Review of <I>River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology Of

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 38 Number 1 Article 29 June 2018 Review of River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga by Georgina Drew Brian Pennington Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Pennington, Brian. 2018. Review of River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga by Georgina Drew. HIMALAYA 38(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol38/iss1/29 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This Review is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. tributary of India’s Ganga River, this conflict. “Political ecology is useful book probes the range of opinions because it focuses on the disparate about hydroelectric development power dynamics that influence how expressed by residents who lived certain practices, ideologies, and along the river valley during the policies of resource management are author’s period of study. The promoted over others” and because technical name of the waterway it emphasizes “who gains and who that River Dialogues examines, from loses from these processes,” she its glacial source at Gaumukh until writes (p. 6). The status of the Ganga it joins the Alaknanda further as a goddess whom many of Drew’s downriver to form the Ganga, is the interlocutors regarded as an intimate Bhagirathi River. Local residents as presence in their lives, however, as well as Hindus at large, however, well as the river’s central place in understand it as the holiest stretch of Hindu cosmology and practice, also the Ganga itself, Hindu India’s most demands, she argues, a concern for sacred river and a goddess in her own cultural politics and religion. right. Twenty-four kilometers below The necessity of an anthropology Gaumukh stands Gangotri, a major of Himalayan activism that is Hindu pilgrimage destination and informed by both political ecology the site of the temple that celebrates and a religiously attentive cultural Ganga’s mythological descent from politics emerged in the course of the heavens. Another 100 kilometers Drew’s research. Over time, she downriver one comes to Uttarkashi, observed activists once passionately the pilgrimage town and district opposed to dams adopt more headquarters where Drew’s work dam-friendly positions as the was centered and the lower limit ramifications of a complete halt to of what the Indian government hydroelectric construction became declared an Ecologically Sensitive clear: declining employment Zone (ESZ) in 2012. River Dialogues options, electricity shortages, is an exploration of debates over abandoned dam construction sites, River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and development and conservation in this and empty, useless tunnels. Hindus the Political Ecology of Dams on ecologically fragile and religiously in the ethno-linguistic region of the Sacred Ganga. significant river valley as well as an Garhwal where the Bhagirathi ethnographic study of the lives of River runs displayed multiple and Georgina Drew. Critical Green women activists who participated often conflicting perspectives on Engagements. Tucson: University in those debates. of Arizona Press, 2017. 258 pages. hydroelectric development along ISBN 9780816535101. Georgina Drew’s primary argument the sacred waterway. On the one proceeds from her recognition that hand, political ecology, with its Reviewed by Brian Pennington in cases such as the Ganga, where concern for resources and conflicts resources are revered, political over their allocation, could not Based on eight years of field research ecology alone is insufficient for account for the motivations of those along the upper reaches of a major understanding and assessing resource who fought the dams on the basis 212 | HIMALAYA Spring 2018 River Dialogues makes an important contribution to the anthropology of Garhwal and convincingly demonstrates why scholarship and public debate about development along India’s rivers must take stock of local livelihoods and local religious practices. Brian Pennington on River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga of personal devotion; on the other, subjectivities. In the singing of dams there, the recognition that an overemphasis on the role that Garhwali devotional songs to the these decisions would impact devotion plays in the construction Ganga, in the regular act of bathing development more generally in of cultural meaning and value could in her sometimes frigid waters, and Garhwal led to a reconsideration of not comprehend why many devout in the substantial labor required the issues by Garhwalis previously Hindus, including those who once to farm land in this valley, women opposed to the dams. Catastrophic opposed hydroelectric development, develop distinctive ideas about flooding caused by locally heavy would support it. Attention to both the river and about dams. Despite rainfall in 2012 and 2013 again the impact of political decisions her emphasis on the ethnographic raised questions about the ecological about resource management on present, Drew does not fail to remind viability of dams. Drew’s long-term the livelihoods of Himalayan us that these gendered perspectives association with dam activists as residents and the religio-cultural are also conditioned by the distinct these events shaped and reshaped meaning making that is inspired trajectories of Garhwali history. This the conflict enables her to sketch by the Ganga will move us beyond historically informed analysis is the controversy with sensitivity and the development/conservation seen, for example, in her discussions nuance. Debates that flared at these binary, Drew argues. of activists’ sometimes bitter turning points contributed to her reflections on the “tree-hugging” own evolving position, eventually As the majority of her interlocutors Chipko demonstrations of the late convincing her that development were women, gender forms a twentieth century that generated and resource decisions must be key vector in Drew’s analysis of much outside interest but little local undertaken with the lives and development and conservation control over resources. livelihoods of local residents whom conflict. River Dialogues examines they impact most directly in mind. how women’s participation in The book’s narrative is framed by anti-dam activism emerges from a set of dramatic events that have River Dialogues issues a call to scholars the specific conditions of their shaped how the public debates who study resource conflict to lives and work in the Ganga River about hydroelectric development attend to the meaning and value valley. Rejecting scholarship that along the upper reaches of the that religiocultural practice can naturalizes gendered experience Ganga have developed and shifted assign to the natural world, and and gendered meaning-making, over the last decade. Following the it routinely engages its scholarly Drew locates the transformation in completion of the massive Tehri audience on theoretical questions. women’s subjectivities occasioned dam further downriver, activist The book is, however, accessible to by participation in dam opposition G. D. Agarwal launched the first of others who might find its discussions movements in their everyday his three hunger strikes against of political economy in the Indian interactions with the divine river the high-altitude projects in 2008. Himalayas or the hydrodevelopment itself and in the practices of devotion These Gandhian protests were of the Ganga River useful, including that cultivate their relationship to it. watched nationally, sparking local advanced undergraduates. With Here she is attentive to the cultural sympathy as well as opposition chapters divided into short specificity of cosmology and practice in Garhwal. When the Indian sections and separated by narrative in Garhwal, whose departures from government halted construction and “interludes,” the book is also replete prevailing norms in the plains of declared the 100-kilometer stretch with substantive accounts of Drew’s India informs much of the politics of the Bhagirathi from Gangotri to fieldwork encounters and excerpts of around dams in the region, just as Uttarkashi an Ecologically Sensitive interviews, giving the reader not only they have long informed Garhwali Zone in 2012, thereby prohibiting a sense for the words and passions of HIMALAYA Volume 38, Number 1 | 213 her subjects but also the experience of the anthropologist. This latter is a particularly effective tool for unsettling the scholar’s authority and disclosing her own shifting perspectives on development in sensitive Himalayan regions. River Dialogues makes an important contribution to the anthropology of Garhwal and convincingly demonstrates why scholarship and public debate about development along India’s rivers must take stock of local livelihoods and local religious practices. Brian K. Pennington is professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society at Elon University. His current book project is focused on entrepreneurial religious ventures in the pilgrimage city of Uttarkashi in the Indian Himalayas. 214 | HIMALAYA Spring 2018.

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