Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  India’s new dams attracted thousands of visitors from near and far. They became landmarks on the landscapes they had altered beyond recognition. Their clean lines and monumental size reminded some observers of Buddhist stupas. Aesthetically, as well as symbolically, they were the “temples of new India.” But most Indians in the 1950s had never visited a big dam. Most Indians did not read the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, the pages of which told a heroic story of India’s hydraulic adventures. The place where most Indians encountered the grandeur of India’s water projects was on screen. Public information films made an impression on many minds, but the feature films of Hindi cinema really captured people’s hearts—they, more than any pamphlet filled with statistics, gave India’s hydraulic revolution emotional content. And in the process, they reached beyond India’s shores to make India’s dams a symbol for hope and progress across postcolonial Asia and Africa.

  Construction workers on the Bhakra Dam site came from all over India and had many specialized skills. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images

  Where many a foreign consultant ended up “a White Man’s Burden character,” as David Lilienthal described himself in his diary, one American observer of India’s water projects was admiring, even at times uncritical: Henry Hart, a University of Wisconsin political scientist.37 Having worked as a “minor administrative officer” in the Tennessee Valley Authority as a young man in the 1930s, having seen a “newly-harnessed river brought to life” and the rural southern landscape of his childhood transformed, Hart lived in independent India between 1952 and 1954. He sought the answer to a question that weighed on many American minds as the Cold War intensified: “Can a revolution… be built?” Hart traveled the length of the country, funded by a Fulbright fellowship and a grant from the Ford Foundation. His book, New India’s Rivers, remains the most detailed and sympathetic account we have of India’s great hydraulic experiment.

  Hart’s eye was drawn to the workers who were reduced to “an army” in so many depictions of India’s dam fever; he dedicated his book to “all who died without seeing the new India they built.” And where many observers saw only the romance of technology, Hart’s romanticism sought artisanal skill. At the Tungabhadra Dam site, for which Hart saves his richest description, he encountered Vellu Pillai, a fifty-three-year-old stonecutter who chiseled granite from the quarry to exacting specifications. Hart discovered that Vellu Pillai came from a family of stonecutters in Thanjavur. His had been “a life of dressing stones for well-linings and walls”—for “ten prosperous years,” he had carved temple deities. Evoking the ruined capital of the Vijayanagar empire, just a few miles away, Hart saw the dam resurrecting ancient skills. “The design itself was novel,” he wrote,” but the teamwork of brain and hand was a renaissance.”38 Hart speaks to no women workers, but their presence and their labor are visible in his account and especially in the photographs that illustrate his book; their stories remain untold.

  The centripetal force of India’s water projects drew workers, skills, and materials from across India—and beyond. Hart observed that some of the earliest workers on the Tungabhadra worksite were Telugu porters who had arrived from Burma during the war; they were among the half-million Indian refugees who had walked through the hilly jungles back to India when the Japanese bombs fell. Many died on the arduous journey on foot across the mountains into Assam. In the 1920s and 1930s, Burma was a frontier for Telugu-speaking migrant workers from coastal Andhra: they provided much of the labor on Rangoon’s docks, they pulled rickshaws, laid roads, worked in the rice mills.39 As long-established patterns of migration shut down during and after the war, new ones opened up along India’s river valleys. From the moment the war ended, the large projects’ capacity to generate employment was a strong argument in their favor. Water projects were themselves a way to prevent the resumption of Indian labor migration overseas, which so many Indian nationalists had come to oppose as exploitative. “At present a great deal of Indian labour is being sent to Burma and other places,” noted a water engineer surveying the Ramaprasadasagara scheme along the Godavari. “An irrigation scheme of this magnitude would prevent the exodus of labor.”40

  Some workers traveled to the dam sites in groups. Teams of porters, masons, and stonecutters arrived, some of them following an old practice of migration from place to place in search of work. Others ended up building the dams of India after a chance encounter. In a wartime hangar along the Tungabhadra River, India’s first factory for the manufacture of sluice gates was overseen by Mr. Eswariah; his “sheer mechanical intelligence” had been discovered by the dam’s chief engineer, Srirangachari, in a “Madras highway repair shop.”41

