The death we misunderstand: reflecting on literary depictions of drowning

This year, an image that seized the digital world was that of a speedboat capsizing in the rough seas off Phu Quoc, Vietnam – a few terrifying minutes of unspeakable tragedy, repeated endlessly across news feeds. Stories of drowning have piled up elsewhere too: children dying on their way to school, cars swept away by rivers in spate, farmers and fishermen swallowed whole, a woman taken by the sea while clutching an idol of her favourite god.According to the World Health Organization, 3,00,000 people die by unintentional drowning every year. Since the publication of WHO’s first global report on drowning in 2014 we are only just beginning to recognise this barely understood public health crisis.And yet, since days of yore, literature has been obsessed with drowning. From the Mesopotamian epic poem The ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, Ganga’s drowning of the seven sons she bore with King Shantanu in the Mahabharata, and Shakespeare’s Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’, to modern depictions such as Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’, literary texts have been replete with incidents of drowning.With the uneasy conscience of a public health advocate, I find myself asking, has literature been guilty of aestheticising this terrible death? Or has it, in fact, been slipping us powerful diagnostic clues and decoders that we have chosen to ignore?The face of drowningI turn first to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Hamlet’s beloved, who dies by drowning. Ophelia’s wonderous death is described by Gertrude as a beautiful tableau: “Her clothes spread wide and Mermaid like...” decked in fantastic garlands of crow flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples, she sank.The feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter in her seminal 1985 essay, “Representing Ophelia,” reminds us that Ophelia’s unintentional drowning is the textual archetype of woman as madness or madness as woman. Elizabethan culture would have diagnosed Ophelia’s condition as an excess of female love-melancholy, or erotomania. Male melancholy, of the kind associated with Hamlet, is linked to intellectual and imaginative genius. A women’s melancholy, by contrast, is biological and dangerous. Such is the power of this scene that in 1942, phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard categorised death by drowning as a truly feminine death – a passive, beautiful immersion in the softness and fluidity of water.Over time, Ophelia has been resurrected again and again. Her visibility in painting, theatre and popular culture — from Odilon Redon’s ‘Ophelia Among the Flowers’ to Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ — stands in inverse relation to her invisibility in critical texts. The English Pre-Raphaelites were obsessed with her death. John Everett Millais’s Ophelia —sensuous, floral, every botanical detail luminous — turned her into the very face of drowning and irreversibly shaped the idea that it is silent, calm, and painless.A violent deathBut drowning is a horribly violent death. It is respiratory impairment caused by submersion or immersion in liquid. We do not often hear the violence because drowning is literally silent. Physiologically, when a person is drowning, it is almost impossible to scream or make any sound because the airways collapse and the lungs flood with water.That silence has been appropriated for centuries by great literary works as a political and narrative tool. Drowning is often the death given to those pushed to the margins. Consider Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s novel, The Mill on the Floss. Maggie dies in a flood while trying to rescue her brother Tom. It is not a suicide, but it performs a similar narrative function. Maggie is a problem the novel’s social world cannot solve: her errant sexuality compromises her and it is difficult to return her to any respectable future. Her drowning in the flood is an erasure. Contemporary fiction set in the Global South has often offered a counterpoint to the elegant drowning of Ophelia. Most recently, in Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, a work of climate fiction set in dystopic future where Calcutta has been overcome by famine and lawlessness, drowning becomes collateral damage in a world of climate precarity. As a starving mob clamours for rice, a ferry overturns and hundred drown. In Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, a work of climate fiction set in dystopic future where Calcutta has been overcome by famine and lawlessness, drowning becomes collateral damage in a world of climate precarity A fearful phantomThe one recent novel that situates drowning within an epic sweep and presents it as an elusive, little-understood, and fearful phantom is Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. Set in Parambil, a fictional Kerala town, traversing three generations of an Orthodox Christian family, drowning is a lived experience, a daily threat, and also a family curse in this health-humanities text par-excellence.In Big Ammachi’s family, men die by drowning. It is a curse and a mysterious ‘condition’ to which one family member, usually a male, succumbs generation after generation, until Mariamma, a gifted doctor, diagnoses it as a medical ailment which can be treated. From what is perceived as a dark curse, we come into the light and are granted a diagnosis and cure.Yet what is most riveting in this tale, is the inexplicability and suddenness of these drownings – such as that of 10-year-old JoJo who drowns in an irrigation ditch after falling from a coconut tree. The ditch is so shallow that Ammachi’s spine jars when she jumps into it to save her little boy. These deaths are documented on a crumbling parchment. JoJo’s father, Big Appachen, cannot inscribe the details of his son’s death into this family document because he himself had never attended school which was across the river. Fear of drowning kept him unlettered. Big Ammachi delicately scribbles the cause and year of death next to JoJo’s name – Death in an Irrigation Ditch, 1908. Ironically, this fragile family parchment shines as a death register more detailed and accurate than the records on drowning available in many countries. In Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, depicting a fictional Kerala town and traversing three generations of an Orthodox Christian family, drowning is a lived experience, a daily threat, and also a family curse. Lack of accurate data, hurried burials, weak death registration systems and the unreliability of verbal autopsies are among many reasons why global data on drowning remains severely underreported.The viral bodyIn contemporary literature, drowning continues to be a persistent literary trope partly because drowning is more common than we assume. But also because this death is like the element in which it occurs – water itself: a metaphor for power and also a canvas for sublime aesthetics.In the new visual culture of the digital age, shaped by the voyeuristic pleasure of witnessing dying moments livestreamed, literature’s long work of interpreting drowning has been overtaken by CCTV footage and mobile phone recordings. Ophelia’s drowning has been replaced by algo-feeding images of a man flashing his phone atop a bottomless construction pit – the phone light slowly fading away as the man sinks while bystanders record a video of his drowning.Drowning has been released from its historical role as metaphor and transformed into spectacle. The beautiful drowned woman of literature has given way to the viral drowning body. Yet as public health begins to recognise that data alone cannot tell the whole story and looks for clues in people’s lives, perhaps literature can rescue drowning from spectacle — not by aestheticising death, but by restoring it as a preventable tragedy and a matter of social justice and accountability.(Lopa Ghosh is an author and global policy expert.)