Work Word And The World Essays On Habitat Culture And Environment Susan Visvanathan

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For Meera, Sandhya and Mallika,
and to the memory of their grandmothers
Mariam Paul (1918–2013) and Rajam Viswanathan (1925–2021)
Work, Word and the World.indd 9Work, Word and the World.indd 9 27-06-2022 17:53:2927-06-2022 17:53:29

Work, Word and the World.indd 10Work, Word and the World.indd 10 27-06-2022 17:53:2927-06-2022 17:53:29

xiii
Acknowledgements
My grateful thanks to my daughters Meera, Sandhya and Mallika for
making my frequent fieldwork trips and visits to libraries possible.
Jawaharlal Nehru University made teaching and research easy. I could
not have written this book but for the support of the University Grants
Commission (UGC) Capacity Build Up Grant. My grateful thanks to
my teachers Prof. T.K. Oommen and Prof. Nandu Ram, who actively
engaged with new questions relating to occupations and life chances. In
Coonoor, I must thank my cousin James Kuriappan and his family who
provided me with security and friendship in new territory and made
their home available to me. I owe much to my aunt, Asha Elizabeth
Kuruvilla, and my paternal uncle, K. Kuruvilla, for interpreting so
much of Kerala’s social reality to me through conversations. I must also
thank Thomas George, who left us too soon, and his beautiful family in
Kuruvillangad and Palakkad. Without his help, I could not have begun
my organic agriculture work in Kerala. Many thanks to Swapna James
and her family in Cherpulassery, Palakkad; to Arun Venkatraman and
his family in Tiruvannamalai for letting me into their professional and
personal lives as educationists and ecologists. In Ladakh, the sustained
friendship of Tashi Lundup and Deskid Dolma opened many doors for
me. I thank Sumera Shafi, Rebecca Norman, Sonam Wangchuk, Harjit
Singh, Suresh Babu and Renoj J. Thayyen.
Ravi Nandan Singh very kindly allowed me to excerpt sections
from his PhD thesis ‘Representations of Death in Benaras’ making
the complex questions of water cleansing scientifically easier to read.
Bharat Jhunjhunwala abstracted various reports and not just made
them accessible but also interrogated them. Amita Singh drew me into
various conferences and research trips and introduced me to Disaster
Management experts from various countries. Ishwar Modi was charm
personified and invited me to contribute to his festschrift volume for
Prof. Yogendra Singh, who had educated generations of scholars with
his versatility and adaptability to new motivations in writing Sociology.
Work, Word and the World.indd 13Work, Word and the World.indd 13 27-06-2022 17:53:2927-06-2022 17:53:29

xiv Acknowledgements
I owe a deep debt to all these people. Samit Kar was certain that I could
inform the college and monastery audiences in Kolkata by giving a
keynote address. Renoj J. Thayyen, George Thomas, Ishwar Modi,
Yogendra Singh, Satish and Edie Saberwal, A.P. Barnabas and Samit
Kar have moved on, but before their deaths, they left behind a buoyant
aura about the significance of new and interdisciplinary notations in
cultural studies necessary to imagine the 21st century.
Chitra Harshvardhan, Alka Grover, Radhika Singha, Nandini Sundar,
Sucheta Mahajan, Taisha Abraham, Renny Thomas, Sandhya Raman,
Ratna Raman and S.R. Iyer, Asha and K. Kuruvilla, Jeanette and Jiju
James, Esther and Suresh Pillai have been my support group, and for
them, my gratitude is huge. Rajam Viswanathan, my mother-in-law, was
always supportive of my work, and I am grateful to her and my mother,
Mariam Paul, that in their lifetime, I could sustain my intellectual interests
in various ways. Their courage and love have been a great support to me.
My granddaughters, Uttara and Nandita Tewari, made life easy with
their affection, and though interactions remained mainly conducted in
cyberspace, I am deeply grateful to them for their company.
I could never thank my friends Jayati Ghosh, Avijit Sen, Smita Gupta,
Praveen Jha, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Chitra Joshi, Asha and D.S. Rawat,
Vijaya Ramaswamy and Krishnan enough for the support they provided
me with in the first decade of the 21st century when I was coping with
severe ill health. My heartfelt gratitude to the anonymous reviewer who
made the publication of this book with Bloomsbury India possible.
My friends at Sri Ramanasramam, Dr C.N. Srinivasa Murthy, Michael
Highburgher, K.S. Kannan and J. Jayaraman, will always be remembered
by me for their courtesy and solidarity in all circumstances of my frequent
visits to Ramanasramam for 25 years. K.V. Subrahmonyan and V.S. Mani
have been friends too as has been Abhitha Arunagiri, all of whose various
intellectual and spiritual journeys I sought to understand. I am immensely
grateful to Shiv Visvanathan and Saagar Tewari for access to many
valuable books in their personal collections and their familial concern.
I would also like to thank Mini Shivkumar Menon, Sonam Wangchuk
and Becky Norman, late Devinder Singh, Namgyal Dorjay, Rinchen
Dolkar, Sunil Meka, Sreeja Govindan, Rani Philip, Gitika De, Ravindra
Karnena, Debanjana Das, Mallarika Sinha Roy, Saswati Bhattacharya,
Work, Word and the World.indd 14Work, Word and the World.indd 14 27-06-2022 17:53:2927-06-2022 17:53:29

xv Acknowledgements
G. Arunima, A.R. Anupama, Lam Khan Piang, Vineeta Menon, Colonel
Venugopal and Girija, M.P. Joseph, Sian Miles, Molly and P.K. Hormis
Tharakan, Ezhupunna P.H. Hormis Tharakan and Aniruddh Menon.
Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi; SOAS Archives, London; Queen’s
University, Belfast; and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS),
Shimla, had important resources that I used for writing essays in the 1990s
and the 21st century; I extend my grateful thanks to Ashok Sharma and
archivists and librarians of IIAS, Shimla. Bettina Baumer was extremely
helpful when I visited the library at IIAS, as we shared interests in the
dialogue of religions for many decades. I would also like to thank Jaya
Ravindran for her great kindness in helping me use the National Archives,
Delhi. I must also acknowledge the contributions of Istvan Perczel, Vlad
Naumescu, Triloki Pandey, Annapurna Pandey, Huma Ahmed Ghosh,
Annie Paul, Neena Paul, Christoph Wulf, Stephanos Stephanides, Tamer
Soyler, Boike Rehbein, Saskia Lange, Ari Sitas, Gilles Tarabout, Catherine
Clemont, Denis Matringe, Roland Lardinois, Nicolas Porret Blanc, Geetha
Ganapathy Dore, Bruce and Adele King, Lars Eklund, Linda Hiltmann
and Anna Lindberg for fellowship and solidarity, which allowed me access
to libraries and journals in their cities. Thanks too, to late Gispert Sauch
(SJ), T.K. John (SJ), late George Keerankeri (SJ), Pius Malekandathil,
Yann Vaneaux, Chandrika Grover, Martin Stokes, Hastings Donan, Suzel
Reily, Katy Radford, Anil Nauriya, Mallika Shakya, Sukh Pamra, Devyani
Jayaswal, Karen Koelho, Kanta Soni, Mukta and R. Manu, Siddharth
Iyer, Smriti Iyer, Veena Das, J.P.S. Uberoi, Andre Beteille, Ravinder Jain,
Shobhita Jain, Frederique Marglin, Jyoti and Jane Sahi, Pratiksha Baxi,
Carsten Wilkes, Anandi Shanmugam, Becky Holland, Mahesh Rangarajan,
Sasanka Perera, Peter DeSouza, late A.P. Barnabas (Indian Institute of
Public Administration), late Ravinder Kumar (Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library) and Mrinal Miri. My editor at Bloomsbury India, Chandra
Sekhar, and his team have been immensely supportive. I am deeply
grateful to the Central European University, Budapest for awarding me
the Research Excellence Award, 2018, and to my friends Maja Skalar,
Erika Belko, Esther Holbrook, Benedik Zsigmond, Marie Koves, Adam
Bethlenfalvy, Klara Trencsenyi, Ute Falasche and Ildiko Markuz for
making me feel at home in their city. Thanks to Spitting Image, Bengaluru
for help with the typescript and collation of photographs.
Work, Word and the World.indd 15Work, Word and the World.indd 15 27-06-2022 17:53:2927-06-2022 17:53:29

xvi Acknowledgements
Some of the essays in this volume are pre-published works. I am grateful to the
publishers for their kind permission to include them in this volume.
‘Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power’ was previously published
in Politics and Religion Journal (1), 2013 and in Land, Leadership and
Local Resource Management, edited by Rabindranath Bhattacharya and
Ahmad Martada Mohamed, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2016, written as a
keynote address to the Network of Asia Pacific Schools and Institutes of
Public Administration and Governance (NAPSIPAG) Conference, 2013, in
Dehradun.
‘Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam
Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative Practices in Education
and Farming’, was published in Society and Culture in South Asia, 7 (2):
211–231, Delhi, 2021.
‘A Time Known to All: Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas’ was published in
Transcience, 11 (2): 171–181, Berlin, 2020.
‘Detachment and Faith’, in Religion and Society, edited by Samit Kar. Kolkata:
Monoshakti, 2016; it was the keynote address in seminar proceedings in
collaboration with the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR),
Bose Institute, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University and Directed
Initiative.
‘Kalpathy Heritage Village: Sacred and Modern’, in Education, Religion and
Creativity, edited by Ishwar Modi, 138–163, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2013.
‘Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of Right to Education
Debate’, in Ideas, Institutions, Processes: Essays in Memory of Satish
Saberwal, edited by N. Jayaram, 171–200. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2014.
‘The Labyrinth of Covid-19’, in Paragrana, 30 (2), Berlin: Freie University, 2021.
Work, Word and the World.indd 16Work, Word and the World.indd 16 27-06-2022 17:53:3027-06-2022 17:53:30

