Professor Bishnu Mohapatra, Professor, Politics and Director – Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences has received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for Water: Immersion, Embodiment and Imagination, a public humanities project that will explore water as a living force rather than merely an exploitable natural resource. The project will bring together events, performances, art installations, films, and discussions to open a rich interdisciplinary conversation on water, rivers, rain, memory, culture, and ecological imagination. It will move beyond technocratic and resource-management approaches to water by foregrounding embodied experience, literary traditions, artistic practice, public thought, and cultural memory. Through conversations on river biographies, screenings of films on water, cultural performances, and enduring artistic interventions, the project will invite participants to consider how water shapes our inner and outer worlds. It will also engage with water as a source of song, story, ritual, migration, settlement, language, and imagination. The initiative is distinctive in its effort to connect poetry, performance, environmental thought, visual art, social history, and public scholarship within a single frame. By creating spaces for artists, writers, scholars, students, and wider publics to encounter one another, the project will encourage forms of reflection not usually available within conventional environmental discourse.
