Not many people get to have the word "explorer" in their title but Arati Kumar-Rao does. She's an environmental photographer, writer, and artist as well as a National Geographic Explorer. In 2023, she was named one of the BBC 100 Influential and Inspiring Women from around the world.
Splitting her time between Bangalore and the Western Ghats mountain range in India, she takes on all sorts of assignments, from documenting the people of the Thar desert to photographing the Sunderbans, the world's largest unbroken mangrove stand.
Recently, she wrote a beautiful story for Orion magazine, "Hunting with Dolphins: Night fishing on India's Brahmaputra River." The story is part of her book, Marginlands: A Journey into India's Vanishing Landscapes.
All along the Brahmaputra River, wetlands serve as nurseries for fish. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao.
Evan Kleiman: I'm very intrigued by the title "National Geographic Explorer." What does that mean?
Arati Kumar-Rao: Well, it's actually really simple. It just means that I have been given a grant by the National Geographic Society to do a bunch of work. There are different kinds of grants that they hand out every few months. Some of them are research grants, and some of them are storytelling grants. I have a storytelling grant, and I'm currently on the grant documenting forced human migration across South Asia.
I can't wait to see the fruit of that work. Tell us about the Brahmaputra, the ninth largest river in the world. Where is it? How long is it? What is its significance to different cultures?
So this is a fascinating river. It starts from a glacier in western Tibet, and it flows all the way past Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet in China. Then it makes this stunning U-turn or bend between two very high mountains in the eastern Himalayas. Then, it comes down south, through the deepest gorge in the world. And it comes into India, in a state of ours called Arunachal Pradesh, where it takes on the name Siang. It's born as the Yarlung Tsangpo in China then it takes on the name Siang when it reaches India. Then, it flows south, and it joins two other rivers, the Lohit and the Dibang, to become this massive river called the Brahmaputra.
While the Brahmaputra is the ninth largest river, it is ridiculous to look at, especially in the monsoon. You can't see the other bank. If you're standing on one bank, it's about 18 kilometers wide. It's crazy. That flows through first China and Tibet, so basically through Buddhist areas. Then it flows through India, which are a bunch of Hindu areas and so on. Then it flows into Bangladesh, which is a Muslim country. So it flows through three religions and three countries before it ends in 1,000 tongues where it flows into the Bay of Bengal, and that is the Sunderbans, which is the largest unbroken stand of mangrove forests in the world.
Wow, what a story of its geography. In your piece, you went out on this river at night with two fishermen. Where along the river were you?
We were in the Indian state of Assam, so it has come down the mountains and it has come into the plains, and that's where we camped by the river. It was in the dry season, so the river was not quite 18 kilometers wide, but it had these huge sandbars that we'd have to walk across to reach some water on which we jumped onto this boat, this fishing boat with these two fishermen. Then we found a sand island, a silt island, actually, on which we camped and then went out fishing on the darkest night of the month. It was just two days before and two days after the new moon, and we went out with them on those dark nights fishing, because that's when they fish. 
Harpoon fisherman on the Brahmaputra River are a dying breed, says National Geographic Explorer Arati Kumar-Rao. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao.
Can you describe the two men, Lekhu and Ranjan, and what they do? Why do they go out at night? What do they fish for? How do they go about fishing?
These guys are traditional harpoon fishermen. It's a dying breed. They're probably the last two of their kind left in India, for sure. They do it only on the very dark nights of the month, and only in the dry season, not in the monsoons, because the river just swells up when it's the monsoon. So not then, but when it is shallow and very clear, is when they go fishing.
They fish with this handheld harpoon, which has six prongs, and there's this long, dingy boat, and they hang a small lamp in the front of the boat, which throws an arc of light in front of their boat. The rest of the whole place is dark, if you can imagine it. You can't even see your hand in front of your face. It's that dark. So they use their oar and their harpoon to just kind of tickle the water. They make sounds, and that's what summons river dolphins.
They fish with river dolphins. This is something that they have been doing for several generations, and it's not going to last, I think, beyond our generation. Unfortunately, in fact, I just spoke to Lekhu the other day, and he isn't fishing anymore, and he's doing some building work and so on. This is primarily because they are not finding fish in the river anymore. Fish in the Brahmaputra has fallen by 80% to 85% in some places.
What a shame. So these Gangetic dolphins, you write so beautifully about the speed and the grace and the power of these dolphins. Can you describe them for us and the role they play in this ballet between the men, the fish, and themselves?
So the Gangetic dolphins are river dolphins. They're the oldest cetaceans in the world. They're blind because both the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, the two big river systems in which they're found, are extremely silty rivers, so they can't really see underwater. Therefore, over time, they've lost sight, and they can only barely tell the direction lights are coming from. They use echolocation for everything — for feeding, for mating, for any communication whatsoever, it's echolocation. So they're blind dolphins. They're side-swimming dolphins.
It's really funny to see them. They turn on their side and they swim. These dolphins are not like their marine cousins. They don't jump up and spin and fall back into the water. They barely break the surface of the water. They poke their snout out, and they take a gulp, and then they whoosh back in. It's a very gradual, very graceful arc.
There was a recent census that was conducted, and the numbers still have to be verified, but we have a few thousand left in the whole river systems in both India and Bangladesh. So these dolphins are the apex predators in the rivers. They're the ones that are like the tigers of the river systems, and they eat fish. Unfortunately, that can also be their undoing, because rivers are used by everyone, and the Ganga Brahmaputra basin is the most populous basin in the world. 800 million people depend upon this river basin.
What happens is that there are dams along the river, which fragment the habitat, but more importantly, impound water. So there are times there's very low water and these dolphins love deep water, so they go looking for deep water, which is also where the fish are, therefore, which is also where the fishermen congregate. Very often, these dolphins get stuck in the fishing nets and because they have sharp teeth, the fishing nets get wound around their snouts, which are pretty long as well, and then they thrash about, which makes it much worse. A lot of them die in fishing nets. So that's a pity, but they're beautiful creatures. They're actually India's national aquatic animal.
You write about the beauty of being out on this boat with these fishermen. Can you dig into that a little bit, this human/animal symbiosis in this way of fishing?
What happens is that the dolphin and the fishermen both want the fish in the river, right? When the fishermen call the dolphin by making those sounds on the water with their oars, the dolphins come to the boat. They're predators, right? So the fish are afraid of the dolphins and they're running away from the dolphins. The dolphins are coming towards the boat. So of course, the fish are also coming towards the boat, because they're running away from the bus. It's almost like they're chasing the fish towards the boat, and the fishermen then harpoon those fish. But as a reward, they leave a few fish for the dolphin to get as well.
That night that you spent fishing alongside these dolphins on the Brahmaputra, how long did you spend out there and how many fish did you have at the end to show for it?
Not too many fish to show for it. We spent three days of about two to three hours each. The first day we didn't even have any. The second day, I think we had one fish. Then the third day, we had two fish, or something like that. I forget now exactly, but it was the number of fish you could count on the fingers of one hand and you would still have fingers left over, which is the real pity, because that was fishing season, and there should have been fish in the river. We just have seen a huge drop off in riverine fish thanks to river mining upstream, because that takes away the habitat where the fish breed, as well as wetlands, which are also habitats where the fish breed. So both those are endangered spaces, which are affecting the wild fish in these rivers.
Gangetic dolphins are the oldest cetaceans in the world and are blinded by the silt in the Ganga and the Brahmaputra rivers. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao.