A Hydro-Medical Humanities Reading of A. K. Ramanujan’s A River

Abstract

Hydro humanities is a subfield of environmental humanities that focuses on water, rivers, floods, etc, as a cultural, political, ethical, and material force shaping human and nonhuman life. Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field that studies health, illness, death, care, and vulnerability. Through the lenses of literature, ethics, and cultural studies and it is not limited to the cure or hospitals. When brought together, hydro-medical humanities studies how water produces bodily vulnerability, trauma, and mortality and how these are represented ethically in culture and literature. This paper studies A.K. Ramanujan’s poem “A River” through the lens of hydro-medical humanities; the text operates as a literary case report of hydro-induced medical trauma rather than a conventional ecological or lyrical meditation on nature. The poet exposes how seasonal flooding in Madurai produces predictable trauma that is normalized through poetic tradition and civic neglect. The river acts as a determinant of health, injury, and mortality. Flooding emerges as a public health event shaped by infrastructural absence and governance failure rather than as a natural disaster. By framing ‘A River’ as a text of hydro-induced medical trauma, this study reveals that the medical humanities are not restricted to narratives of disease or healing. Instead, it advocates for a broader perspective of medicine that incorporates preventive, public accountability, and the environmental factors that influence life and death. The poem ultimately challenges both literary aesthetics and medical ethics to confront the normalization of avoidable mortality.