The Well of Loneliness : Not a Lesbian but a Trans Novel

 

While its literary value has been questioned, and many of its values now appear outdated, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness still holds a place as a beacon for sexual self-discovery, writes Hephzibah Anderson in BBC Culture's Banned Books series.

When a book has been banned on grounds of obscenity, a reader may be forgiven for coming to it with certain expectations. In the case of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, those expectations are decidedly misleading. For all the clasping of hands and flushing of cheeks that fill its nearly 500 pages, this is no Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Both were published in 1928 and subsequently banned, but whereas DH Lawrence described his protagonists' trysts in vocabulary that would still necessitate asterisks here, Hall stops at the bedchamber door. Aside from a kiss that is "full on the lips, as a lover", the coyly phrased "that night they were not divided" is as racy as The Well of Loneliness gets.

The controversy of course stemmed not from what was being done so much as who was doing it with whom. If Lady Chatterley caused a scandal by showing lust to be no respecter of class boundaries, Hall's novel was still more shocking because its protagonist, despite being named Stephen Gordon, is a woman, and her supposedly masculine proclivities extend far beyond her name. She weightlifts and refuses to ride side saddle; she gets her clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker and longs to cut her hair short; and from a young age she's prone to unusually intense feelings for other women.

In early adulthood, those girlish crushes blossom into a torrid affair with a bored American housewife, Angela Crossby. After Stephen's mother, Lady Anna, finds out and banishes her from the family home, Stephen becomes a writer and travels to Paris, where she's taken under the wing of a lesbian salonnière. Later, she serves in the ambulance corps during World War One and falls for fellow servicewoman Mary Llewellyn – she from whom Stephen will be "not divided".

The novel chronicles her nascent understanding of differences she's sensed in herself for as long as she can remember – differences dubbed "queer" behind her back. However, what truly sealed its fate when it landed in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates Court mere months after publication is the case it dares to make for recognition and tolerance of Stephen's sexuality. Hear her plea at the novel's fevered end: "Rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" Not only is this a novel that strives to humanise the experience of outcast lesbians, it also argues for equality.

In 2019, newly revealed papers from Hall's archive at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center showed that thousands of readers had written to her to protest the novel's ban. "It has made me want to live and to go on," wrote one. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism wasn't in fact illegal in the UK in 1928, though that position should not be mistaken for tolerance. In fact, Stephen's prayer was destined to grow only more radical-seeming for some decades to come, and for generations of women – and men – on their own difficult passages to sexual self-discovery, The Well of Loneliness became a beacon.

 Speaking in a recording for the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Archive, a reader named Rene Sawyer, who was a teenager when the book was finally republished in 1949, explained its importance: "To me it was my bible. To me: it had every aspect of tenderness, of love, of heartache, of anguish, of problems – physical and mental problems – it had everything in that book. Which for me was a lifeline at that time."

If the book's historical and cultural significance is unquestionable, its text inevitably feels dated almost a century on. There's Hall's language, for starters. The first edition carried an "appreciation" by her friend Havelock Ellis, the sexologist whose theory of "sexual inversion" she supported, and his word "invert" – until then restricted to scientific literature – appears throughout Stephen's story.

Also jarring is the apologetic way in which Stephen's sexuality is framed, and the sheer pessimism surrounding Hall's depiction of gay life. As a devout Catholic, it was no coincidence that she named her protagonist after the first Christian martyr, and ultimately, she has Stephen embrace drastic self-sacrifice in her love life.

The novel has been slated, too, for its limited depiction of lesbianism as being so determinedly butch, it might almost seem a form of heterosexuality. And it's been called bi-phobic for the way it depicts Mary Llewellyn, who has relationships with men as well as with Stephen, and misogynistic for the way in which it denies her any say in her own future. Its descriptions of gay men, meanwhile, read like crass caricature. There's also its racism and classism, which can be shocking to encounter in a text that's gone down in literary history as being so radically progressive.

Pulp fiction

Nor is there any getting away from the fact that this is simply not great literature. The book is long-winded and full of stilted dialogue. Change a few pronouns and in some ways, it resembles the pulp romances of its era. Writing in The Times in 2008, Jeanette Winterson didn't mince her words, declaring that "The Well of Loneliness is one of the worst books yet written".

As with other banned books, this is a novel whose status is intrinsically linked to its having been censored. As Professor Laura Doan, who co-edited Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, tells BBC Culture, "In a way, the function of The Well of Loneliness is to convince you that lesbianism matters – lesbianism matters so much that the government can ban us and silence us, and that works very well to put you on the cultural map."

In recent years, however, discussion of the novel has been turbocharged by fresh debate. This time, the controversy stems less from its content than from the extent to which we choose to view it through the lens of 21st-Century gender identity politics. A woman who dresses like a man, goes by a man's name, and is described as being "midway between the sexes": could it be that one of the world's most famous lesbian novels has all along been a trans novel? Whatever you conclude, there's no denying that this book continues to challenge received beliefs and to polarise readers, sometimes in ways that not even its author could have anticipated.

 Born in Bournemouth on 12 August 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall did not have an easy childhood. Her wealthy, philandering father left the family when she was a baby; her mother, an American who'd already been divorced once before and was prone to violent outbursts, rejected her daughter's boyish ways. She later remarried an Italian singing master, and there are hints that he abused Hall.

At the age of 21, Hall came into a substantial sum of money from her father, giving her the security and freedom to leave home. She's said to have written poems and songs from the age of three, and in her twenties, published some books of poetry. She was encouraged by her first long-term lover, amateur singer Mabel Batten, to try her hand at short stories, and was then persuaded by a publisher to write a novel. Her first, The Unlit Lamp, was published in 1924. Two years later, her fourth, Adam's Breed, won a clutch of prizes and sold 27,000 copies in its first three weeks.

Its success emboldened her to risk writing The Well of Loneliness. By then, Batten had died and Hall was in a relationship with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge. The pair were as "out" as it was possible to be in 1920s England – a life made easier, undoubtedly, by the privileges of wealth and class, but there were furtive elements to their existence all the same. Troubridge supported Hall's decision to publish The Well, and in the spring of 1928, Hall wrote to her publisher, Jonathan Cape, to warn him: "I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world". She added: "So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction".

Is it autobiographical? Despite very different childhoods, there are certainly physical similarities to be spotted between Stephen and her creator: both are tall and "handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim-flanked fashion". Stephen is her protagonist's given name – having been convinced she'd be born a boy, her father decides "Stephen" will work equally well for a girl – but from her mid-twenties, Hall was known to her intimates as "John", a nickname given her by Batten. Like Stephen, she wore men's clothes.

The novel garnered positive reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and Time and Tide but no critic was as convinced of its potency as James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. Certain that it would contaminate and corrupt English fiction (his words), he wrote an article damning it as "unutterable putrefaction", notoriously declaring: "I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel". The book should be withdrawn, he thundered, or else the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, must act to suppress it.

On trial

It was sensationalist journalism but Joynson-Hicks was a man who had even found cause to object to a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer. He threatened Cape with criminal proceedings if the book wasn't withdrawn. Cape complied, though not without first licensing the rights to Pegasus Press, an English language publisher in France. Inevitably, copies found their way back into Britain and a trial ensued – with the Home Secretary claiming the novel "supports a depraved practice and that its tendency is to corrupt, and that it is gravely detrimental to the public interest".

 Among the writers who rallied to the novel's defence were EM Forster, Vita Sackville-West and George Bernard Shaw, though not all were convinced of its artistic merits. Virginia Woolf, for instance, thought it a "pale tepid vapid book" and dreaded having to take the stand for it. She needn't have worried: the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that authors could not testify as literary merit was irrelevant. On 16 November 1928, he found the novel to be obscene on the basis that it had the ability to corrupt, ordering its immediate removal from circulation. An appeal the following month similarly failed, with judge Sir Robert Wallace labelling The Well as "more subtle, demoralising, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written".

The judgements did nothing to dent support for Hall, who appeared in the courtroom wearing a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. She was described by the Daily Herald as "well-chiselled", and at the conclusion of the obscenity trial, according to the Daily Express, two women approached her from the crowd, took her hand and kissed it.

Suppression would be the making of both the novel and its author's reputation and yet in the decades since, this supposed Sapphic survival guide has continued to attract plenty of criticism from diverse quarters. In the 1970s, for instance, it became the focus of a backlash from Second Wave feminist critics for its patriarchal worldview. And by 2017, Winterson still hadn't warmed to it – although she chose it as the book that helped her come out, and argued that "A book can be bad and still have a place in history". Writing this time in The Guardian, she asserted: "The Well reads like a misery memoir long before they were invented. It's the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary".

Hall's beliefs definitely complicate the book's legacy. Contrary to what might be expected of a pioneering lesbian author, her politics were reactionary at best. As an expat living in Italy in the lead-up to World War Two, she not only supported Mussolini's Fascist government, she also supported its censorship – of books. And if Victorian womanhood wasn't for her, she fully supported it for others, believing that a woman's place was in the home.

For Professor Doan, much has changed in terms of how the novel is discussed. "When you read it today you do feel that there's a lot in it that makes you feel pretty embarrassed by it," she says, noting that its racism, for instance, was scarcely talked about even a couple of decades ago.

These days, she prefers to direct anyone interested in learning more about Hall to Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, a short story written in 1926 in preparation for The Well. This story holds the key to the novel's real meaning, Doan believes. "To me, that story is about a human who is trapped in the wrong body, has been designated as a female and doesn't feel like a female and has a fantasy of becoming a male. There's no desire or love or romance in that story, and it made me realise that The Well of Loneliness isn't about love between women either."

Doan says she was never really convinced that The Well was a lesbian novel. As she explains, "It would be a better text to think of in the context of trans history. The publishers would be missing a commercial opportunity right now if they didn't try to push its cultural meaning to the trans community. If they want to identify a text that is at the start of the awareness in culture of the possibility of a trans existence, it's got to be The Well of Loneliness."

 So should we be using a different set of pronouns for Hall and Stephen? Some scholars, including Jana Funke, associate professor of English and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter and editor of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, now use gender-neutral pronouns for both author and protagonist.

