Esha SHAH

The Self and the Political: History of social movement against large dams

In the last three decades, the social movement against the large dam on river Narmada in India has powerfully challenged the notion of development adopted since independence. This movement is arguably one of the most important dissenting political and social thoughts in recent Indian history. This proposal makes a case for writing a history of the social movement through subjective lens of the pioneering feminist scholar-activists. This inquiry on history of the social movement will foreground the making of the “agentic subjective selves” of these citizen activists who provided the force, thinking, and motivation for the movement leading to the significant shifts in the policy on large dams not just in India but also internationally. This research inquiry will be a genealogical analysis —a critical history of the present. It will be a reflexive interpretation of processes, events and ideas leading to the dissenting practices, and it will shed light on how the contemporary practices and institutions of the social movement emerged out of struggles, conflicts, alliances, and contradictions involving both intrapsychic and intersubjective agentic selves.