AUDIO RECORDING: Book release of The River Mhadei: The Science and Politics of Diversion
Frederick Noronha
Wency Mendes
Yesterday marked the launch of a book on the Mhadei, published by Goa,1556 (Frederick Noronha).
Peter Roland D’souza asserts an episteme (Foucault, 1970) as he frames the book, reinforcing it further through film. He reiterates this in a his-story of layered temporalities and the proliferation of the “intergenerational.”
Yet questions remain unanswered: the processes of inclusion and exclusion in constructing such discourse. Who holds the authority? Who is granted the voice? These are questions of identity and representation (Spivak, 1988; Butler, 1990) that continue to shape knowledge and its silences.
In Goa, historical violence has unfolded through gender, caste, and the condition of the unlanded. This can be traced back to the gaunkari, the comunidades, and more recently, the Forest Rights Act—all of which accentuate the “other” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963) and propagate deskilling, dislocation, and dispossession. Layered into this is a historical reinforcement between “word” and “rule,” where the word itself becomes the guarantor of power (Fanon, 1961; Foucault, 1972).
Water remains a contested site—marked by purity and pollution through gender, stratified further by caste, and bordered by race. Through film, Peter reiterates this hegemonic structure, anchored in a patriarchal Brahmanical “point of view,” which risks hijacking the urgent discourse of the day. The tragedy of his endeavour is not simply its blind spot, but its active participation in the continued erasure of the voices of the marginalised and the unlanded (Guru & Sarukkai, 2012; Spivak, 1999).
The making of the film emerges from the industrial age of imperial colonisation. Peter’s work continues this legacy of framing the iconic—the authority who speaks. The Mhadei, the water, and even Goa itself are reduced to objects of a colonised, social-anthropological gaze. In this, the film echoes what Said (1978) described as the Orientalist move: rendering the subject into an empty metaphor, stripped of its own voice, awaiting meanings imposed by the authority of power.
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