Subaltern Ecology and Planetary Solidarity in Orijit Sen's River of Stories

In India, like other postcolonial nation-states, big dams have served as symbols of economic independence; they fit the grand narrative of progress for a developing nation restrained for so long by foreign oppressors. Sardar Sarovar Dam, partially funded by the World Bank, was one such project promising hydropower, clean drinking water, and irrigation reform. But the project exacted an exorbitant price: the displacement of thousands of Indigenous riverine commons alongside the forest, the nesting grounds of countless non-human species. To the nation’s surprise, with solidarity extended by transnational environmental activists, the construction of the dam was interrupted by the resistance and uprising of the peasant and tribal communities. Orijit Sen’s graphic narrative, River of Stories (1994), is a fictional adaptation of the politics, predicament, activism and aesthetic of the Indigenous people of the Narmada Valley, and also a register of the voices of the Indian urbanites, who favoured the construction of the dam for the sake of a “greater common good” and deemed it as necessary for the nation’s overall economic growth. This chapter, through its close reading of River of Stories , examines resistance to the dam project in relation to the broader context of subaltern ecology. It seeks alternatives and attempts to find out whether the planetary aesthetics of the Indigenous groups offer a solution to the ecological catastrophes caused by agents of globalisation and neocolonialism.