Dams in India are a spatial equivalent of a “Trojan horse”—remade by religious myths, embodying much more than water storage and energy production, they reinforce nationalist sentiments while bypassing the urgent questions of climate change adaptation. As such, dams sit at the confluence of technocratic ideals and mythical-imaginative traditions, calling back on India’s age of technological boom while rewriting the mythopoetic origins of the landforms they harm. Pilgrimages to these now-sacred sites blur the line between dam and temple, reinterpreting myths to extend their significance into the concrete that builds them. This research examines the spatial practices that have come to venerate the dams, both as a consequence of a nationalist political project and an ideological-material legacy of colonization. By analyzing map and myth-making forms, the research aims to disentangle the relationship between India's anthropogenic climate change effects, its imagined landscapes, and post-colonial nation-building.

Padmini Unni works across architecture, history, and myth. She holds an MArch from McGill University and a BArch from the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on ritual practices and visual storytelling at the intersection of water infrastructures, religion, and climate change; particularly the impact architecture has on ecologies upon changes in its cultural meaning. She employs mythopoetic narrative structures, speculative fiction, and alternative cartography to explore the relationship between architecture’s role in reshaping environments and the stories that reimagine them. Her thesis, “After the Floods,” serves as the foundation for her current project and has received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Medal and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Award. Unni’s interest in addressing the critical issues of Indian environments extends to her work with students at the National Association of Students of Architecture in India.