1
Introduction
One of the key problems that this book has tried to handle is how
contemporary sociologists build bridges with historians, students
of literature and all those who communicate the resilience of ideas.
Interdisciplinarity has always been important to those of us who work
with tradition and modernity. Hackneyed though these latter terms
may be, they are still integral to the social sciences. What we need to
do is to spatially interlock it with globalism to see how alive the world
becomes when our analyses seek to understand reality as the people
experience it!
This book attempts to understand this connection between past
and present as a problem of interlocution, where narrative production
is based on the understanding of a prism, where there is a continual
reflection on how the continuity of symbols manifests itself in world
cultures. As India moves into new forms of globalisation, where digital
mediation becomes ever more insistent, the craft of reading narratives
becomes a significant methodological tool for literary studies,
comparative sociology and cultural studies. I now provide the reader
with a summarised introduction to each essay.
Chapter 1, ‘Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power’,
looks at the comparative literature on the debate on dams, focusing
on how the interrelationship of activists and intellectuals creates a
swathe of materials to help us interpret peoples’ movements and
water distribution. By chronicling the way in which dissent appears
as a life force, I show how science and community interests are often
intertwined. We can only understand the Greens Movements in terms
of why letting rivers remain rivers, becomes essential for understanding
the survival of riverine civilisations. By following the course of the
Ganga as described by Ravi Nandan Singh’s path-breaking doctoral
thesis, the role of phagi is placed in detail through the dialogue with
scientific reports in relation to the cleaning and maintenance of rivers.
In the hierarchy of wants, sustainable agriculture during climate change
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Work, Word and the World 2
is seen to be a necessary variable in understanding the fate of rivers. In
2013, I was collating materials for a conference arranged by the Disaster
Studies Programme in the Centre for Law and Governance, and Amita
Singh invited me to give the keynote address for their meeting in
Dehra Dun. As it happened, the terrible Uttarkashi floods happened
during the days of the seminar. The team went to the conference from
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in four taxis despite the news of
the flood, but being ill, I stayed home. It was summer; the international
delegates had arrived, the team lodged in a hotel, where from their
windows they could see dead bodies floating in the river. The long
traffic jams on their return from the conference held them captive for
hours, at obscure places—in one instance, for eighteen hours as people
fled the hills in whatever mode of transport they could find. My role
as an ethnographer and collater of materials has led me to various
places, and I have always been informed by the contentious ways in
which social events explain themselves through varied ideologies and
circumstantial friendships.
Chapter 2 is titled ‘Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert’.
The Union Territory of Ladakh, which till recently was integrated into
the State of Jammu and Kashmir, in India is an inhabited zone in the
Himalayas with a strong military base, which contests borders with
China and Pakistan. Ladakh offers us new ways of thinking about organic
farming, and I describe the contributions made by two charismatic
figures towards the questions of education and water management. As
a husband–wife team in Leh, Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman
have received much attention for their work, comprising farming as a
form of husbandry, where earth and its care has taken on nuances that
are of significant pedagogic importance. We need to analyse through
the reading of their methods how arid land is converted into fertile
agricultural soil, and why training students for 20 and more years has
contributed substantially to taking forward their pioneering methods.
They were building on what Wendell Berry calls an intrinsic ‘awareness’
of the earth, where there was already a practice of frugality and respect
(Berry 2012: 11). The data for this paper was collected in 2013 and
2015, but this was also written up while I was in the Central European
University, Budapest, in 2018. While I had gone to conferences in Leh
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Introduction 3
and Badrawah in 2013 and 2014, organised by my colleague Suresh Babu
from the Zakir Hussain Centre for Education in JNU, I did not have the
opportunity to write up my field notes for the interviews conducted
later in 2015. In the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of
Ladakh (SECMOL) school, I had been surrounded by young students,
activists and the young and professional administrators of the school.
I condensed the interactions into some nucleated descriptions but
could not communicate the immense vitality that the founders Sonam
Wangchuk, Rebecca Norman and the young teachers and delegates
represented. Again, in the guest house in the Central European
University at Budapest named after Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish
activist against Nazi fascism, I was immersed in thinking about and
writing my data on riverine communities. Somewhere, these debates
are so intermeshed in the questions about industrialised agriculture
and development that any stand alternativists may take is pedagogically
informed. This is why schooling is such an important element in the
socialisation of sustainable agriculture methods. The intensity of
work patterns and austerity of consumption patterns in these obscure
villages make us look askance at how electricity consumption is so
profligate in the cities. Here, whether it is malls, shopping arcades or
domestic spaces, the extravagant way in which people use electricity
in metropolitan cities leaves one amazed. Mountains are ceaselessly
punctured, tunnels created for commerce, people lose their cultivated
and fallow lands, forests are eroded, floods happen, but the city-dweller
eats up electricity as if there is no tomorrow.
Chapter 3, ‘The Territorialisation of Water’, attempts to understand
the way in which issues of water concern us in the 21st century. I use data
from South India collected by ethnographic methods between 2006 and
2018 spanning the Western Ghats and the Annamalais to understand
how certain horticultural practices have developed, and the problems
that are faced by a new generation of farmers who see their occupation
to be defined by their genealogies and migration patterns. The concern
is with foregrounding the water debates in much the way those who
have been working with issues on dams and rights to forest produce
have done, by further analysing, ethnographically, the problems raised
by settlers. Today, with the shift in the timing of seasons and climate
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Work, Word and the World 4
change, settlers have new problems to face. I also presume that the
geomorphology of the Western Ghats has to be understood through
occupation and community identity. Thus, quite often, these hillside
towns represent an amalgam of local and regional identities, which
cross over easily between neighbouring states, namely Kerala, Tamil
Nadu and Karnataka. By using the discursive methods of Comparative
Sociology, I link the ongoing debates on water with the empirical
topographical preoccupations that concern us, as ever-changing, in the
times of climate change. This essay was written in Budapest in 2018 as
an intervention to the debates on water and as my contribution in terms
of work done as Professional Excellence Award Fellow, an award which
I had received in affiliation with the Departments of Sociology and
Mediterranean Studies, CEU, Budapest. My colleagues Istvan Perczel
and Vlad Naumescu made hospitable arrangements for my stay at the
Institute of Advanced Study in the Raoul Wallenberg Guesthouse. I
was left to myself to read, write and think for three months, and I was
deeply grateful to my colleagues for giving me this opportunity to write
up the data which I had collected over many years. As ethnographers
keen to find new voices that challenge existing theory and throw up
new puzzles for others to decipher, I was drawn into the reforestation
and alternative education debates. This essay, therefore, looks at the
ways in which the questions of borders and boundaries are constantly
blurred, and why people often travel across them with occupational
intent. Water becomes one of the symbols by which we can understand
the resilience of communities and farming and allied occupations. The
essay also looks at how the floods in Kerala in 2018 affected the life
chances of local communities. As someone present in Kerala in the
first week of August both in 2018 and 2019, I was able to chronicle the
impact of the opening of 35 dams right across the state in 2018. My real
aim in using newspaper accounts was to corroborate the experiences of
the people during climate change. We need to understand the repetitive
nature of survival strategies and the manner in which cyber networks
will become the real occupational strategies of Keralites in post-deluge
and post-Covid-19 stages. While the data is collected in mosaics of
time or by the ‘patchwork’ of data collection as young researchers today
refer to it, most sociologists who work on social movements know
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Introduction 5
that a tapestry of events makes up the whole. Every year, the people’s
movements look different. With climate change, we never know how
the future will look. Farming communities generally accommodate
themselves to the circumstances they find themselves in, and life in
camps, death, crop destruction are pervasively present, with no idea as
to what will happen next, given rising seas and shifts in the earth’s axis.
Chapter 4, titled ‘A Time Known to All’, looks at the verse and prose
of Stephanos Stephanides in relation to a fellow Cypriot, Ari Sitas.
The attempt is to highlight their work referring to their identities as
travellers who have made their mark in the literary world, as activists
of language and translation. This ‘translation’ presumes their globalised
and cosmopolitan persona, which have been well recognised,
internationally, by state and society. In their minds, they are both
sons of the soil and the Sea of Marmara, while living and working in
many different countries across the globe, because the vision of their
‘belongingness’ always returns them to Cyprus. In this essay, I use both
verse and prose as fragments to help us understand key concepts in the
organisation of time and space in the mnemonics of nostalgia. I look
at the work of two eminent poets with diverse skills to understand how
cosmopolitan cultures always look back at the past, however painful
and riddled with things the body longs to forget. I wrote this essay for
a conference arranged in honour of Stephanos Stephanides, which I
had attended as a delegate while at the Central European University
(CEU), Budapest, in 2018. Time at CEU, helped me compose this essay,
as I could not only engage with my basic interests in diaspora and its
variegated longing in different situations but I could also juxtapose
the work of two very successful litterateurs who were bonded in their
love for their home country and were frequent visitors to JNU. While
foregrounding Stephanos Stephanides, in whose honour the seminar
was held, I thought by bringing in the verse of Ari Sitas, a trade unionist
and activist, I could highlight the term nostos more accurately. These
were two poets who were unafraid of the past, who dwelt on it, whose
very ethos involved drawing in all that could not be otherwise spoken
about. Rather than absence, what they conferred was the informed love
for the entanglements of desire and longing, unsuppressed. Like the
oranges of Larnaca, I found their abandonment to privileges gleaned
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Work, Word and the World 6
from travelling and homecoming to Cyprus and the bonds they held
so dear, very healing. I take these theoretical questions forward in the
essay as I look at biographies as a narrative resource for understanding
nostalgia as an evocative and useful way of thinking about ‘belonging’.
Chapter 5, ‘Detachment and Faith’, tries to understand the relationship
between work and the world, where a certain obsessiveness is defined
as the hallmark of involvement. By the euphoria that calls towards
enlightenment, the worker is entranced by his/her preoccupations.
This in a sense changes the Sisyphian task into something else, a certain
tranquillity follows, and with it, transcendence. By using the work of
Paul Ricoeur, I wish to enhance the way in which the illusion of eternity,
rather than confounding us, allows us to work with reality and belief
systems so that we are calmed into acceptance of our everyday routines.
I wrote this essay at the invitation of Samit Kar, a very well-known
scholar–activist for colleges and mystical communities in Kolkata,
who had strong links with the Ramakrishna Mission. He was visually
handicapped, immensely charming and volatile, and persuaded me to
write a paper for the anniversary of Sister Nivedita or Mother, as she
was known. I wrote it in 2015 December while occupying my parents’
house in Alappuzha, Kerala, for the first time after my mother’s death
in 2013. I was alone, the house was comforting, I saw no one for a
month, except to go out to shop, or daily walks to the beach. It was
a true ‘writers’ retreat’ and I could write the paper which had to pass
the test of the intellectual audience of the Ramakrishna Mission monks
in Kolkata. Samit Kar’s easy confidence, that I was up to the task of
writing this paper, led me to solitary confinement and the knowledge
that return to the comforts of the past was peopled by memories of my
parents, their close kin and the ever-present ‘aloneness’ that follows us
when we return to our youth, as we become elders in reality. Books
keep us company when we no longer quite remember who is alive or
who is dead in times of severe internment.
In Chapter 6, ‘Songs of Solomon’ and Adi Shankara’s ‘Soundarya
Lahari’, written on the invitation of Istvan Perczel while being a Visiting
Professor at the CEU, in 2018, I go back to the literary questions that
have irked me since I was a young woman. What is faith? Do we
understand the longing that people have for the presence of God?
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Introduction 7
In this essay, I juxtapose the collated work of two great persona,
mythical or historical, King Solomon and Adi Shankara, separated by
millennia, but whose verse is still precious to contemporary readers,
communicating that they were interesting to readers along the ages.
The passion for words, the contexts of travel and the certitude of their
faith transcend boundaries, geographical as well as historical. It is here
that I am concerned with how plural realities are created, where love is
ruled by the essence of words and their meanings. Is there a certitude
to these sentiments? Verses can have multiple meanings, which is why
interpreters use pluriverse as a way of thinking of myriad contexts.
In this paper, I look at the ways in which verses can typify both the
conquest of space and the conquest of the body. By placing celibacy
and polygamy together in comparison, I argue that both mendicant and
king are chiselling away at their own desires, but the gravity of verse
and the divine nature of poetry command that they, singularly, come
away empty-handed.
Chapter 7, ‘Kalpathy Heritage Village’, looks at a village known to
be an important pilgrim site in Kerala for those who look to preserve
mortuary rituals traditionally associated with Benaras. In Kalpathy,
two kilometres from the Ollavakod railway station in Palakkad, an
agraharam of Brahmins from the 14th century still exists. They were
given the right to live and earn their living by ritual means, including the
use of traditional medicine, music and mathematics. The community
continues to face the exigencies of postmodern globalised economies
in their own way. My essay tries to capture their lives through the
maintenance of field notes across the period of a decade to show how
time is fleeting and changes are so rapid that oral histories give us a
sense of the constancy of ritual grammars. Circumstances change but
certain traditions, such as those associated with festival practices, begin
to evolve new commercial and aesthetic avenues. The fate of the holy
Kalpathy river, which in microcosm represents the Ganga, becomes a
corollary of rapid transformations that involve sand mining and the
pervasive appearance of flatted urban geographies as a result of the
return of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora during ritual occasions and as
returnees to a heritage village. I started visiting Kalpathy in 2006 at the
invitation of my friend and colleague Vijaya Ramaswamy of the Centre
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Work, Word and the World 8
for Historical Studies, JNU. She was an authority on medieval histories
in which I had a great interest, and on weaving cultures of textiles as
well as oral narratives. Over the years, I managed to watch Palakkad
change before my very eyes, and my notes became a testimony to the
relation between tradition, orthodoxy and postmodernism. Much of
this book is about the surreal quality of the ethnographic present. The
past is quixotic; it seems interred in the constancy of values, but people
know how to balance their present interests and motivations and the
aesthetic balance that they maintain with their traditions.
Chapter 8, ‘Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of
the Right to Education Debate’, is an attempt to look at the fascinating
relationship between ecological practices and schooling. In 2006, I had
finished my book on Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai published
as The Children of Nature (2010). I had found myself following the lives
and work of devotees of the sacred mountain and Ramana followers
or devotees as they are called. Over several years, I could see a pattern
emerging where the teachers involved in alternative schooling were
qualified professionals with a deep commitment to networking amongst
themselves and crossing boundaries seamlessly over the states of Tamil
Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. In 2012, I organised a conference in the
Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, where I invited nineteen
participants with the help of funds raised by the Vice Chancellor, JNU,
New Delhi. The conference went a long way in bringing schoolteachers
from South India to the university to meet academics who were involved
in the participatory nature of education that ‘The Right to Education
Bill’ had brought about. The essay that I wrote was published by
N. Jayaram in a festschrift dedicated to my former teacher from the
Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Satish
Saberwal, who was a well-known authority on bureaucracy and social
change. Activists set up new channels of enquiry, and as cultural
analysts, our preoccupation with oral histories allows us to place
wedges in the debates that may currently hold sway.
In Chapter 9, ‘The Abyss: Covid-19 and Its Implications’, I attempt
three things. First, I try to understand the nature of the abyss into which
Covid-19 has drawn Homo sapiens. It segregated us, and yet our life
chances became neutralised as the mutant gene could affect the lives
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Introduction 9
of men, women, children and was equally regardless of age and gender,
healthy or previously diseased. I ask basic questions about the nature
of this segregation and describe the condition of the landless labourers
and the wage labour that comes to the city. My basic preoccupation is
with the nature of survival and, consequently, I go on to question why
we need to analyse the phenomenon of affliction in cultural terms. The
third segment of the essay looks at my experience of being a patient
in a Covid ward in a general hospital in New Delhi. I am keen to find
out whether I can use a subjective account (my own) of pain and the
trauma of other patients to explicate some of the terms I dealt with
theoretically. The essay was written in fragments on the independent
requests of Christoph Wulf and K.V. Cybil and appears in a varied
form as the Covid mutations kept escalating and the debates kept up
alongside.
In Chapter 10 titled ‘Diaspora and Memory’, I attempt to understand
why Indians use nostalgia as the premise on which they plan their
holidays or their return to their native land. Whether Hindus,
Christians or Muslims, or of any other religion, they assert their
regional or religious identity as primary, thus creating boundaries
within themselves in terms of how they practise their religion,
according to denomination or creed or secular practice. They may
also, by being purists or fundamentalists, separate themselves off from
people of other religions, or from those who do not live as they do. The
reterritorialisation of space and emotions go hand in hand as the world
becomes increasingly conflict-prone. Since identities are gelled by
circumstances, the diaspora uses its religious symbols and affiliations
to define how different they are from the host community. On their
return home, for brief periods during their tenure as workers in the
Gulf, the ‘States’ (USA) or the UK, they communicate their pleasure
in everyday outings to meet relatives, eat local foods and participate in
ritual events. Old people who have been left to their own resources or in
the care of old-age homes are equally pleased to see their offspring. The
logic is that propelling a new generation forward and being responsible
for them is the sole criteria for staying aloof from their adult children
when the parents themselves become elderly. As migrants for work,
they are destined to return to the family plot, and horticulture is a
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Work, Word and the World 10
necessary aspect of the economic sustenance of the family. Kitchen
gardening as an aspect of organic farming, in fact, has a huge potential
today as later essays in this collection will show. I wrote this essay for
a conference at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla,
organised by Peter DeSouza and Yogesh Snehi. The institute was always
supportive of scholars writing on themes of religion and culture. As an
Honorary Fellow from 1990 to 1995, I had published a book from IIAS
on a French Benedictine monk, Henri Le Saux, who had contributed to
our understanding of inter-religious dialogue, by focusing his studies
on Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai. I had also contributed to
the Religion and Culture Network Bibliography spearheaded by its
director in the early 1990s. The opportunity to speak on what was
most intimately known to me, the contexts of the lived experience
of St Thomas Christians in Kerala and their neighbours, Hindus and
Muslims, was something more difficult to do. Sociologists work with
data as plenitude of received information; however, my task here was
not to collate information but generalise it, knowing that the dangers
involved were of simplifying that which is held most dear. When we
speak of marriage or death, we are dealing with intense community
emotions, which are stylised and safeguarded. These emotions are
even more deeply ingrained when we come to community rituals,
which have a special grammar memorised over hundreds of years. In
this essay, I was looking at why ecological issues of sacred rivers are
integrated into the vocabulary of rapid urbanisation and demographic