  On many accounts of India’s dam projects, as in the public information film on Bhakra, a sense of mission drove the workers. There can be no doubting that idealism animated the efforts of many who toiled on the dam sites. But so, too, did the need to earn a living. For only so long could appeals to sacrifice on behalf of the nation mask poor pay and harsh conditions. The workers on the Hirakud Dam learned how quickly the postcolonial state was willing to deploy force to keep construction going. In 1954, Hirakud’s workers established a union of their own to challenge the officially recognized association of workers. They grappled over pay rates and the rhythms of work. After a breakdown in negotiations, the district magistrate ordered armed police to disperse a group of workers who were headed toward the chief engineer’s residence, reportedly with the intention of harming him. Following a lathi (baton) charge, fifty workers were hospitalized; two died the following day.42 In Hart’s account, which reflects the official view, the strike was the work of “agitators” affiliated with the Communist Party. As he tells the story, India’s climate itself played a role. “On any great outdoor work built in a monsoon climate,” he declared, “the hot, pre-monsoon months are the tense season.” And so, in the end, the strike appears in Hart’s account as a mere interruption: “On the Monday after the bloody Friday, men began going back to work. By Wednesday, the dam began to rise again, full speed.”43 It is as though India’s dams were a juggernaut, with a life and force of their own. That is certainly how they must have seemed to those who stood in the way of the engineers’ plans.

  Not every commentator was unequivocally in favor of the large dams. The Bengali journalist Kapil Prasad Bhattacharjee was among the earliest to call into question the approach of the Damodar Valley Corporation. As a student in Paris in the 1930s, he was influenced by the work of French hydrologists. Schooled in the economic nationalism of Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Dutt, Bhattacharjee argued that the Damodar valley project would perpetuate a colonial effort to keep India poor by keeping it an agrarian economy. He worried for the future of Calcutta as a port; for Bhattacharjee, the worst effect of the Damodar projects would be to silt up the Hooghly River. He felt that more could be achieved by repair and restoration—the “proper maintenance of old canals, tanks, lakes”—than through expensive projects dependent on foreign engineering expertise. Voices like Bhattacharjee’s were in a very small minority in the 1950s, not only in India, but all over the world. He worried about the economic and the ecological effects of dam building; even Bhattacharjee had little to say about their human consequences.44

  AS INDIA SOUGHT TO TAME ITS RIVERS, THE DISPUTE WITH PAKISTAN over who controlled the Indus intensified. It did not take long for David Lilienthal’s idealistic vision of water beyond politics—his proposal for the shared development of the Indus basin—to fail. In early 1954, the World Bank proposed an alternative solution, which gave shape to the treaty that eventually came about. In place of Lilienthal’s idea, the bank proposed to finish the job of Partition by dividing the water of the Indus and its tributaries completely, if not neatly, between India and Pakistan. The eastern rivers—the Beas, the Ravi, and the Sutlej—went to India; the western rivers, the Chenab and the Jhelum, went to Pakistan. Since the latter, too, originated in Indian territory, India would have the right to use their water for ir
rigation, transportation, and power generation, up to a limited volume. The negotiations dragged on for six years: India’s position of strength as the upper riparian continued to trouble Pakistan. But much remains obscure about the process. Despite a commitment to greater transparency, the bank declassifies documents on a case-by-case basis; many of my requests were denied, as they contained “classified material provided by member states.” Dam building remains a sensitive subject—its history raises uncomfortable questions about the present and the future.45

