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The Indian ecological disaster that inspired new Australian play, The Wrong Gods
Travel deep into the dense forest and rolling hills of central India and you will find the ancient town of Amarkantak — the birthplace of the great Narmada river.
The river runs west, all the way to the Arabian Sea. By the water's edge, eagles and hornbills flit across the immense jungle canopy comprising countless tree species that are found nowhere else on the subcontinent. The river's vast banks are a refuge for wildlife as grand and diverse as tigers, bears and wolves.
It's also a home for humans, and a holy place. Mentioned in classic texts like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, it's not hard to imagine Hindu gods taking a stroll along its rapids.
But, after centuries of being home to not just intricate ecosystems but countless villages and farmers, the Narmada River now represents human-made ecological disaster and powerful protest.
The iconic grassroots movement that sprung up around the river has rippled far and wide — including here to Australia, where a new work by award-winning playwright S. Shakthidharan uses it as inspiration. Called The Wrong Gods, the play's central question is: what stops us from acting in the best interest of nature?
The Narmada Valley Project, or the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) is one of the world's biggest hydropower infrastructure projects — including 30 major, 135 medium and 3,000 small dams.
Proposed in the 60s, the national building goal was noble: capture the river's huge flow to irrigate farmland and provide drinking water and power for three Indian states.
Instead, it has been described as India's "greatest planned environmental disaster".
While no environmental impact research was done prior to its construction, the dam has led to widespread deforestation, loss of habitat and loss of wildlife, both aquatic and mammal.
Almost immediately, Indigenous Indian villagers (Adivasis) were displaced by the rising river banks or, as famed writer Arundhati Roy put it, "chased off their ancestral lands as though they were intruders".
The total count of the farmers, farm workers and fisherfolk who would be made homeless is somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 and encompasses hundreds of villages. Most of these people have been forced to move to slums surrounding major cities.
Ten years ago, Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan visited one such farming family, who were part of the resistance to the dam project, and it was there the seed for his new play was planted.
"I'll never forget those few nights," he tells ABC Arts.
"It takes a long time to get there, it's very remote, and so we hadn't eaten much for a very long time. And when we got there, they killed a chicken for us.
"I was vegetarian at the time, which I didn't tell them, and I helped them clean and prepare the chicken. We spent the whole night doing that, cooking and eating it. And then I slept next to the farmer on a rattan bed, over the chickens."
According to Nadini K Oza, a former activist and current archivist of the movement, it was a true grassroots operation.
"For more than half a century, the people of the Narmada Valley who were affected by the project have been conducting small and big struggles against the SSP," she says.
"In the mid-1980s and late 1980s, many of these groups, organisations and struggles came together and ultimately evolved into the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)."
The NBA was hugely successful with its protests. It forced the World Bank to withdraw its $US450 million loan from the dam project and later was able to halt construction for several years through the Supreme Court. The movement fought for and won "better rehabilitation and resettlement of the people" displaced from their villages too.
Despite these successes, dam construction has continued and is due for completion in 2025 — making the conservation and Indigenous-rights debates a continuing part of India's political landscape.
It may seem half a world away but, for S. Shakthidharan, the story of the Narmada River has much to offer us in Australia today.
"I was really grappling with the reasons that we aren't acting on climate change," he says.
"I think our biggest issue is actually a cultural one, which is that we are locked into systems of consumption that we don't know how to get out of, and we're locked to it, to a way of relating to the natural worlds that we don't know how to get out of.
"How do we acknowledge the incredible things progress has given us, and still find a way forward to cultural change, to bend the power of progress in a different way?"
That's when he came up with the idea for The Wrong Gods — reflecting that perhaps the most successful religion of all time was that of progress.
"We pray to it and believe in it regardless of political beliefs about it. It's a religion that, even if you're against it, you're still a part of."
Finally, the playwright realised he had already visited the perfect setting for all this — the Narmada Valley.
"I tried to write a plan which kind of took inspiration from that setting and that struggle, but could turn it into a parable for all of us."
Shakthidharan has also intentionally incorporated one of the most striking aspects of the anti-dam movement — the prominent role of women.
Women have led many direct actions, including long fasts and have faced the brunt of state retaliation including police beatings and jail.
The Wrong Gods centres on Nirmala, a very traditional village woman, and her daughter Isha, who has dreams of leaving their remote valley to study and become a scientist.
"The characters ended up becoming all women in the play, and the relationship between individual liberation and collective liberation felt so potent in that context," Shakthidharan says.
He soon realised the benefits of co-directing with a woman — Hannah Goodwin, the resident director of Belvoir.
"I realised that it would be great to use this opportunity to build a team where as many women are at the forefront as possible: so the set was built by women, we have women costume designers, stage managers and actors.
"The room and the process has been different for that and I'm so proud of that."
The Wrong Gods is currently showing at Arts Centre Melbourne until June 12.
