Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacques Leslie's writing has won numerous awards, including the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for Deep Water and the Sigma Delta Chi Foreign Correspondence Award for his reporting during the Vietnam War. He is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

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Deep Water

Picador USA

Chapter One

To get to Domkhedi, Medha Patkar's monsoon headquarters, you fly to Bombay, then to Baroda, the second-largest city in the state of Gujarat. You call up Joe Athialy at the Baroda office of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the "Save the Narmada Movement" that Patkar leads, and Joe invites you over. Note that "office" is misleading to the extent that it implies accoutrements such as desks and chairs-of the Andolan's two offices, in Baroda and Badwani, Baroda's is the nicer one, and it consists of a couple of grimy, largely empty rooms on the second floor of a moldering residential apartment building. You and Joe sit cross-legged on the rug-covered part of the floor and work out the details of the last leg of the trip. In my case, the only rough spot was when I told Joe I wanted to take some bottled water to Domkhedi, and he said the Andolan opposes bottled water because it is an instrument of globalization. I was willing to concede the point on ideological grounds, but I couldn't get over the medical ones. Given the abundance of disease-producing bugs in Indian drinking water, consuming it struck me as highly imprudent. It's a measure of Joe's grace-and the Andolan's-that despite my political lapse, he arranged for Ajit, the Mario Andretti of Andolan drivers, to take me to Domkhedi in a four-wheel-drive jeep and told Ajit to stop at a shop along the way where I could buy a few cases of bottled water.

The drive took five hours. After five minutes, we all smelled of diesel, the odor of modern India, and wore a layer of diesel grime. My friend Bob Dawson, an environmental photographer, and I sat in the backseat; in the front sat Ajit, the race-car driver, and Champalal, an endearingly cheerful young activist. Ajit and Champalal spoke animatedly to one another in Gujarati and occasionally tossed a word or two of broken English in our direction. "Narmada," they'd say, and point off into the distance toward our destination, reputedly India's most beautiful river. "Canal," they said once, but no explanation was needed-at that moment we were on a bridge over the world's largest canal, itself an expensive adornment to one of the planet's largest dams, Sardar Sarovar, which already loomed 295 feet over the Narmada yet was only two-thirds completed. "Dam" was the one word nobody uttered, but we all knew its approximate location, thirty or forty miles downstream from our destination. In a fundamental way, the dam was the reason for our journey.

Sardar Sarovar is a wall, a monument, a modern ziggurat-it's as voluminous as two or three Great Pyramids, and it attracts equivalent adoration. It's a block so massive that its construction would be noteworthy even if it weren't bisecting a riverbed, holding back a seasonally torrential river. Large dams come in two basic shapes: arches, such as Hoover, which are elegant, and use the massive force of reservoir water to fortify their walls; and the blunt instruments of gravity and embankment dams, which fling themselves in a straight line across riverbeds too broad for arches, and rely on raw mass to stay there. Sardar Sarovar is a spectacular specimen of gravity dam: it's a straight cement salient across a bed nearly a mile wide, transforming the Narmada behind it from sinuous river to jagged, elongated lake, and seeming to promise in its bulk and geometric regularity an end to nature. The overlapping sine-wave-shaped hills that arise from both shores still turn throbbingly viridescent during the rainy season, but the dam will be the final indignity that the hills' inhabitants endure. Over the last few centuries, tribal people fled to them to avoid the depredations of dominant Hindus and learned how to survive in the forest. By one anthropologist's count, they found uses for sixty-four tree species, from edible fruit to bows and arrows, from medicine to fuel, from goat fodder to a paste for stupefying fish. Then, over the last century, the state logged the forest, until much of it was degraded. Now Sardar Sarovar will force many tribal people out of the forest entirely. The presumably luckier ones will receive infertile lowland plots; the others will end up on city streets. Either way, the tribal cultures will shatter. Sardar Sarovar is a wailing wall.

The V-shaped canal, the dam's upside-down, scooped-out converse, flows northward, perpendicular to the river, as rigid as a robot's arm. The canal is the chief justification for the dam, the reason the dam's planners felt no compunction about displacing two or three hundred thousand people from the Narmada Valley and a hundred thousand more from the canal's path. At its head, the 270-mile-long canal is as wide as two football fields are long, and will bring water to the "drought-prone" areas of Kutch and Saurashtra in northern Gujarat, turning a desert into an oasis for twenty million people-according to the planners. There are many reasons to doubt that the water will ever get there, including the water-guzzling "development projects" accumulating at the head of the canal to intercept the water: sugarcane plantations, chemical plants, golf courses, hotels, and a water park (a water park!). The government itself has conceded that the water won't reach Kutch and Saurashtra until 2025-a date, as Dilip D'Souza wrote in The Narmada Dammed: An Inquiry into the Politics of Development, "so remote as to be meaningless." Now, however, as we crossed over the canal, the debate remained hypothetical-the dam hadn't yet been built high enough to divert water into the canal, and if Medha had her way, it never would. We looked down into the canal's symmetrical, brick-lined V and saw near the bottom a pane of nearly motionless steel-blue water-the canal was nearly empty. In a certain way, the dam was a technological marvel, but the women at the water's edge were cleaning clothes in the traditional fashion, pounding their fabrics into submission against the canal wall.

There is no gracious way to say this: we'd come to see Medha try to drown. True, we had plenty of other reasons for making the trip, and we understood that it probably wouldn't be a failure if she didn't drown, but the drama of the spectacle pulled us in. Drowning was the reason we chose to visit Medha at a remote malarial hamlet on the lip of a Narmada tributary, and it was why we were arriving in late July, in the heart of the 2001 monsoon season, even though the heat and humidity, would be prodigious, bordering on preposterous. This summer, as in the previous several, she'd announced her intention to drown in the Sardar Sarovar reservoir's rising waters, in hopes that the furor her death might induce would force the government to reconsider its zeal for dams. One sign of the depth of her commitment was that she stationed an Andolan outpost on a low-lying patch of Domkhedi (pronounced dom-KED-ee) ground. Now that the dam was high enough, the rains of a strong monsoon would lift the reservoir's water level above the Andolan's huts, thereby affording Medha and her squad of volunteers the chance to drown. But the monsoon often failed, and when it didn't, the police intervened, to save the Indian government the embarrassment of her death. In September 1999, Medha and several other activists stood in bone-chilling water for thirty hours, until they were neck-deep; then the police used a barge to break down the...