Watery friction: the River Narmada, celebrity and new grammars of protest

Abstract

This essay examines the construction of the River Narmada – the site of one of the largest popular protests in post-Independence India – as celebrity and cultural icon. It argues that the river’s iconicity emerges from a grammar of protest built around the friction of discourses of environmentalism and social justice. In the first section, examining the myths around the river, I propose that its iconicity lies in its cultural legibility as mother, goddess and nation. The second section turns to the rituals of protest, discourses of ecological ethnicity and spectacles of suffering. I suggest that Narmada-as-brand is the effect of the semiotics of protest that focuses less on a ‘face’ of protest than on the space of protest: the space is the face. In the conclusion, I treat the river as a chronotope. Moving beyond its immediate spatial and temporal dimensions, Narmada’s iconicity is less about being an event than a scandalous, affect-ridden process. It becomes fully celebratised when its grammar of protest appeals to the global humanitarian regimes.

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