Dam(n)med Bodies: disorderly subjectivity and sublime experience in the Narmada Movement

Abstract

This paper explores moments of plural and democratising disorderliness that interrupt and contest a vision of the sublime as a particular ordering of subjectivity. Situated within the context of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) movement against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam in India in the mid-1990s, it argues gestures toward sublime regimes and ‘counter-sublime’ insurgences draw their energies from the figure of the dam and the bund, respectively. Where the dam’s walls establish the horizons of visibility, instituting imaginaries of subject/object, human/nature, the bund’s curved surfaces reveal a pluralising depth that folds the visible with/in the invisible, collapsing differences, and constituting the possibility of novel modes of seeing/subjectification.
Working through oral histories, films, images, archival materials, and ethnographic studies alongside the work of Foucault and the later Merleau-Ponty, the paper argues, the Narmada movement enacts a ‘counter-sublime’ in terms of an interruption that discloses the possibilities of alternative modes of seeing, contesting the invisibility imposed by the dam. The cultivation of a particular style of being, and its interrelated modes of visuality that open affirmingly towards a depth characterised by the collapse of dichotomies of subject/object, and thus of a regime of visibility/subjectivity. An imbrication of the human subject into the natural world, disclosing – by way of a novel ‘seeing’ – the complex ecosocial conditions of all life. In this way putting under erasure the dam’s sublime order of in/visibility; revealing its contingent character and uncovering the possibilities of radically different constellations of visibility; of subjectification.

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ORCID for Tanay Gandhi: orcid.org/0000-0002-1159-054X

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