Maureen Duffy takes a different view, seeing Stephen's gender nonconformity as a function of Hall's discomfort with her own lesbianism. Writing in her introduction to the most recent Penguin Modern Classics edition, Duffy uses a pivotal scene from the novel to make her point: defending herself to her mother, Stephen justifies her sexual intimacy with Angela Crossby by explaining that she's "never felt like a woman". It's an argument Hall insists upon, Duffy suggests, "in order to justify her own very active homosexuality, which she embraced in spite of her espousal of Roman Catholicism".

It's worth noting that even readers for whom Hall clearly had a desire, however latent, to transition, The Well of Loneliness is by no means a straightforward text. Oliver Radclyffe, the trans author of a forthcoming monograph, Adult Human Male, changed his surname in homage to Hall. He's written on the website Electric Literature about how his feelings for the book changed as he undertook his own journey from Englishwoman raising four children in the Connecticut suburbs, to femme lesbian, to trans man. As he puts it, "it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues".

Ultimately, it isn't possible to know whether or not Hall would have identified as transgender – a term not coined until much later – and labelling this long-dead queer person as such is innately problematic. What is certain is that more than 90 years after it was banned, this decidedly flawed piece of literature continues to make readers think anew. As Doan says, "We're confronting its complexity, and that can only be a good thing."

The Well of Loneliness: The book that could corrupt a nation. By  Hephzibah Anderson. BBC, November 22, 2022.

I can’t remember how I happened upon my copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which is a shame because it’s a first edition. The story in my mind is that it was sent to me by one of my mother’s friends shortly after I came out, but I’m pretty sure I first read it while I was still in the closet, so that can’t be right. Maybe I invented this story because of its narrative advantages; that a book written by an aristocratic English lesbian might be sent to me from an English aristocrat trying to endorse my lesbianism sounds like the sort of story I’d like to be true. I’m not sure that it happened that way, though, and the English aristocrat in question can’t remember either. She thinks it was The Price of Salt.

Anyway, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Lady Fitz-Waterford sent me The Well of Loneliness as a gift when she heard from my mother that I’d told my husband I was leaving him for a life of Sapphic love. I didn’t actually have a Sapphic lover at that point—I was living in the Connecticut suburbs and raising four children largely on my own, which left me a little short on time—but the principle of the matter was that I was a lesbian and, as such, would probably need a companion guide, an instruction manual to show me how to do it properly.

Radclyffe Hall had been born to a wealthy, respectable British family and so had I; she grew up in the English countryside and so did I; she was a writer and so was I. Charitably, I’m going to assume that Lady Fitz-Waterford hadn’t actually read the book—or its famously depressing ending—and that her intentions had been supportive, not cautionary.  

It’s not a very good book. At best, the writing is dated. At worst, it’s embarrassingly mediocre. But its place in history is unique. Up until its publication in 1928, the English ruling classes had been pretending that sex between women didn’t happen—in case innocent young girls were corrupted into thinking it might be fun to try—so the book was banned as soon as it came out. Of course, the furor surrounding the censorship only served to broadcast across the country that lesbian sex was very much a thing and paved the way for Djuna Barnes to write the much better (and more sexually explicit) novel Nightwood, which must have annoyed the British establishment immensely since it was entirely counterproductive to their original aim.

But Nightwood was not the book I read multiple times, nor was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which was published shortly afterward, because I wasn’t looking for literary excellence; I was looking for answers, and each time I read The Well of Loneliness I somehow managed to find them.

The first time I read it I wanted confirmation that the sacrifices I needed to make in the pursuit of true love would be worth it. I was idealistic and naive, certain that my internalized homophobia was the only obstacle standing between myself and eternal happiness; I just needed to figure out how to let go of my past—and the wealthy, white, heterosexual world in which I’d been living—so I could find the woman of my dreams. I devoured The Well of Loneliness in one sitting because I thought it was a book about love and loss, and at the time I felt as if I might lose everything.

The novel’s female protagonist—named Stephen in a surprisingly progressive act of gender-fuckery that I decided not to focus on too closely during that first reading—also had to leave the familiarity and comfort of her homeland before she could find true love, since Paris was the only place to be a lesbian in those days. The book was peppered with longing descriptions of the English countryside, the loss of which could only be justified by Stephen’s desire to live openly with her girlfriend Mary. I could totally identify with this. I was living in self-imposed exile in America, and although I was fully prepared to sacrifice the English countryside at the altar of my desire for a lesbian relationship, I wasn’t so single-minded that I couldn’t indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia now and then.

What I couldn’t identify with, however, was Stephen’s ludicrous decision at the end of the book to send Mary back to England in the arms of a man—the slightly unremarkable Martin—to save her from a life of sexual depravity in Paris. This felt not only like an act of betrayal, but also one of gross stupidity. Wasn’t the whole point of the story that true love—specifically perfect, unadulterated lesbian love—should conquer all? Otherwise why would we be making all these sacrifices? But I reassured myself that lesbian romances weren’t permitted to have happy endings until at least the 1950s (hello The Price of Salt), so this was merely a narrative device that had been designed to rescue the book from censorship. In real life lesbian love would conquer all. Obviously. I mean, we are living in the twenty-first century now. We are allowed to love whomever we choose.

By the second time I read the book, I had grown a little more discerning. I’d divorced my husband, ditched most of my cis-het friends, found my queer community, and was in a complicated relationship with a woman who was sorely testing my faith in the all-conquering power of lesbian love. Yes, I was irrefutably gay, and yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with men, but there was still something missing. I was looking for something else, something beyond my lesbian relationship, something that felt more like an identity.

Yes, I was irrefutably gay, and yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with men, but there was still something missing.

Up until this point I’d presented as femme—due to a second type of internalized phobia that I wasn’t yet willing to look at—but the more comfortable I got with being a lesbian, the more certain I was that my internal dynamic was on the male end of the spectrum. And yet somehow the butch identity didn’t feel right. Memories surfaced of Stephen’s rakishness, her dandyish wardrobe, and I wondered whether there might be a way of being a masculine-presenting lesbian that was a little more foppish, a little less straight-up butch. So I pulled the book back down from my bookshelf.

I was surprised this time by how much page space was dedicated to Stephen’s masculinity, details that I hadn’t noticed the first time. I was looking for descriptions of the clothes she wore, but what kept jumping off the page at me were the moments when she seemed confused by her own body. These little revelations were hidden among the text like Easter eggs, but now they felt more visceral than the lengthy, angst-ridden passages dedicated to forbidden love. Stephen spoke of her discomfort about her “hard, boyish forearms,” “the strong line of her jaw,” which gradually grew into an anxiety she couldn’t name, a feeling of being lost, “a great sense of incompleteness,” and then, suddenly: “It’s my face,” she announced, “something’s wrong with my face.”

The sentence sent a chill down my spine. She’d put words to my feelings, voiced the thought that surfaced every time I looked in the mirror. From inside my muffled state of denial, I could hear her trying to acknowledge her own deep-rooted fear of her emerging masculinity, her powerlessness over a body that seemed to be trying to turn male against her will. 

But for the most part, the rest of the book—when it wasn’t indulging in exhausting descriptions of anguished love—concentrated on Stephen’s desire for gender equality, for a position in society, for the respect of the ruling classes. There was something uncomfortable about her mimicry of upperclass, old-school masculinity—I knew men like these from personal experience and I didn’t like them—but I was interested in her friendship with Martin and her desire for male companionship, although the ending still annoyed me. I understood that Stephen had some kind of martyr complex, but the insistence that Martin take her lover was beginning to look less like an act of grandiose self-sacrifice and more like an act of overt misogyny. Why hadn’t Mary been allowed any say in the matter?

It was around this time that I decided to name myself for the author. I’d just had a story accepted by the New York Times and I didn’t want to write under a name bequeathed to me by either my father or my ex-husband (because patriarchy). Searching in a hurry for something fitting, I’d settled on Radclyffe, not only because she was an English lesbian, but also because she bore an uncanny resemblance to my grandmother, whom I had adored. Naming myself Radclyffe somehow felt like honoring both my grandmother and my lesbianism at the same time, so Radclyffe I became.

By the third time I read the book, I was specifically looking for the things I’d been trying to avoid seeing in the previous readings. I’d addressed my internalized transphobia and accepted my trans-masculinity, and I wanted to find out whether in a moment of uncanny foreshadowing—or perhaps subconscious intention—I had named myself for someone who might also have been trans. 

I was aware that this was a purely theoretical exercise. The difference between butch and trans is one of self-identification—because there isn’t an objectively defined line on either side of which cis and trans people fall—and, given that the term transgender wasn’t coined until 1965, there would be no way to accurately surmise how Radclyffe Hall might identify today. The only label Stephen applied to herself was that of “congenital invert,” which appears to conflate sexual orientation and gender identity, so it’s difficult to extrapolate from the text how much of her anxiety was related to her masculinity, and how much to her gayness.

She spoke of “the terrible nerves of the invert … running like live wires through her body … causing a constant and ruthless torment,” and how she must “drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed upon her spirit,” which sounded suspiciously like gender dysphoria to me, but this described how she felt in childhood, before she had control over her own presentation. I wanted to see if I could find evidence of continued discomfort after Stephen’s butch identity had been actualized; a clue that, like me, identifying as a masculine-presenting woman—and therefore still technically female—hadn’t been enough to relieve her gender dysphoria.

But mostly what I found instead were oblique references to her envy of cis-het masculinity, most notably through the eyes of her dog, who is unapologetic about his preference for male company and always somehow manages to make Stephen feel slightly less than, as if he can smell a whiff of the man about her but is really only humoring her because he loves her. And I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to overlook Stephen’s undeniable misogyny for so long: the superiority, the condescension, the control she exerted over the women she claimed to love.

Radclyffe Hall paints Mary as an ingenue—consistently referring to her as “the girl” or “my child”—enthralled by Stephen’s superior intellect, whose greatest joy is apparently found in mending Stephen’s clothes, cleaning her house, or hovering silently by her side at the Parisian artists’ salons. It was all beginning to feel a little like literary masturbation, as if The Well of Loneliness was an instruction manual written specifically for Hall’s own partner, Lady Una Troubridge, who by all accounts took it to heart and became exactly the kind of “wife” she’d been instructed to be.

