Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo s big book and substitute it with reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they re built and what they do. My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet, almost everyone has a passionate opinion.
Nobody s neutral.
I realised very quickly that I was straying into mined territory. In India over the last 10 years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar Dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago, it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That s what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle.