Where the Water Waits
In the arid embrace of Karoonjhar, water gathers like memory: slow, sacred, and often, still. Here, we trace the seasonal ponds, ancient dams, and the salt lake of the Rann of Kutch, each holding stories of survival, longing, and return. Long ago, this land touched the Arabian Sea. Until the 15th century, the coastline reached into Nagarparkar, and thriving Jain communities traded across its waters from ports like Parinagar. As the sea receded, it left behind not just salt and sediment, but a deep imprint on the cultural and spiritual life of the region. These water bodies now remain as silent witnesses—holding ecological lifelines, oral histories, and the memory of a landscape once fluid, connected, and alive.
Sardharo: Water as a Vessel of Memory and Healing
In the village of Vikasar, Nagarparkar, they still tell the story of a woman who was married across the old border, into Gujarat, when people still moved freely. In her new home, far from the Karoonjhar hills of her childhood, she began to suffer from a deep, recurring pain, a migraine that settled sharply in one side of her head.
Nothing helped. Not rest, not treatment. Then one day, her husband brought home lentils from a travelling merchant. She tasted them and paused.
“This daal,” she said, “is from my land.”
Her tongue had remembered what her soul longed for.
He took her to a mystic, who listened and then told her, “This woman carries something from a life before. She must return to Sardharo.”
According to his vision, she had once been one of two deer fleeing from hunters in the hills near Sardharo. Her head had become lodged in the branches of a tree while her body had fallen into the water and dissolved with time. Now, in this life, she would only find peace if she returned and helped that fragment of her past find rest.
She walked back to Sardharo by foot. At the edge of the pond, where the monsoon collects and the stones hold the sun’s warmth, she found it: the bleached head of a deer still lodged near the water. She placed it gently into the pond. Her pain faded.
Since then, the pond at Sardharo has been quietly revered. Not through ritual alone, but through respect. Some speak of it as sacred like the Ganges. Others simply say it heals. What remains is the sense that certain places hold memory, and that water, especially, does not forget.
The woman's affliction and its resolution through a ritual act at the pond symbolize the enduring connection between past actions and present experiences. This reflects the belief that unresolved events or traumas can transcend lifetimes, affecting individuals until they are acknowledged and addressed.
These stories, passed from mouth to ear, root people to place. They remind us that preservation is not always about protection from the outside, but recognition from within. In them, the mountain becomes more than stone. The water becomes more than resource. They ask us to move carefully, to listen closely, and to consider what might still be held in the landscape, waiting to be returned to.
Even today, locals speak of a deer — or perhaps a gazelle, as the names often blur in these lands — whose fate became bound to the waters of Sardharo.
Today, the hills around Sardharo and across Tharparkar are home to some of the last remaining populations of Chinkara gazelles, animals that have long appeared in the region’s myths and folk tales as symbols of grace and continuity. But despite their cultural significance and ecological importance, they remain at risk.
Hunting practices, especially by outsiders, continue to threaten wildlife in Tharparkar. In recent years, cases have emerged where non-local hunters have illegally killed protected animals, including Chinkaras, for sport or meat. In one incident in 2022, residents of Godhiar and Rangilo apprehended hunters who had shot seven gazelles and a rabbit. The villagers handed them over to authorities, who prosecuted them. This was one rare instance of accountability in a system where enforcement is often weak. These actions underscore the power of community stewardship, where local people defend not only animals but the memories and moral worlds those animals inhabit.
The scale of the challenge is vast. The Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary, which spans over 8,300 square kilometers near Nagarparkar, is one of the largest sanctuaries in Sindh. Yet only seven wildlife officials are tasked with patrolling this immense landscape, often without adequate vehicles or equipment to intervene in time (Lok Sujag, 2023). In this vacuum, it is the villagers, those who still tell stories like the one of the woman and the deer, who often act as the last line of protection.
Stories like these acts of care are offerings, rituals in their own right. They are reminders that ecological preservation is also emotional and spiritual, a defense not only of species but of memory, dignity, and ancestral connection.