  As ambitions for river development intensified, older water disputes reasserted themselves within India. British India had always existed amid a patchwork of other forms of sovereignty—the absorption of the former princely states into independent India raised its own problems where water was concerned. The Kaveri River dispute between the princely state of Mysore and the British-ruled Madras Presidency dates back to 1891, when the Maharaja of Mysore first proposed to make use of the river’s water in his domains. The failure of the two sides to agree on how to share the Kaveri’s water stalled M. Visvesvaraya’s great Krishnarajasagar Dam, which began to rise only after a 1924 agreement that apportioned fixed amounts of the river’s capacity to each state. In 1956, the internal map of India was redrawn: some of the old provinces of British India were broken up into new states, their boundaries corresponding roughly to the boundaries of linguistic regions. The old Madras Presidency was divided into Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andra Pradesh, each with its own state legislature—and each with a new set of claims upon the central government for resources. In this context, the Kaveri dispute resurfaced. The government of Karnataka reopened the argument, arguing that changing political and economic realities demanded a revision of the earlier agreement. In particular, the ambitious plans each state had to expand irrigation—under the auspices of India’s overarching five-year plans—spawned a new set of claims upon the Kaveri’s waters. The Kaveri dispute remains India’s longest-running water conflict; it is far from resolved. Competing claims to ownership over water, in the postcolonial era, were not only national: they were just as likely to be regional.46

  IV

  Mehboob Khan’s 1957 melodrama, Mother India, remains one of the world’s best-known films. It is, among other things, Indian cinema’s great water epic. The film opens with the shot of an aged Radha, the film’s protagonist and the eponymous “Mother India,” touching a clump of earth to her mouth; she raises it above her head, hands trembling. Behind her: tractors, power lines, roads—the churn of progress. A procession of construction equipment roars in the foreground, drowning out the music. The camera pans to a shot of a large dam rising. A jeep arrives in the village, full of khaki-clad, white-capped men—functionaries of the ruling Congress party. They tell Radha that the new dam will bring water to her village; they want her, as the community’s most respected elder, to inaugurate it. She refuses in all humility, until, head lowered, she allows the politicians to lead her to the dam. They place a ceremonial garland around her neck. At the very moment she is about to pull the lever to open the dam’s gates, the film slips into flashback. Radha’s life comes to symbolize the struggle of the Indian nation for freedom.

  Early in the film Radha’s husband is maimed in an accident; scenting her vulnerability, the predatory moneylender makes advances to Radha, which she rebuffs. The capricious power of nature over Radha’s life and livelihood is a recurrent theme. In one of the film’s central song sequences, we see Radha working in the fields with her children, pausing to feed them a meager meal of porridge, eating none herself. But she is proud, unbowed. As the song comes to an end, storm clouds build in the sky. The sky darkens, the screen crackles with lightning, the wind rises and the rain pours. The family’s makeshift shelter collapses. Floods destroy the village. The crops lay ruined. Radha’s youngest child dies. Even in extremis, Radha makes her surviving children reject the moneylender’s offer of food. Redemption comes when the villagers fight back the flood; they come together to harvest a good crop the following season. In their dance, the camera zooms out to show us the massed villagers form the shape of a map of undivided India.47 Radha’s song implores the villagers not to abandon their land.

  In opening the film with the large dam, and a vision of prosperity, Mother India suggests that India’s victory was, in part, a triumph over the monsoon. These were the freedoms that India fought for, and won: freedom from want, freedom from exploitation—and freedom from the vagaries of nature.48 The publicity pamphlet for the film used a quotation from the German Orientalist Max Mueller to encapsulate its central message: “If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow—I should point to India.”49 In Mother India, vulnerability to the weather is confined to the unhappy past; it represents an old, unchanging India, juxtaposed against an India where technology and political freedom would triumph over nature.

  Mehboob Khan (1907–1964) was born in Baroda state and moved to Bombay as a young man to work for a noted horse supplier to the film industry; his first job was repairing horseshoes. He rose as a producer in the era of silent film. Khan was an active participant in the Progressive Writers Movement, a group of left-leaning writers, dramatists, and film producers who forged an Indian art that reflected the social conditions of the country. In common with many others of his generation, Khan’s strong commitment to Indian nationalism melded with an outward-looking internationalism: he was voracious in his absorption of artistic inspiration from diverse places; he believed in a sense of shared struggle, across what would come to be known as the Third World, against imperial exploitation. The logo of his production company incorporated a hammer and sickle, a symbol that was discreetly removed before the film was submitted for the Oscars.

