Anthropological Quarterly

River Dialogues is about a group of dam protestors who live on the headwaters of the Ganges in Northwestern India. Through fine-grained ethnography, Georgina Drew tells the stories of women who oppose hydropower projects on the Bhagirathi Ganga in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand and makes a compelling case for a stronger emphasis on religiosity in studies of political ecology. After all, Drew argues, the hydro-power projects in question were only cancelled after years of religiously motivated opposition to dam building. At the outset, she states that "this book describes in detail the diverse motivations expressed by mountain people working to save the Ganga from hydroelectric dams, as well as the ways that they navigated movement campaigns to voice their concerns" (19) and aims to "challenge observers of environmental campaigns to acknowledge the contingency, ambiguity, and positive political potential inherent in lived experiences of devotion to sacred entities that are also natural resources" (19).

Drew locates her discussion of the relation between religiosity and activism within the field of cultural politics. This enables her to focus on the conflicts both within the social movement to "Save the Ganga" and the complex, often contentious relations the movement entertains with other actors: progressive urban environmentalists, dam supporters in the region, the regional and central governments, a major construction company, and the Hindu Right who is also fighting against dams on the last unaltered [End Page 1155] stretch of the Ganges. The most important figure here is a charismatic engineer-turned-saint who, through a number of declared fasts-unto-death, has a big part in the eventual cancellation of the proposed dams along the Bhagirathi and the establishment of a so-called Eco-Zone by the Central government in New Delhi to prohibit future dam construction.

The backbone of the book is a remarkably detailed micro-study of a group of semi-urban, middle-class, high-caste women who make up the core of the local anti-dam activists and are introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. Drew engages closely with their individual life stories to shed light on their motivations to join the struggle. She also discusses the importance of devotional songs as the women's preferred performance during public events despite the contempt they experience from their male co-activists who are better educated and rather give long speeches. The composing and singing of songs, the author argues, are ways for semi-literate women to combine devout religious practice with public visibility. Chapter 3 asks why women participated in the anti-dam movement, discusses the history of women's activism in the region, and sheds light on the individual conditions motivating Drew's informants. A stronger embedding of these rich biographies in the anthropological literature on conservative feminism would have made these three chapters even stronger. Chapter 4 continues with a discussion of "outsiders" and how Drew's interlocutors position themselves in relation to the attempted fasts-unto-death of a Hindu nationalist activist from the plains. Despite the legacy of the practice in both Hindu and Ghandian contexts and despite their shared aim to stop dam constructions, some of the "local" activists perceive this tactic as undemocratic and violent, as one person blackmailing the whole society. In general, they keep their distance and oppose this appropriation of their struggle through the Hindu Right. Chapter 5 examines the developments after the fasts were proven successful and the dams had been cancelled in 2012 when a 100 kilometer stretch of the river is declared an "Ecologically Sensitive Zone." Many of the activists suddenly softened their stance against dams. On the one hand, they realized the negative impacts of the building stop on employment options in the region. On the other hand, the Eco-Zone would impose a number of regulations on resource use and thereby put a new burden on mountain people's livelihoods. Additionally, people felt left in the dark about the...