Ch. 2: Cosmopolitanism, Environmental Harm and the Diffuse Human in Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh
Introduction
Since independence in 1947, India has undertaken numerous development projects, with mixed success. The Green Revolution, first implemented in Punjab in the 1960s, is a case in point. Conceived of as a plan to generate both economic revenue for India’s farmers and combat food scarcity by replacing the traditional, small-scale, sustainable farming of the majority of India’s hinterlands with modern, high-yield, technology-intensive farming, in its early yearsspecialized seeds and intensive fertilization and irrigation led to huge crop harvests and increased profits. Between 1960 and 1979, total statewide yieldsin wheat increased by 124 percent, while rice yields increased by 175 percent.[1]A minority of Punjabi farmers with large land holdings earned about 1240 rupees/acre compared to the roughly 750 rupees/acre they earned previously, and in 1971-72, their rate of return was over 20 percent.[2]
As early as 1978 though, these farmers saw their returns plummet to around 6 percent.[3]And the vast majority of Punjab’s farmers, who own 15 acres or less, never made enough to break even with the exorbitant costs of the Green Revolution’stechnology-, pesticide-, and water-intensivecultivation.The Punjabi government concedes that between 1984 and 2004, 2116 farmers committed suicide, most by drinking the pesticides that were to herald their successful futures but which had instead destroyed their traditional means of livelihood and hopes for futureprosperity.[4]Farmers outside the Punjab, not subject to Green Revolution investments, were neglected and millions suffer food scarcity which persists through the present; as recently as 2001, Green Revolution monocrops slated for export combined with a dearth of internal distributive infrastructure, such that storehouses at the Delhi-based Food Corporation of India contained millions of tons of surplus grain and yet starvation deaths in rural areas occurred in more than a
dozen states.[5]
The grim turn of the Green Revolution is just one example of the uneven distribution of costs and risks that India’s rural population bears within the nation’s narrative of modern progress. That development projects have been factors in the rapid growth of India’s national economy, especially in the past two and half decades of free market trade, is not in question. However,greater wealth has also meant greater wealth inequality as the benefits of neoliberal trade accrue mostly to India’s urban populations and upper and middle classes. Within the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and especially since adopting fiscal reforms at the behest of the IMF in the 1980s, India has openly courted international investment and prestige as integral to the growth of its national economy. This mindset was epitomized in the “Indian Shining” marketing campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2004, and most of it has focused on opening the Indian domestic market to multinational corporations looking to invest in India’s urban centers. Thus, where national growth is premised on good international standing, it has been to the vested interests of certain segments of India’s populace to downplay or excuse the costs of development that defray to the hinterlands.
Environmental justice theorists and activists alike have pointed out that redistributing such environmental “goods” and “bads” has been a central concern of the EJ movement.[6]The earliest US-based environmental justice activism brought to light the disproportionate risks poor and minority communities were exposed to and called for a more equitable distribution of harm, while more recent activism and theoryhas called for a minimum of environmental quality and nonharm, focusing on the distribution of goods and benefits.[7]In India, development projects that affect the environment continue to distribute environmental and economic harm disproportionately to the poor and their benefits to urban centers. Further, they threaten the very basis of rural livelihoods, since many of those affected count as “ecosystem people,” which Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha have defined as those who depend
closely on their surrounding environments to meet their most basic needs.[8]
Tourist complexes, reserve forests, and dammingon India’s many rivers have displaced millions of rural inhabitants from their customary lands, cut them off from subsistence resources, polluted their drinking sources and food supply, or otherwise made the places they live in uninhabitable and unable to support them. Politically marginal and often crushingly poor, the rural agriculturalistsand tribal castesmost harmed by these kinds of projects often have little hope for redress, compensation, or political action on the part of the nation’s legislators.
But, while the globalized economy haslargely benefited the Indian upper classes and urban centers, theorists, writers, and activists concerned with environmental justice have leveraged media outlets and their own cultural visibilityto bring the attention of the international community to the challenges faced by the poor.In this regard, prominent Indian writer-activists have been among the most vocal advocates for those parts of the Indian populace who, while accounted for politically as potential voting blocks, have little voice and weight in government. Despite the fact that they are most immediately and adversely affected by decision making about the environment, rural ecosystem peoples are marginalized from processes of decision making, a failure which in turn is premised on a lack of recognition for their cultural ways of life, subsistence lifestyles, or local knowledges.
This chapter looks at the work of two writers, Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh, both of whom have set out to reveal the darker consequences of Indian environmental development, the costs to particular affected communities, and the wide geopolitical and temporal reach of contemporary resource attrition and environmental harm. For both, harm is concentrated in figure of the climate refugee, who is displaced by political and environmental harm, or who, while remaining in place, is subject to increasing pressures for mere subsistence.
Rob Nixon, who has developed the latter idea of “displacement without moving,” notes the need to theorize, represent, and make visible the ways in which climate degradation creates new categories of displacement.[9]I suggest that it recasts the idea of the “unhomed,” whichcan no longer be confined to legal regimes of politically motivated forced migration, or the psychic and cultural dissonance experienced by diasporic families and communities that was central to discourses of exile and displacement in postcolonial studies through 1990s. Climate or environmental refugees may well be subject to these forces, but their status is primarily linked to the ways in which their material surroundings have been stripped of the resources that support their ways of life and bodily survival. Their movement, or their misery in place, indexes both the changes in their surroundings that make formerly habitable places uninhabitable, as well as the political and economic factors that motor these changes.
Roy and Ghosh, in different ways, propose that the millions displaced by environmental harmwarrant the same recognition, moral response, and political accountability as those who fall within the formal categories ofmodern refugee asylum, aid, and intervention. Both writers argue that climatically displaced peopleshave been failed by a national polity that ignores their needs in pursuit of narrow definitions of monetaryself-interest, as well as the international community which either tacitly sanctions their displacement as part ofits return oncorporate investments or else disregards their displacement within the borders of the nation-state because such displacement is not recognized within the actionable categories of refugee law and aid.
Through the figure of the climate refugee, Roy and Ghosh expose the many ways in which the rural poor and the environment they depend on disproportionately bear the burden of elite wealth. The environmental degradation that results from short-sighted, profit-drive development schemes reverberates in the displacement of the poor, the increasing precarity of both human and nonhuman bodily survival, and the selective national interest and political neglect that underpin both.
This re-figuring of the refugee poses at its core a twinned knot of environmental and political harm. It also exposes the inadequacies of keying refugeeism only to political violence or overt conflict, without being able to account for the life threatening forms of violence that come from resource attrition and exploitation, environmental degradation, and other climate changes. To the plight of these environmental andclimate refugees, Roy and Ghosh offer cosmopolitan countervisions that might take into account not only the concerns of the poor but also the common resources of the world.
And yet, as we will see in the final section of this chapter, even the modes of refugee agency and cosmopolitan politics they raiseto critique globalized capital, legal exclusions, and the narrow interests of the nation-state, have their limits. In “The Greater Common Good,” Roy posits a cosmopolitan vision of the world in which the destruction of particular places and peoples is linked to wider sites of exploitation, and in which environmental violence becomes comparable to the obvious violence of a war whose scale encompasses the planet. In her concern with the exploitation of the world’s resources on behalf of those humans most harmed by and most vulnerable to the loss of their material subsistence base, her essay fits squarely within an environmental justice frame of“the intertwining of environment and social difference.”[10]
Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide also offers a cosmopolitan polity as one alternative to the repressive, violent tactics practiced upon refugees and unwanted national subjects alike. His novel opposesan egalitarian, nonpartisanhuman community of refugees and a modeof collective living with communalist divisions and the profit motive that drove colonialism and which continues to drive the globalized neoliberal economy. Yet his novel also suggests that such a humanist vision cannot fully accommodate the spectrum of climatic agents and victims, nor the purview of places, spaces, and sites, affected by environmental harm. Even at its most inclusive, a cosmopolitan community of traditional human subjects cannot accommodate the full range of subjectivities, bodies, agents, or violenceinvolved in environmental harm. To take into account this range without reinforcing a human/nonhuman binary or erasing the human inequalities and inequities that are exacerbated by climatic factors, Ghosh’s novel introduces a version of the human stripped of its customary markers but enriched in other ways.
This human figure, woven through the novel’s narrative of refugee mistreatment, is characterized not by rights, rationality, interiority, or a coherent body. Those markers, which encompass both individual particularity and the ostensibly inalienable properties of the human being as universal subject, have served it poorly within regimes of justice that have all too often fallen short of their theoretical universality, or legal categories which cannot accommodate forms of harm that do not adhere to bodies in prescribed ways. To the limits of the traditional human subject within environmental justice, Ghosh offers a multiply-mattered, spatialized version of the human that I will call the “diffuse human.”This disembodied human penetrates into the very stuff of the surrounding world, demanding that harm be recognized even when invisible, that forms of life and matter interpenetrate each other and must be accounted for together, and that justice might be sought despite exclusions in the law, narrow definitions of evidence, or the attritions of time.
Arundhati Roy and Indian Dam(nation)
In 1954 at the inauguration of India’s first megadam, the Bhakra Nangal, Prime Minister Nehru declared dams to be the temples of modern India. Since then, India has built at least 3,300 damns that qualify as big dams out of a national total of 3,600. At the time Arundhati Roy wrote “The Greater Common Good,“ a polemical anti-megadaming essay in 1998, one thousand more were slated for construction. While dam building is now falling out of favor in some countries, for much of the history of big dams their construction has heralded national progress.[11] In India as elsewhere, dam building became synonymous with nation-building, the size, scale, manpower and resources required of dam construction both marking and propagating Indian modernity. Dams are touted to provide irrigation to India’s massive rural hinterlands and hydroelectric power to its cities, as well as to stand as testaments of modern mastery over nature. But as the title of her essay alludes, the proposed benefits of dams often distribute largely away from the rural poor, toward the “greater good” of national progress and economic growth centered in the nation’surban centers.
In the case of India’s dams, it is not only that the areas projected to be irrigated by dam developers and engineers have always been far greater that the areas actually irrigated after construction. Or that the moral cause of bringing water to arid regions such as Gujarat, far from major rivers, has been undermined by the siphoning of water into upstream cities. Dam construction has also caused massive environmental damage, from waterlogging of arable land to flooding or bulldozing of planted fields, to excavation of otherwise cultivatable riverbanks, to the proliferation of standing water that provides breeding grounds for mosquitoes and leads to higher incidences of malaria around dam sites. And it hasdisplaced millions and millions of people.
That dams have not been the silver bullet of Indian development is no surprise, and Nehru himself came to revise his position on them only a few years after his secular invocation to the gods of big dams. In 1958 he gave an obscure speech entitled “Social Aspects of Small and Big Projects” to the Central Board of Irrigation and Power. In it he critiqued the “disease of gigantism” in India, of which big dams have been one symptom. This “idea of doing big undertakings or doing big tasks for the sake of showing that we can do big things—is not a good outlook at all.” Instead he proposes that it is “the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power which will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places” and without “the national upsets, upsets of the people moving out and their rehabilitation and many other things, associated with a big project.”[12] As Ramchandra Guha notes, at the time of his speech there were no anti-damming campaigns as there are today; Nehru’s reversal on the desirability of dam construction as a motor to Indian futurity might be attributed to his opposition to the corruption accruing around dam construction and payoffs, or his willingness to evaluate new evidence about the inefficacy of dams and their tendency to disfigure “the face of the country”[13] in a geophysical sense. But its face is also recognizable in Nehru’s explicit citation of the displacement of peoples, mostly Adivasi tribals and rural lower caste peoples, by big dams.
In “The Greater Common Good,” Arundhati Roy brings this concern to the pitch of polemic: “the government of India does not have a figure for the number of people who have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of ‘national progress.’ Isn’t this astounding? How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it?”[14] The issue is not that such an approximation of the number of displaced or an apprehension of the downsides of progress cannot be made. Rather, such knowledge is actively not pursued.
Roy notes that the national government keeps track of the tons of food grain domestically produced and the surface area of national highways; clearly those markers of progress deemed desirable are measured and kept as ready citations of Indian progress. Neglecting to measure those persons displaced by dams can therefore be seen as an agnotological exercise.Nonetheless, according to a study by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a single large dam is over 44,000.[15] To bring the figure down to more mentally apprehensible proportions, Roy suggests considering a mere 10,000 people per dam; multiplying by 10s is grade school material, after all. But multiplying even this figure by the 3,300 big dams in existence approaches the sublime.
Roy gives political clout and empirical grounding to this floating referent by comparing the plight of dam-displaced peoplesto the status ofrefugees from Partition, Palestine and Kosovo. In these cases, each were recognized as a humanitarian disaster and occasioned all manner of national rehabilitation in the case of Partition, and for Palestine and Kosovo, international aid as well as direct United Nations intervention. The aporia of national and international response to the millions displaced by dams takes on, then, an accusational quality. Indeed, Roy goes so far as to equate this kind of national development with an “unacknowledged war,” in which the displaced are figured as refugees who have been failed by both national and international justice.[16]