ABSTRACT
The works presented in this chapter seek to explore the complexities of rivers and coasts through the examples of Yamuna River and the coast of Tamil Nadu in India from a local perspective. The changes observed through perceptual and aesthetic materials, on these landscapes during the last decades, demonstrate their social and cultural upheavals, and their contestations with mainstream discourses and representations of a global economy. Though only a small part of it, about 40 km, forms the banks of the megapolis of Delhi, now a city of 17 million people, it is hugely impacted by this traverse. The river has been the reason for this city's location since ancient times, providing it with water security. Despite it being black with sewage, never the river as dirty. The love-landscape poems describe nature as a backdrop of life and of an aesthetic or use value.
