The Rationale
With important contributions to the development discourse, the struggle in the Narmada valley has been considered as an important mass resistance in the history of independent India. This is best explained by Professor Shiv Vishwanathan as follows:
…To me, the most important historical event of the last two decades has been the battle over the Narmada dam. The battle over the Narmada dam reflects a journey, a pilgrimage, and a recollection of 30 years of resistance. It demands a different kind of story telling. This struggle is about a collective history of a people challenging the official history of a nation state…
29 March 2016, The Hindu
Unfortunately, like the dominant development paradigm, there is also a dominant history of a Nation State where people’s history, voices and resistance are absent. It is mostly the dominant history of a nation and development which is written and promoted. People’s struggles like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) that have challenged the main stream notions of development, at the most find cursory references in the dominant, mainstream history if at all.
The absence from pages of history is specially true when it comes to the voices of the people displaced by development projects across the country because displacement due to “development” projects, unlike other forms of displacement is considered essential for national interest and growth.
India has been a witness to several types of man made forcible displacements. Be it during partition at the time of independence or due to disputes over ethnicity, religion, etc. While this kind of forcible displacement is recognised as a tragedy and the aggrieved people taken note of as being wronged, development induced displacement on the other hand is considered necessary and legitimate. Besides, unlike in other forms of displacements where there is hope that people will be able to return back to their homes and lands some day, development induced displacement is permanent and there is no scope of dislocated people returning back to their homes and lands ever. This is because lands, villages, towns, forests, rivers, streams, hills, waterfalls, historical and religious sites are permanently lost with coming of dams, mines, and other types of projects.
And the victims of development go unnoticed and their voices remain unheard as their dislocation is considered essential for the nation’s growth rate.
However lately, there is a growing interest to know and study the impact “development” has on people and environment and also study people’s resistance around development projects. But even where there is some attempt to study people’s struggles challenging the dominant development paradigm, it is often found that the affected people are mostly respondents, subjects and or sample to be studied. The people creating history have very little place in writing this history. Even when a movement writes its history, and although the struggle has been a mass movement, the focus is often on the issues, important actions and programs, or the role of only a few well known faces of the movement.
Narmada struggle as a mass movement has seen the involvement of hundreds of people, and this has been the strength of the struggle. However people’s roles in the struggle have not come to the fore as much as they should and the extraordinary contributions of ordinary people, the lives and collective struggles of the communities do not find a significant place in history.
Therefore the people of the Narmada valley including activists like me (Nandini Oza) felt the need for the people of the NBA to have a legitimate place in the development history of the nation and in the history of the NBA in particular. A senior tribal leader of the NBA explains this aptly as follows:
I feel that the twenty two years’ of struggle of the Narmada has not been written anywhere. Whatever has been written is about the issues the movement has raised like environment impacts, cost benefit analysis of the project, displacement and rehabilitation…But the narrative of how the people and activists have participated in the Narmada struggle or how have they fought has not been written anywhere…I feel such a history should be written by meeting the people of every village who have participated in this struggle…Because if such a history is written, it will be of immense use for the generations to come. The future generation will get to know how their ancestors fought to save their lands, the forests, the villages and save the mother Narmada herself…
Kevalsingh Vasave, Oral History Interview August 2007
Insights from these Oral Histories
It is with all this in mind, the oral histories of the Narmada struggle around Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) have been recorded by me with over 400 hours of digital recording of eighty key players of the struggle. The oral histories so collected help understand the powerful people’s resistance to the SSP, the reasons behind it, the role and contribution of common people in the movement and its history. The oral histories offer many insights into issues like challenging dams as development models, the environment impacts of large dams, the life of victims of displacement, the flaws in rehabilitation plans and its execution, the sustainable alternatives for water and power generations, etc.
The oral histories so collected also help understand:
*Conflict between two development ideologies- GDP and for profits vs. sustainable development based on equity and justice.
* Conflict between two world views
*Conflict between two life styles, cultures, traditions within a Nation
* Conflict between development planners and technocrats vs. people’s traditional wisdom and knowledge.
The oral histories of the Narmada struggle also give us an insight as to how displacement and rehabilitation of victims of development are seen in a narrow sense by the development planners.
The voices of the people help us understand that for those uprooted in the name of development, it is not just about compensation and rehabilitation but it is about:
*People’s participation in development planning.
*Right to know.
*Consent of the people.
Besides, through these oral histories, it is possible to understand the relation that people have with the Narmada River, their cultural ethos, traditions, socio-economic practices, resource based sustainable livelihoods and challenges therein, languages, festivals, beliefs and what the forests and common property resources mean to the people living on the banks of the Narmada. The oral histories bring to the fore the Narmada valley as one of the oldest and one of the richest river valley civilisations and its historical and archaeological significance.
Importantly, the oral history of the Narmada struggle helps understand how the people of the Narmada valley fought to preserve their way of life, their world view, their lands, homes, forests and the River Narmada herself from the onslaught of “development” and the many challenges there in.
The oral histories presented here contain records of one the most important social and environmental movements of Independent India. These interviews record the experiences and insights of the struggle as seen from within by its most active members. These interviews contain voices of those who are rarely heard.
One of the important features of these oral histories is that as the interviewer and most of the interviewees had worked together in the NBA for several years in challenging circumstances, there existed a bond and a trust between the two.
This was crucial for free sharing of one’s life, one’s role, many details of the struggle, the highs and the lows of the movement and personal views and thoughts of those directly involved in the struggle.
Finally, the oral history of the Narmada movement helps us understand the profound influences people’s struggles have had on the large dams and development debate the world over. It helps us understand the people, communities, environment, culture, heritage, traditions of the Narmada valley and the changing notions of development in the process of nation building. It helps us understand the people’s struggle for sustainable development and its many intricacies. These oral histories are not only a rich source for students of history but these voices of resistance and loss will help influence the development planners to plan projects that have smaller ecological, cultural, social, economic footprints. It will help influence those in power to not build the remaining dams that have been planned on the Narmada to protect the Narmada River Valley as our national heritage. It could also help to build a case to decommission some of the destructive dams that have not helped to achieve even fifty percentages of benefits these were set out to.