Water as Material/Semiotic Resource in the Anthropocene: Nuclear After-Lives of the Narmada River Protests

• In Event: Extracting and Commodifying Aquatic Resources

Abstract

Water serves to dissolve, shape, perforate, shelter, and carry with(in) it things, beings, temporalities, and memories. Unsurprisingly, most human civilizations have sprung up around water sources and the palimpsestic layers of habitation, agriculture, trade, communication have appeared along shores of rivers and oceans in a sublime imitation of rhizomatic geological processes. Nuclear technology, with its distinctly aberrant impulse to consume and contaminate water in unprecedented volumes, represents a rather anomalous and inorganic entrant in this dynamic backdrop. The impacts of radiation on and through water, as well as the sharp turn that nuclear thirst introduces in the economy of water around which our worlds are scaffolded, transcend the modes of governing water as a material/cultural resource. Pivoting the histories and ongoing struggles of communities of Narmada Valley in Central India which stand threatened with a second forced displacement as the under-construction Chutka Nuclear Power Project envisages extracting water from the Bargi reservoir for which they were first dislocated in the 1980s, this paper seeks to ruminate on the intersections of nuclear risk, nuclear colonialisms, indigenous livelihoods, and sustainability in entangled temporalities. The bio-political assemblages in Chutka – people, landscapes, vegetation and animal species – are faced with daunting twin problems: a) the nuclear reactors will compete with them for the water extracted from Bargi reservoir originally meant for farmers, and b) impending dangers of contamination of the ecosystem especially through water cycles. Besides, this techno-political issue also acquires deep cultural proportions when it manifests itself as contending notions of eternity of the mother river revered by the local communities on the one hand, and the eternal-on-human-scale and hence unmanageable problems of radioactive contamination. Adopting a material-semiotic approach, this presentation will seek to visibilize the implicit imaginations of futurality in which both, colonial-technological and cultural discourses surrounding Narmada river’s nuclear futures are nested.

Author

• Kumar Sundaram PATHAK, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada