A River Dammed: Oral Histories from the Narmada River Valley with Nandini K. Oza

In this episode, we talk to #NandiniOza about archiving oral histories around the struggles against dam projects in the #NarmadaRiverValley. The former President of Oral History Association of India (2020-22), Nandini is a researcher, writer, chronicler, and an archivist.
For over a decade, she was an activist with the powerful people’s movement, the @NarmadaBachaoAndolan (NBA). In 2004, Nandini began recording the oral histories of prominent leaders and activists of the NBA-both local and from outside the #Narmadavalley-and of impacted women and men belonging to adivasi, farming, and other natural resource-dependent communities.
The Narmada is India’s longest west-flowing river, and it makes its way through the three western states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. The #SardarSarovarProject (SSP) is the terminal dam on the river in Gujarat, and is part of the Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) which includes 30 big, 135 medium, and 3000 small dams on the river and its tributaries. In an article published in The Hindu in 2016, Shiv Viswanathan wrote, “To me, the most important historical event of the last two decades has been the battle over the Narmada dam. The battle over the Narmada dam reflects a journey, a pilgrimage, and a recollection of 30 years of resistance. It demands a different kind of storytelling. This struggle is about a collective history of a people challenging the official history of a nation state.”
For Nandini, oral history is people’s history-the history of the marginalised and exploited, narrated in their own voice, which is often actively suppressed by mainstream history. Even in people’s movements, when history is written, it often focuses on the key issues, programs and strategies, or on known faces, and the people who form the backbone of the resistance and their battles do not find a place of prominence. These interviews also help us understand how turning a free-flowing river into a reservoir of stagnant water by building a mega dam destroys the very way of life of people who belong to one of the oldest #rivervalleycivilizations.
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