. This strikes me as really enormously shortsighted, and yet every major world religion-- I was thinking about comparatively in world religion-- every major world religion has some form of water ritual, but today, we understand it as womb to tomb, womb particularly.

And so I wonder what modernity has done in that breakage. That snipping has made us as humans-- and I'm talking about all religions now. We seem really unwilling to contend with that, the evil that we wreak upon the world.

And I think that it is not explained to-- in the right passionate way-- to developers, and the laws are not enacted. They're unable to be enacted for various monetary reasons, and so we hit a dead wall. So we understand it to be our existence. We understand it to be ritually significant. We understand it to be important, and yet, yet, we are unwilling to husband that resource.

And yet people have children every day, so there is a sense of hope. It's not like we're saying, well, this world is shot. We're going to go anywhere. We don't do that sort of thing. We have a sense of hope. So I'm still struggling with my own thinking, and a group-- we need a global conversation, and yet, of course, we're not having it. The only way I can afford is a very local small thing.

Yeah. Thanks, Jordan.

AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you so much. I think I remember attending a talk of yours during COVID, and so it's really amazing to see the research progress. But I'm Blaine from the Graduate School of Design. So I'm just trying to-- amongst all the coffees that I've had today, trying to locate a question. And this idea of poetics of care and thinking about how environmental law might come in to enact this, which I think dovetails onto the previous question of the comparative, right, like--

So I was thinking about the 2017 Uttarakhand resolution on the-- recognizing the Ganga as a personhood, and then-- so briefly, during, yeah, that year when I saw your talk, I looked at the genealogy of law, and reference, and precedents that came before that.

And there's a riverbed where I'm from a New Zealand-- Aoteoroa-- called the Whanganui which is-- has been recognized with environmental personhood and has a council that administers care, so I know-- sorry, it's a really long-winded question. But I know [? Delaptakuna ?] and Arundaha--

TULASI SRINIVAS: [? Delap ?] has done beautiful work.

AUDIENCE: --have written about the kind of challenges. He talks about environmental personhood. I shouldn't quote because this was a talk, but as being quite problematic in the context of India and in the context of Hindutva and Hinduism. And so maybe you could speak a little bit to the challenges of protecting a river as an environmental person, and if we're recognizing places as people. But maybe I'll-- I don't know why I'm shaking. I think I just get nervous when I ask questions.

ANN D. BRAUDE: That's OK. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Don't be nervous. It's a brilliant question, and Professor Bulgaria would be better placed as an anthropologist of law. But yes, I went to New Zealand primarily to see the kea parrots, but also for a conference, I think on religion, which was secondary.

And I think New Zealand has-- because it's small, it's done a phenomenal job of understanding the future and protecting natural resources. But in a country as large and as diverse as India, enacting laws is not good enough. A law is only as good as the teeth it has, so you can't-- the Ganges is a special circumstance. It's a river, it's sacred, but you can't see a river as a sacred person.

Simultaneously with several 100-year-old rituals whereby stuff is thrown into the river, including dead bodies, and alongside that have modern industrial effluents into the river, and not fine or stop at least the industrial effluents. And you can't change the ritual construction. It's very difficult to change cultural and ritual constructions of rivers.

So we have a central problem in India in that the government enacts a very progressive policy, but fails to identify where the policy will fail and doesn't sell the policy to people. There's no passion around it. Eh, Ganga is Sacred. But how people use the river doesn't fall in line with the law.

So how do you enact a law that works is more the point, not just enacting a law? And India has very progressive laws. It has progressive laws on LGBTQ. It has progressive laws on castes. It has progressive laws on ecology. And the [INAUDIBLE] is a problem, but I see it also as a cultural problem of how Indians think about resources and rationalize this disintegration, this ecological disintegration, through religious understandings of Kali Yuga.

Yeah. I think that's part of the problem, at least-- I'm speculating here-- I hope intelligently.

ANN D. BRAUDE: I'm going to take a question online from a past research associate who's with us online today, Vijaya Nagarajan. And it's great to have you here, Vijaya. She asks, what does the language of Canada have in terms of understanding the way that common resources are imagined? I think this is part of our solution.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yes, I agree with Vijaya, and I suspect from her last name she is from South India or has some connections to South India.

