Dr Abheesh Sasidharan during a performance of ‘Meenachil R’
Somewhere between the waters of the Meenachil and the arid landscape of Jodhpur, a performer searches for home, only to discover that returning to a river also means returning to history. (The writer is a performance researcher and theatre practitioner) You Can Also Check: Gold Rate in Kochi | Silver Rate in Kochi | Bank Holidays in Kochi | Public Holidays in Kochi Stay updated with the latest Kochi news. By: Devendranath Sankaranarayanan Abheesh Sasidharan’s multimedia performance explores Meenachil River as a repository of personal, social and ecological histories There are performances that tell stories, and there are performances that excavate them. ‘Meenachil R’, conceived and performed by Dr Abheesh Sasidharan, produced by Techno Gypsie Production, with creative collaboration by Sudheer Pattambi, belongs to the latter. A research-led multimedia theatre performance, it approaches the Meenachil River not merely as landscape, subject or metaphor, but as an archive of childhood, caste, labour, ecology, violence and belonging. The Meenachil flows for nearly 78km from the Western Ghats through the cultural and agrarian landscapes of Kottayam before entering Vembanad Lake. In ‘Meenachil R’, however, this geography becomes more intimate and politically complex. The river is simultaneously a physical waterway, a historical witness and a deeply personal inheritance. Born on its banks, Abheesh now lives in Jodhpur, a landscape defined by a very different relationship with water. Distance transforms the familiar. What was once an ordinary part of childhood becomes an object of longing, inquiry and return. For Abheesh, the river is inseparable from the making of the self. Yet ‘Meenachil R’ refuses the easy comfort of nostalgia. Who worked its soil? Whose labour created its prosperity? Whose histories disappeared from its dominant narratives? Historian Dr Vinil Paul’s research on slavery and slave-trading networks in Kerala provides an important intellectual current within the performance. His scholarship reveals brutal histories of caste-based agrarian slavery and the buying, selling and displacement of marginalised communities. These histories disrupt any romantic idea of landscape. The beautiful river valley is also a social terrain marked by hierarchy, ownership and historical erasure. The performance then turns its critical gaze back on the artist himself. He interrogates his own place within Kerala’s social structures. What does it mean to claim a river as one’s own? What inherited privileges accompany the idea of belonging? Can one love a landscape while confronting the violence embedded in its history? This self-questioning gives ‘Meenachil R’ its intellectual integrity. Abheesh’s years at the University of Hyderabad also shaped this political consciousness. His experience of the university during the period surrounding Rohith Vemula’s death brought caste, dignity and institutional exclusion into focus. These experiences connect with the histories encountered along the Meenachil, bringing past and present into conversation. Yet ‘Meenachil R’ is not a lecture transferred to the stage. Its strength lies in its expanded multimedia vocabulary. The performer’s body, recorded material, sound, visual elements and documentary traces work together. Research becomes sensory. Childhood and adulthood, memory and history, the intimate and the political coexist. Its most striking material interventions are elemental. Water collected from the Meenachil at Pala, mud from Manjadikkari, stones from Illikkal Kallu and black sand from Thottappally enter the performance not as props but as witnesses. In encountering these materials, spectators experience landscape as something with weight, texture and physical presence rather than as a distant image. This is also where the environmental dimension of ‘Meenachil R’ becomes significant. Rivers are increasingly treated as resources to be diverted, managed and consumed. The Meenachil, too, faces ecological change, monsoon flooding, seasonal scarcity and shifting patterns of land and water use. Rather than offering a conventional environmental slogan, the performance makes a deeper point: Human history and natural history are inseparable. A river carries more than water. It carries the consequences of how societies organise themselves. Caste, labour, agriculture, settlement and environmental change have all left traces on the same landscape. By bringing these layers together, ‘Meenachil R’ suggests that environmental memory is also social memory. Abheesh begins with his river, but the performance ultimately turns towards the spectator. We begin to ask about our own landscapes, the histories beneath our homes and the silences within our memories. ‘Meenachil R’ does not ask us simply to remember a river. It asks what a river might remember about us. The performance ends, but its questions continue to flow. Download the TOI App.
Returning to the river also means confronting difficult questions: Who has historically belonged to this landscape?