changes, which are in turn translated into questions of heritage sites,
conservation of urban spatial topography and people’s ‘matter of fact’
or practical responses to these.
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Environmental Concerns
1. Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power
2. Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work
of Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative
Practices in Education and Farming
3. The Territorialisation of Water
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13
1
Sacred Rivers:
Energy Resources and People’s Power
This essay is concerned with the way energy requirements in the last
three decades have seen a response from local communities who
wish to express their love and longing for traditional occupations.
Agriculture is a multifaceted representation, and riverine civilisations
have epitomised the relation between land, labour and production not
just as a relation with technology and culture but also in terms of the
symbols of the sacred. With large-scale over-utilisation of resources
and a lack of vision, the rivers are polluted. People’s movements draw
on the work of scientists and those working in the Arts, including
the Humanities and the Social Sciences, to draw attention to the
way in which petitions and protests communicate that politics is not
merely about imposing ‘the good vision from above’ but an interplay
between the political, the legal, the socio-religious, the secular and the
economic. In a democracy, politics is essentially about dialogue, and
the rate of industrialisation may well be mediated by the power of the
greens and environment movements, which have learnt their lessons
from the genocide of peasantry and tribal communities and the mass
exploitation of the resources of nature.
The questions of water and land have become politically the
most sensitive questions today. Rivers are recognised to be ancient
embodiments of the gods as well as sites of civilisation. The last
hundred years have transformed the way we think about rivers and
embankments. In Kerala, the Mullaperiyar, with its source in the
border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which was once called the Madras
Presidency, faced many public battles regarding not just the use of the
water but the age and viability of the dam. The Malayalis have seen
apocalypse in the eroding dam and have led processions and marches
till they received assurance that the 19th-century Mullaperiyar would
be repaired and a new dam built further downstream by their own state
government. Anand Pandian writes of a colonial engineer called Major
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Work, Word and the World 14
John Pennycuick, who built the dam and to whom a Tamil ode has
been written, extolling his virtues in changing the drylands of Madurai
into a silken quilt of green, where women, who were previously used to
famines, now bedeck themselves and dance like peacocks and swans.
Major Pennycuick, who invested his own money in the building of the
dam and requisitioned finances from local people, is also thought to
have thrown his second wife, pregnant with child, into a crack to seal
the dam. There is a famous tantric tradition of sacrificing human life
to stabilise a new building, which the colonist seems to be implicated
in, and by which he becomes the cultic embodiment of the artificially
created fertility of a once dry area. Is this to say that no sacrifice is
sufficient when it comes to the building of dams? Pandian writes:
The severe famine of 1876–78 temporarily suspended any
administrative attention to the project, but the Famine Commission
constituted in its wake specifically recommended the plan to help
secure grain production in the hard-hit plains of Madurai. Major John
Pennycuick was ordered to assume full responsibility to the proposed
project in 1882, and in the same year he submitted a detailed plan that
was ultimately sanctioned. The plan called for a thick rubble masonry
dam that would eventually rise 176 feet above the riverbed to impound
its waters in a large reservoir—water held here would be led through a
tributary stream-bed to a mile-long tunnel blasted through the granite
mass of the Western ghats, emerging east to tumble down to the
plains of Madura. An agreement was signed with the Government of
Travancore to lease the necessary lands in 1886, and work on the dam
commenced in 1887. The first waters passed out of the tunnel in 1895.
(cited in Baviskar 2003: 14)
Interestingly, this is very close to the time the Vice-Regal Lodge in
Shimla was electrified after much debate since the question of coal
and gas was being discussed, and electricity was seen to be an urgent
substitute (Visvanathan 2010a). Anand Pandian uses A.T. Mackenzie’s
History of the Periyar Project (1899) to describe the making of the dam.
There were tropical forests, wild animals and leeches, half the year was
monsoon, and malaria and cholera killed off thousands of workers
who found working at 3,000 feet tiring enough. ‘Hundreds of these
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Sacred Rivers 15
labourers perished due to accidents, contagious diseases and climatic
exposure—camp hospital registers tell only part of this story as many
sick workers went back to their native villages never to appear again
at the construction site’ (ibid.: 14, 15). Pandian comments that the
British commemorated their own dead with gravestones, but the Indian
workers’ graveyard remains unmarked and overgrown with scrub.
Ecologically, it is significant that many lower-caste communities buried
their dead in the land allowing for the earth to rejuvenate. British ideas
of sedentarisation of agriculture in Chingleput have been well discussed
by Eugene Irschick in Dialogue and History (1994), where he suggests
for Chingelput that a rural population was created in order to put in
place the idea of village society for taxation purposes in the eighteenth
century, where the temple festivals were supported in order to make way
for a cooperative and mutually supportive village society (Irschick 1994:
79). Dams would have a similar place in modern India, except that,
displacement would be the key symbol of reorganisation of society for
the creation of the modern metropolis as the hub of political decision-
making, where a pampered middle class would be led to believe that
they were the beneficiaries of the policies of the nation-state, and the rest
of the population silent witnesses to transformation.
In 1964, Yashoda, the family maidservant, told me that they buried
dead ancestors in the yam gardens, and I thought, then, from an
eight-year-old’s perspective that that was great proximity indeed! A
family member laughingly said that our jackfruit tree produced such
excellent fruit because it was fed by the water of not just the Pamba
which flowed by our field but also by the trapped rainwater that passed
the adjacent graveyard, the land which had been gifted out of my
grandfather’s property to the church. This contiguity to river and water
is what makes farmers’ families so alert to the warp and weft of life and
death, to subsistence and continuity, which are such essential tropes in
green movements. India has never stated the problem ideologically as
‘agriculture vs industrialisation’ till very recently for Gandhi’s influence
in Nehruvian realpolitik is very well-known. Secularism had its own
enchanted spaces. Nehru’s fascination for Buddha and Advaitism in the
same breath is worthy of analysis. Diana Eck quotes Nehru:
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Work, Word and the World 16
My desire to have a handful of ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad
has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no
religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga
and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I
have grown older, the attachment has also grown. I have watched their
varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the
history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become
attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing
waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people,
round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears,
her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a
symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-
flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-
covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved
so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work
have been cast. (cited in Baviskar 2003: 30, 31)
In Benaras, the questions raised about river pollution have been
steadfast. Sacred concerns and scientific ones are mutually supportive,
and the activists and human rights petitioners have shared resources
to fight their battle. The question of Narmada too has always been
read as a political and spiritual battle: There has been no conflict
in understanding the support that believers receive from secular
intellectuals (Baviskar 1995).
Amita Baviskar (1995) has posed very significant problems of the
nation-state bias towards industrialisation and the productivity of
tribals and peasants vis-à-vis the assumption that poverty rules by using
agricultural statistics as markers of grain production and self-reliance.
This data is then juxtaposed with the substitution of the Red Revolutions
of the 1950s to 1970s, by the Green Movements in the 1990s, as a symbol
of middle-class activist preoccupation with the survival of the tribal and
peasant communities. Milind Ghatwai, on the other hand, writes that
protest movements delay the projects and quotes M.N. Buch: ‘He [Buch]
says the “jholawala brigade” opposes everything from nuclear to hydel to
thermal power projects’. [Buch also says that] ‘those who benefit should
be made to share the spoils with those who are displaced or deprived of
their livelihoods, but projects must go on’ (2012).
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Sacred Rivers 17
Ghatwai writes, ‘What started as a struggle against the Sardar Sarovar
Project in the 1980s now encompasses every dam on the Narmada in
Madhya Pradesh’ (2012: 9). Speaking on behalf of people’s right to life
and work, on the other hand, are Suvrat Raju and M.V. Ramana:
Contempt for democracy is as old as democracy itself. The British
liberal, John Locke, wrote in 1695 that for ‘day-labourers and
tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids … hearing plain commands,
is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice.
The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe’. The
Indian ruling classes have evidently taken these medieval ideas to
heart. They are simply unable to acknowledge anywhere in India, that
farmers and working class people may have a valid and independent
perspective on infrastructural projects that must be respected. (2012:
10)
Ideologically, the plank of development as an industrial representation
of so-called ‘dead villages’ being replaced by the metaphors of spatial re-
organisation is well captured by Village Matters (2010) edited by Diane
P. Mines and Nicolas Yazgi. Here, several authors show that traditional
systems of irrigation or the preoccupation with small dams are the right
of the peasantry, insomuch as these have been creative spaces where
they are able to live their lives in harmony with nature. David Harvey
(2001), the Marxist geographer, who sees the relationship to Nature as
a problematic of theory as ideology, writes:
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to persuade engineers that they should
take the idea that knowledge, including their own technical ingenuity,
is still socially constructed. But when I argue with people from the
humanities, I find myself having to point out to them that when a
sewage system doesn’t work, you don’t ring up the postmodernists,
you call in the engineers—as it happens, my department has been
incredibly creative in sewage disposal. (Harvey 2001: 18)
The petition accompanying the protest, the inscribed voice of the
human rights activist, has been one of the most important ways in
which the battle over the future of India with regard to waterways has
been fought. Along with this are people’s meetings, confrontations with
banks, including the World Bank, and representatives of the nation-
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Work, Word and the World 18
state. The use of internet technology and the impact of personalised or
collective web dissemination through the blog has been considerable.
Clearly, the penultimate forum is the court and the belief that petitions
can be formalised and submitted to the judges for coming to a resolution.
The Ganga has always been a site of myth and riverine subcultures, its
reach so phenomenal, that even its tributaries are considered sacrosanct.
Diana Eck, in her classic work on Benaras, wrote compellingly about
the myths of the Ganga, showing that these myths evolve because of
love and attention that people give to the river, and that nature worship
integrates the indigenous yaksha and naga traditions.
It is a view in which the universe, and by extension the land of India,
is alive with interconnections and meanings and is likened to a living
organism. There is no nature ‘worship’ here, but a sacramental natural
ontology. (Eck in Baviskar 2003: 33)
However, the enthusiasm with which pilgrims throw plastic into the
river or factories their effluents is perhaps the greatest detriment to
river-cleaning efforts. In their report Emerging Contaminants in Ganga
River Basin with Special Emphasis on Pesticides, Manoj Babu et al. argue
that,
The active ingredients in a number of PCPs (personal care products)
are considered bioactive chemicals. This implies that they have the
potential to affect the flora and fauna of soil and aquatic receiving
environments. In some cases, bioactive ingredients are first subject
to metabolism by the consumer and the excreted metabolites and
parent components are then subject to further transformation
in the receiving environment. Personal care products differ from
pharmaceuticals in that large quantities can be directly introduced
into receiving environments (air, surface and groundwater, sewage,
sludge and bio-solids, landfills, soils) through regular use, such as
showering, bathing, spraying, excretion or disposal of expired or
used products. Because of this uncontrolled release, they can bypass
possible treatment systems. As a result, PCPs are referred to as
pseudo-persistent contaminants. (Barceló and Petrovic [2007], cited
in pg. 3 of J. Manoj Babu’s report)
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Sacred Rivers 19
The authors also detect steroids in the municipal wastewaters and
streams that flow into the river. On a visit to Mathura in 1994, my
daughters and I were astounded to see the filth that flowed through the
drains into the sacred river. Two pundits accompanied us; one of them
jumped into the boat that we took and casually took water for us to
drink with a cupped palm, filled though it was with ash and sludge. It
turned out that he was one of the petitioners in a court case demanding
the cleaning of the river in Mathura. All over India, there are people
who petition the court to hear their case over the most dramatic of
cases, and the spirituality of these places is never denied, though the
law is secular. Bharat Jhunjhunwala of the Ganga Mukti Andolan, a
former Professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), was
attacked for petitioning against damming the Ganges; his activist
colleague Vimalbhai has carried out protests through digital means,
including building a dedicated website. In Kerala, sand river mining
has become so acute that the rivers are drying up and the reclaimed
land is silting up rapidly with foliage and trees; people used to bathing
and worshipping at the sarpu kavu s or snake groves now find that
they are literally without a river in the summer months. That rivers
have holy value is a visible aspect of our geo-morphology. People of all
religions accept this quality, and their own stories of origin are related
to the sacred river.
The St Thomas Christians of Kerala have many stories of floods,
floating crosses, and establishment of churches and Christian
hamlets wherever such holy emblems were found, as in the case
of Niranam where St Thomas is supposed to have made his first
Brahmin convert. Farming communities have a long history of
living in contiguity with each other regardless of their religious
differences. Kalpathy, a sacred river to the Hindus in Kerala and
a tributary of the Nila and Bharatapuzha, has an annual festival
where Muslim and Christian traders have been setting up shops for
several centuries. Sacred rivers are not only physical manifestations
of the divine spirit cleansing people of all castes and religions, for
the flowing water does not carry the weight of distinctions, but it
also reproduces on its embankments the architecture of its mythic
representation.
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Work, Word and the World 20
So, Kalpathy temple in Palakkad, Kerala, recreates the steps of
Benaras because the origin of the temple is from the 14th century when
it is believed, a Brahmin widow walked to Kashi with her husband’s
ashes and brought back a stone lingam from there; she received the
king’s patronage for establishing a temple at the site where she placed
the lingam. Kalpathy, which is now a heritage village (with laws
regarding repair and renovation of its streets and houses), is a settlement
of Smartha Brahmins who lived by their traditional occupations of
astrology, ayurveda, accounting, temple management, music and
mathematics, Vedas and its dissemination and a very rich food culture.
They were not tillers of the soil; so, when the land distribution occurred
in Kerala in the 1950s, they lost much of their wealth and property,
and since they had been the backbone of the colonial clerical and
bureaucratic structures in the presidency towns, they were able to
enter the professional enclaves of modern India very early. One of the
fearsome aspects of the river is that since it dries in summer when the
Mallapuram dam is shut, and water is released for farmers every three
days, sand mining is frequently seen as not just predatory but criminal
by the residents who are afraid to speak out, as threats of murder then
follow. Cementing, creating barrages, sand mining, glacier melt can
very often lead to devastating floods in hilly terrain as we have seen in
Tehri in February 2021.
The Case of the Tehri Dam
For the farmer, however, the sacred river stands for agricultural
prosperity. An activist has summarised the National Environmental
Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) Report of 2005 (and has made
it available to me on personal request) to say that, the Tehri dam ‘is also
likely to capture around 65% of the total sediment carried by Ganga at
present’. In his summary, the report is thought to valorise the quality of
the water for a specific utilitarian purpose without taking into account
how the destruction of algae and phage occurs. I now provide the
summary of the NEERI Report by Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala.
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Sacred Rivers 21
Twenty sampling points were identified in the stretches from Gomukh
to Rishikesh and from Badrinath to Devprayag. Maximum five sets of
samples were collected from identified sampling points of the rivers
(Bhagirathi, Bhilangana, Alaknanda, Mandakini and Ganga) during
September 2002 to August 2003 for assessment of different abiotic,
biotic and microbiological parameters. Application of water quality
index (WQI), which is based on nine parameters, viz. DO, pH, BOD,
temperature, total solids, turbidity, total-P, NO
3
and faecal coliform, at
various stretches of the river water revealed that water quality of the
river between Tapovan and downstream of Uttarkashi was good (index
value 70–90) throughout the period of study, while water samples of
other areas were ranging medium and good during the same period.
An exercise further revealed that WQI values would have been
excellent (90–100) throughout the study area, if faecal coliform values
were eliminated from the 9 parameters used for WQI calculations.
Based on the irrigation water quality classification, water quality of all
the sites of the entire stretch was determined and found to fall under
the desired category of C
1
S
1
. The irrigation quality of water having C
1
S
1
category is beneficial for growing plants like Eucalyptus robusta, Acacia
nilotica, Casuarina sp., Prosopis tuliflora, Dalbergia sissoo, Azadirachta
indica, etc.
It has been observed that water samples from different rivers contained
specific types of phages. Different types of hosts were required for their
detection. The experimentation done at NEERI revealed that Ganga/
Bhagirathi sediment has the capability to absorb coliphages and
induce their proliferation. The coliphages adsorbed to the sediment
appear to be responsible for predating coliforms in the overlying water
column when the sediment and water co-exist in a container under
static conditions. The Bhagirathi water to be stored in a dam mimics
such static condition and, therefore, shall in no way deteriorate the
water quality of the river downstream of the Tehri dam.
The release of copper and chromium under static conditions and
the synergistic effect of chromium on the bacteriostatic/bacteriocidal
property of copper appear to be the factors that keep the water free
from coliforms and other bacteria responsible for putrefaction of
water when left for a long time under static condition.
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Work, Word and the World 22
Quantification of U
3
O
8
, ThO
2
and percent K in sediment samples
and comparison of these parameters with those present in other river
sediment samples and freshwater lake sediment samples show that
Bhagirathi/Ganga sediments collected between Gomukh and Rishikesh
are more radioactive than others though it could not be established
as to whether the radioactivity observed could be bacteriocidal.
However, possibility of existence of synergistic effect of radioactivity
on the antibacteriocidal activity of Cu and Cr, in combination, cannot
be ruled out.
It can be concluded now that the uniqueness of river Bhagirathi/
Ganga lies in its sediment content which is more radioactive
compared to other river and lakewater sediments, can release Cu and
Cr which have bactericidal properties and can harbour and cause
proliferation (under static conditions) of coliphages that reduce and
ultimately eliminate coliforms from the overlying water column. This
is possible as the dam is going to retain practically all the sediment
load of Bhagirathi as particles of the size of >0.01 mm are likely to
be retained in the dam. Thus, the Tehri dam is not likely to affect the
quality or self-preservation property of the river Bhagirathi/Ganga,
as it mimics a static container which is conducive for conditions
responsible to maintain the water quality. The NEERI study has honed
in on coliphage as the source of the self-purifying capacity of River
Ganga. There are two types of bacteria in the river water—coliform
are harmful bacteria while coliphage destroy the coliform and are
beneficial bacteria. Usually a particular species of coliphage destroys
one particular species of coliform. There are innumerable species of
both coliphage and coliform. The speciality of Ganga lies in the fact
that the coliphage are ‘wide-spectrum’—one coliphage destroys many
species of coliform.
1
This helps the river self-purify itself more easily.
Bharat Jhunjhunwala’s comment on the NEERI report is useful as the
terms of discourse are based on the phagi:
The coliphage are absorbed in the sediments after having been
created. They lie dormant in the sediments—even for many years—
1 This was mentioned by scientists of NEERI during personal discussion with Dr
Jhunjhunwala at NEERI on 18 February 2010. This is not mentioned explicitly in the
two NEERI reports.
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Sacred Rivers 23
