Political psychologist Ashis Nandy spoke last night about the career of Kapil Bhattacharjee-whom he called India's first modern environmentalist-and explored the limits on Bhattacharjee's criticisms of the Damodar Valley Corporation's building of mega-dams.
Nandy, the author of The Savage Freud and the former director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India, addressed an audience of about 150 in Griffith Film Theater on the subject of the "range and limits of dissent."
Nandy said Bhattacharjee's criticism of the DVC, which built four dams in a nine-square-mile area beginning in the 1940s, laid the groundwork for many later environmentalists.
But, he said, there were psychological limits on the extent to which Bhattacharjee, who died in 1989, had been able to criticize the DVC, because he failed to see the environment as an end in itself.
"Though he always chose to speak on behalf of the people," Nandy said, "He could never take the position that rivers like the Ganges were... wombs that could be and should be left out of cost-benefit analyses."
Nandy said Bhattacharjee criticized the DVC, which was based on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, on three levels.
First of all, he took on the dams as a form of exploitation of the third world by first-world nations.
Bhattacharjee also launched a critique of the mindset that views technology as an end in itself. The expenses of operating the DVC exceed its output, Nandy explained, so the project was valuable only as a means of proving India's worth to those who saw technology as a measure of that worth. "Dam building was also character building...," he said. "Criticisms of dams has become equivalent to criticisms of one's painfully created self."
As a result, Bhattacharjee was often vilified as a traitor to the cause of India's progress. "Many saw him as a dangerous, evil person... who used [scientific] knowledge to benefit the enemies of his country," Nandy said.
Third, Nandy said Bhattacharjee considered the effect of the DVC on the local population through its impact on the environment.
"According to Bhattacharjee, in the pre-colonial days, those who stayed near the banks of the rivers... knew how to use the floods" to fertilize their fields, Nandy said. Also, the annual flooding brought fish eggs that controlled the mosquito population.
But when the DVC stopped this flooding, the population's 4,000-year interaction with the river was interrupted, and an annual malaria epidemic arose, Nandy said.
Nandy said the range of Bhattacharjee's dissent against the DVC was limited to analyzing its projects' effects on people rather than considering the revolutionary view that the environment might be an end in itself.
"His public image was that of a counter-expert who offered an alternate technical solution rather than an alternate worldview," Nandy said. "He is pushed by his inner self and professional background to disown that part of himself."
Nandy said these limits on dissent result from ideologies that try to preserve themselves.
"Conformity is not a problem," Nandy said. "Dissent often is, because a truly awful intellectual regime has to ensure somehow that dissent itself is somehow monitored."
Nandy's speech was the last in a spring series on "Pivotal Ideas in World Civilizations" sponsored by the E.L. Wiegand Foundation. The event was also sponsored by the Triangle South Asian Consortium.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.