Anand Patwardhan’s Chronicles of Socio-political Realities

Probably India’s best-known documentary film-maker Anand Patwardhan, for close to four decades now, has been raking the country’s political consciousness through his films, which delve into the crux of India’s social and political lives. In this piece, the editors have put together, with Patwardhan’s permission, his writings from his blog ( http://patwardhan.com/wp/ ) on the state atrocities upon Dalits in Maharashtra, the protests through poems and songs by a young group of Dalit activists from Pune—the Kabir Kala Manch (KKM)—and the satyagraha for the freedom of expression by its leaders like Sheetal Sathe; on the Supreme Court judgment that failed the Narmada Bachao Andolan as well as the belief in the justice system, making irrelevant a whole body of evidence built by the Andolan over the years that underlined the huge financial and human costs of the Sardar Sarovar dam project; and on the whole climate of intolerance that was behind the attack on M. F. Husain for his depiction of Hindu goddess Saraswati. This piece also includes a commentary by Alex Napier on Patwardhan’s documentary of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, drawn from Patwardhan’s blog. These are important social commentaries of our times.

How Movements Move? Evaluating the Role of Ideology and Leadership in Environmental Movement Dynamics in India with Special Reference to the Narmada Bachao Andolan

Lawrence Cox (1999) has argued that the established perspectives on social movements operate with an inadequately narrow conception of the ‘object’ that is being studied and thus tends to ‘reify’ “movements” as usual activity against essentially static backgrounds, and in its place, he advocates a concept of social movement as the more or less developed articulation of situated rationalities. Following Cox, therefore, the present study perceives social movements as articulations of situated rationalities by perceiving them as a tactical, dialectical response to the harsh realities of the political system. This would help us capture the essential dynamic and transformative aspects of the movement. Any social movement, and for that matter, environmental movements are characterized by the presence of agencies and structural components, which, however, are not a priori and static. They are rather dynamic and get changed and transformed in the course of the movement. Precisely for this reason, the environmental movements can at best be comprehended by way of locating and analyzing the dynamism and transformations of the movements produced by the dialectical interaction of the various components and parameters of the movement over a span of time. Hence, the present paper aims to evaluate the dynamics and transformations of the environmental movements in India, taking the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and, adopting a strategic relational approach within the agent-structure framework as its framework of analysis. For the present purpose, however, we have taken only two variables, namely, Ideology and Leadership and attempted the analysis of their contributions in producing movement dynamics.Hydro Nepal: Journal of Water, Energy and Environment Issue No. 4, January, 2009 Page 24-29