ABSTRACT
The anonymous speaker iterates a mantra against the Indian postcolonial state. He lives in Domkhedi, one of the many villages slated for submergence by the coming of large dams. He represents the countless damaffected-the relocated, the displaced, and the drowned out-in India’s Narmada river valley for the past three decades. He speaks of an “ecologic,” the logic of oikos (or the household),2 of dwelling in an interconnected system (oikonomia or economy) of human and nonhuman relations. He offers such logic as a polemic against developmental projects undertaken by the state that provide compensation only for the loss of property-if that. The speaker intimates the losses go further, deeper. Some may be tabulated (land, home, cattle, crops), but others remain incalculable (forest, water, community, generational memory, religious practice). Together they provide the basis for the testimonies that I scrutinize here.