I also wasn’t sure whether my new awareness of—and aversion to—these overtly gendered roles was the result of my having worked so hard to purge them from my own life, or a general evolution into a more empathetic, mature human being, or a side effect of early transition. But I was rubber-necking toxic male behavior everywhere now—a precautionary act of vigilance against adopting the same as I became progressively more masculine—so I suspected it was probably a combination of all three.

And yet, I still couldn’t make a clear call on Stephen’s gender until in the final chapters I finally caught a glimpse of something that might speak to a trans identity. Instead of seeing the dismal ending as a betrayal of true love, as I’d done the first time, or as an irritating act of martyrdom as I’d done the second, in this third reading Martin seemed to represent not just the masculine friendship Stephen craved or the male privilege she envied, but the body she wanted to become. At the end of the penultimate chapter, when she decides to bequeath her lover to him, she “found that she was holding his hand.” This strange act of physical contact now made the transaction seem almost supernatural, as if Stephen had sensed that in the absence of gender-affirming surgery, her “incompleteness” could only be resolved by transference into an actual male body, in this case Martin’s.

I decided to do some more reading—of her biographies, letters and lesser known stories—to see if I could bolster this theory. Eventually, I found a short story published a few years later, in which a female protagonist transforms without warning into a prehistoric man while exploring a cave on the English coast. In “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” the author finally seems to rid herself of all inhibition, exposing a desire for masculinity so extreme that she actually manifests as a caveman, complete with supplicating, half-naked female. It’s almost impossible to read this glaringly obvious symbolism as anything other than a fundamental desire to transition, particularly since she ends the story by killing off the protagonist’s female body.

So I finally had an answer, although the research it had taken to get there left me feeling a little queasy, since it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues. For a brief moment I wondered how I could reconcile myself with bearing the name of someone whose views were so diametrically opposite to mine, until I remembered that ugliness can coexist with beauty, that good people can do bad things, and that we can’t always judge the actions of someone in the past based on our own standards in the present, particularly if that involves devaluing the impact they’ve had on our future. Because however problematic Hall’s position on women, race, and class might seem today, she was still a radical progressive in her own time, and her determination to break through the constraints of her gender not only helped to build a society in which trans people like me could eventually exist, but also one in which I could move away from my own unprogressive background with far greater ease.

As guidebooks go, The Well of Loneliness was far from perfect, but celebrating its existence feels more important to me now than dissecting the flaws of its author. The path from cis-het-presenting to queer or trans isn’t an easy one—I don’t know anyone who has managed to navigate it without falling into a few holes along the way—and let’s face it, sometimes we need someone with a bit of bullheaded persistence to hack through the undergrowth and clear a trail for us, however clumsily they may do it, however unlikable it might make them. My own history isn’t exactly unblemished, but if we lived in fear of exposing our faults, then we’d never write our stories, and the one thing I’m certain of is that more of our stories need to be heard. And if I can hold some compassion in my heart for Radclyffe Hall, in all her messy, dysfunctional, human complexity, then maybe I can remember to do the same for myself.

I Found My Queer Guidebook in “The Well of Loneliness”. By Oliver Radclyffe. Electric Literature, February 15, 2022.

Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was subjected to a vicious campaign of attack led by the Sunday Express for its depiction of lesbian relationships, eventually being suppressed and censored in the UK as a piece of “obscene libel”. But the author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a character with whom they could identify.

Seen today as a seminal work of gay literature, The Well of Loneliness tells of the “invert” Stephen Gordon, who realises from a young age that she is attracted to women, dresses in masculine clothes, and falls in love. Hall, a lesbian herself, wrote it to “put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world”. At its raciest, it goes no further than “she kissed her full on the lips, as a lover”, with a night of passion described as “that night they were not divided”. It ends with Stephen’s plea: “Give us also the right to our existence!”

Sunday Express editor James Douglas led a campaign against the novel, writing in his paper: “In order to prevent the contamination and corruption of English fiction it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.” Despite support from writers including Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, it was banned in the UK until 1949, after Hall’s death. But newly revealed papers from the author’s archive, which are set to be digitised by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas alongside those of her partner, the artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, show that the novel was also supported by thousands of readers, who wrote to Hall in outrage at the ban.

 “The picture you paint of the poor invert should make everyone more charitable … No one could finish your book, Miss Hall, without donning a sword and shield forever in the cause of inverts,” wrote one reader from the US, where the novel was not withdrawn despite a challenge, a court declaring it not obscene.

“It has made me want to live and to go on … I discovered myself in Paris and I dreaded this thing which I thought abnormal,” wrote another.

In the UK, an 18-year-old man told Hall he had “experienced many of the terrors of the invert”, hailing her “truly marvellous but searing book”. Others offered to send money to help Hall in an appeal against the judgment, or wrote of how the book changed their perspectives. “At first it repulsed and disgusted, and then the pathos and beauty of it got me, and if I had it in my power to help those poor souls I would have offered my services,” wrote a London correspondent.

Dr Steven Macnamara, who has researched Hall’s papers, said she received “thousands of letters of support”.

“The letters demonstrate the public’s awareness that The Well of Loneliness was not an obscene novel, and that Hall had been unfairly and unjustly treated by the government and the media. Access to these letters, through the future digitalisation project, will enhance the importance and understanding of this groundbreaking novel for Hall’s contemporary readers,” he said.

 

In one letter, a married coal miner in Doncaster wrote that he had “marvelled at the bigoted outlook of so-called ‘thinking men’, who are ashamed to let broader minded folk than themselves delve into the great sex problems”. The miner added: “Some day we will wake up, and demand to know ourselves as we profess to know about everything else.”

The new project will see more than 38,500 images from Hall and Troubridge’s papers digitised and made available online in January 2021. Alongside Hall’s notebooks and drafts for The Well of Loneliness, the archive also includesdiaries, letters – including around 650 that Hall wrote between 1934 and 1942 to Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigrée with whom she had an extended affair – and evidence gathered by Hall’s American lawyer before her obscenity trial in the US in 1929.

In a telegram, physician Dr Logan Clendening writes that “it is incredible to the scientific mind that an honest and sensitive presentation in literary form of a subject familiar and tragic to every physician should be threatened due to the pornographic imagination of a censor.”

Ransom Center director Stephen Enniss said: “The richness and depth of this material goes well beyond the subsequent censorship and cultural controversies sparked by The Well of Loneliness.”

Jana Funke, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and author of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, said the archive also includes early drafts of The Well of Loneliness, which are “more explicit in their depiction of lesbian desire and more affirmative regarding the protagonist’s gender non-conforming identity”. Hall dropped earlier sections from the book “arguably to try and make the book less scandalous – a strategy that obviously failed,” said Funke.

One chapter in an early draft, included in Funke’s book, begins with the protagonist having sex with a woman during wartime at the frontline. “They spoke very little, for the darkness was rent by intolerable noise, and by sudden swift flashes that penetrated even into this darkness between cracks in the war-scarred brickwork,” wrote Hall. “And something, perhaps this near presence of death, seemed to quicken their bodies into agonised loving, so that they felt the throb of their bodies in each separate nerve and muscle and fibre, so that they ceased to be two poor atoms, and became one transient imperative being, having reason for neither good nor evil – the primitive, age-blind life force.”

Funke said that when people read The Well of Loneliness, knowing that it was banned as obscene in the UK, “they are often surprised and disappointed to find that there is no explicit sexual content. It was banned simply because it argued that lesbian sexuality and gender non-conformity should be accepted by society.”

Hall and Troubridge, she added, “are internationally recognised as LGBTQ pioneers, and it is vitally important that audiences around the globe have access to their papers now and in the future”.

 ‘It has made me want to live’: public support for lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall over banned book revealed. By Alison Flood. The Guardian,  January 10, 2019

In July of 1928, three months before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Orlando — a classic celebrated as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which subverted censorship and revolutionized the politics of same-sex love — the English novelist and poet Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880–October 7, 1943) set into motion a cultural revolution. With the publication of The Well of Loneliness (public library), the way gender and sexual identities are formulated and articulated was forever changed.

Hall, born Marguerite Radclyffe Hall but known to her loved ones as John, was an out lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes in a society and era when same-sex love was considered not only immoral but legally punishable. In the spring of 1928, encouraged by the success of her previous writings, Hall warned her publisher, Jonathan Cape, that her next book would require a high degree of faith on his behalf, for she was taking a great personal and cultural risk. “I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world,” she wrote to him in a letter cited in Sally Cline’s biography Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (public library). “So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction,” she added.

Cape, who also published such literary daredevils as Ian Fleming and James Joyce, was willing to take the risk. Hall delivered. The manuscript she turned in was a pioneering inquiry into gender and sexual identity, part social protest against bigotry and part manifesto for equality.

She made her heroine, Stephen Gordon, both a lesbian and unambiguously likable: loyal, tenderhearted, often mistreated, and endowed with what Descartes called “nobility of soul,” that most admirable of virtues. Stephen was animated by one central question: “Why am I as I am — and what am I?” It echoed what young Leo Tolstoy in his diary nearly a century earlier: “This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” For queer people, this question has always been acutely alive, but especially in eras and cultures where not all answers have been acceptable. The devastation of that unacceptability is found in the damning words of Stephen’s mother: “This thing that you are is a sin against creation.” — words strikingly similar to those with which Oliver Sacks’s mother broke her son’s heart. Hall’s intention was that her novel would “speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority” — a minority to which she herself belonged, rendering the book both deeply political and deeply personal.

Many initial reviews were favorable. Some lauded Hall’s countercultural bravery. One reviewer, Vera Brittain, wrote that the novel “can only strengthen the belief of all honest and courageous persons that there is no problem which is not better stated frankly than concealed,” and that “persecution and disgusted ostracism have never saved any difficulty in the world.”

But the vociferous editor of the Sunday Express, a man named James Douglas, did what critics — especially self-satisfied male critics — do to this day upon encountering art they don’t understand or find personally objectionable: He argued that it was not a work of art but immoral propaganda and wrote that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” Douglas launched a concerted campaign to suppress the book, which rose all the way up to Britain’s Home Secretary — a man so conservative that, in addition to attempting to ban alcohol and nightclubs, he had opposed a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer.

