Department of Anthropology university of pennsylvania

Sandesara talks tragedy and its aftermath

No One Had the Tongue to Speak (2011) Penn Anthropology MD-PhD student Utpal Sandesara, along with co-author Tom Wooten, will be at the Penn Book Center at 5:30pm on Monday, 3/19 to discuss No One Had a Tongue to Speak, their narrative nonfiction account of the 1979 Macchu dam disaster in India, which killed as many as 25,000 people.

Sandesara's mother survived the disaster, and in 2006 he and Wooten spent 11 weeks in India researching the flood through extensive interviews and archival research.  Adam Hochshild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, calls No One Had a Tongue to Speak "an absorbing story not just about bureaucratic ambition and folly, but about power and powerlessness."