and get revived when coliform enter the water. NEERI has found
that coliphage are present in the river water downstream of Tehri
Dam up to Rishikesh. Moreover, NEERI has assessed that 10 percent
release of sediments from Tehri Dam, plus sediments being added by
the Alaknanda River at Dev Prayag, will be sufficient to supply the
sediments required for the coliphage to survive and multiply, hence
there is no negative impact of Tehri Dam on the self-purifying capacity
of the Ganga.
The special quality of Ganga waters is also due to minute (but high)
levels of thorium, which is radioactive, and high levels of copper and
chromium in its waters.
It can be concluded now that the uniqueness of River Bhagirathi/
Ganga lies in its sediments content which is comparatively more
radioactive compared to other rivers and lake water sediments
investigated, and can release Cu and Cr which have a bactericidal
property and can harbour and cause proliferation (under static
condition) of coliphages which reduce and ultimately eliminate
coliforms from the overlying water column (NEERI 2004: 107).
These beneficial elements—thorium, copper and chromium—enter
the river water from the rocks against which the water rubs during
flow:
The metal ions, originally derived from the breaking of rocks,
are controlled by several river valley conditions—physical as well as
chemical (NEERI 2004: 74; NEERI 2011: iii).
This absorption takes place in two ways—chemical and mechanical
weathering. Rain water contains minuscule amounts of acid. This acid
breaks the rocks and loosens the metals therein which then flow into
the river. This is called chemical weathering. Secondly, metals are
directly absorbed in the river water as the water dashes against the
rocks containing these metals. The difference in metal composition of
the river is said to be due to this difference in the weathering regime:
The striking feature of the radium isotope data is the distinct
difference in the
228
Ra and
226
Ra abundances between the highland
and lowland rivers. The lowland waters are enriched in
228
Ra, while
the highland waters contain more
226
Ra. This difference mainly results
from the differences in their weathering regimes (NEERI 2011: 169).
The problem is that if the upstream river is diverted into tunnels
for the generation of hydropower then the water will not rub against
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Work, Word and the World 24
the stones and not absorb the beneficent metals. It is to be noted that
bumper-to-bumper dams have already been made upstream of Tehri
Dam except the uppermost 135 km; and are planned on the entire 300
km flow of Alaknanda except the lowest 30 km stretch. Thus it is likely
that the coliphages will be deprived of the sediments on which they
survive. The metals loosened by chemical weathering due to the rains
may seep into the dry riverbed and also not get carried by the river.
The conclusion is that the single project of Tehri Dam may not
adversely affect the sediments because the sediments have already
been created during the upstream flow or are being added from other
rivers. However, a cascade of projects which prevents weathering in
upstream reaches will prevent absorption of the beneficent elements
in water and remove the base on which the coliphages survive. The
conclusion that Tehri Dam will not affect the self-purifying capacity of
Ganga waters may possibly be correct on a stand-alone basis, but this
cannot be extrapolated to other projects especially when a cascade is
being built which will almost totally divert the upstream river waters
into tunnels and prevent weathering.
Creation of coliphages
The NEERI study does not give any indication of the reasons for
the creation of the wide-spectrum coliphages. There is an oblique
suggestion that this may be due to the minuscule amounts of beneficent
radioactivity on the river water. However, this is not substantiated. If
this were so, it should be possible to replicate their creation under
laboratory conditions by exposing water of other rivers to the same
small levels of radioactivity. NEERI agreed to this suggestion for
further research but expressed inability to undertake this in absence of
another sponsored project (NEERI 2010).
It is possible that the vibrations of sages in the area may be leading
to the creation of these coliphages. Or a unique combination of flow
velocity, weathering, algae, temperature etc. may be leading to their
creation. It is wise to apply the ‘precautionary principle’ until we
know the precise conditions under which these special coliphages are
created. It is best to leave the river in its pristine conditions till then.
Algae
River water has small micro-organisms that are food for bacteria.
These are called ‘phytoplankton’. The quality of aquatic life substantially
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Sacred Rivers 25
depends upon the availability of a variety of phytoplankton. NEERI
has calculated the diversity indices of phytoplankton in Ganga waters.
These are reproduced below:
Table: Average Density, Diversity and Composition of Phytoplankton
at different Sampling Points of the Rivers/Tributaries in the Study Area
(September 2002 to August 2003)
Sl
No
Sampling LocationCounts/mlShannon
Weiner
Diversity
Index
(SWI)
Palmer’s
Index
7 Tehri upstream
(Bhagirathi)
0 0 0
8 Tehri upstream
(Bhilangana)
46 1.55 2.0
9 Tehri downstream
(Bhagirathi)
22.75 0.68 0.75
Source: Table 17, NEERI 2004.
A reading of the above table shows that the Tehri upstream shows a
complete absence of phytoplankton and a diversity index of 0. This may
be due to upstream hydropower projects which cause almost all the
water of the river to flow through tunnels, deprive micro-organisms of
sunlight and air that are necessary for their development.
The table also shows a major decline in the count as well as the diversity
index between upstream Tehri (Bhilangana) and downstream Tehri
(Bhagirathi). These data indicate a negative impact of Tehri Dam on
micro-organisms. NEERI has not assessed the implications of this decline.
(All material indented here is from Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala's summary
of the NEERI report and has been used with his permission)
The Phage in Ganga
Interestingly, the role of the phage as available in sediment is the
most emphatic aspect of a river’s life and sustenance. Ravi Nandan
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Work, Word and the World 26
Singh, in his very lucid work on Benaras and the river Ganga,
Representation of Death in Benaras (doctoral thesis submitted to
JNU 2010), writes of these phages as disappearing because of the
irrevocability of plastic, both as reality and as a metaphor, which
replaces the theological idea of the immortal soul. Singh writes that
the Ganga Action Plan was set up in the domain of a particular
affectual politics where Rajiv Gandhi saw his role as expiatory after
the assassination of his mother in 1984.
The extent of the river’s pollution cannot be gauged by the abstract
quantified measures of scientific results of chemical experiments or
moral-religious damning of the people. The extent of the pollution
can be properly estimated by locating how people’s lives have been
failed by liberal democracy in certain domains, water being one major
component of it, but not the only one. Badiou similarly does not
consider the liberal humanitarian capitalistic democracy itself to be
evil. He argues that what is evil is that it is posed as the greatest possible
Good. He also argues that Evil could only be conveyed when Good is
clearly represented. Thus it would be useful to locate both these idioms
in Badiou’s own words. In delineating Good he poses event, fidelity
and truth to be the three registers:
The event, which brings to pass something other than the situation,
opinions, instituted knowledge; the event is a hazardous, (hazardeux)
unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears; the
fidelity, which is the name of the process; it amounts to a sustained
investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself;
it is an immanent and continuing break; the truth as such, that is,
the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit
by bit, it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces. (Badiou
2001: 67–68, cited in Singh 2010: 181)
Singh uses the work of Veer Bhadra Mishra, the mahant, who combines
his religious belief with scientific principles to clean the Ganga. Singh
writes that:
He (the mahant) observes that the machinery installed at the ghats
do not work, so the only way to ‘save’ Ganga would be to apply a plan
which runs without electricity. In his plan of ‘Integrated Wastewater
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Sacred Rivers 27
Oxidation Pond System’ based on ‘biological control’ it is a ‘return to
the bacteria’. (Singh 2010: 214)
Singh traces the history of the discovery of autophage to Felix D’Herelle
and others, such as Ernest Hanbury Hankin and Frederick Twort (Singh
2010: 220). Singh quotes D’Herelle’s 1921 work:
The difficulties of exposition of the subject will readily be
comprehended if we realize that up to the present time Bacteriology
has been considered as a ‘problem of two bodies’, bacterium and
medium, whether the medium be the organism parasitized or a culture
fluid. And this problem of the two bodies has been indeed complex.
But it is of necessity much less complicated than the ‘problem of
three bodies’ with which we must now be concerned, where we must
recognize the interactions between the medium-culture medium
or organism parasitized—the bacterium parasitizing this medium,
and the ultramicrobial bacteriophage parasitizing the bacterium.
(D’Herelle 1921: 6, cited in Singh 2010: 221)
The interesting problem for the sociologist is of course that the
relationship of the state to its people has changed dramatically. T.K.
Oommen’s work From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation (1985) was
concerned essentially with the way in which land reforms could make a
difference to how the poor benefitted or did not benefit as much as was
hoped, from the bhoodan movement and redistribution. The problem
of land displacement has been foremost in the minds of social scientists
for the last several decades. For the generation that grew up with the
idea of dams as the symbol of secular and rational citizenship, the
real problems came with the problematic questions around the latter
(Baviskar 1995).
Rashid C.A. has in his Mphil dissertation titled ‘Industrial Pollution
and People’s Struggle: A Case Study of Eloor, Kerala’ (JNU 2010) argued
forcefully for riverine rehabilitation. In a note he prepared for private
circulation, he says that:
For the past two decades, social anthropological research on
environmental issues has been part of a broad public sphere that has
witnessed a sharp increase in environmental decay like contamination
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Work, Word and the World 28
of groundwater, degradation of flora and fauna, genetical disordering
and livelihood problems, e.g. decline of fishing wealth and the fertility
of agricultural land, on the banks of the Periyar river due to large-scale
emission or affluence of manufacturing, biochemical industries. The
associated people’s struggle and industrial and state discourses attract
sociological investigation. (mimeo. n.d.)
Sustainable development is the basis of the people’s movements on
the banks of the Periyar in Kerala, and following the pioneering work
of T.K. Oommen, Rashid C.A. believes that people’s movements are
essentially innovative and creative. My work on the fisher people in
Alappuzha in the 1990s showed that river and sea movements were
becoming linked across India, as they believed that they had the right
to protect the earth: Tom Kocherry and the nuns and priests of the
radical liberation theology movements essentially believed that they
would link up with Medha Patkar to provide a catalyst to the ecological
movements of the 1990s to give a framework, within which grassroots
leaders could represent the occupational choices of men and women in
the country (Visvanathan 1994, 2000). David Harvey in the Spaces of
Capital (2001) argues that ideology defines the way in which space is
transformed in the relationship established by migration between town
and country. He writes:
The history of cities and of thinking about cities has periodically been
marked by an intense interest in the transformative role of urban social
movements and communal action. Such movements get variously
interpreted, however, depending upon historical and geographical
conditions. The Christian reformism culminating in the social
control argument of Robert Park and the Chicago School of Urban
Sociology (evolved during the inter-war years in the United States
and exported around the world in the post-war years as standard fare
for urban sociologists) contrast, for example with both the pluralist
‘interest group’ model of urban governance favoured by Robert
Dahl and the more radical and revolutionary interpretations arrived
at (mainly in Europe and Latin America) during the 1960s and the
1970s (culminating in Castell’s magnum opus on The City and the
Grassroots). (Harvey 2001: 188)
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Sacred Rivers 29
Harvey suggests that ‘the sense of possibility and desire for change in
political and intellectual circles, often expressed as utopian dreams
of alternative city forms on the one hand and the need to identify
political agents—such as proletariat or urban social movements—
capable of realizing such dreams on the other represent potential
points of disjunction’ (2001: 189). While the bourgeoisie represents
Commonwealth Games and Walmart as the symbol of their consistent
desire to be westernised, the farmers’ movements have essentially
located the earth and their articulate position on it, in the use of
symbols, as their anchoring point. When Khandwa farmers immersed
themselves in their inundated fields for a fortnight in April 2015 till
their MPs (Members of Parliament) and chief minister responded, we
see such heroism, unrelenting, because farming was their life. Similar
long-standing protests from Punjab farmers have captured media
attention. Gandhi wrote in the 1920s and 1930s in Young India that
the poor are committed to India because they have nowhere else to
go. Patriotism then becomes the very lifeblood of such movements.
While Germany and Japan have said ‘No!’ to nuclear energy, the Indian
nation-state pulverises the survivors of the tsunami in Kudankoolam,
but the protest of the fisher people is essentially about water, pollution
and the right to life and work. Whether it is the 48 rivers that flow into
the sea in Kerala or the state of the Coovam as it represents the sludge
of Chennai, activists have made rivers the essence of existence for both
town and country. The rivers are the veins of the cosmic egg, the seas,
the inner waters, as Diana Eck reminds us.
Was citizenship a basic human right? The difference between the
rhetoric of the 50s and the loss of dialogue in the 21st century is because
there has been a radical shift away from the redistribution model to
the idea of the liberal economy, where the bourgeoisie get to make the
rules, regardless of a political party. The obstacle to a shining India or
the development paradigm are the farmers, the rural stakeholders in
agriculture. The state’s interest in agriculture then, unfortunately for
such people as farmers with small landholdings, becomes represented
as food security, scientific temper, industrialisation of agriculture,
technology. The ideology of capitalism then locates itself in the questions
of ruling the masses, the so-called 80 per cent of our population, which
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Work, Word and the World 30
now is drawn into the cities as cheap labour during floods, famines and
drought. The riverine economies which are ancient and self-sustaining
are now problematised as essentially out of sync with the real ambition
of Indians, which is the colonisation of extraterrestrial space and missile
warfare, as the art of hoarding, self-defence and power-mongering.
In a talk given at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, on 14
September 2012 at the Sarvepalli Gopal Memorial Lecture, Christopher
Bayly spoke of the friends of Nehru who influenced him; they were
G.B. Pant, A.R. Gadgil, P.C. Mahalanobis and S. Radhakrishnan. Pant
brought the sense of village India, influenced as he was by Madan
Mohan Malaviya and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; A.R. Gadgil believed
that cooperatives were a midway towards industrialisation and differed
in this from Gandhi, who believed that rural development was an end
in itself; Mahalanobis was concerned with the ethnographic role of the
state, and Radhakrishnan thought that Vedanta could bring people
appreciably closer. There is another map, though, I wish to argue, and
that is the way in which we understand how the Congress Socialist
Party (CSP) in the 1930s brought about a great dialectic in the way
we think about peasantry. This was essentially to use associations and
the printing press during colonialism to actually work a new map of
rights and duties for the farmers, which would include wages, prices
and consumption. These kisan sabhas, as Acharya Narendra Dev saw
it, were an integral part of the vision of how the peasantry would
define its own place in the birth of the nation. In a paper written for
presentation at the Benaras Hindu University at the Exclusion and
Inclusion Cell in 2009, I argued that today, the farmers need to define
their orientation to land, water resources and food in terms of the
debates which make them representative stakeholders, in how India
is perceived by them (Visvanathan 2009b). The theoretical premises
which were discarded in the tension that arose between the CSP and
the Congress during the freedom movement have to be re-visited.
An ‘intelligentsia of the people’, which is essentially what activists
are, have to present the very terms of the argument in terms of the
practicality of their world views. Freire encourages scientists to learn
from the people (Freire and Freire 1994).
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Sacred Rivers 31
The right to life and the right to speech are some of the key areas
that the activists who fight for Gangaji (the personification of the
river Ganga) and the free flow of her waters, define as the primary
aspect of their struggle. However, given the vested interests of the
MPs, MLAs, traders and their goons, the activists who wish to oppose
the building of dams for hydroelectricity have a very hard task. When
Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked in his home, the activist Vimalbhai
sent out a petition on 26 June 2012. His first language is Hindi, in
which his blogs are written, but for the benefit of English speakers
who do not read Hindi, he wrote as follows, using English as bhasha:
Dear friends,
As you know about the attack on Bharatji by goons of [the] dam
company. Many of us are active and doing something in different ways.
Now, I think there is need of a coordinated effort. or we divide the
work. I have some thoughts in my mind which I am sharing with you.
Petition to NHRC on the roll of state govt (we need to make a
draft, I am trying to find out possibilities from lawyer)
Mass letter writing to CM and to PM, my letter is with you, English
translation can be done.
Delegation to power Ministry – demanding black list[ing] the
company and contractor
Delegation to MOEF asking them to follow their own rules and
committee recommendations. (On the larger issue related to dams on
Gangaji: we can work on that)
Letter or a Delegation to PM as he is the chairman of NRGBA with
all the member[s] of NRGBA
Statements from different districts of Uttarakhand (I am doing
that and some other groups are also active)
Best,
Vimalbhai
Their blog matuganga.blogspot communicated the urgency of the
matter. In 1942, when Gandhiji came out of jail, he communicated
that the cotton farmer could survive only if he/she learnt to multi-task
(Visvanathan 2009a). They would have to be spinners, weavers, dyers
and also learn to sell their cloth. The activists of the river protection
communities are essentially learning that if their concern with holistic
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Work, Word and the World 32
living is to be the signature of their life and work, they would have to
be visible, not just numerous. The interesting aspect of the bourgeoisie
is that they cannot see the people, except as functionally in servitude to
them. Popular movements dispel the idea of the invisibility of the masses,
as the peasants of Khandwa and the fisher people of Tamil Nadu have
shown with regard to nuclear energy, which potentially and vehemently
changes the horizon of their daily lives. The Gandhian prerogative of
‘doing without’ becomes the leitmotif of these movements—it is a choice
they make, and as citizens, they have a right to those choices. America-
returned and state-decorated Dr Jhunjhunwala, a former faculty
member of the IIM, who chooses to live in a village in Uttarakhand,
writes to intellectuals, petitioning for support; On 7 April 2012, he says:
Many dams on Ganga River have been held up because the Supreme
Court has asked for a study of the cumulative impacts of dams on river
ecology. Now Ministry of Environment and Forests has given a study
to IIT Roorkee. Our study indicates that this study will be a whitewash.
We have written a note on the topic which is attached for your kind
perusal. We intend to circulate it widely among all faculty members of
IIT Roorkee, and more. We have sent a similar note to the Ministry of
Environment and Forests already.
We would be very happy if you would endorse this petition
and also help us obtain endorsements by academicians—past and
present—and persons who can help us.
J.P. Debral, one of the intellectuals who was asked to mediate between
World Bank officials and the activists’ opposition, wrote in a collective
web chain email (personal communication) on 7 April 2012:
Come what may. We will have to accept reality. RR issues will remain
the most important issue for the affected people. This is also sure that
once they get the money many of them will not oppose the dam. But
then they have nothing to lose if they oppose the dam after getting
the compensation. Let us keep this opportunity open. Let them say
what damage has happened or is likely to happen after taking the
compensation.
We cannot be choosers at this stage. We will have to continue
to fight at every front. Those who are opposing the dam at the
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Sacred Rivers 33
ground should be encouraged to do so. The dam authorities or the
government must face resistance from every quarter. We cannot
be selective here. If Bharat Bhai wants to interact at the policy level
we must encourage and support him. He is doing it at the levels of
Rajya Sabha, Planning Commission, Courts, WB and Government.
I think Vimal Bhai, Madhu Kishwar, Bharat Bhai and Thariyalji have
already made their positions clear. Let us respect their commitments.
I do not want to pitch the wisdom of one against that of the other.
Together we can think of bringing change. A few inches gained by each
of them will make a feet of progress. What is important is that in the
end the policy changes.
Regards
J.P. Dabral
Activists have their perspectives which arise from their orientations
and training. Biographically, they may have points of departure. The
energy that one person has is a result of many hundreds of people
in the movement, providing him/her with a stabilising position.
Weber’s theory of charisma as a form of social action is useful for
us to understand since activism often depends on the power of the
collectivity to recognise this individual as a catalyst for social change.
The networks that form may run in a period of decades, as in the case
of Tehri, including in its fold, new members according to context. On
10 December

