The River Ethnographies mural catches a student’s eye as they walk by. Credit: Neha Shahid | Lantern Reporter.
A student stood outside the Department of Geography in Derby Hall, studying a mural about rivers, his attention lingering on a section featuring the Ravi and Chenab rivers flowing through northern India and eastern Pakistan.
As Madhumita Dutta approached the water fountain to fill her water bottle, she noticed the student. A simple question about what had caught his attention turned into a 15-minute conversation about the Indus Waters Treaty, the communities living along the rivers and what often gets lost when water is discussed only through policy.
Dutta, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State, created the River Ethnographies mural to bring Indus River Valley research out of academic journals and into a space students encounter daily.?
Designed by Sandhya Kochar, a senior lecturer at the Knowlton School of Architecture, the mural uses photography by Abhay Kanvinde to show how politics, climate change and water-sharing decisions shape the lives of people along the rivers.
“People just think rivers as water, but it’s not. It’s more than that,” Dutta said.
Kochar said she wanted the design to convey the intricate relationship between the rivers and the stories of communities living along them.
Rather than putting traditional captions beneath the photographs, she sought to recreate the movement of water through the words and stories from Dutta’s research.?
“This exhibition became a way to allow words to flow,” Kochar said. “That’s why the words and the rivers are kind of entangled. You can’t separate the words from the rivers.”
The mural’s placement inside Derby Hall was intentional.?
“It’s visually accessible, and also in a very discreet place like a corridor where the role of a corridor is generally used for a passage,” Kochar said. “You go from one place to another.”?
Dutta said she wanted to use photographs to help students visualize the real people living along the rivers.?
“We allow the images to take center stage within the piece, and then the rivers just follow that,” Kochar said.?
For Kochar, the mural offers students another way to engage with academic research, complementing rather than replacing traditional academic publications. She said educators have a responsibility to adapt their teaching styles in ways that benefit students.??
“Allowing the students to discover their own potential, be it through text, it’s not one in lieu of the other, but it’s like they’re supporting actors,” Kochar said.?
For students passing by, the mural lets them engage with research they otherwise wouldn’t have encountered.
“I think a lot of research goes unseen because it’s usually in a written format, so I think pictures make people want to look at it more,” Diana Gertner-Agudelo, a third-year in biology, said.
Beyond its design, one student recognized a deeper message about people’s relationship with water and its centrality in their lives.??
“The words flowing on the page are very much indicative of the rivers and how the rivers are such a life force because everyone has to gather around them,” Ellie Holzwarth, a third-year in history and international business, said.?
For Hibo Mohamed, a third-year in anthropology, the mural shows that rivers are not defined by borders and connect communities.
“I noticed how much it’s not just geography or waterways and struggles or anything like that. It’s about how people are connected by the water,” Mohamed said. “The water not being able to be separated by some sort of made-up border.”
Mohamed’s insights reflect what Dutta hopes students take away from the mural.?
“In this whole process, what you have really forgotten is you forgot the rivers themselves,” Dutta said. “You’ve forgotten the people and the places.”
