Unruly Waters by Sunil Amrith

Author:Sunil Amrith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Harvey Slocum, the American dam builder who supervised construction at Bhakra. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images

The Bhakra Dam under construction. CREDIT: James Burke/Getty Images

India’s new dams attracted thousands of visitors from near and far. They became landmarks on the landscapes they had altered beyond recognition. Their clean lines and monumental size reminded some observers of Buddhist stupas. Aesthetically, as well as symbolically, they were the “temples of new India.” But most Indians in the 1950s had never visited a big dam. Most Indians did not read the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, the pages of which told a heroic story of India’s hydraulic adventures. The place where most Indians encountered the grandeur of India’s water projects was on screen. Public information films made an impression on many minds, but the feature films of Hindi cinema really captured people’s hearts—they, more than any pamphlet filled with statistics, gave India’s hydraulic revolution emotional content. And in the process, they reached beyond India’s shores to make India’s dams a symbol for hope and progress across postcolonial Asia and Africa.

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