Tuesday night a throng of students and members of the community
lined up in front of Royce Hall long before its doors were set to
open that evening.
All were gathered with the same desire to watch the screening of
“Dam/age” and to hear from the central figure of the
documentary, Arundhati Roy.
The documentary made up the first portion of the event, which
began at 7 p.m.
The film depicted the struggles of Indians living near the
Narmada river when dams were built across this waterway, their main
water source, and flooded villages.
Roy, a well known essayist and winner of the Booker prize for
her novel, The God of Small Things, became a major focus of the
fights against the dam project when she joined the protests.
The Supreme Court case against Roy in India was a major catalyst
for the making of the documentary, said Aradhana Seth, director and
producer of the film.
“One didn’t know what would happen in those months,
and that was really frightening,” she said.
The documentary depicted October of 2001, when Roy was charged
with contempt of court and had to appear in front of India’s
Supreme Court the following March.
According to the documentary, the charges against Roy were based
on three paragraphs in an affidavit against a group of lawyers who
filed a case accusing her of attempting to murder them.
The lawyers’ case was dropped, but the court filed a suit,
saying the last few paragraphs lowered the authority of the
court.
Roy was put in jail for a day and given the option to either pay
2,000 rupies for bail, or remain in prison for three months.
She opted to pay for bail, and later explained her reasoning
when a member of the audience asked why she had made her decision
during the question and answer segment of the event.
“I’m bigger trouble outside jail than inside
jail,” Roy said.
Roy drew the attention of the Supreme Court when she joined
protests formed and led by those who would be affected by the dam
project.
The Narmada project was the biggest river project in India, but
other dams had been built before it.
Archived footage showed the result of other dams built by the
government.
Houses and crops were destroyed when the collected water
submerged areas where people lived.
The main reason for the protests against the dams was the fact
that people were being displaced from their homes and lost the only
means of their survival, Roy said during the documentary.
The government was not helping the general population but was
centralizing the water source and making it available to big
industries, she said.
After the documentary, Peter Nabokov, chair for World Arts and
Cultures, a department that co- sponsored the event, moderated the
question and answer segment of the event.
Roy tied in the struggles of Indians affected by the
government’s dam projects with the war against Iraq.
“When the whole war with Iraq was happening I kept saying
it’s not the lying that I mind, but the quality of the
lying,” she said.
The audience applauded Roy’s comments about both the
Indian and American governments, and were able to interact with her
by asking their own questions.
“I really like the question and answer part, and how she
makes us think of modernity and how it’s a euphemism for
colonial power,” said Susan Kim, fifth-year Asian American
Studies student.
Another point Roy delivered to the audience was the need to
speak out against the wrongs they see committed by their
government.
“To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking
out,” she said.