When the “gormen” (government) – walled up the rivers: Reading Sarah Joseph’s Budhini as contemporary Indian hydrofiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT In India, nationalist discourses surrounding hydro-modernity rely heavily on the mega-dam as a political symbol that promised technological progress. New critical perspectives like the “blue humanities” allow the exploration of the politics and poetics of “dam narratives” from India that respond to the infrastructural imaginary of the mega-dam. This article will analyse Sarah Joseph’s novel Budhini as a hydrofiction centred around hydropower. It will argue that Budhini counters the nationalist iconography associated with mega-dams in India, reclaiming the palimpsestic (hi)stories of its unimagined communities. The re-imagining of Budhini’s story can be understood as an act of “writing back” that challenges the postcolonial state’s appropriation of the language of sacrifice, central to its developmentalist rhetoric. The novel foregrounds the little narratives of postcolonial India’s developmental oustees against the dominant accounts of its celebrated hydro-modernity, through emphasis on the thematic motifs of sacrifice, submergence, and displacement.