Sure, Sajjad Ali’s Ravi and Noori and Shilpa Rao’s Par Chanaa De are back on your social media feed again, evoking a sense of nostalgia. Songs about rivers, both poetic and tragic. But while we romanticise the tales of love lost to the rivers, real waters are drowning cities. Turns out, the Indian subcontinent’s musical metaphors were warning signs all along.
Rivers sing the region into being. They are not only the lifelines to civilisations, but highways of longing, lines on which memory travels, and while sometimes the memory of the river is different from its current reality, it can also be quite real.
Rivers have served multiple purposes in the collective artistic imagination of the country: from the banks where lovers meet, to the holy water where pilgrims cleanse themselves, from poets finding metaphors in its vastness, to musicians finding choruses in its rhythm.
But lately, these tales are changing. The same rivers that have long anchored our stories are being rewritten by climate extremes, erratic monsoons, and human engineering. The result is a dissonant duet: songs that mourn a river’s imagined past, and rivers that behave unlike anything in the songs.
The Sorrows Beneath the Songs
Take Sajjad Ali’s line from his 2019 song Ravi—“Je Raavi vich paani koi nai, te apni kahani koi nai”—a lyric that imagines the river Ravi as a disappearing archive of stories.
The song’s melancholy reads like an elegy for a shrinking, absent river. Yet, the Ravi—like many rivers across the subcontinent—refuses to be pinned down: after periods of low flow, it has also seen sudden spikes in discharge, underlining how unpredictable the river’s course has become.
With the song trending on social media, many are pointing out that now that Ravi is flowing again, perhaps the stories will come into being. But, beyond the online frenzy and meme-fication, underlying is a change that is going to affect many people who live across the banks of the same river.
Similarly, the Coke Studio Pakistan song, Par Chanaa De, by Noori and Shilpa Rao is a reimagining of the legend of Sohni-Mahiwal and casts Chenab as a merciless force—a river of fatal crossing and tragic reunion.
Chenab, which currently flows between India and Pakistan, reflects the border between these two lovers, even though their stories are older than the manmade borders. While the river served as an antithesis to Sohni-Mahiwal's love story, it now stands between two countries whose relationships have soured. The river itself is now a metaphorical geographical division.
The turbulent nature of Chenab as represented in Par Chanaa De of “waters whirling higher and higher” is reflected in the deadly floods of 2010, 2014, and 2022.
This year, Chenab has flooded regions across Punjab and Pakistan—only underscoring the increasing ferocity with which the river flows.
Of Ambivalent Love For Water
In Bengal, Bhatiyali, folk songs sung by boatmen and riverside communities, have always expressed an ambivalent love for water: a friend for the journey, a foe with the power to sweep life away.
Contemporary reinterpretations, such as Coke Studio Bangla’s Nodir Kul, remind us that in Bangladesh and West Bengal, rivers are both cradle and catastrophe.
The Brahmaputra and its tributaries bring fertile silt and seasonal bounty. They also, increasingly, bring prolonged floods that reshape communities year by year.
In 2013, Coke Studio Pakistan released a rendition of the folk classic Amay Bhashaili Rey, performed by Alamgir and Fariha Pervez. Seamlessly blending Bengali and Urdu, the song echoed the deeply entwined histories of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Alamgir, a Bangladesh-born Pakistani singer with Bengali roots, lends an added layer of poignancy as he sings, “Amay bhashaili re, amay dubaili re, okul doriyar bujhi kul nai re" ("You’ve made me drift, you’ve made me drown, this boundless river has no shore.”)
The line becomes a powerful metaphor for rootlessness, belonging, and fractured identity—of a man, and perhaps a nation, afloat without a bank to rest on. In this way, the river becomes the storyteller, carrying the weight of memory, loss, and cultural complexity across generations.
A Changing Landscape: Climate Change & Loss
When rivers change, the metaphors embedded in music and folklore are forced to adapt. That friction is what we are witnessing now.
Science confirms what poets and fishermen have long suspected—South Asia’s rivers are becoming less predictable. Scientists point out that shorter but more intense rainfall events, snowmelt in Himalayan catchments, and glacial dynamics will alter seasonal flow of rivers across the Indian subcontinent.
On the ground, the impact of a shifting climate is no longer theoretical. Pakistan’s catastrophic floods of 2022 displaced millions and wiped out entire harvests. In India, the recent monsoons brought similar chaos: repeated cloudburst events and human-engineering failure have pushed water levels beyond danger marks, even flooding urban centres like Delhi where the Yamuna overflowed into surrounding neighbourhoods.
Himachal Pradesh’s Kullu and Manali have faced back-to-back years of landslides and flash floods—the result of climate extremes, swelling rivers, and unchecked human interference.
As we increase the concrete construction over the mountains, fault lines appear turning already fragile slopes into disaster zones.
Further east, Bangladesh’s flood cycles have grown longer and more severe, with the Brahmaputra and the Ganga rivers regularly breaching embankments and submerging vast areas of farmland and settlement. Assam in India’s northeast now treats devastating floods as an annual inevitability. In September 2025, Kolkata came to a standstill after torrential rains coincided with high water levels in the Ganga, leaving no escape route for rainwater. These are just some of the escalating symptoms of a climate system in crisis.
Volatility breaks the tidy tropes of nostalgic river songs.
You can no longer assume that the “river that carried my father’s boat” will bring that same, reliable rhythm next year. And yet, music keeps returning because it’s how people think aloud about what they've lost and what they might recover.
Cultural Politics of Water: A Tale of Borderlands
Rivers in the Indian subcontinent serve more than its natural course; they serve as political weapons for governments across borders. Dams, barrages, and inter-basin transfers re-route narrative arcs as much as water.
The Indus Treaty, Ganga water disputes, and transboundary tensions over river management reflect how communities relate to their rivers. The “story” of a river—who owns it, who manages it, who can worship or navigate it—is a contested space.
Music then becomes a counter-narrative: a way for communities to assert belonging when legal or bureaucratic instruments render them invisible.
This politics also shows up in the migration that songs mourn.
When climate stress erodes livelihood, harvests fail, riverbanks collapse—people move. That migration alters the audience for river songs: the young may leave the riverbank and carry the chorus into city slums; the old remain to sing.
Longing in song becomes both elegy and repository, a living archive for dispersed people.
Art and popular culture aren’t only passive witnesses. They trace history and pave the way for the future. The folk repertoires of Bengal and Punjab encode observation: they register when rivers change course, when banks erode, when the water levels change, beyond their tales of love and separation.
They are a map of memory, of belonging, and increasingly, of climate.