Description

The Krishna river, sacred to nine million people across four Indian states, has flowed past Janaki Patwardhan’s ancestral home in southern Maharashtra for fourteen generations. In this exquisite, unclassifiable book, she sets out to write the river — not as geography, not as ecology, not as religion, but as the lifelong relationship it actually is.

Drifting between memoir, prose poem, riverbank reportage, family history, and the close attention of a working translator, *The River Speaks Marathi* moves slowly downriver from the source at Mahabaleshwar to the delta at Hamasaladeevi. Along the way, Patwardhan listens. To the women washing clothes at dawn in Wai. To the boatmen of Sangli. To the temple priests at Audumbar. To her own grandmother — ninety-four, half-blind, in flawless village Marathi — telling stories of a Krishna that flowed wider, slower, and more loudly in 1947.

This is a book about a river. It is also, very quietly, a book about a vanishing language, a vanishing childhood, a vanishing landscape, and the long, lyric work of paying serious attention to the place one is from.

Hauntingly written and unlike anything else in contemporary Indian nonfiction, *The River Speaks Marathi* will be read, recommended and quoted for many years.

For readers of *Olivia Laing* and *Robert Macfarlane* — but unmistakably, gloriously Indian.