Nature and the Nation-State:
Towards a History of the Modern River
By Ritupan Goswami
Regime of truths propounded and disseminated by
the nation-state regards the Brahmaputra as a problematic
river required to be tamed and used for the benefit
of the state and the people. This is how nature is
objectified as resource. The 'truth' thus established
becomes a part of the commonsensical.
THE PROBLEM
The 'Master Plan'1
for the Brahmaputra asserts the river as one of the
'largest' and 'problematic rivers' but 'having the
capacity for bestowing enormous benefits, particularly
of hydropower, irrigation, and navigation'. Are these
statements true? Is it true that it is one of the
largest rivers in the world? Is it true that it has
been a problem river as it causes great damage every
year by flooding vast areas of valuable land, and
blocking the drainage channels? Is it also true that
it is a depository of abundant water resource with
a potential to confer enormous benefits, but which
has only been minimally utilised till now? The answer
to all these questions would be 'yes', and all the
statements will in general be regarded as true.
We do not seem to
see a problem in such statements and the reality they
stand to depict. We would more or less agree that
they are true. And this is the problem we seek here
to address: the question of the production of a regime
of truths, the purposes to which these truths are
put, the ways in which their production is related
to the exercise of power. So, the attempt here would
not merely be to inquire whether the statements are
true or false. Rather, it would seek to analyse how
these truths themselves are created through a historical
process, which simultaneously creates the criteria
with reference to which we judge the truth or falsehood
of these statements; in short, to inquire about the
conditions that make a particular regime of truths
possible.
This way of seeing
has a history in that it can be traced back to the
ways nation-states in the past too made the river
'visible' to its gaze, first of all in Europe: the
birth-place of the nation-state, which suppresses
the different existing, and possible ways of perceiving
the river. Also, though these state forms, i.e. the
nation-state of nineteenth century Europe, and the
colonial and the post-colonial states in India, could
be argued to be very different in their composition,
they have all shared the same plane/archaeology which
made these truths about the river possible which is
not very different from the ways a capitalist society
would see Nature in general. This history therefore
is also a history of colonisation.
This involved the
parallel colonisation in two domains: of matter and
of mind, both at social as well as ontological levels.
They are therefore processes that entailed a simultaneous
subjectification of man and objectification2 of the
elements of Nature. It thereby initiated a new relation
between the subject and the object; a relation which
like any other, is to be studied as a historical process.
The coming of the nation-state and the subjectification
of its people in a particular way are closely connected
processes, and as far as the subject shares the state's
way of seeing and the truths it propagates, it also
shares the way it relates to an object. Thus, the
state and its subjects would share the ways of relating
to Nature in thought, and the ways of acting upon
Nature in practice.
Now, to come back
to our problem: the nation-state presents the Brahmaputra
as a 'problem river', is taken by its subjects to
be the truth, and thus would generally agree to the
state's way of finding a 'solution' to this 'problem',
as provided here by the 'Master Plan': 'As creation
of large storage reservoirs on some of the major tributaries
is the key to the solution of the problems of the
Brahmaputra, investigation of the Dihong Dam Project
and the Subansiri Dam Project which were being carried
out… these multipurpose projects are integral part
of the Master Plan.'3 A brief detour in history would
here be helpful to understand the conditions that
make possible a depiction of the river, or Nature
in general in this manner, and also the possible oppressions
that a 'solution' of this kind involves.
THE SECOND NATURE
When Cicero, the
Stoic philosopher of Classical Rome wrote, '[W]e enjoy
the fruits of the plains and the mountains, the rivers
and the lakes are ours, we sow corn, we plant trees,
we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we confine the
rivers and straighten their courses…,'4 he was only
adding another voice to the long tradition of celebrating
the transformative potentials of Nature through the
application of the human mind and the human hand.
This Second Nature, the product of human creativity
and ingenuity which thereby gives birth to Art (techne/)
and Culture, has long been understood as the outcome
of struggles against Nature. The ability to create
this Second Nature is also perceived as the defining
character of a human life, as distinct from that of
an animal life. Yet, the moment of overcoming Nature
is also the moment of creating Nature, in that even
the thinking, or the cognition of Nature has been
made possible by an alienation of man from its 'primitive'
environment, from a life in the 'wilderness'. Thus,
'[T]he state of nature was the state of mankind prior
to social organization and prior to the state of grace.
Nature spirits, nature deities, virgin nymphs, and
elementals were thought to reside in or be associated
with natural objects.'5
Outside the time
and space of the 'modern', however, the underlying
metaphor that has bound the cosmos, society and the
self had been of an organism, where man and his artifice
was perceived as parts of the immensely intricate
whole that connected the highest conceivable form
of being: the Supreme Being, to the 'lowliest' of
the creatures, with man in the middle of this 'great
chain of being'.
This organic image
characterised Nature as a living entity, 'sensitive,
alive, and responsive to human action." This 'living
character of the world organism' not only implied
'that the stars and planets were alive, but that the
earth too was pervaded by a force, giving life and
motion to the living beings on it.'6 This organic
conception of the cosmos, of which man imagined himself
to be a significant yet subservient part, gave way
to a mechanistic one in a steadily industrializing
West. The image of Nature as disorder and imperfection,
and replete with malevolent forces was more strongly
presented than ever, calling forth an important modern
idea of power over Nature. 'Two new ideas, those of
mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature,
became core concepts of the modern world…. As Western
culture became increasingly mechanised in the 1600s,
the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued
by the machine.'7 Though the organic view of Nature
did not disappear altogether, and was much celebrated
in the Romantic literature, the machine was to become
the dominant symbol of the age. 'The development of
modern sciences, beginning with physics, led to [this]
change in metaphors, but more profoundly to a change
in explanation; from the belief in the Earth as an
organism created by the Great Artist to the belief
in the Earth as a magnificent machine invented by
the Great Engineer.'8
THE NATION-STATE,
SOCIAL CONTRACT, & THE EPOCH OF 'MAN'
The formal manifesto
of the Revolution, The Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizens, promulgated in 1789, announced its
hostility towards the hierarchical society embedding
noble and 'divine' privileges, and laid the foundation
for a constitutional, secular state that would 'guarantee'
civil liberties, private property, competitive enterprise,
and a government by tax-payers and property-owners.
In return it claimed for itself the paramount right
over man and matter, the subjects and the objects
existing within the confines of its frontiers. This
entailed a 'contract among the citizens of the new
political organism, the nation-state, where every
'individual'-'free' and equal before the law-would
willingly and voluntarily participate in the formation
and functioning of this new political society. Within
this newly constituted political society, capitalism
found the expression of its fundamental ideals, and
the condition of its further development. The legal
provisions and the institutions of this new state-form
ensured the furtherance of the liberal-bourgeois aspirations.
In man was now invented
the 'individual', which signified the coming of a
new epoch by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
He is 'only a recent invention, a figure not yet two
centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge,'9 and
born at the threshold of modernity, also of the Nation-state
and industrial capital. This modern man would emerge
as the engineer of Nature; ironically though, he would
also bear a 'nature' that had been 'engineered' to
the needs of this new epoch through the formation
of a new subjecthood.10 This emergence of the subjectivated
individual, and his subjugation to regimes of property,
alienated labour, institutionalized family, regulated
'freedom', and a mechanistic and objectified worldview
could later be read as an 'infringement of the impersonal
norm of the group and the species, of an imprescriptible
rule....'11
SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS
& THE KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE
The rapid industrial
expansion of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made
enormous demands on science and technology. Newly
established nation-states like France set the pace
for the founding of scientific and technical institutions,
to be followed by countries like Britain, Germany
and the U.S.A.12 Swelling ranks of scientists and
scholars found their patrons in the state or in the
industry. 'The question of science' in such changed
circumstances had become 'very frequently career questions,'
Goethe observed. 'A single discovery may make a man
famous and lay the foundation of his fortunes as a
citizen…. Every newly observed phenomenon is a discovery,
every discovery is property. Touch a man's property
and his passions are immediately aroused.'13 For Science,
Nature was but a machine with underlying laws and
principles to be unravelled.
In this process,
Science and 'Scientific temper' achieved a social
milieu where a new subject-object relation was made
possible. It replaced the organic image of the universe
and of Nature where the 'subjects' and 'objects' were
made visible and meaningful by a different light.
'To consider the world of Nature as "object" is already
to have stood back from primary and pre-cognitive
familiarity and imbrication with it; it is already
to have adopted a theoretical mode of "knowing", which
necessarily overlooks or distorts the more primordial
level at which Nature is already simply "there" for
us and we ourselves "thrown" into its midst.'14 And
what made possible this transition from a pre-cognitive
existence to a reflective distancing of the elements
of Nature, now perceived, and acted upon as inanimate
'objects', is 'a theoretical and technological mode
of thinking' which has permanently dislocated itself
'from a more unthinking pre-understanding of the world,'
marking a significant break with a past 'archaeology'.15
Science as a practice
of knowledge (a new positivity) production mapped
out, tabulated, and systematized the objects, ordered
them according to their relations of resemblance,
proximity, difference, etc., and grids of specification.
'Concepts' such as 'genus', 'class', 'tribe', etc.
were formed which compared, classified and framed
every single object within them. Though unlike the
inanimate matter, life-forms were difficult to be
imagined and explained as mechanical systems, physiology,
botany, or zoology sought to understand them and make
them known. Scientist now would refer to a 'game of
truth,' according to which the truth-claims of his
statement would be 'scientifically' verified. These
truths, once established, get circulated as the 'fact'
or the 'reality', as opposed to 'beliefs' or to the
'fabulous'.16 The body of 'results' of scientific
inquiries thus constituted a new regime of truths,
which became dominant and institutionalised through
the nation-state by the nineteenth century.
The idea of mechanical
Nature brought with it the sanction for its mechanics
and engineers. And domination of Nature through an
'instrumental reason' was hailed as the call of the
modern epoch. 'In this age ruled by instrumentalism,
nature ceases to have any value in itself…. A tree,
a mountain, a river, and its edges are meaningless
except where they can be turned to some human use
by a farmer, a scientist, or a manufacturer.'17 This
agenda for the total domination of nature, however,
inevitably entailed a domination of people by the
techniques of domination.
THE STATE, SCIENCE
& THE 'STATE-SCIENCES'
The secular nation-state
adopted science as its official ideology. If the degree
of scientific achievements reflected the nation's
place of pride in the scale of progress and civilization,
then technological accomplishments presented the visible
proofs of such progress.18 Moreover, technology could
augment the riches of the nation-state by harnessing
Natural 'resources,'. Ecole Polytechnique in France,
for example, established itself as the leading national
institute for technical education and scientific expertise
soon after its founding in Paris in 1794. For its
'gentleman' engineers, the scientific study of rivers
was driven by two basic assumptions: '[F]irst was
the scientific belief that rivers, properly understood,
would reveal the natural laws that governed all life
on Earth. Second, in a more immediate way, the control
of water was a political experiment that proved the
state could prosper through [their] strict regulation.'19
Engineers, earlier trained and employed mostly by
the army for the construction of war-machines during
the ancien regime, now were provided by the nation-state
with a wider role of implementing 'public works.'
In North America, much like in France, national institutions
such as the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority
got the mandate and resources from the Congress and
the federal funds to overhaul the natural hydraulic
regime of its streams and rivers by building huge
concrete structures that made possible their regulation
and control at specific locations. Science and technology
thus came together to subdue Nature for the 'benefit'
of the industrial man.
THE 'PROBLEM' RIVER,
TECHNO-POLITICS & THE NATION-STATE
British colonialism
initiated a fervent practice of building dams and
dykes outside Europe and North America during the
crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It expected that a regulated regime of year-round
supply of water would enable a steady growth of high-value
crops such as cotton and sugarcane, etc. to be sold
profitably in the international market. The Aswan
dams over the Nile in Egypt, and the 'Canal Colonies'
of Punjab in India are two glaring monuments of commercial
enterprise of late colonialism. In Egypt and India,
as also in the American West, the state encouraged
consolidated large farms over fragmented small-peasant
holdings, and land regulations and policies of taxation
were geared to facilitate the formation and successful
functioning of such large-scale commercial estates.
This 'great transformation' involved not only the
forced resettlement of the Egyptian fellah [small
peasant] or the American 'Indian' from his land, but
also a fundamental transfer of power of decision-making
from marginal communities, in favour of the nation-state
and big agricultural/industrial farm interests.20
These modern structures demonstrated that they could
also act as means of exercising centralised rule,
i.e. the rule of a few over many. They therefore represent
the modern sites of contestation: of different players
with conflicting worldviews, interpretations, and
life-ways.21
In such a context
the presenting of the river as a 'problem',22 as is
done in the case of the Brahmaputra, seeks to legitimise
the interventions which are aimed to make it a 'planned'
river; a river which can then be conveniently 'turned
on or off' according to the 'needs of the nation'.23
But river basin planning, as Patrick McCully points
out, 'has long been a euphemism for the establishment
of powerful and largely autonomous agencies filled
with dam and irrigation engineers who have strewn
watersheds with dams and then hoped that the associated
energy-industries and irrigation schemes would successfully
follow in their wake.'24 Not surprisingly, the only
'benefits' that the technocratic state-scientists
see plausible to be 'secured' are 'in the shape of
hydropower, navigation and irrigation,' the motors
of modern industry. This is thus reflective of not
a mere 'will to power' over Nature by the nation-state,
but also of the vision of a society which would be
willing to exploit and control Nature in its 'progress'
towards a heavily industrialised and mechanised future.
It is here that it
seems that the logic of the nation-state and of capital
merges to form a common agenda of 'modernisation'
of the 'developing' nation; they share, and are part
of the same plane. It is hardly surprising therefore
that in his report, B.P. Bell, the Chief Engineer
of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recommended in 1965
that reconnaissance studies be carried out to determine
not only the hydraulic but also the economic features
of the 'Brahmaputra Basin'. Only a 'planned' and 'stabilised'
river could be forced to yield to such demands, he
argued, and that was what H.E. Weller of the U.S.
Corps of Engineers too thought, should be done with
the Brahmaputra. In 1966, Weller made a 'detailed
study of the erosion problem on the Brahmaputra,'
and suggested that 'the most desirable plan for controlling
of Brahmaputra River is complete stabilisation.' To
accomplish this he further suggested that 'sufficient'
number of reservoirs should be constructed. 'The river
could then be confined into a single channel trained
in a series of easy bends, preferably along the main
channel by all methods of channel stabilisation.'25
The implementation of a scheme of such magnitude,
of course, required 'a vast outlay of money, tremendous
amount of manpower, equipment and materials,' not
to speak of advanced technical expertise, which the
international dam industry and its funding agencies
were only too eager to supply, but as it were in the
name of 'the people' and for the cause of the 'development'
of the nation.26
The case against
such structures which impede the natural flow of rivers
and streams have been comprehensively built up by
recent research, so much so that 'one wonders how
the building of a large dam can ever be regarded as
rational from now on.'27 What was here intended to
outline was a history of a fundamental transformation
of the relation to Nature, the latter being made possible
only through its objectification. It is not to argue
that the modern epoch, and its concomitant ideologies
of nationalism, scientificism and the machine metaphor
etc. is simply a 'derivative discourse.' Colonial
modernity is distinct and mediated; the result of
different transmutations. But if anything that gives
the concept of modernity a unity, it is this 'archaeology'
which explains the shared 'reality' that is experienced
by the modern men in spite of their location in different
times and spaces. It is this plane of modernity, for
instance, that connects two temporally disparate figures
as James Rennell, 'the father of British geography'
of the eighteenth century, and the engineer in the
Brahmaputra Board of the twentieth century, both of
whom pronounce that the Brahmaputra is one of the
largest rivers of the world, an irrefutable 'truth'.
Both of them produced a table of the 'biggest rivers
of the world', in comparison to which this claim on
behalf of the Brahmaputra could be verified and 'proved'.28
The 'truth' thus established become a part of the
commonsensical, the obvious. But this truth is distinctly
modern, an epoch when knowledge of all the rivers
of the 'world' could be 'scientifically' mapped, tabulated,
classified, and then acted upon. This is also the
truth shared by the modern state, and its modern subjects.
It is only in the modern epoch that the river is possible
to be seen in this light; as an object and a commodity.
It is only the plane of modernity that makes possible
such domination of man over Nature, and it is only
this plane that makes possible such domination of
man over man, and of the Self.
NOTES & REFERENCES
1 Brahmaputra Board,
Master Plan of Brahmaputra Basin, Part I: Main Stem,
Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India,
1986.
2 Karl Marx, Introduction
to A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, tr.
Joseph O'Malley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
(first published in 1843) 1970.
3 Brahmaputra Board,
Preface, op. cit. In a recent development, '[T]he
last hurdle in implementation of the Subansiri (Lower)
Hydro Power Project in Arunachal Pradesh has been
cleared with the Supreme Court's go ahead. The 2000
MW power project is expected to be completed by March
2010….' See 'Subansiri Hydel Project gets Supreme
Court Clearance', The Assam Tribune, June 1, 2005.
The Subansiri is a major north bank tributary of the
Brahmaputra, and is a part of the above 'Master Plan'.
4 Marcus Tullius Cicero,
De natura decorum. Academica, tr. from Latin by H
Rackham, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press),
1948; cited in Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the
Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought
from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century,
(Berkley: University of California Press), 1967, pp.
116-49.
5 Carolyn Mechant, The
Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution, (New York: Harper Collins), 1989, p. xxiii.
Foucault indicates that there have been processes
of objectivation during the modern epoch. Objectivation
itself is not new, but the novelty was in that the
modern epoch produced a different order of objectivation.
Michel Foucault, 'Foucault', in James D. Faubion (ed.),
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, tr. Robert Hurley
et al, (London: Allen Lane), 1998, pp. 459-63.
6 Mechant, op. cit.,
pp. 22-3.
7 Ibid., pp. 164-90.
8 Daniel Botkin, Discordant
Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century,
(New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1990,
pp. 100-10.
9 Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences,
tr. from French by Allen Sheri-dan-Smith, (Random
House Inc.), 1970, p. xxiii.
10 As Deleuze notes,
'the subjectivation of the free man is transformed
into subjection: on the one hand it involves being
"subject to someone else by control and dependence"
… through all the techniques of moral and human sciences
that go to make a knowledge of the subject.' See Giles
Deleuze, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand, (London: Athlone
Press), 1988, p. 103; emphasis added.
11 Jean Baudrillard,
Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000, (London: Verso), 2003,
p. 17.
12 Eric Hobsbawm, The
Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, (London: Viking),
pp. 276-96.
13 Goethe, Conversations
with Eckermann, December 21, 1823; cited in E. Hobsbawm,
op. cit., p. 277.
14 Soper, What is Nature?
p. 48.
15 Foucault defines
'archaeology' not exactly as a 'discipline but a domain
of research, which would be the following: in a society,
different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas,
everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial
practices and police activities, mores.… See Foucault,
Aesthetics, p. 261-62.
16 Interestingly, Hume
puts belief at the basis and origin of knowledge,
whether scientific or non-scientific, 'factual' or
'fabulous'. See Giles Deleuze, 'Hume', in Pure Immanence:
Essays on a Life, tr. Anne Boyman, (New York: Zone
Books), 2001, pp. 35-52.
17 Donald Worster, Rivers
of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the Modern
West, (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press),
1985, p. 59.
18 As Patrick McCully
notes, 'Massive dams are much more than simply machines
to generate electricity and store water. They are
concrete, rock and earth expressions of the dominant
ideology of the technological age: icons of economic
development and scientific progress to match nuclear
bombs and motor cars…. Hoover Dam [in the U.S.] was
supposed to signify greatness, power and domination.
It was planned that way.' See Patrick McCully (ed.),
Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large
Dams, (London & New Jersey: Zed Books), 1998, p. 3.
19 Todd Shallat, Structures
in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the
US Army Corps of Engineers, (Austin: Texas University
Press), 1994, p. 23.
20 For an absorbing
study of the politics of the Aswan Dams, refer to
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics,
Modernity, (Berkley: University of California Press),
2002.
21 As Anderson & Huber,
in their study of the conflict over the Bastar forests
in Madhya Pradesh, shows, 'The problems facing each
of the groups had a variety of interpretations, as
did the terms they used. For example, to the corporation,
a "tree" was a resource to be mined for cash flow
and replaced; to the forest department, it was capital
to be reserved and protected from tribals…. To the
tribal people, it was their "place", their home.'
See Robert S. Anderson & Walter Huber, The Hour of
the Fox: Tropical Forests, the World Bank, and the
Indigenous People in Central India, (Seattle: University
of Washington Press), 1988, p. 6
. 22 There have even
been demands that the 'problem' of the Brahmaputra
be recognized as a 'national problem'. Brahmaputra
Board, op. cit., p. 5.
23 Ibid., p. 1.
24 McCully, op. cit.,
p. 19.
25 Brahmaputra Board,
op. cit., pp. 54-5. These 'foreign experts' were part
of a 'Study Group on the Erosion Problem of the Brahmaputra'
set up in 1964 by the Govt. of India.
26 The dam industry
in the West was going through a 'geographical reorientation'
in the second half of the twentieth century as the
demand for new dams in the U.S. and Europe was reducing,
and was increasing in the 'newly liberated' countries
of the 'third world'. A consultant associated with
the World Bank wrote in 1987 that 'most scenarios
of future developments in water resources agree that
ultimately, say by the mid-21st century' all of the
runoff waters in all of the world's rivers 'must be
stored by reservoirs [dams] or other methods.' Cited
in McCully, op.cit., p. 26.
27 Gautam Appa, in
McCully (ed.), op.cit., p. 24. It has been argued,
'A growing number of academic and activist researchers,
however, have been building up an impressive data
showing the extensive damage which dams and their
associated irrigation schemes cause to watersheds,
cultures and national economies…. Dams assist the
powerful and wealthy to enclose the common land, water
and forests of the politically weak. By misleading
people into thinking that they can control huge floods,
dams encourage settlement on floodplains, turning
damaging floods into devastating ones.'
28 James Rennell, Memoir
of a Map of Hindoostan,or the Mughal Empire, with
Geography and Present Division of that Country, (London:
W. Bulmer & Co.), (first published in 1785) 1792,
p. 337. It is worth noting here that while in the
Master Plan the table of rivers has 'length', 'Basin
Area', 'Discharge' and 'Average Annual Yield' as the
criteria for comparing the 'bigness' of the rivers
of the world, Rennell's table takes the River Thames
as the primary unit of comparing the proportional
length of the other rivers. Thus, while the length
of the Thames is shown as 1, that of the Rhine is
5.5, the 'Wolga' 9.5, the Nile 12.5, the Mississippi
8, the Amazon 15.7, and the 'Burrampooter' 9.5, etc.
<<
BACK TO CONTENTS
