A visual essay by Eileen McDougall
Floating on the Edge
Loktak Lake, India
A vision by Eileen McDougall
I am floating across Loktak, the largest freshwater lake in northeast India and one of the last remaining pats, or lakes, of an ancient wetland system. The wetland used to cover most of the valley of Manipur, a remote state on the edge of the world’s second most populous nation. Today only Loktak and a handful of smaller pats remain.
The lake is famous for its phumdis, tangled clumps of biomass, vegetation and soil, half-submerged, half-floating in the water. Over generations local fishermen have sculpted these phumdis into natural fish farms, creating a covering of perfectly symmetrical circles to the lake. It was the idea of these kaleidoscopic phumdis that has drawn me to Loktak, on a tortuous bus journey from India’s Assam. What I have found is an oasis of tranquillity and calm.
The lake is famous for its phumdis, tangled clumps of biomass, vegetation and soil, half-submerged, half-floating in the water. Over generations local fishermen have sculpted these phumdis into natural fish farms, creating a covering of perfectly symmetrical circles to the lake. It was the idea of these kaleidoscopic phumdis that has drawn me to Loktak, on a tortuous bus journey from India’s Assam. What I have found is an oasis of tranquillity and calm.
But during those delectable, days of floating, I discover the lives of the lake and its precious phumdis are under threat. A recent hydroelectric barrage has interrupted Loktak’s natural cleaning process which, during the monsoon, washes the phumdis and silt out the lake, through Myanmar to the Bay of Bengal. Now the phumdis and silt are building up, strangling Loktak. As one local says, “she gives us life, but we don’t know how much longer she will live.”
Photography & Words by Eileen McDougall
Edited by Marion Garnier
Traveller/s
Eileen McDougall
Writer and Photographer
Eileen is a writer and photographer who lives between London, Scotland and India. She has a special interest in the culture and contrasts of South Asia where she works on long-term writing and photography projects. Her work attempts to tell the stories of the people and places she discovers, to those who normally wouldn’t heard them. She is particularly interested in rural communities, and their relationships with the natural world.
@nomadicnumerist