And I think that's one of the parts I held back because Harnini Nagendra and her-- who's a rather famous sociologist of ecology in the city, has written about the trashing of the lakes and resurrection of them. And I think the [INAUDIBLE] imaginary deals with the landscape-- it has four ways of thinking about the landscape. They talk about kalu, kere, behkta, karu. Kalu Is stone. Kere is lake. Behkta is mountain, and karu is copse of trees, forest.

So there is an understanding that these form the ecology of the Deccan, and there are ways of thinking about-- the language use a sort of poetics of repair very frequently. And so I think there is an imagination there of repair. And that's what I want to look at, to think about. It's deep in my field notes. I have to extract it, but thank you, Vijaya, that's a really important point, a thoughtful way to think about moving forward.

Thank you. I just want to make a note.

AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Denise. I wonder if you've already touched on the answer to this with the gentleman from New Zealand,

I was thinking about how much-- I wonder what you think about how much religion actually does play in the stopping of the feeling for the need to make changes of how the rivers are treated. For instance, Kali Yuga meaning basically the inevitability of the end of the world, and the customs of burning the bodies in the Ganges River and such. So I just wanted to touch on that a little bit.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yeah. Yeah, that's what the book is about. It's about the Hindu religious imaginary and how it constructs the rationalization of the apocalypse or creates a timeline for the apocalypse, and it creates the understanding that the apocalypse is inevitable. It might come in different forms, but it is a reduction of ethics. It's understood as a erosion of ethics, and so we reach this point where we have no solutions.

And then what anthropology can teach us, the anthropology of wisdom can teach us is there is always a sense of repair. So while the great textual treatises, the Sanskrit treatises tell us, well, this is the end. The end is coming. The end is nigh. On the other hand, you get people like Kempamma going, well, I care for these waters. They are my children. I birthed them. What do you do with that in the face of this? Clearly this is talking to that.

So there's a sense also that she is repairing the text. She's adding at least addendum to the text. And I shouldn't make this generalization, but what the hell, I'm going to make it anyway.

Hinduism has always been a sort of confection of the unification of colonial powers with upper caste translators. That is Hinduism. And so when Kempamma speaks back to the text, she's doing something really important. She's inter-digitizing the text. She's providing marginalia to the Sanskritic, to the inevitability, the temporal inevitability of decay. She goes, no, but wait, and I think the "but wait" is really important, and I want us to pay attention to that.

As scholars of religion, we pay paid a lot of attention to the Sanskrit texts. What the Rig Veda says, who said it, how it was translated, who translated it, the number of translations of these mythic texts and the ethics that are involved in them. And slowly, of course, we are beginning to pay attention to Dalit voices and the ethics of indigenous understanding. But I think when she says I care for these waters, I birth them, she's saying something that responds to the easy use of Kali Yuga by middle-class, upper-caste Hindus.

And it's not a simplistic feminist resilience, response, counter-narrative. No, it's none of those things. It's about being present in that place and caring for the act of repair. So it can't be easily corralled into a feminist narrative of resilience. I don't want to go that route. That's too easy-- survivability and resilience. We have that. The Eurocentric imagination has given that answer to us.

This, I suspect, is something else, located in the current imagination that Vijaya was asking about. And I want to extract that. I think there are threads there that are counterintuitive and very useful.

AUDIENCE: I am a Greg from the Extension School, and I live in Cleveland, which is like 10 miles from the Great Lakes or right on the Great Lakes. And I was wondering how do we convince others that it's such a huge problem when I look out and see water unto the horizon?

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yeah, that is true. I think I'm going to tread on many toes at this moment. Let me find a diplomatic way of trying to say what I want to say.

I think America has a particular problem with this because it is such a wealthy country. I'm not talking about money. I went to Niagara Falls. I nearly fell over. The amount of water wealth, the amount of mountain wealth, the amount of land wealth, from sea to shining sea this country owns. I have seen Americans open their refrigerator and stare in for five minutes while they decide what to take out. That indicated to me tremendous wealth. The wealth to generate the electricity, that is water wealth.

And I think you're right. I think Americans have a problem with this reality because when they look out, they see natural wealth, and it is-- but they must understand it has been protected so that one can look out and see those pine forests, by previous generations. And we have failed on the job of protecting it for future generations. So your grandchildren, Brad, may not see those pristine waters, and that is what you have to understand. Your great-grandchildren will definitely not.

