“Exploring East India’s Mighty Brahmaputra River”, Hinduism Today, April 01, 2026
“A wide silver ribbon glittered beneath us as we flew into Dibrugarh, in Northeast India’s Assam province—the mighty Brahmaputra River. “We call it the Brahmaputra because it is the son of Lord Brahma,” explained the young Assamese woman sitting next to me.
Photojournalist Thomas Kelly and I were interested in the Brahmaputra as one of four sacred rivers that emanate from Mt. Kailash, the mountain in western Tibet that is holy to four religions. In January 2025, we followed the river from where it enters India in northern Arunachal Pradesh, to Guwahati, about 180 miles downstream in Assam, where it exits into Bangladesh. It is known as the Tsangpo in Tibet, Siang when it enters Arunachal Pradesh and Brahmaputra from the confluence in Assam of the Siang, Lohit and Dibang. We flew in from Kolkata to Dibrugarh, Assam’s northernmost airport.
All along the way, we met people living next to the river who consider the Brahmaputra to be a Divine Being, a living Deity to be respected. This reverence for rivers, which has always been the norm in India, is now being tested by increasing economic exploitation and pollution of rivers, including the Brahmaputra. This is much in the news these days due to large-scale hydroelectric dams planned on both the Indian and Chinese sides of the border. We wondered, how exactly do people experience the river as sacred? And what could be lost when a river is viewed as a commodity to be turned into money……”
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