Georgina Drew - River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga

Development Encounters in Religious Landscapes

THIS BOOK EXPLORES CONFLICT over development and conservation along a Himalayan stretch of the River Ganga (also known as the Ganges) in Indias Uttarakhand State. It focuses on competing discourses about change, including the transformations brought on by hydroelectric development, along a water body that is revered by Hindus as a living goddess whose unfettered flow is capable of physically and spiritually purifying devotees. I emphasize the competing values asserted by people from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds over how the Gangas freely flowing waters should be used and protected. These different perceptions are part of the cultural politics that fueled the controversy over dam building on the Ganga, and they are important to the contestations that arose when the region was eventually declared an Ecologically Sensitive Zone. The tensions that emerged over the policy change are best understood, I argue, by combining the lens of cultural politics with political ecology. I explain these links in the introduction and throughout the book. Here, I pause to situate the growth of my interest in these issues and explain the ways in which I came to study them.

My engagement in the topics that inspire this book emerged in a roundabout way. The first time I saw an image of the River Ganga I was an undergraduate student at a small liberal arts college in California in the late 1990s. I recall being seated in a Cultural Anthropology course that was about to start when I turned to a page in my textbook and saw a photograph that visually captured a momentof Hindu reverence for the river and its associated goddess. The photo, which showed people with hands folded in moments of prayer as they faced toward the Ganga, was most likely taken from the rivers banks in Varanasi, India. This is arguably one of the most iconic locations for the Gangas worship due to the continuity of rituals for the living and the dead that span over two millennia in the oldest of Indias thriving cities. I remember feeling curiosity when confronted with a scene so different from anything I had known growing up on the west coast of the United States. It would perhaps make for a good story if I said that I felt something more, that a part of my being stirred at the sight of those prayerful poses. That would not be the truth; instead, I absorbed the image and continued my study of different religious practices from around the world before the instructor walked in and class began.

I recalled this memory when I encountered the river several years later in 2004. I first saw and touched its waters at a point where the river emerges from the Himalaya in a city known as Rishikesh. Experiencing the river in person was completely different from seeing a photo. The Ganga was wide and powerful as it flowed through a riverbed bordered on all sides by ashrams (centers of religious or spiritual retreat). Devotees of Indian and foreign origin emerged throughout the day to touch the waters and to swim playfully in parts of the river where the current was not too swift. At twilight, people gathered to sing devotional songs alongside the Gangas banks in evening fire ceremonies referred to as aarti. The embodied experience of being alongside the river and of seeing the emotional fervor with which it is celebrated was beyond anything I imagined. In a world where water resources are so easily taken for granted, the reverence I witnessed for the Ganga stood out as a welcome exception.

As 2004 wore on, I found myself compelled to return to the river. I traveled to Varanasi and saw scenes reminiscent of that textbook photo. I also returned several times to Rishikesh. It was enthralling to watch people approach the Ganga time and again with their prayers and their faith in the rivers powers of inner and outer purification (to be explained more in subsequent chapters). At the same time, I was also increasingly alarmed by reports in the news that the Gangas headwaters were being subject to a series of hydroelectric development projects. These projects were located near to the upstream glaciers that feed one of the Gangas first tributaries, labeled on maps as the Bhagirathi (and sometimes the Bhagirathi Ganga). The newspapers and online media outlets noted that these glaciers were receding and that the dams were likely shortsighted efforts that would be rendered obsolete if the glaciers disappeared. In my navet,I struggled to understand why the government would approve projects on the last freely flowing section of a sacred Hindu river, especially when the ecological context seemed so fragile.

Toward the end of 2004, I traveled to the Gangas first tributary to see for myself the impact of the ongoing hydroelectric development projects. On my way up the mountains above Rishikesh, in the region of Garhwal, I passed a colossal dam in its final stages of completion. The rock-and-earth fill construction stood out as a somber gray pyramid stuck in the middle of a valley between two mountainsides, near a town called Tehri. The dam would eventually submerge over a hundred villages and displace thousands of people.

The Tehri dam was not, however, my point of focus. Although it would become important to my understanding of the politics of hydroelectricity along the Ganga, I was initially more interested in understanding the impact of three new projects that were planned for construction much farther upstream. I continued onward, eventually traveling to a prominent point of worship to the goddess Ganga at a high-altitude temple town known as Gangotri. This location is above where the three newest dams were targeted for implementation; however, since those projects were not yet in visible stages of construction, the trip to Gangotri allowed me to see one of the more auspicious pilgrimage destinations for Ganga devotees. Once there, I traveled 22 kilometers (15 miles) by foot to the receding terminus point for the Gangotri glacier. By the time I reached the terminus pointan outcropping of ice called Gaumukhmy head spun from the increase in altitude and exposure to the sun on the long hike over rocky terrain. Bits of greenish-blue ice shone from under the gray, soot-looking debris covering the glacier. This lent an air of fragility to an otherwise massive and commanding body of ice that stretches far up into the mountains. Along the way, in Gangotri and on the trails, I asked those I met about the three impending dams planned for construction downstream. Only one person offered a strong opinion: a Hindi swami, who dedicated a large portion of his life to photographing changing Himalayan ecologies, lamented that the dams would not make a difference; Ganga was already finished (