 Despite an outcry by some of the era’s most venerated writers and intellectuals, Douglas’s tireless bullying pushed matters to court and a trial for obscenity began on November 9, 1928. (Lest we forget the gravity of those charges, a generation earlier Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison for his homosexuality under similar charges of obscenity.)

Hall’s publisher and his team mailed 160 letters to potential witnesses who would be willing to stand against the censorship. Many never responded. Some gave unimaginative pretexts for why they couldn’t help. H.G. Wells declined, saying he was going abroad; he might as well have claimed to be mounting his time machine. In a letter to her nephew penned eight days before the trial, Virginia Woolf lamented the collective cowardice behind the litany of excuses:

  “Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins.”

Among the courageous were fifty-seven esteemed writers and scientists, many of whom were ready to defend the novel’s social and political function as a call for equality and freedom, despite doubting its literary merit. Vita Sackville-West — Woolf’s longtime lover and the inspiration for her own censorship-subverting queer classic — went to the trial ready to testify. The Bloomsbury set were particularly troubled on creative grounds. Lytton Starchey, one of Woolf’s dearest friends and a queer man himself, agreed to take the witness stand, but not without noting in a letter to E.M. Forster — also a willing witness — that “the book itself is pretty frightful.”

Woolf herself was reluctantly willing to be a witness on account of the novel’s political significance and her contempt for censorship, but dreaded defending what she considered to be a “pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about the court” — writing, in other words, afflicted with the malady of middlebrow. So when the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that writers couldn’t testify as experts on obscenity, only on art, which wasn’t permitted as evidence, she was immensely relieved to be dismissed from witness duty.

Woolf captured the larger significance of the trial in her diary:

“What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject & the treatment?”

A week later, Sir Biron ruled that the novel was obscene, ordering that it be destroyed and that the defendants pay court costs. The decision was appealed in a second trial — in which Rudyard Kipling was summoned and never actually used as a witness — but after deliberating for only five minutes, the five new magistrates upheld the original decision. Across the Atlantic, Alfred A. Knopf, who had acquired the American rights, cowered from publishing a book censored by its country of origin.

In a letter Woolf co-wrote with to E.M. Forster, she once again captured the grim enormity of the implications: 

“ Novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention [lesbianism]… Although forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? … Writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. A novelist may not wish to treat any of the subjects mentioned above but the sense that they are prohibited or prohibitable, that there is a taboo-list, will work on him and will make him alert and cautious instead of surrendering himself to his creative impulses. And he will tend to cling to subjects that are officially acceptable, such as murder and adultery, and to shun anything original lest it lead him into forbidden areas.”

And yet The Well of Loneliness made its way into the body of culture. In America, the publishers Pascal Covici (who would later join Viking and become John Steinbeck’s fairy godfather) and Donald Friede took a $10,000 bank loan — around $137,000 in today’s money — in order to purchase the rights from Cape. They enlisted the help of Morris Ernst, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and set about defending the book against censorship. To protect booksellers from being targeted, Friede reached out to the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and offered to sell him a copy of the book directly. But even before Friede and Covici were taken to court, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first year — despite its price point at $5, twofold the average for fiction, proving Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “repressing ideas spreads ideas.”

Eventually, the NYPD invaded the publisher’s New York offices and confiscated 865 copies of the book. But under U.S. federal law, literary merit was allowed as evidence against changes of obscenity, unlike during the U.K. trial, so Covici and Friede assembled a formidable roster of writers to stick up for the novel — including Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ernst argued for the novel’s value as a protest against intolerance and a tool of social justice. After a series of contentious legal battles, justice prevailed on August 19, 1929: New York’s Court of Special Sessions ruled that Hall dealt with “a delicate social problem,” which in itself didn’t violate the law and therefore merited her novel’s free circulation. All charges were dropped and Radclyffe Hall went on to become a cultural icon.

As Lillian Faderman writes in her excellent book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (public library), queer women in America came to call Hall “Our Matron Saint” and one mid-century op-ed proposed that the “inelegant word butch” be replaced with clyffe. Today, Hall’s influence can be traced to lesbian icons like Adrienne Rich, Jeanette Winterson, and Audre Lorde, and the cultural significance of her work finds no greater testament than in Lorde’s assertion the “visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

 

November 9, 1928: The Trial of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf’s Exquisite Case for the Freedom of Speech. By Maria Popova. The Marginalian, November 9, 2016. 

How the Adani Group Gets Away With Destroying Communities in India For Coal-Fired Power, One of the Dirtiest Fuel Sources on the Planet

 

In a lined notebook, Bhole Nath Singh Armo, a lean 28-year-old man wearing a blue shirt and matching baseball cap, drew a map of his village. He pointed his pen at the middle to mark the temple where the village deity had lived. To the west, he noted a settlement of more than 200 houses where he, his father and his grandfather were born and raised. Then, to the north, another temple for a female deity. This was how his village, Kete, looked until nine years ago, when it was destroyed by a company controlled by a $260bn conglomerate. The conglomerate is named after its owner, Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani.

The village was located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, on the edge of the dense Hasdeo Arand forest. One of India’s few pristine and contiguous tracts of forest, Hasdeo Arand sprawls across more than 1,500 sq km. The land is home to rare plants such as epiphytic orchids and smilax, endangered animals such as sloth bears and elephants, and sal trees so tall they seem to brush against the sky.

The forest also contains an estimated 5bn tonnes of coal. This coal is located close to the surface, which makes it easy to mine. The federal government has divided the region into 23 “coal blocks”, six of which it has approved for mining. The Adani Group has bagged the contracts to mine four of those six, including the one that encompasses Kete and adjoining villages. The construction of these mines will destroy at least 1,898 hectares of forest land. The specific coal block under Kete has about 450m tonnes of coal, worth about $5bn.

India is the world’s second-largest producer and consumer of coal (after China), and Kete’s story is just like others playing out all across the country. In 1998 it was calculated that more than 2.5 million Indians had been displaced by mining projects since 1950; many, many more will have been displaced in the years since. The coal sector generates about 70% of the country’s annual electricity and employs at least 2.9 million people. While India has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, it has no plans to phase out coal.

 That’s bad news for the environment – coal-fired power is one of the dirtiest fuel sources on the planet – but good news for corporations like Adani. Over the last three decades, Adani has built his mammoth conglomerate by penetrating almost every sector of India’s economy, from sewage treatment to data processing, edible oil to solar panels, transport to media. Even the apples on sale in my neighbourhood in New Delhi have Adani’s sticker on them. Among these many ventures, few are more profitable than coal. Until a few years ago, more than 90% of India’s coal has been mined by government-owned companies. However, in recent years, prime minister Narendra Modi’s administration has increasingly turned to private companies to do this work. One of the chief beneficiaries of this shift has been Adani.

As Gautam Adani continues to expand his empire, his influence at the top levels of Indian government has come under scrutiny. Adani works very closely with influential political figures, journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told me before an Indian court issued a gagging order against him for apparently defaming the billionaire. “Call it crony capitalism, call it oligarchy, call it regulatory capture, this is the story of Adani in a nutshell,” he said.

Activists, researchers and politicians have raised concerns about how Adani wins its mining contracts and how the company, working with the government, acquires mining land from indigenous communities. There are also questions about alleged preferential treatment by state governments in awarding contracts to Adani, though the company has consistently denied any such claims. “Adani is a master manipulator,” argues Alok Shukla, the coordinator of a network of human rights groups in Chhattisgarh. Shukla added that Adani’s power and money has had a powerful, negative effect on communities and local governments across India. In October 2021, hundreds of villagers from Hasdeo Arand walked 300km over 10 days to Chhattisgarh’s capital, Raipur, demanding the cancellation of all coalmining projects in the forest.

Adani is the third-richest man in the world, and his influence extends way beyond India. In Queensland, Australia, his company has developed the Carmichael open-pit coalmine, a hugely controversial project built on land that some local indigenous groups claimed was obtained without their permission, though they lost their legal bid to block the mine on this basis. More recently, Adani became the focus of protest in the UK, after the London Science Museum announced that it would be opening an Energy Revolution gallery, focusing on green energy, in 2023, with sponsorship from an Adani subsidiary.

Adani’s representatives have long denied allegations of obtaining land through underhand tactics. “As a responsible corporate citizen, the Adani Group has always conducted its operations in total compliance within the laws of the country,” a spokesperson for the Adani Group told me via email. “The Adani Group remains aligned with India’s position on sustainability,” they continued, adding that the company plans to spend more than $70bn on “the Energy Transition space” in the next decade, with huge investments in renewables such as green hydrogen, solar energy and wind. “This puts us well on track to be the world’s largest renewable power generating company by 2030.”

 Although Gautam Adani is almost always in the news, he rarely grants interviews. He is ubiquitous and elusive at the same time. The company’s global headquarters is in Ahmedabad, the biggest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, but its power is felt most acutely in small villages across the country. Critics say that the methods Adani has used to acquire consent from communities for industrial development demonstrate the “quiet” ways in which large corporations now operate, in India and elsewhere, to ensure they get what they want.

I met Bhole and his elder cousin Patar Sai Armo in late 2020, at a small detergent factory they have built about a four-hour drive from their former home in Kete. The cousins are Gond, one of the 700 indigenous tribes in India, many of whom live in remote forested areas. About 9% of 1.3 billion people in India belong to these tribes, which are collectively called Adivasis. Many of them earn less than a dollar a day.

Although these communities have been living in the forests for thousands of years, it wasn’t until 2006 that a law was passed to formally recognise their rights over their land. But that was not enough to preserve Kete. In order to reconstruct what happened, I tracked down and interviewed more than a dozen families who used to live there and are now scattered across Chhattisgarh. I also interviewed local shopkeepers and journalists, and government officers who worked in the area between 2009 and 2014.

“They came with machines,” said Patar, recalling the day in 2008 when he first saw outsiders arrive in the village. The survey equipment – the machines that Patar referred to – included a big camera placed on a yellow tripod. When the men told the villagers that they had come to survey the area for a proposed coalmine, they were met with anger. A couple of weeks later, the village chiefs told locals that the company that would be mining the coal under Kete was named Adani.

Adani’s precise role in the story of this coalmine is somewhat disputed. What seems certain is that in 2007, the Indian government allotted the coal block under Kete, called Parsa East Kete Basan, to an electricity company owned by the government of Rajasthan. That same year, RVUNL, as the electricity company is known, formed a joint venture with Adani Enterprises. While RVUNL owns the mine itself, Adani owns 74% of the joint venture, which is named Parsa Kente Collieries Limited (PKCL). In July 2008, the electricity company signed a contract with the Adani-controlled joint venture to develop the coalmine. (The electricity company, RVUNL, did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Adani Group spokesperson claimed that Adani’s role in developing the mine was limited. RVUNL “appointed Adani Enterprises as a mining contractor through transparent competitive bidding”, said the spokesperson. The company’s role, they continued, was just to undertake mining operations and supply washed coal, as per the terms of the Coal Mining Delivery Agreement.

However, the agreement between RVUNL and the Adani-controlled joint-venture seems to suggest the latter had a broader role. The scope of the joint venture’s work, according to the agreement, involved obtaining the clearances and licences required for land acquisition, rehabilitation, resettlement and mining of coal. The contract also says that the joint venture will bear all expenses, including the cost of acquisition of land, and no expenses and liabilities shall be borne or shared by RVUNL. (In July 2009, the joint venture also subcontracted Adani for development and operations of the Parsa East Kete Basan coal block.)

 Testimony from local villagers supports the view that Adani had a broader role in the project. They told me that Adani representatives had started to come to their villages years before the mining began, and would introduce themselves as Adani employees. They claim these employees would try to persuade the villagers to agree to give up their land for coalmining. Numerous villagers told me that it was a long time before they heard any references to entities such as RVUNL. Nor were people using the name of the Adani-owned joint venture. The name they heard most often was Adani.

In the beginning, the villagers were united against the mine, Bhole told me. Life in Kete, as in many Indian villages, was hierarchical. At the top were people who came from the oldest families in the village, or who were born into higher castes or had more money. Lower-rank Adivasis would follow their orders. But according to several villagers, locals of all social rankings were opposed to the development plans. Together, multiple villagers told me, they wrote letters to the local government stating that they didn’t want to give up their land. Those who couldn’t write added their thumbprints in support. When representatives from Adani or the government came to Kete to talk about the mine, villagers held protests.

Yet over the next four years, opposition to the mine steadily dissipated. In early 2009, Adani hired Rakesh Yadav, who had previously won the villagers’ trust through his work for an NGO that ran welfare activities, such as vaccinating cattle and helping locals improve farm yields. Two members of the local elite, Mani and Kailash, told me that Yadav would meet with them regularly to explain that it was in the villagers’ financial interest to sell their land. They were told to pass on the message to the villagers. (Mani and Kailash are not their real names. They agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, as Adani hired them in the early 2010s and they continue to work there. Rakesh Yadav is also a pseudonym.)

Initially, Mani and Kailash didn’t want the coalmine in the village, and for a while they resisted. But after about a year, they told me that Yadav started giving them 5,000 rupees (around £50) each in cash every month, the equivalent of a local Adivasi family’s monthly income. At first, Yadav said he didn’t want anything in return, recalled Mani, but over time, he started asking them to use the money to organise “parties” before crucial village meetings about the coalmine. At the parties, between 15 and 20 men would gather to drink and feast. Mani alleges that the idea behind these parties was to get these men drunk and ask them to give their consent in the village meetings. Although they were not Adani employees at this stage, Mani and Kailash began to be seen as Adani’s representatives, or brokers, in the village. (The villagers told me about two other locals who performed a similar role to Mani and Kailash, but when I met these two individuals, they were reluctant to comment because, like Mani and Kailash, they were now employed by Adani.)

According to numerous former Kete residents, as time passed, Adani inserted itself into the town’s social fabric, organising community meals and football tournaments, and paying for cultural festivals. Many villagers told me that Yadav, Mani and Kailash let them know that if they needed financial assistance for weddings or funerals, they could just ask Adani. “Suddenly there was this sense in the village that there is lots of money around us and we could get it, if we wanted,” said Bhole. “The whole atmosphere had changed.” Yadav said that Adani organised football tournaments, but when I asked him whether the company paid for those tournaments and other local festivals, he declined to comment. But Adani’s website says that as part of the welfare activities in relation to this coalmine, the company has built a school and a football academy in a nearby city to “nurture and nourish the aspiration of tribal youth.” (Since we first spoke in late 2020, I have tried to contact Yadav for further clarification, but he has not responded to my requests.)

Having started out protesting against the mine, from around 2010 many locals stopped resisting. Some Adivasis started approaching Yadav and other representatives from Adani whenever they needed money. “People thought that their land is going to go, so it is better to take whatever they can from the company,” said Bhole.

But when I visited the area, many displaced Adivasis told me that they now felt they had been played by Adani and the local government. “It was a set-up,” said Patar, “which fooled us into giving our land.”

 

 

If violent struggles over land were once central to the business of large-scale industrial mining, in recent years a new pattern has emerged. According to Matthew Himley, professor of geography at Illinois State University, who researches extractive industries’ activity in Peru, over the past couple of decades mining companies have adopted subtler strategies. This kind of approach – which some researchers call the “social engineering of extraction” – has played out across the world from Zambia to Peru and Canada.

The process is gradual. According to a number of academics I spoke to, when a mining company encounters resistance to their plans, they seek out people from within the community who could become the company’s eyes, ears and voice in the village. These people are paid, or given other perks, to persuade – or, in the view of critics of this strategy, manipulate – locals to support the project. Sometimes this can involve exploiting existing divisions in the community, such as the caste hierarchy in Indian villages. Some companies even hire social scientists to study community dynamics for them. Local governments are often aware of these strategies, but remain silent. Through the brokers, the mining company starts supporting local community initiatives. It also begins to plug the gaps in services such as health and schooling, at least at first. Gradually, a sufficient number of people are won over to the industrial project that the village’s unity begins to break.

The “social engineering of extraction” sounds sinister, but some argue that what is being described is just persuasion. After all, funding local initiatives, health and education sounds like a good thing. Kamalpreet Singh, who, between mid-2009 and early 2011, held the highest administrative post in the district where the Parsa East Kete Basan coalmine is located, denies that the methods used in Kete were manipulative. “What you may define as manipulation,” he said, “somebody else can say, ‘I am trying to convince the public.’”

 Leah Horowitz, a cultural geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes a different view. “It stops being persuasion and becomes manipulation when you’re offering someone something they don’t feel that they can refuse,” she said. This kind of process, Horowitz added, is shaped by massively unequal power dynamics between the corporations, local elites and villagers. In many cases, the latter are very poor and have not been empowered to make informed choices. Shukla, the Chhattisgarh-based activist, put it like this: “How can you even expect villagers to give a free and informed consent in such compromised situations?”

 

Gautam Adani, a college dropout, made his fortune in the late 1980s trading plastic granules. The following decade, he built what is now India’s largest port, at Mundra on the Gujarati coast. Adani has always had the gift of good timing. He started trading coal just as India’s energy sector was booming. When Narendra Modi became Gujarat’s chief minister in 2001, and was eager to brand himself as a business-friendly leader after sectarian riots in 2002 had scared off investors, Adani quickly became one of the leading investors in the state. By 2006, Adani had entered natural gas distribution, oil exploration and real estate. Then, around 2007, he started building coal-fired power plants – first in Gujarat, then beyond.

Over the next few years, as Adani’s company continued to grow at breakneck speed, some observers began to suspect that it was being given preferential treatment by the Gujarat state government, led by Modi, though Adani has denied this. It was later revealed by India’s national auditor that, between 2006 and 2009, the Gujarat government sold natural gas to Adani at below-market rates. According to a 2013 report in the Economic Times, several senior Gujarat government officers had been given jobs at Adani following their retirement from public service. In the same report, a Gujarat-based lawyer, Anand Yagnik, claimed that “[more than] 20 lawyers who fought cases against the Adani Group are now on its retainership”. Today, Yagnik told me, there are now only two lawyers in the Gujarat high court who will take on cases against Adani – and he is one of them. (Adani denies that its dealings in Gujarat were in any way improper or unusual. “The Adani Group has a successful track record of implementing and operating large projects across India with support from the state governments governed by different political parties,” said a spokesperson.)

Criminal and journalistic investigations into alleged corruption seemed to have little impact on Adani’s growth. In 2011, an anti-corruption office in the southern state of Karnataka found Adani to be one of a number of companies involved in a scam to trade iron illegally – though Adani denied that this finding was accurate. Apparently untroubled by these findings, in early 2014 Modi used Adani’s private jet while campaigning to become India’s prime minister. He won the election in May. Two months later, Adani was given environmental clearance to continue running a Special Economic Zone – where companies can enjoy perks such as tax exemptions and duty free imports – near Mundra port, putting an end to almost a decade of legal disputes surrounding the project.

Adani, now 60, is one of the leading beneficiaries of the Modi government’s stated agenda of promoting “ease of doing business”. In practice, this has often involved weakening environmental laws and democratic decision-making structures. Since Modi became prime minister, industrial and infrastructure projects have generally received quicker approval, certain polluting industries have been exempted from routine inspections, and emissions standards have been relaxed. Some policy changes, such as amendments to India’s Forest Conservation Act, have taken power out of the hands of the Adivasis and given it to local governments.

For Adani, during the Modi years, it seems doing business has indeed become easier. But in a 2014 interview with Reuters, he rejected any suggestion that his personal closeness with Modi had brought him commercial advantages. “Crony capitalism should not be there. I definitely agree with that. But how you define crony capitalism is another issue,” said Adani. “If you are, basically, working closely with the government, that doesn’t mean it’s crony capitalism.”

 

Before any development project can be undertaken in a forested area in India, permission must be granted for clearance, a process overseen by the federal environment ministry. Every application must include letters stating that at least half of all adult members of a village that depend on the forest give their consent to the project. The application also requires proof that villagers have been provided with the full details of the proposal, including its environmental and social impact, and the relocation plan for displaced communities. It is also necessary to demonstrate that the communities understood the information.

Former residents of Kete, who are now scattered across Chhattisgarh, say that these standards were not met. They allege that local elected officials, working with Adani representatives, forged documents, failed to inform the villagers about crucial meetings and withheld important information about the coal project. Some told me that the officials leading the meetings mostly talked about the benefits of coalmining in the area, and the jobs it would bring, rather than about the pollution and environmental destruction involved. Some villagers said that they were often asked to sign or put their thumbprint on plain registers without any matter written on them. In at least one instance, a Kete villager told a local journalist, who was working with me on this story, that he was shocked to see that someone had printed his name and signature in a letter supporting the coalmine, even though he had been opposed to it.