2011, an activist wrote that:
We had filed a Writ Petition in Uttarakhand High Court, regarding the
Dhari Devi Temple, which is to be uplifted for the Srinagar project.
The High Court asked us to approach the Archaeological Survey of
India. If ASI fails to protect the monument then we may approach the
HC again. The temple is not currently protected under the Ancient
Monuments Act. Please let me know if you know someone in ASI who
can help.
Elsewhere, in my work The Children of Nature (2010a), I have shown
how secular scholars and devout believers have engaged with the
question of the greening of the Annamalais and specifically the Holy
Mountain, called Agnisthal or Arunachala, in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil
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Work, Word and the World 34
Nadu. The Madras High Court has accepted petitions on behalf of
Arunachala, thought to be the embodiment of Shiva and Parvati in
unison. So also, the concern that believers have shown in the protection
of Ganga is allied with the concern of ecologists, scientists and activists
of various political hues. When Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked, the
noted activist Vimalbhai sent a letter on email:
Dear friends,
You might know on 22 June 2012, a mob of about 40 people including
employees and contractors of JVK, a company building a large
hydropower dam in Uttarakhand, India, barged into the house of
Environmentalist Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala and threatened him to
withdraw his legal representations against the dam. This is a breach of
personal safety, freedom of speech and democracy. The Government
of Uttarakhand must ensure that perpetrators of this attack are
brought to courts and tried. The administration so far has taken no
initiative to arrest them. Law and order in the state remain at the
mercy of political leaders and powerful police officers. The daughter of
Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala started an online petition to gather support
for his right to lead. The attack against Bharatji is not only against
that particular individual but in fact, this is an attack to suppress the
voice of the people in favor of the environment and people’s rights by
the dam builders. The attack shows the attitude of total disregard of
environmental issues and people’s rights and the dam builders want to
construct the dam with any hook and crook.
(blog<matuganga.blogspot.com>)
The whole process of building opinion to save sacred rivers takes time,
energy, money, and involves legal help and publicity. Yet, those who care
about the legacy of a five-thousand-year civilisation often feel they have
the time and the commitment of the people who dwell in these riverine
communities. In that sense, they are optimistic, because their notion
of time is not apocalyptic, it is essentially ordered by their faith either
in the divine or in the rational secular order of the Constitution as it is
enshrined in the common knowledge of ordinary people. Activists seek
to rewrite the contexts of modern geography by the play of interstices in
how cartography becomes an emotional space for these actors. To the
reified space of maps as authoritatively represented as an idiom of the
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Sacred Rivers 35
nation-state, they use local grammars and everyday practice to rewrite
the plans of the centralised government. This affectivity is seen to be
essentially problematic and is voiced or represented by partisans of the
nation-state and local communities in different ways. ‘Do you think
development will not happen,’ asks one side acerbically, ‘just because
the jholawallas (carriers of ethnic bags signifying local community
interests and crafts) do not want it?’ On the other hand, intellectuals
who are concerned with the rights of peasants and tribals to speak out
in postmodern democracy will continue to write on the behalf of local
communities.
Maps are therefore not just artistic productions (Baviskar 1995)
explaining where places are, their contiguity to forests, lakes, mountains
and railway lines, but as Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins argue in their book
Rethinking Maps (2009):
Maps do not then emerge in the same way for all individuals. Rather
they emerge in contexts and through a mix of creative, reflexive,
playful, tactile and habitual practices, affected by the knowledge,
experience and skill of the individual to perform mappings and
apply them in the world. This applies as much to mapmaking as map
reading. As such, the map does not represent the world or make
the world, it is a co-constitutive production between inscription,
individual and world; a production that is constantly in motion,
always seeking to appear ontologically secure. Conceiving maps
in this way reveals that they are never fully formed but emerge in
process and mutable (they are re-made as opposed to mis-made,
mis-used or mis-read). (21)
Jane Beckett (2001), while describing the transformation of the
rural landscape in the 19th century in the Netherlands, through
industrialisation, shows that its museumisation was an ongoing process.
She writes that the transformation involved both the diversification
of agriculture under capitalism as well as the use of fertilisers and
pesticides replacing animal manure. Potatoes replaced the small-scale
garden, where vegetable production and dairying had previously been
standard livelihood practices. In Kerala today, where small dams have
been accepted by the people, the state government has made it very
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Work, Word and the World 36
clear that the people must have recourse to agriculture even though the
lands lie fallow due to migration for work in Gulf countries, Europe or
America. Shaju Philip writes,
Last week saw politicians up in arms over a suggestion by Planning
Board Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia that Kerala [should]
not worry about food security but instead focus on cash crops. His
suggestion must have been prompted by the large tracks of paddy
fields lying uncultivated in the state for years because of lack of labour
hands—both outward migration from middle-class agri-families and
shift from food crops to cash crops hit the fields. (2012: 20)
The Kerala politicians however know that the state’s interest in organic
farming as expressed in the success of Ezhimayur in Palakkad has to be
reduplicated in other parts of Kerala (Visvanathan 2009a). The political
position represented by all parties, including the ruling Congress party,
that the state is not ready to hand over to monopolists is a legitimate
claim to make. Beckett writes that ‘Michel Foucault has noted that “a
whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the
same time be the history of power … from the great strategies of geo-
politics to the little tactics of habitat’ (2001: 64).
The moral claims that people make to the past may involve geological
and mythic time as well as the way in which industrialisation can
make a famine-struck, drought-prone, waterlogged in the monsoon,
desert-like Barmer in Rajasthan suddenly turn into an oil field with
luxury hotels and modern roads, farmers rapidly selling off their
lands or conversely, mythographers continuing to search for the River
Saraswati. The polemics of industrialisation may suddenly replace the
mythological impetus, and this is something that sociologists urgently
need to work on since their task is essentially that of documentation
and analyses.
Bibliography
Babu, J. Manoj, Shamal Mandal, Bandana Mahto and Sudha Goel. Emerging
Contaminants in Ganga River Basin with Special Emphasis on Pesticides
(internet report www.researchgate, accessed on 12 March 2022).
Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
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Sacred Rivers 37
———. 2003. Waterlines . Delhi: Penguin Books.
Beckett, Jane. 2001. In the Bleaching Field: Gender, Landscape and Modernity
in the Netherlands 1880–1920 in Gendering Landscape Art, edited by Steven
Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. 2009. Rethinking Maps. New
Yor k: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Eck, Diana. 2003. ‘The Goddess Ganges in Hindu Sacred Geography’. In
Waterlines, edited by Amita Baviskar. Delhi: Penguin Books.
Freire, Paulo and A.M.A. Freire. 1994. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum.
Ghatwai, Milind. 2012. ‘The Means to Block or Release a Dam’. The Indian
Express, 19 September.
Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital , Towards a Critical Geography.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Indian Express,The New Refineries Likely in Barmer, 30 August.
Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History , Constructing South India,
1795–1895. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mines, P. Diane and Nicolas Yazgi. 2010. Village Matters: Relocating Villages in
the Contemporary Anthropology of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Oommen, T.K. 1984. From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation: Dynamics
of Agrarian Movement in Twentieth-Century Kerala. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan
Pandian, Anand. 2003. ‘An Ode to an Engineer’. In Waterlines , edited by Amita
Baviskar. Delhi: Penguin Books.
Philip, Shaju. 2012. ‘Why FDI Retail No-Go in State That Earns Well, Spends
Better’. The Indian Express, 19 September.
Raju, Suvrat and M.V. Ramana. 2012. ‘Where the Mind is Full of Fear’. The
Hindu, 19 September.
Rashid, C.A. 2010. ‘Industrial Pollution and People’s Struggle: A Case Study of
Eloor Kerala’, unpublished MPhil dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Singh, Ravi Nandan. 2010. ‘Representations of Death in Benaras’, PhD thesis
submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Visvanathan, Susan. 1994. ‘The Fishing Struggle in India’, Seminar , November.
———. 2000. ‘Workers of the Sea’, Seminar, Annual, January.
———. 2009a. ‘Foresters and New Orientations to Survival’. Indian Journal of
Human Development 3 (1), January–June.
———. 2009b. www.peasants need our consideration, TOI/TNN/Feb 13 2009,
13 February 2009. Susan Visvanathan’s keynote address on Narendra Dev
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(accessed on 23 September 2021).
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Work, Word and the World 38
———. 2010a. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi.
New Delhi: Roli Lotus Press.
———. 2010b. Forestation and New Educational Practices in Living Together,
Symposium on Intercultural Dialogues: Problem Posed by Ramin
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———. 2010c. ‘Summer Hill: The Building of Vice Regal Lodge’. In Studies
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———. 2012. Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Palm Leaf
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Work, Word and the World.indd 38Work, Word and the World.indd 38 27-06-2022 17:53:4527-06-2022 17:53:45