  From the start, Khan envisaged an international audience for Mother India. His initial working title was This Land Is Mine, and he wanted to work with Sabu Dastogir, an Indian actor successful in Hollywood; the plan fell through, but the ambition to reach the wider world remained.50 Mother India was not the first Hindi film to strike a chord with audiences across Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) was a global blockbuster, the story of an unfeeling and autocratic judge and his estranged son, who becomes a vagrant. The film’s strong message of social justice, its memorable theme song (“Awaara Hoon”), and its visual splendor all compelled audiences across Asia and Africa; reportedly, Mao Zedong was a fan. Mehboob Khan followed Raj Kapoor’s success with Mother India, which was popular across Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, in Ethiopia, across Asia and the Middle East, and in the Soviet Union and Greece. Egyptian audiences were enthusiastic about Mother India, which had immediate resonance in another country where dams symbolized modernity.

  The film’s influence endures. Anthropologist Brian Larkin describes a scene in northern Nigeria in the 1990s, where Lebanese distributors had been importing Hindi films for four decades. “It is Friday night in Kano, and Mother India is playing at the Marhaba Cinema,” Larkin writes. “Outside, scalpers are hurriedly selling the last of their tickets to the two thousand people lucky enough to buy seats in the open-air cinema of this city on the edge of Africa’s Sahel desert.” Throughout the screening, “people sing along to the songs in Hindi, they translate the dialogue into Hausa and speak the actors’ lines for them.” Forty years after its release, Mother India’s appeal transcends generations. “I have been showing this film for decades,” a local distributor told Larkin, “it can still sell out any cinema in the north.”51

  How did a Hindi film about one woman’s lifelong struggle against nature and exploitation prove so resonant across so much of the world? We are used to thinking of “development” as something imposed from on high, by all-powerful states upon unsuspecting populations. Since the 1980s, a lot of writing about “development” in the postcolonial world has been heavy with irony: we know, now, how so many of those schemes turned out. Their costs are too
evident; their consequences, intended and unintended, have mounted.52 But beneath the grand plans were also simple dreams of a better life. Mother India touched millions of people because it told a humane and humanizing story about dreams of water and plenty, dreams of security—dreams of a future that was better than the past.

  V

  A darker reality lurked behind the glossy dreams of dams and plenty. On a rock of colonial-era legislation, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, millions of lives in independent India foundered. Passed to foster railway development, the law gave the state the right to compulsory purchase of land for “public benefit”—the law of “eminent domain,” a version of which most modern states have retained. The postcolonial state pressed the act immediately into service. Bhakra, Hirakud, the Damodar valley: each of these projects began in 1948; each of them needed more than one hundred thousand acres of land. So, too, did the new steel plants of Bhilai, Rourkela, and Durgapur.53

  Even before the end of the war, intensive discussions were underway about the numbers of people who would be displaced by the Bhakra Nangal Dam. One Punjab official wrote in February 1945: “We cannot obviously allow the whole scheme to be wrecked by a few obstinate people who may refuse to move.” If the “majority” were “not strongly averse to the proposal,” then those against it would “if necessary [be] ejected by force.”54 Pieces of paper came to bear immense value; a Punjab government official dismissed cultivators’ fears of dispossession by pointing out that “they appear to have no right in the lands they cultivate at present.” He could “sympathize wholeheartedly” with those “ousted from their ancestral lands,” but the “cold truth” was that “their interests cannot be allowed to impede” a project “which, with its irrigation and hydroelectric potentialities, is likely to carry so many benefits to wide areas of the country.”55 The architects of Bhakra were under no illusions about the scale of displacement the project would cause. However attractive the alternative land offered villagers, one official wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether it will be a satisfactory form of gilt-edged security.”56 Where could people go? How would they recover their livelihoods? And what of their bonds of community—their bonds with the piece of the earth they knew best? Too often, irreversible projects ploughed ahead with those questions unasked.