I think the kinds of bird migrations we see today are 1/10 of what they were a hundred years ago. That should tell us something. Our children, our grandchildren will definitely not look in the sky and see birds. It's too polluted for birds to fly. In Delhi, sometimes the birds fall out of the sky because it is so polluted. That is what we have created.

And when I think of a sky without birds, to me that induces a sense of dread. I mean, just think of those-- even if you stepped out and you've heard birdsong, we take it for granted. Those damn birds, they shit on our cars, we say, right? And we see flocks of them when we go to any natural place. We take them for granted. Chickens, the swallows in the sky, those grackles. Imagine a world with that just gone. And we know. We pushed so many species into extinction. We've done it.

I don't see us recognizing or acknowledging that our children will not have this. It's too frightening, and too dreadful, and too hopeless to imagine, but yet it's very real. So we have a problem with the reality, all told, but in this country, particularly so because it is so naturally wealthy, and it has been protected, luckily, up to this point.

I am the bearer of bad news, but--

ANN D. BRAUDE: This is going to be our last question.

AUDIENCE: Yes, before I ask my question, I want to tell you that I have-- I'm continuing to learn deep lessons from the Srinivas family. Your father was a great teacher, and I've learned a great deal from you. Thank you.

TULASI SRINIVAS: That's kind.

AUDIENCE: My question or comment, you see we speak-- in modernity, we speak of natural resources. Natural resources are not persons. They are not persons with whom we reciprocate, with whom we speak, with whom we exchange. And the term natural resource seems so devoid of anything ideological, but it's profound. It carries-- it's a huge weight that it carries. The word natural means it's not us. It's an anthropocentric statement.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yes

AUDIENCE: And resource makes it doubly anthropocentric. It's there for us, the humans.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yes. Yes. Yes.

AUDIENCE: And that's something that is at the core of modernity.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Yes

AUDIENCE: Modernity was built on making the cosmos, or what we call "nature" in quotation mark, a mechanism, an object. There is a profound problem.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Beautifully put. I think you've led me to believe that my quarrel needs to go to Webber. This Protestant ethic is the root of modernity. It is the root of understanding our dominion rather than our custodianship. Right? That we are co-creators is never understood. It is our dominion, and that is a very old religious understanding, very Eurocentric religious understanding of the world that our dominion is there for our extraction and use.

To build a better world-- what is better is, of course, now questionable in retrospect, and I think that is dead right. And I was reading Levinas, and then I was reading-- Oh, I've lost the name. Who's the anthropologist? Julian Pitt-Rivers, who hasn't written much, but he wrote a beautiful piece on hospitality and grace.

And I think that's where I need to go. I need to go to the notion of grace and what grace actually is as a blessing, as well as custodianship. That grace involves the sense that one takes care versus one has dominion over. I think also it's a sort of [? regarding ?] kind of Sisulu's understanding of care and love.

So there's that, but it's rooted in old ritual understanding, Hindu ritual understanding, of how to situate a human. Because if you do any kind of worship, any kind of puja in a temple, these situate you in space and time. They say [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] and then they recite your lineage descent, right?

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] in the land of Barta. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] to the north of Ceylon. They're locating you in this sacred geography. So there is a long history of locating human in relation to the geography and the natural world which we just recited, and we forget. And all the gods, the planets of the universe, are the nine Navagraha, the sun, Ravi-- I mean, everyone who does yoga worships him every day. We do it. Somehow we've lost that part of our brain that understands that that is connected not just to our well-being, but to our very existence.

That is what troubles me, and it's a moral failure on our part. But I will end with that. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN D. BRAUDE: I just want to end with a few words of appreciation for Tulasi for her care for us, and your thoughtfulness and diplomacy in helping us navigate what are very difficult--

TULASI SRINIVAS: Difficult.

ANN D. BRAUDE: I was going to say waters, but that's not the right word-- that we have ahead of us as intellectuals with the responsibility to confront these very difficult issues. Thank you so much.

TULASI SRINIVAS: Thank you, Ann. You're so kind.

[APPLAUSE]

You're so kind.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor, Women's Studies in Religion Program.

SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2022, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.