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Abstract
This essay examines the construction of the River Narmada – the site of one of the largest popular protests in post-Independence India – as celebrity and cultural icon. It argues that the river’s iconicity emerges from a grammar of protest built around the friction of discourses of environmentalism and social justice. In the first section, examining the myths around the river, I propose that its iconicity lies in its cultural legibility as mother, goddess and nation. The second section turns to the rituals of protest, discourses of ecological ethnicity and spectacles of suffering. I suggest that Narmada-as-brand is the effect of the semiotics of protest that focuses less on a ‘face’ of protest than on the space of protest: the space is the face. In the conclusion, I treat the river as a chronotope. Moving beyond its immediate spatial and temporal dimensions, Narmada’s iconicity is less about being an event than a scandalous, affect-ridden process. It becomes fully celebratised when its grammar of protest appeals to the global humanitarian regimes.
Notes
1. Available from: http://www.ielrc.org/content/c0604.pdf.
2. I am adapting the idea of a secular icon from Vicky Goldberg, via Cornelia Brink (Citation2000).
3. This is Goldberg’s (in Brink Citation2000, p. 136–137) definition of a secular icon: I take secular icons to be representations that inspire some degree of awe – perhaps mixed with dread, compassion, or aspiration – and that stand for an epoch or a system of beliefs. Although photographs easily acquire symbolic significance, they are not merely symbolic, they do not merely allude to something outside themselves … for photographs intensely and specifically represent their subjects. But the images I think of as icons almost instantly acquired symbolic overtones and larger frames of reference that endowed them with national or even worldwide significance. They concentrate the hopes and fears of millions and provide an instant and effortless connection to some deeply meaningful moment in history. They seem to summarise such complex phenomena as the powers of the human spirit or of universal destruction.
5. Michael Taussig (Citation2012, p. 75–76) writing about Occupy signage argues that it is in the ‘handmadeness of the signs, their artisanal crudity, art before the age of mechanical and digital reproduction’ that produces its ‘talismanic function, an incantatory drive’.
6. Available on YouTube.com at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Rexfjg0xGek&feature = player_embedded.
7. See http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/jal-satyagraha-govt-agrees-to-protesters-demand-will-lower-water-level-in-dam-265484 (Accessed 5 October 2012).
8. Interview by Venu Govindu with Medha Patkar, in Domkhedi, India Aug. 7, 1999, The Face of the Narmada; Available from: http://www.indiatogether.org/interviews/iview-mpatkar.htm.
9. Roy’s statements about the Indian judiciary after her token imprisonment in 2002 calls attention to the inadequacy, the belligerence and lack of introspection among the judges. See http://www.narmada.org/sc.contempt/aroy.stmt.mar7.2002.html (Accessed 27 October 2012).
10. Clause XI, sub-clause 1(2), Report of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal, 1978, Available from: http://www.sardarsarovardam.org/assets/SitepagesDocument/SPD__Userid2_20100402_104848.pdf (Accessed 5 October 2012).
11. http://mss.niya.org/people/baba8_amte.php (Accessed 13 September 2012).
14. The Gujarat government claims that ‘most of them [the forests to be submerged] are degraded forest’ – available from: http://www.sardarsarovardam.org/Client/answer.aspx (Accessed 13 November 2012).
15. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tlObdnVcKa8J:www.sardarsarovardam.org/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in (Accessed 13 November 2012).
17. See ‘An Open Letter to Gail Omvedt’s “Open Letter to Arundhati Roy”’, 11 August 1999, emphasis in original; Available from: http://www.narmada.org/debates/gail/ashish.response.html.
18. Mikhail Bakhtin (Citation1982, p. 84) defined the chronotope thus: We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture. In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. I see the chronotope as the effect of discourse – literary or non-literary (what Bakhtin terms ‘other areas of culture’ in the above passage). My sense of the chronotope is therefore of a set of narrative modes where the account of a place fuses time, history and the topography in powerful tropes whereby any focus on spatial arrangements would automatically direct attention to temporality (such as history) and attention to the movement of time would involve recognising spatial locations.
19. Lury (Citation2012) writes that the brand ‘makes available for appropriation aspects of experience of product use as if they were effects of the brand’. Frow therefore proposes that the brand is divisible from the product. In this same way, Narmada protests do not any more have any original connection with the locale, object or event of the protests. Instead, Narmada is an effect that seems to circulate independent of the historical object.
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Pramod K. Nayar
Pramod K Nayar’s most recent books include Frantz Fanon (Routledge 2013), Posthumanism (Polity 2013), Digital Cool (Orient BlackSwan 2013), Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) and Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012), besides essays on posthumanism (Modern Fiction Studies), Indian travel writing (New Zealand Jl. of Asian Studies, South Asian Review) and graphic novels (Hungarian Journal of American and English Studies, South Asian Film and Media). He is currently working at the Postcolonial Studies Dictionary and a book on surveillance. He is often seen reading superhero comics in his office.