39
2
Ladakh and the Creative Greening of
the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam
Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman
through Alternative Practices in
Education and Farming

Fig. 2a and 2b: SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of
Ladakh) is an alternative school which tutors pre-college students in practical and
allied arts. These young people all enjoy their skill-learning environment, whether it
is working with horticulture, food preservation, solar energy management or quilting
crafts. Secmol School, Leh, 2015. Copyright: Author.
In this chapter, I will attempt to look at the mnemonics of daily life
in terms of topographical features and their connection to everyday
concerns of an institution that serves to integrate members of local
Work, Word and the World.indd 39Work, Word and the World.indd 39 27-06-2022 17:53:5127-06-2022 17:53:51

Work, Word and the World 40
communities into everyday duties. Activities create new palimpsests
of events, which carry forward age sets of young people into familiar
tasks. There is a need to describe these as they inform the rejuvenating
practices of agricultural communities through their relationship with
the earth and the previous generations while interlocking with new
occupations and new settlers. Tourism and the presence of the Indian
Army in Ladakh has been of central importance to the understanding
of agrarian practices, and now with mighty aircraft carriers which
take produce to the Tata Trusts (www.Himmotthan, Leh Livelihood
Initiative) and Ram Baba’s organic therapeutic industries, new forms of
commerce are entering into the practice of agriculture.
Wendell Berry writes very powerfully in The Art of the Commonplace
(2012) of how there has been a great change in the traditional
occupations of farmers geared towards feeding local communities and
harnessing them to the earth in a just balance of love and nurture co-
existing with industrial concerns that are closely related to conspicuous
consumption. Food security and industrialised farming lie at the very
root of wresting from the earth, where
the first casualties of the exploitative revolution are character and
community. When those fundamental integrities are devalued and
broken, then perhaps it is inevitable that food will be looked at as a
weapon, just as it is inevitable that the earth will be looked upon as fuel
and people as numbers or machines. But (character and community)
that is, culture in the broadest, richest sense—constitute, just as much
as nature, the source of food. (ibid.: 40)
Food security without equitable distribution will result in the severest
of inequalities and the confirmation of the inegalitarian policies of the
state. The Ladakh case shows us the presence of both market gardening
for purposes of local tourism as well as the necessity of the export of
fragile commodities to laboratories in other parts of India. Between
waste of perishable natural and organic fruits and vegetables and societal
resistance to intrusive tourist practices, lies a whole gamut of cultural
indexes, of which socialisation of young people is a necessary axiom.
Paul Hawken, in The Ecology of Commerce (1993), writes that the charm
of the market as a meeting point, while being intermeshed with global
Work, Word and the World.indd 40Work, Word and the World.indd 40 27-06-2022 17:53:5127-06-2022 17:53:51

Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert41
processes, is what engages us. At one level, there is the local market and
at the other, the processes by which cost of production, transportation
and the adjustment of prices, use and abuse and the interlocking of
supply with demand is dealt with (Hawken 1993: 76). It is towards this
that the alternative schooling practices of Sonam Wangchuk and Becky
Norman have borne great success.
One must recall that Ladakh is a cold desert, and the greening
practices initiated by the army by planting trees has created a visible
change in the landscape. The architecture of houses and monasteries is
conducive to a frozen desert, but tree plantations have brought about
rainfall, and what follows directly is interest in market gardening as the
soil is extremely alluvial. Rene Dubos, while writing about landscapes,
which were described as forests in ancient literature, shows how these
become denuded by human activity. Then, new literature evolves
around these deserts, which become oriented towards the description
of scarce resources and continual feuding, as with the Greeks. However,
reforestation occurs in the need for agricultural and pastoral land,
making the desert disappear (Dubos 1980: 4). In this present scenario,
we have a landscape where agriculturists become foresters, a process
which I have earlier described for the Annamalais (Visvanathan 2009).
Dubos (1980) argues that the planet Earth goes through many
transformations, and often agricultural practices transform lands once
thought to be barren or forested. The push was to create new ecological
systems in lands that had degraded soils. These, for him, are artificial
environments (ibid.: 104). The central problem here is where does
nature start or stop, and how do these environmental transformations
affect the livelihood of people?
As James Lovelock (2006) writes in The Revenge of Gaia, climate
change has been in process for a long time, and the earth undergoes
transformation in its temperature and organic composition. Fifty-five
million years ago when carbon entered the atmosphere at the same rate
as it does now, the heating lasted 200,000 years, and the temperature went
up by 8 degrees in the northern hemisphere and 5 degrees in the tropics
(Lovelock 2006: 35). El Nino has meant that the monsoon has changed
its trajectory and volume, and Ladakh’s vulnerability to rain, given that
it is a cold desert with melting snowcaps, has alarming consequences.
Work, Word and the World.indd 41Work, Word and the World.indd 41 27-06-2022 17:53:5227-06-2022 17:53:52

