Discussions on mining in India over the past 20 years are liable to produce fatigue. The names of places, companies, tribes, forests, states, regions, rivers and hills flit lazily and incoherently in and out of our ears including Jagdalpur, POSCO, Reddy brothers, Niyamgiri and Vedanta. The steady trickle of news about mining-afflicted areas – always remote, always misty, always in the 'under-developed' parts of the country – has both kept us saturated with factoids, and somehow also crushed our ability to connect, think straight and act. Everybody, that is, except those directly facing the prospect of seeing their farm, hill, house or river imploding into a cavernous mine pit below, and clouds of dust above. These are the Grimm's fairy tales of contemporary India, with an added postmodern twist. They seem to have no beginning – we can't seem to remember a time before mining; no clear middle – what is happening now, has it stopped or resumed?; and no clear end – aren't the displaced communities going to be rehabilitated with the usual package of primary school-dispensary-jobs, and isn't this enough?
Hartman de Souza's Eat Dust: Greed and mining in Goa gives us the full context. He shows us how to see the story in the midst of the deafening hum of news bytes. It reminds us that 'information', reports and a couple of interviews from opposing sides of the mining 'debate' that are filtered through to Delhi or Bombay do not by themselves make a narrative. And this is not because there is no narrative. There is a beginning, there is a middle, and we are all living through the end. The end of a sustainable, non-polluting, non-exploitative way of living. A form of life that is as 'natural' as it is 'human', a life that does not need Goa holidays and spa resorts to counter its sophistry and meaninglessness.
A squalid triumvirate
De Souza pulls no punches. Of Goan-Kenyan descent, and possessed of a profound love for the little strip between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, he has engaged with the land and people in Goa in multiple ways over decades: as a theatre actor and director, teacher, art critic, farmer, writer and journalist. He is also somebody who saw a hill in front of his sister Cheryl's farm in Goa disappear almost overnight, engulfed and decimated by a rapidly expanding circle of earth movers and rock blasters. With the stubbornness of a bulldog combined with the instincts of a bloodhound, over the years de Souza stuck to the edge of the mine, photographing, writing and just watching. He then did this with other mines in Goa, all across a mining belt that extends in what he calls a "squalid triumvirate" from Quepem in the south, Bicholim in the north, and Sanvordem in the southeast.
At the outset, the central achievement of the book: Never again will one who has carefully read this memoir be able to just "go to Goa!". De Souza's account carefully lays bare the dense history and culture that lies behind the wafer-thin touristic impression of Goa as simply beaches, sand and sea. While this may sound dispiriting, it isn't. Beyond the beach shacks and curio shops is a much richer, infinitely more stunning Goa made up of hills, streams, farms and a rich culture replete with local traditions and deities. It is a Goa lovingly experienced by natives as their 'mandkulem' – a Konkani word that means a "baby crawling on the floor and beginning to discover the world". In a metaphor reminiscent of the one used in another urgent, powerful book on the environment, Churning the Earth by Aseem Srivastava and Ashish Kothari (they speak of imbalanced growth in India as a "drunken, stunted dog"), de Souza describes this mandkulem now as being attacked by three "wolves": a middle-aged one that goes by the names of Tourism, Real Estate and Infrastructure; an older, wiser wolf who "sits back until it's time to eat", namely, the mining industry, made up of several blue-blooded old mining families; and finally a young, vicious wolf called Consumerism.