The villagers’ allegations are partly supported by a May 2011 inspection of coalmining projects in Hasdeo Arand commissioned by the national environment minister. The subsequent report concluded that the Adivasis in the Kete area earmarked for clearance did not fully understand their rights, and had not been fully informed about their relocation. It recommended that the project should not be approved.

Yet less than a year later, in March 2012, overlooking these discrepancies and disagreeing with its own ministry’s inspection report, the environment ministry gave clearance to raze the forest. In a statement published around the same time, the environment minister explained why he had not followed the recommendations of the inspection report. Among other reasons, he said that he had to take into account India’s energy requirements and broader development. He also stated that he had received a stream of letters from the Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan governments asking him to give permission for developing Parsa East Kete Basan.

 

When Kete residents learned that the deal was done, they were told their compensation cheques were ready to be collected. Some of the villagers told me that they were confused because they couldn’t recall consenting to the coalmine. But now the money was there, and there was a lot of it.

Patar’s family received 7m rupees (around £70,000), and Bhole’s family received 8.6m rupees (around £85,000) – about 40 times the annual income they made by selling forest produce such as flowers and mushrooms. In no time, almost every house in Kete had cars or motorbikes or tractors. Some had all three. Villagers had been told that Kete would be destroyed, and a new settlement would be created nearby, in Basen village, where they could move if they wanted. In February 2013, Adani workers began mining the land around Kete.

While Bhole and Patar acknowledged that the compensation money has helped them restart their life – they have used some of that money to build their detergent factory – their life in Kete was good the way it was, they said. Many former residents of Kete later told me that they had felt powerless to resist the development of the mine because they were convinced the local government was not on their side. Between 2009 and 2010, government officers and Adani representatives would often travel to the village together, they said. On one occasion in 2009, they said, a government officer, who was accompanied by police, threatened to have the villagers arrested if they obstructed the mine development work. One former resident, Kanwal Sai Warkade, claimed that an officer asked Kete villagers, “Do you want to eat your meals in jail?” When the villagers requested the officers’ support because they didn’t want to sell their land, they say they were ignored. And while villagers were repeatedly told their lives would improve if they gave up their land, they claim that they were not told that they had the legal right to veto the project. “For generations we lived our lives without knowing or caring whether we even had rights and what we could do with them. And nobody told us,” said Patar. “This is what companies take advantage of.”

Allegations of similar tactics have been made in relation to Ghatbarra, a village of about 300 families near Kete, where 32 residents handed over their individual forest titles – documents that prove Adivasi ownership of the forest land they have been using to live and earn a living – to Adani in 2019. The cheques some of them received in return mention Adani Enterprises as the purchaser. Ghatbarra has been marked for elimination in the next phase of coal block mining in the area, which is expected to begin in 2028. One of those 32 villagers is an elderly man I met in October 2020. I am not revealing his name in the story to protect his identity. He told me that he had sold his forest title because he’d been warned by a member of the village elite, who is employed by Adani, that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t get the compensation that other villagers would receive. His nephew, who lives nearby, told me that the family felt that they had no choice. “Most people from my community don’t want to give their land,” he said. But he belongs to a lower Adivasi tribe that has less power to negotiate such matters. “We fear speaking up” in front of the village elites, he told me.

However, Amresh Prasad Markam, who was Ghatbarra’s chief between 2010 and early 2020, said that Adivasis “were eager to sell” their titles to get money. Markam said that, as in Kete, Adani provided money for weddings and other rituals in Ghatbarra.

 

One night, in a village close to Ghatbarra, Adivasis were celebrating Karma, a local festival. Men wore big anklets and peacock feathers on their backs as they sang and danced around a tree branch they had brought from Hasedo Arand that morning. They had stuck the branch into the ground to worship it. As they danced under the moonlight, they prayed for protection from evil.

The festival travels from village to village. Next it was going to Ghatbarra, where the tide may be turning against Adani. In the local elections in early 2020, the village elected Jainandan Porte as its chief. Porte has been campaigning against the coalmine in Ghatbarra for almost a decade. He claims that the consent letter from a 2019 village assembly meeting, on the basis of which the government has approved the second phase of mining that will consume Ghatbarra, contained fake signatures. “The document has signatures of three people who had died years before 2019,” he told me. He claimed that some signatures on the document bore the names of villagers who cannot write. He has asked the Chhattisgarh government to investigate how the consent was taken, but the government has taken no action so far.

Porte acknowledged that Ghatbarra is divided on the coalmining issue, but he believes his election victory shows that people “in their heart don’t want the coalmine”. He is determined to reunite the Ghatbarra’s community, which is the only way he thinks he can save the village from Adani’s bulldozers.

But based on their experience, Adivasis who once lived in Kete, now divided and scattered, have little faith that Porte will succeed. Ultimately Ghatbarra will meet the same fate as Kete, Bhole told me: “It is guaranteed.” In September this year, the local government, in the presence of the police, began tree-cutting in Ghatbarra forest to prepare the area for coalmining, while some villagers continue to protest. Giving ongoing protests against coalmines in Hasdeo Arand as the reason, Chhattisgarh’s chief minister, Bhupesh Baghel, wrote to the federal environment ministry in November, asking it to cancel the clearance given to Parsa coal block. (Like Parsa East Kete Basan, the Parsa coal block is owned by RVUNL with mining operations contracted to Adani.)

During my time in the area, I visited Bhole’s parents in Mohanpur, the village where they moved after their home in Kete was destroyed. In the middle of sprawling rice fields, which had turned greenish-brown in October’s harvesting season, they were using sickles to cut rice stalks. Their bare feet were covered with the slushy mud. “Living here feels like punishment,” said Bhole’s father, Kalyan Ram, when we sat down in a nearby field to talk. “My heart is not here.”

Kalyan and his wife, Teejmati, said that they felt very lonely in Mohanpur. They hesitated to ask other villagers for help, so they spent most of their time working in their rice field. “I won’t be able to forget Kete until I die,” Kalyan said as his eyes glistened under the strong sun. “I feel as if I am looking at it right now.” Teejmati looked away, blinking, and then down at the orange and golden bangles that partly covered her tattooed hands.

Every Kete family I met expressed similar feelings of longing. They missed their community and the forest that was destroyed by Adani’s bulldozers in the years after 2012. “My house comes into my dreams,” one told me. Another, Dharam Sai Kusro, now lives in a village about 7km from the mine. He avoids the road that leads to the mine. Seeing what became of his old home is too painful. “I tear up,” he said.

 When I visited, just nine Kete families were living in the Basen resettlement, which is about 2km from the mine and contains around 60 houses. Most Kete villagers instead used their compensation money to build houses in other villages and towns. Some described the resettlement as a “joke”, because the houses had just two tiny rooms, much too small for their multi-generational families. The Adivasis I spoke to told me about other promises that they say had not been kept. As recently as 2016, Kete villagers were writing to the local government to complain that many local Adivasis were still waiting for jobs that had been promised to them.

As I wandered through Basen, most houses were vacant. The health centre was shut. Outside it, garbage was piling up. Streetlights didn’t turn on. One woman I met, Gangawati, was living in one of Basen’s tiny houses with her two children and her husband. All four share one room; the other is used as a kitchen. They’ve chosen to live here, rather than with Gangawati’s inlaws, because of the short commute it gives her husband, an electrician who works for Adani. “I feel embarrassed when guests visit us. We have no place to seat them,” Gangawati said. Her old house in Kete had 18 rooms. She set up plastic chairs outside her house. “Think where would I seat you if it were raining?”

The people of Kete who I spoke to were mourning the loss of something hard to measure: the feeling of community. The resettlement with a few tiny houses is nowhere close to what a village means to them. After being displaced, Kete’s villagers have found it hard to integrate themselves in the community and rituals of their new village or town. “The thing is you can never build a village by uprooting a village,” said Shukla, the Chhattisgarh-based activist. You cannot restore the relationships Adivasis had with each other and their forest. “A village has a culture. A soul of its own.”

 Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Lalan Singh Dhurve, a journalist based in Surguja in Chhattisgarh, contributed reporting.

 

‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village : In a pristine forest in central India, the multibillion-dollar mining giant Adani has razed trees – and homes – to dig more coal. How does this kind of destruction get the go-ahead? By  Ankur Paliwal. The Guardian, December 20, 2022.

GODDA, India — For years, nothing could stop the massive coal-fired power plant from rising over paddies and palm groves here in eastern India.

Not objections from local farmers, environmental impact review boards, even state officials. Not pledges by India’s leaders to shift toward renewable energy.

Not the fact that the project, ultimately, will benefit few Indians. When the plant comes online, now scheduled for next week, all of the electricity it generates is due to be sold at a premium to neighboring Bangladesh, a heavily indebted country that has excess power capacity and doesn’t need more, documents show.

The project, however, will benefit its builder, Gautam Adani, an Indian billionaire who according to Global Energy Monitor is the largest private developer of coal power plants and coal mines in the world. When his companies’ stock peaked in September, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranked Adani as the second-richest person on the planet, behind Elon Musk.

For decades, Indian officials have rebuffed Western pleas to phase out coal, a reliable but dirty energy source that produces one-fifth of all planet-warming carbon emissions. India’s fast-developing economy — it is the world’s second-largest consumer of coal and third-largest carbon emitter — must burn coal for several more decades out of necessity, not choice, they say.

“Critics would have us instantly get rid of all fossil fuel sources that India needs to serve a large population,” Adani, 60, told a conference in Singapore in September. “This would not work for India.”

But the story of Adani’s power plant in Godda offers a stark example of how political will in India often bends in favor of the dirty fuel — and the business titan who dominates the country’s coal industry.

More than two dozen interviews with current and former Indian officials, former Adani Group employees, industry executives and experts, and a review of hundreds of pages of company and government documents, including a confidential power purchase agreement, reveal how Indian officials repeatedly facilitated a project that seemed to make little economic sense.