Work, Word and the World 42
Joshi and Sharma have written for the Sundarbans in West Bengal, which
also experiences sudden landslides and floods with heavy rain, that the
quantum of rain can affect not just agriculture but also every detail of life,
including schools, tourism, bureaucracy and trade (Joshi and Sharma
2019: 96). Tourism involves rapid urban development, and the only way
in which local communities can handle the morass of garbage and waste
that visitors produce is to be self-aware and proactive in enriching urban
commons and supporting recycling and social consciousness through
education and planning (Baviskar 2020: 30). In Seasonal Variations of the
Eskimo, Marcel Mauss (1950) proved that modes of social classification
will explain to us cultures dependent on frugality, which explain the link
between occupation and seasons to define the nature of time and work.
Alternative education has been the mainstay of many individuals, such as
Sonam and Rebecca, who wish to keep the traditions of their community
while promoting development ideals. Now that the prime minister of India
in the Independence Day speech on 15 August 2020 has spoken of Ladakh
as a carbon-neutral territory promoting organic farming, the state is set
for the processing and sale of fruits and vegetables; but for the produce to
reach Chandigarh or Delhi, trucks will further increase the icecap melt at
an accelerated rate. This is unavoidable since trucks arrived anyway from
Chandigarh to bring fresh fruits and vegetables during the Covid-19 and
Galwan crises. After the Galwan border skirmish in August 2020, it stands
to reason that Ladakh will become more of a military base for urgent
combat against the Chinese, should there be cause. As Pankaj Sekhsaria
(2016) rightly argues in Islands in Flux , secrecy is the norm when there is
military reconnaissance in fragile military zones, and the threat to flora and
fauna is a natural consequence of military presence (ibid.: 160).
Schooling of Young People as a Tool towards
Bringing about Change
One of the interesting ways of living on Earth is to think of the future
here. In a desert society, people are aware that their delicate ecology
is balanced by their needs and the way in which tourism has become
the new metaphor of modernism. As a result, Ladakh has opened up to
this sector of economic profit-seeking by using the ‘greens movement’
Work, Word and the World.indd 42Work, Word and the World.indd 42 27-06-2022 17:53:5327-06-2022 17:53:53

Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert43
as its open-door initiative. Organic farming, the sustained use of solar
energy to propagate it and the manifesto of an integrated politics, which
is inclusive, transcending the traditional Buddhist/Muslim divide is
the way it proceeds towards its goal. Schooling, therefore, becomes an
interesting tool in socialising young people towards a model society. In
this paper, I will present the case of SECMOL (the Students Educational
and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) as it transforms itself over two
decades and democratises ‘traditional education’ through ‘government
school’ training, substituting in its place integrated or holistic education
as a lifestyle practice for young people. It then spearheads a campaign
for a change in schoolbooks in Ladakh as well as emphasising active
political life as a basic human right. The move to transform learning in
the upper Himalayas focused on school education in the 1990s, and the
method used to inculcate awareness was the promotion of a newsletter-
cum-magazine called Ladags Melong or Mirror of Ladakh. A letter to the
editors, by Rinzing Sorphel, in the Summer issue of 1995 suggests that in
the Zangzibar subdivision, there are 40 primary schools for a population
of 1,00,000 and only five middle schools and two high schools. Each
has a minimum number of teachers—in fact only a single teacher in
each primary school. The teachers are from local communities; they
are inexperienced, newly recruited and when they leave for any time,
the school remains shut. Rinzing Sorphel, a resident of Phey, Ladakh,
argues that there is only one zonal officer for the entire area; laboratories
and other facilities are not available for older students, and there is a
dependence on personal tutors which many cannot afford.
The editorial board members of this influential magazine were Tashi
Rabgais, Rev. E.S. Gergen, A.G. Sheikh and the Magsaysay 2018 award-
winner, Sonam Wangchuk, who replied to the young student, Rinzing;
the latter wrote them a letter in 1995 that ‘all the problems you describe
are faced throughout Ladakh’.
Political Mobilisation for Social and
Political Transformation
Both Sonam and his wife, Rebecca (Becky Norman, as she is popularly
known), were actively concerned with institutionally responding to
Work, Word and the World.indd 43Work, Word and the World.indd 43 27-06-2022 17:53:5327-06-2022 17:53:53

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Work Word And The World Essays On Habitat Culture And Environment Susan Visvanathan

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