#pavithraramanujam

[12magazine]

Why not my language 

Pavithra Ramanujam (2017) 

The project is a response to the ongoing suppression of linguistic diversity by the state, through the funding of Hindi language promotion.

[12magazine]

Water - the elixir of life.

Sara Ahmed / founder and lead curator – living waters museum, in coversation with Vamika Jain and Pavithra Ramanujam

Sara, you’ve been connected with water for a long time. How do you feel your relationship with water has changed over time? When and how did you decide to work with water? My first connection with water started back in 1986 when I was doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge. The first Ganga Action Plan had just been launched by Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister, seeking to involve people in the cleaning of the Ganga and I, as a young person thought, how will people participate to clean a river which they essentially believe to be pure and sacred, and not dirty as we think? So I started examining the political economy of water pollution in the holy city of Banaras where, as Mary Douglas, an American anthropologist, puts it ‘dirt as matter out of place’ defined the cultural politics of ‘cleaning’ from the British colonial times right to the present. I looked at the multiple layers of people from the banks of the river to the dark bye-lanes of the city who were impacted by the Action Plan - the dhobis, the Doms and the electric crematorium, the sewage treatment plant and the displacement of village land, the Swacch Ganga Abhiyan and the Sankat Mochan Foundation…… so it became a story. Besides this, I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the technical dimensions of water quality, sewage treatment etc., to have an interdisciplinary understanding of water. Though my earlier work did not have a gender lens, after I joined the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) in 1992, and began to teach on gender and development issues, my work gradually shifted from the political economy of natural resources management to feminist political ecology and how it shapes water governance. For me, ‘water is a primal resource, it is the elixir of life’ and unless you have water you really don’t have anything else. It is the foundation of life. What I find challenging about water governance is that since water is a flowing resource, it has been difficult to define rights. And women have typically been denied water rights (for irrigation) as they rarely own land. I also value the symbolism of water and how it is intrinsic to all our religions. So, I have been working on water over the last 30 years now.

Having worked extensively on field, can you share with us an invigorating incident or memory which deeply moved you? Yes, actually it is interesting, because it is related to photography. In 1982, I was doing my undergraduate work on the Chipko movement up in the Tehri-Garhwal region. One day, I was sitting on the side of the road waiting for my colleague and talking with an old woman who had just made me some tea. As we chatted, she looked at the camera around my neck and asked me in her dialect, ‘how is this going to help me?’ As a young student with a growing passion for “development”, I had no answer to give her but she  made me question what I was doing. And I think that is the essence of research, we have to be answerable to people with whom we work. Another incident happened in Gorakhpur, a chronically poor district in Uttar Pradesh, about 10 years ago, when I went there after a round of devastating floods. We were doing a series of oral history interview with women on their perceptions of floods and when I was leaving in the NGO’s jeep, several elderly women, mostly widowed, pleaded with me to take them with me. They were desperate to get away from Gorakhpur as they were extremely impoverished, and of course we know the plight of widows in rural India. I felt helpless, but I also realized how important it is for development workers to make our objectives clear to the people.

What has made you conceptualize Living Waters Museum? What is it about; can you share your vision of the same?

One of my closes friends, Basia Irland, and I had been talking about idea of a water museum in India for a long time, initially as a physical museum, say around some water structure like a step well. I wondered why India doesn’t have a museum on water, how come we’re not talking about water heritage and history here…. And then I gradually moved from the idea of seeing it as a physical museum, which is going to be more expensive to build and maintain, which is going to be bounded by walls where people go to see (typically, dead) things and objects and it has that kind of fossilized notion and then I thought, why not a virtual museum which can engage young people more effectively. There are so many interesting water and development web portals in India working on water rights, justice and sustainability, but we need to use diverse media such as the arts, music, film and dance to raise awareness on our myriad water challenges.

How was your experience connecting with and looking at different projects of NID students on water? For me working with young people is always inspiring, they bring in so many new ideas, so many new ways of looking at things, there’s a lot to learn and there’s a lot where you have to step back and let people explore their own ideas and their own ways.  I think the learning from the process we adopted with NID has been very encouraging and I would like to use it as a ‘blueprint’ for working with other academic institutes and  schools. But you need committed faculty to anchor the process. I think you students were able to grasp my ideas well and I was amazed with the ways in which you visualised and conceptualized living waters in so many different and exciting dimensions that I hadn’t even thought of. Awesome! You have taken the concept or basic ideas from people like me with experience in the sector but have visualised it with your own understanding and meaning and I think that for me was the most inspiring part of working with NID. The work was refreshingly different and I was amazed. Your projects give a different meaning to water. You students have been like a little pilot for us, a little experiment in how this can be done, keep up the good work!

[12magazine]

Jal nahin toh kal nahin

Pavithra Ramanujam / somnath, veraval,chandod,umeta

Gujarat is a state with the longest coastline in India, hence fishing and related activities take lead in the state’s revenue generation. Water becomes the very premise of their existence. This project is a collection of stories and information gathered around human dependence on water and its resources, in Gujarat. The people-centric stories point to the otherwise ignored aspects: environmental impact of overfishing, waste disposal, working conditions of people, migration and many more that need our attention. The objective of the project is to reflect on the cycle of what we get from water and what we give back to water.