They also illustrate the remarkable influence of a self-made billionaire whose ascent was closely tied to the rise of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. In 2015, Modi laid the groundwork for the Godda plant during a state visit to Bangladesh. It was part of a larger pattern.

After a senior Indian official opposed supplying coal at a discount to tycoons, including Adani, he was removed from his job by the Modi administration. When a local lawmaker led a hunger strike to protest the power station, he was jailed for six months.

On at least three occasions, according to officials and documents, the government revised laws to help Adani’s coal-related businesses and save him at least $1 billion. That came even as Modi told the United Nations he would tax coal and ramp up renewable energy.

In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesman for the Adani Group did not address the Godda plant or Adani’s relationship with Modi but said the company plans to invest heavily in renewable energy and gradually shift away from coal. Modi’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Indian officials have said that they are making an earnest attempt to roll out renewable energy, and that they hope to meet half of India’s electricity needs from those sources by 2030 and aim to reach net-zero emissions by 2070.

Today, the Adani Group owns eight airports and 13 seaports. It has rapidly diversified into the media, defense and cement sectors and even become one of India’s leading renewable energy suppliers. Adani’s net worth skyrocketed from $9 billion in 2020 to $127 billion this month.

Still, more than 60 percent of the Adani Group’s revenue is derived from coal-related businesses, according to his seven publicly traded companies’ quarterly reports and industry experts. Those businesses include four coal power plants, 18 coal mines and a coal-trading operation responsible for a quarter of imports into India, which relies on coal for 75 percent of its power generation.

 Even within a portfolio so vast, few assets speak to Adani’s influence like the two cooling towers and a smokestack that loom over the Godda countryside.

One recent morning, after monsoon rains had washed away the dust and heat, a bricklayer named Bachchan Yadav recalled the day Adani representatives first showed up at the local crossing.

That was before villagers found out about the project and rallied against it, before hundreds of police officers charged at protesters with batons and jailed their leader, before Chinese engineers arrived by the busload and a hulking plant replaced what used to be fields of rice and chickpeas.

The villagers were naive then, the bricklayer said. They didn’t know whom or what they were up against.

“Bada aadmi, badi baat,” he sighed.

A big man, a big deal.

 ‘Absolute gouge’

In June 2015, Modi swept into Dhaka for his first trip to Bangladesh, a friendly neighbor with deep cultural and trade ties to India. Modi’s two-day visit was productive: He led prayers at the Hindu Dhakeshwari Temple, settled a 40-year-long border dispute and inked a $4.5 billion deal for India’s state-owned and private companies to sell electricity to Bangladesh.

One of the power projects would be built by Adani, who had provided a corporate jet for Modi to use during his political campaign and accompanied the newly elected prime minister on his first visits to Canada and France. After Modi’s trip to Bangladesh, that country’s power authority contracted with Adani to build a $1.7 billion, 1,600-megawatt coal power plant. It would be situated 60 miles from the border, in a village in Godda district.

At the time, the project was seen as a win-win.

For Modi, it was an opportunity to bolster his “Neighborhood First” foreign policy and promote Indian business. Modi asked Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to “facilitate the entry of Indian companies in the power generation, transmission and distribution sector of Bangladesh,” according to an Indian Foreign Ministry readout of their meeting.

For her part, Hasina envisioned lifting her country into middle-income status by 2020. Electricity demand from Bangladesh’s humming garment factories and booming cities would triple by 2030, the government estimated.

But the confidential 163-page power purchase agreement obtained by The Washington Post, and reviewed by three industry analysts at The Post’s request, suggests the 25-year Godda deal is hardly favorable for Bangladesh.

 After the plant comes online, Bangladesh must pay Adani roughly $450 million a year in capacity and maintenance charges regardless of whether it generates any electricity — a steep price by industry standards, according to Tim Buckley, a Sydney-based energy finance analyst. It’s not clear when Bangladesh will actually receive power, because it has not finished its portion of the transmission line. And the plant may not even be needed: Bangladesh now has 40 percent more power generation capacity than peak demand, according to government figures, thanks to years of investment in coal- and gas-fired power stations.

Then there is the cost of coal, which has tripled since war erupted in Ukraine in late February. Other agreements with foreign power suppliers, also seen by The Post, include clauses that would put a cap on the prices Bangladesh pays if the cost of coal skyrockets, but the Godda agreement stipulates that Bangladesh will pay the market price.

And the coal for Godda will probably be supplied by Adani’s own empire. The project’s environmental paperwork shows that 7 million tons a year will be transported from overseas. Industry analysts say the coal will probably come on Adani ships to an Adani-owned port in eastern India, then arrive at the plant on a stretch of Adani-built rail. The electricity generated will be sent to the border over an Adani-built high-voltage line. Under the contract, shipping and transmission costs will be passed on to Bangladesh.

All told, Bangladesh would buy Adani’s electricity at more than five times the market price of bulk electricity in the country, according to Buckley, a longtime energy analyst at major financial firms who focuses, in part, on South Asian markets. Even with coal prices returning to prewar levels, he said, Adani’s power would cost Bangladesh 33 percent more per kilowatt-hour than the publicly disclosed cost of running Bangladesh’s domestic coal-fired plant.

When compared with that of Bangladesh’s Kaptai solar farm, Adani’s power could be five times as expensive.

“It’s an absolute gouge,” Buckley said.

Hasan Mehedi, a Bangladeshi environmental campaigner who tracks the power industry, said 60 percent of his country’s power plants sit idle on a typical day. He added that the Godda plant will further tie Bangladesh’s future to coal.

“It kicks out space for solar, which is cheaper,” Mehedi said. “But poor communities in one of the hot spots in the global climate crisis will pay more for coal power they don’t need.”

Facing a looming power glut, Bangladesh in 2021 canceled 10 out of 18 planned coal power projects. Mohammad Hossain, a senior power official, told reporters that there was “concern globally” about coal and that renewables were cheaper.

But Adani’s project will proceed. B.D. Rahmatullah, a former director general of Bangladesh’s power regulator, who also reviewed the Adani contract, said Hasina cannot afford to anger India, even if the deal appears unfavorable.

“She knows what is bad and what is good,” he said. “But she knows, ‘If I satisfy Adani, Modi will be happy.’ Bangladesh now is not even a state of India. It is below that.”

 A spokesman for Hasina and senior Bangladeshi energy officials did not respond to a detailed list of questions and repeated requests seeking comment.

Big ambitions

The shy but resourceful middle son of a textile merchant, Gautam Adani spent his early years as a modestly successful trader, always on the lookout for deals, said two former colleagues. He roamed the western state of Gujarat on a modest Bajaj scooter. He scoured East Asia for sellers of plastic films and pellets.

In 1991, the year India began to liberalize its economy, Adani caught his first big break. He was working as a middleman helping the Minnesota food giant Cargill develop salt mines in Mundra in Gujarat when the deal fell through, leaving Adani with 2,000 acres of white, sandy desert and no project.

So he pivoted. Adani built what was lacking in India: a deep-water port.

Within a decade, Mundra would become India’s most efficient port, awash in one of the country’s most-wanted commodities. Three jetties at Mundra were dedicated to receiving coal, and elevated conveyor belts spanning 10 miles would transport coal from vessels to the world’s largest coal-handling terminal.

The port put Adani at the center of not only logistics, but also energy, in a country where coal consumption more than doubled between 2006 and 2022. As of September, Adani’s businesses accounted for 25 percent of India’s coal imports this year, according to research firm CoalMint.

“He succeeds in the space where no one succeeds — infrastructure,” said Subhash Chandra Garg, a former Indian finance secretary. “His big ambitions always coincided with where the government is focusing.”

Adani’s reach now extends far beyond coal. He is India’s largest seller of consumer packaged goods and operates its largest urban natural gas provider. He has entered cutting-edge sectors, such as drone manufacturing, data centers and hydrogen fuel — a frontier technology in renewable energy — shortly after they were highlighted in government development plans. To many, he is seen almost as an arm of state policy.

“If he falls, oxygen masks will drop down to save him,” said Narayan Hariharan, a former president of corporate affairs at the Adani Group.

Unlike some Indian business magnates whose fortunes rose and fell with changes in government, Adani rose and rose because he has juggled ties with politicians from every party, supporters and rivals alike say. During the 1990s, he came to know the up-and-coming Gujarati politician Narendra Modi, a general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party who took over as the state leader in 2001.

Modi and Adani seemed to mesh, said associates of both men, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions.

 One was an ambitious politician, known for his austere lifestyle and religious devotion. The other was a low-key, workaholic industrialist who traveled without large retinues and obsessed over cutting costs.

One former Modi adviser, who also worked with Adani, said Adani’s projects genuinely impressed the Gujarat state leader. The adviser recalled Modi’s delight when he flew over the Mundra port and saw Adani’s railroads stretching across the desert.

“No one had seen that scale of development in the private sector, and, in his mind, Adani was always excellent at execution,” the former adviser said.

In 2007, the Gujarat government sold Adani 140 square miles for a nominal price, according to news reports, and created a special economic zone (SEZ) around Mundra, which slashed taxes on businesses located within it. The BJP said it was trying to foster development.

In 2009, Adani began building a power station inside the Mundra SEZ that would burn imported coal, transported on his railroad from his nearby port. It was part of what his company called “Integrated Coal Management.”

Adani had entered the power-generation business.

In response to extensive questions from The Post, an Adani Group spokesman declined to address the Godda project, the various government actions related to the plant or Adani’s political relationships. The spokesman said the company plans to invest $100 billion in renewable energy in the coming decade and would gradually shift away from coal.

“As Europe has shown, the stark reality is that replacing fossil fuels is not easy,” he said. “While corporates like us work towards making green energy affordable, equal importance must be placed on making a graduated transition away from fossil fuels so that the hopes and aspirations of our people are not abandoned, literally, in the dark.”

Modi’s office did not respond to an extensive list of questions sent by email or return calls seeking comment about the Godda project and his relationship with Adani. Nor has Modi ever directly addressed their relationship in public remarks. When Indian opposition leaders have accused Modi of being too close to corporate leaders, the prime minister and his allies have often argued that successful companies are crucial in advancing the country’s economy. “Every industrialist who creates money in this country creates jobs. They have created jobs. They must be respected,” K.J. Alphons, a member of Parliament and a former tourism minister under Modi, said in comments before Parliament in February.

