The Language of Water: Ancient Techniques and Community Stories for a Water Secure Future
Synergetic Press, London, England, 2025
352 pp. Paper, $24.99
ISBN: 9781957869193.
In 1924 Dr. King-Brown, a general practitioner in one of the poorest boroughs of London, attended a lecture at Guy’s Hospital on the virtues of sunlight for human health. He was moved to follow it up and took some children from the area to Dr. Rollier’s clinic in Leysin in Switzerland. He was so impressed with the results that on his return he got five discarded streetlights and jury-rigged them to produce a solarium for the children in Bermondsey. The results after of months of experimenting were so astonishing that in 1926 the council financed him to build a solarium that accommodated 1,600 children a day. Within ten years its capacity was 30,000 a year and it spurred the council in 1936 to build an innovative public health clinic with a whole floor dedicated to artificial sunlight in which the deprived children could play.
I was reminded of this reading the first in a collection of research ‘stories’ offered by Jain and Franses in the Language of Water. According to them, in the mid 70s Rajendra Singh, an Ayurvendic doctor, and three friends set off for the poorest area that they could think of. They bought a ticket to the ‘last stop’ and over a day later found themselves in Gopalpura in the remote region of the Alavari Hills. They were unprepared for their polite but unresponsive reception. It seemed that as well as clinical expertise and education for their children, water, another fundamental of life, was missing. While his friends returned to the city, the highly educated doctor stayed and, after digging for five days in a spot identified by one of the elders, he was joined by the villagers. The village now had a good water supply and soon began to flourish once again. Why this spot was so important (and why it had not engaged the villagers before) became a question for him that took up much of the rest of his life. Like Dr. King-Brown, who had to learn the language of electricity, Rajendra Singh had to augment his medical training with the language of water. He had to understand that its cycles and flow had an internal coherence and even a syntax that could be easily corrupted into a lazy Pidgin at the cost of a more nuanced language. The very effective Pidgin version of water where there is technological and economic abundance, is that ‘the rainfalls in reservoirs, it is cleaned up and comes out of a tap at the turn of a handle and flows into a drain and back into the sea to become rain again and, if on the way there is a flood just build a wall’. However, according to Jain and Franses, this won’t do - especially when (i) technological and economic abundance is so localised across the globe (ii) water is better understood as a potentially finite resource when the geological and interpersonal relationship with an ever growing population is factored into the equation and (iii) changing climatic conditions are affecting the volume, distribution and perhaps most significantly the consumption of water so that the conditions of (i) and (ii) are no longer as stable as they may have seemed.
The Language of Water attempts to help us understand this with an engaging personal research journal that captures stories from India, China, the United Kingdom, Africa, Slovakia, Australia the United States of America and South America illustrating the complex elegance of the processes that are necessary for water to become both available and contained on its own terms. Mostly written in the first person capturing the impressions and transformative insights that these stimulate, the book is part travelogue, part diary, part political manifesto, part evangelical tract, and part lots of other things in-between. This could be a recipe for disaster, but the transparency of the style and a generosity of explanation is entirely beguiling. Most of all the book hangs together because all the assertions and claims that are made are underpinned by first class research and detail that can be tracked back through the references for confirmation.
The Language of Water is about water by authors and field workers who know it well and want to share their knowledge as widely as possible. On the evidence of what is written, they are perfectly capable of making that clear in a simple and engaging way, and the problem is a lack of active listening to inform decision making. The book is a worthy effort to remedy this and offers insights into how we might achieve a more equable distribution of a resource as necessary to life as sunlight, and how we might ensure water security globally in the face of infrastructural change in the atmosphere. It is also an example of an art/science project that wears the disciplinary fusion of methods lightly. In the past 30 years there have been acres of print on art/science and a similar landmass of text advocating practice as research. The Language of Water is an exemplary project of an art/science/art-based research inquiry that uses the affordances that such an approach offers. The creative solutions to complex problems that their collection of stories reveal provide practical examples that avoid the academic figure skating and strident shroud waving that is not unusual in this sort of literature.