Sacred Waters, Legal Rights: Reconceptualizing Personhood for Indian Rivers in the Anthropocene

This article examines the emerging jurisprudential concept of granting legal personhood to rivers in India, a nation where waterways hold profound religious and cultural significance while simultaneously suffering severe environmental degradation. The analysis contextualizes India's judicial experiments with river rights within the broader global movement toward rights of nature. Through critical examination of landmark cases, particularly the short-lived recognition of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers as legal persons by the Uttarakhand High Court, this article identifies both the revolutionary potential and practical limitations of applying legal personhood to natural entities. The study interrogates theoretical justifications for river rights through multiple lenses: Hindu cosmology and religious traditions that venerate rivers as divine; indigenous ontologies that conceptualize non-human entities as relational beings rather than resources; and Western legal frameworks that have historically limited personhood to humans and corporations. The article argues that while legal personhood for rivers represents a paradigm shift in human-nature relationships, significant doctrinal and implementation challenges persist. These include questions of standing, representation, liability, jurisdictional fragmentation, and enforcement mechanisms. Nevertheless, this jurisprudential innovation offers promising pathways for reimagining environmental governance in ways that might better protect vital ecosystems. The article concludes that granting legal personhood to rivers requires reconceptualizing fundamental legal categories while simultaneously developing robust institutional frameworks capable of giving practical effect to these novel rights.