When the “gormen” (government) – walled up the rivers: Reading Sarah Joseph’s Budhini as contemporary Indian hydrofiction

ABSTRACT

In India, nationalist discourses surrounding hydro-modernity rely heavily on the mega-dam as a political symbol that promised technological progress. New critical perspectives like the “blue humanities” allow the exploration of the politics and poetics of “dam narratives” from India that respond to the infrastructural imaginary of the mega-dam. This article will analyse Sarah Joseph’s novel Budhini as a hydrofiction centred around hydropower. It will argue that Budhini counters the nationalist iconography associated with mega-dams in India, reclaiming the palimpsestic (hi)stories of its unimagined communities. The re-imagining of Budhini’s story can be understood as an act of “writing back” that challenges the postcolonial state’s appropriation of the language of sacrifice, central to its developmentalist rhetoric. The novel foregrounds the little narratives of postcolonial India’s developmental oustees against the dominant accounts of its celebrated hydro-modernity, through emphasis on the thematic motifs of sacrifice, submergence, and displacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Hydrofiction
• mega-dam
• hydro-modernity
• Budhini
• dam narratives
• slow violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. “Petrofiction”, a term coined by Amitav Ghosh in 1992, originally referred to novels exploring the oil encounter between the USA and the Middle East. In the 21st century, the term has gained broader usage, now denoting a literary era that emerges from and is influenced by hydrocarbon cultures, encompassing fiction written during the period of petromodernity.

2. The word satyagraha, translated as “holding onto truth” or “adherence to truth”, refers to a form of non-violent resistance which became an important tool for protest during the Indian struggle for independence.

3. In this article, the authors use the English translation of Budhini by Sangeetha Sreenivasan instead of the original Malayalam novel also published under the same title in 2019. This enhances accessibility and accommodates a broader readership. Employing an English translation also helps establish Budhini as an “Indian” hydrofiction with global significance. The translation preserves the essence and style of the original text.

4. In India, the term “oustee” is used to denote an individual who is displaced from their land or property as a result of land acquisition for public purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Varna Venugopal

Varna Venugopal is a doctoral student at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. Her research is situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, critical plant studies and Indian writing in English with a specific focus on botanical imagery and symbolism in 20th- and 21st-century narratives. Her areas of interest also include the environmental humanities and the blue humanities.

Swarnalatha Rangarajan

Swarnalatha Rangarajan is professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT (Indian Institute of Technology Madras), Madras, India and is passionate about environmental humanities. She is the founding editor of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism (IJE). Her academic publications include Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies (2018), and co-edited works titled Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development (2014), Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities (2022). She is the co-translator of Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (2018). She is one of the series editors for Routledge Studies in World Literatures and Environment, and the co-editor of the Routledge Book of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). She is also the co-editor of A Handbook of Medical-Environmental Humanities (2022).