Concerns overridden

Soon after Adani signed his power deal with Bangladesh in 2015, some Indian officials expressed concern.

Godda is in Jharkhand, India’s second-poorest state. For years, state law required that power plants built in Jharkhand sell 25 percent of their generated power back to the state at a discount. But Adani sought an exception for Godda, former officials said; he offered to funnel electricity from his plants in other parts of India to Jharkhand instead — albeit at a higher price.

Jharkhand’s finance and energy officials balked.

A 2016 analysis that was conducted by state energy officials and seen by The Post estimated that Jharkhand would lose as much as $240 million a year — and Adani would save more than $1.1 billion over the project’s lifetime — if it proceeded with Adani’s proposal. Scroll.in, an Indian news outlet, reported that state auditors also were concerned about the arrangement.

As the project stalled, Rajesh Adani — Gautam’s younger brother and the Adani Group’s managing director — flew in for meetings with the Jharkhand chief minister, Raghubar Das, a member of Modi’s BJP. The next morning, Das summoned his aides to the cabinet room at Project House, the leafy Jharkhand government compound built by Soviet engineers, recalled a former state official who was present.

“This must move urgently,” Das instructed his aides, according to the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Anything that needs to be done, just do it.”

In October 2016, the Jharkhand government amended the 25 percent rule. Adani’s project steamed ahead.

In one memo to the central government, state officials explained that they greenlighted the plant after Adani executives said the project originated from Modi’s state visit and had received “approval in principle” from the highest levels of government.

While Jharkhand officials wrestled with the project, a parallel process was underway in New Delhi to obtain environmental clearance.

The first environmental review committee to assess Adani’s proposal felt uneasy about the idea of a coal plant that was serving Bangladesh emitting pollution inside India, said C.R. Babu, a Delhi University professor and committee member. For five months, the panel held intense back-and-forth discussions with the company but did not grant approval by the time its term expired and it was disbanded.

After a second committee was formed, in late 2016, then-Environment Minister Anil Dave appeared at its initial gathering to remind the panel of the Modi government’s motto, “Ease of doing business,” recalled a member of the new committee, Sharachchandra Lele, an environmental researcher.

The new committee was inundated by letters from villagers in Godda worrying about pollution and arguing against the project. But Environment Ministry officials pushed back, saying the plant also had local supporters, Lele said.

The panel approved the Godda plant after one sitting.

By early 2018, Adani had received the necessary permits, but there was one more hurdle: potential tax bills on coal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

That February, the company applied for the creation of an SEZ at the Godda site. The request was striking because the Commerce Ministry in 2016 had specifically prohibited tax-free zones around a single power plant. Citing its regulation, the ministry denied the request.

 Months later, the ministry changed its mind. Meeting minutes show officials proposed amending their SEZ regulations and revisited the matter in February 2019 at the direction of then-Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, a Modi ally. Officials argued that tax-free zones like the one proposed by Adani would promote energy exports. A month later, Adani got his SEZ.

Calculations by The Post show Adani would save $35 million a year just on his coal imports for Godda. Coal imports are usually taxed at 400 rupees, or about $5, per ton.

This year, The Post filed a request under India’s Right to Information Act to obtain records related to how the Commerce Ministry came to approve the SEZ. After a six-month appeal process, ministry officials told The Post at a hearing that no such records existed.

Prabhu, the former commerce minister, and Das, the former Jharkhand state leader, declined to comment through their personal secretaries. The office of Tanmay Kumar, the Environment Ministry official overseeing power projects, also declined to comment.

Growing influence

In May 2014, fresh off national elections, a triumphant Modi waved from the tarmac in Gujarat, then flew to New Delhi to be sworn in. The Embraer private jet carrying the next prime minister had shuttled Modi throughout the campaign and sported a distinctive purple-and-blue logo on its fuselage: “Adani.”

After entering office, India’s new leader declared that improving infrastructure was his “greatest priority” and that abundant electricity, including renewables, would be key. Before the 2015 climate conference in Paris, Modi told the United Nations General Assembly that India would install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022 and introduce taxes on coal.

Back home, his administration was helping give coal away at bargain prices.

Anil Swarup, Modi’s former coal secretary, said that in 2015, “privileged businessmen” who owned power plants asked the government for discounted coal produced by Coal India, the state mining giant. When he refused, citing ethical concerns, Swarup was summoned by Modi’s secretary and repeatedly asked to give coal away. He still refused, Swarup recounted in an interview, and was soon transferred to the Education Ministry.

Shortly thereafter, Modi’s cabinet revised regulations to allow Coal India to give discounted coal to private buyers. Adani gained the largest share, receiving 10 million tons, or one-third of the stocks, government data showed. After the coal was distributed, the government said in a statement that it was a “win-win” policy that gave private power producers “long term supply security of coal … while consumers will benefit” from lower electricity prices.

Swarup declined to discuss Adani. But as a general matter, Swarup said, “there was a systematic effort by the government to enable certain industrialists.”

 Adani’s coal portfolio continues to grow. He has 8,760 megawatts’ worth of thermal power projects in the pipeline, including Godda, and has acquired nine new coal mines in the past two years alone. Indian officials, meanwhile, have doubled down on the fossil fuel, saying they plan to add 25 percent more coal-fired power capacity in the coming years.

“Part of the reason the government wants to keep the coal option is because there are very rich people who own coal assets, and they want to wring the last rupee out of those assets,” said Eswaran Somanathan, an economist at the Indian Statistical Institute.

As Adani’s coal business has expanded, so has his ability to overcome scrutiny. In Australia, he defeated a years-long campaign by environmentalists to stop his plans to develop the country’s largest coal mine. Adani’s Carmichael mine, which may provide coal for the Godda plant, began production in December 2021.

In India, tax authorities have struggled to investigate the Adani Group despite suspicions that it overcharged public utilities for electricity by exaggerating the cost of imported coal and machinery. Adani’s attorneys accuse Indian tax authorities of overreaching. The efforts of tax investigators to obtain company records have been blocked in the courts, and the revenue service is fighting Adani in the Supreme Court over whether its probe may proceed.

Adani has similarly turned to the courts to file at least seven defamation suits against journalists. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Abir Dasgupta, two journalists who published investigations into Adani’s use of SEZs to reduce his taxes, are under gag orders from a Gujarat court. In July, police arrived at the Delhi home of another reporter, Ravi Nair, and served him with an arrest warrant for alleged defamation.

Nair was not detained, but he called the arrest warrant an attempt at intimidation. Nair, who has published articles about Adani’s coal mines and offshore investors, said company executives have invited him to meet and told him that Adani was “a powerful man.”

“First, they asked me what I wanted,” Nair said. “Then came the threat.”

Unmet promises

When Adani representatives came to Godda in 2015, they, too, opened with friendly offers, villagers said.

To move the project forward, the company needed to obtain 1,000 acres of land and local residents’ support. It offered compensation to farmers who owned land and jobs to farm laborers who didn’t. It promised residents new shoes, clothes, schools and latrines.

In an impoverished region where 60 percent of women are illiterate and most residents live in basic homes with thatched roofs, the project seemed promising at first.

Many landowners supported it. But hundreds of other residents, mostly lower-caste laborers who worked the land for subsistence farming, were skeptical. Chintamani Sahu, a retired local schoolteacher, began holding meetings that attracted hundreds of attendees. Meanwhile, Pradeep Yadav, a fiery local legislator, began to speak out against Adani, and local opinion started to turn.

 Environmentalists told the crowds the plant would burn 18,000 tons of coal a day and draw 36 million cubic liters of water a year. They spoke of how the 900-foot-tall smokestack would belch pollution as far as eight miles and how that might affect crops and, ultimately, the climate, said Sahu, who can still rattle off the statistics.

When local officials held a hearing in December 2016 on whether the project should move forward, police let in only those carrying yellow invitation letters, residents said. It was unclear who had handed them out, but Sahu and Yadav believe the company was responsible.

Outside the hall, chaos erupted as angry protesters tried to gain entry. Inside, the district administrator asked for a show of hands and determined that 80 percent of the audience supported Adani.

At a second hearing, in March 2017, hundreds of police officers blocked Yadav and his supporters from speaking onstage, leading to a scuffle. Police charged protesters with batons, and fired tear gas and gunshots in the air, according to witnesses and news reports.

“The local officials and police were instruments used by the government,” Yadav said. “If you could build consensus for a project, why would you need to ram it through?”

In April 2017, Yadav and Sahu tried one final tactic: a hunger strike. By day, they marched through Godda chanting, “Adani, go home!” By night, Yadav led a huge crowd in chants hailing the land as a sacred goddess.

Before dawn broke on the seventh day, police swooped in and seized Yadav. He served six months in jail for public disorder, and his movement lost all momentum. Landowners started to sell. Protesters gave up.

“We came home dejected,” said Bachchan Yadav, the bricklayer, who supported Pradeep Yadav after he lost his job at the Adani construction site after two months. “I’d never seen so many police. If even our leader could be arrested, what could we do?”

These days, behind a wall just beyond the last home in the village of Motia, a soaring power plant has materialized. But the schools, toilets, running water, new jobs — much of what Adani promised — have not, residents say.

Company representatives haven’t returned, residents say. Local men, forced to find work elsewhere after the company hired fewer and fewer of them, have gone. Left behind are mostly women and children sustaining themselves on the farmland that remains.

Meena Devi, 40, said her teenage son left this summer in search of work in Delhi after failing to find a job at the Adani plant.

“What else can we do?” Devi asked. “We need to make money to eat.”

 In a muddy clearing, villagers gathered around Devi to share their own stories of the battle with Adani. Some said they feared him, others marveled at him. Many confessed they had only a vague sense of a man so influential that he appeared on television and in newspapers only their children could read. When told that he was one of the world’s richest men, a stunned silence fell over the crowd.

So it’s true, Bachchan Yadav murmured.

“People say he can do anything,” the bricklayer said. “And anything, he can get done.”

 How political will often favors a coal billionaire and his dirty fossil fuel :  The tale of Gautam Adani’s giant power plant reveals how political will in India bends in favor of the dirty fuel. By Gerry Shih, Niha Masih and Anant Gupta. The Washington Post, December 9, 2022.