Debra Kellner

There are no secrets that since man has roamed the earth, he has tried to control or adapt his environment. However, he has forever waged himself against the desert. In return for his efforts, the desert has merely laughed, spread her sands, swallowed his civilisations, buried his treasures, and made his fear audible.

On October 29, 1948, an engineer living in the desert named Kanwar Sain decided to challenge the desert by proposing the single largest man-made irrigation project mankind had ever known. A proposal that aimed at irrigating more than 7 million acres of desert land in Bikaner and Jaisalmer states in Rajasthan, India.

Ten years later, the blueprint of a man’s dream to bring water into the abyss of a desert whose name, Thar, originally means infertile, became a reality. In forty years of construction, hundreds and thousands of workers have toiled the dunes of the great Thar desert, women and men who’ve only ever known the labour camps of this dream.

This story is dedicated to the women whose lives have been spent bringing water into the desert. Those women who will never know the value of their lifetime’s work in building a canal that would be the beginning of a new civilisation. Illiterate hands that have never held books or written their names, yet have taken hoes, shovels, rakes and written their sweat and hardship into the desert sands in an attempt to undo her wandering dunes.

Debra Kellner, 1998