Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Anupama Mohan
(Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur)
Suddhaseel Sen (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Navigating Conflict, Governance, and Activism
- Location:
- Linnanmaa Campus, SÄ124
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
We invite papers on topics of 21st century environmentalism in South Asia, on themes covering local and vernacular movements, environmental literatures, feminist and rural histories of environmentalism, watersheds and the quotidian in SA environmental history, among others.
Long Abstract:
South Asia (SA) presents a strategic space for examining and assessing the progress of environmentalism in the new century. According to a World Bank report, SA is living through a “new climate normal” in which intensifying heat waves, cyclones, droughts, and floods are set to sharply diminish living conditions of more than 750 million people in the 8 countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka — in a region that already has some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. And yet, SA is also pioneering many climate-smart solutions, incl. innovative community approaches to coastal resilience, scaling up renewable energy, and regenerative forestry. Any attempt at mapping SA's environmental history thus not only confronts heterogenous national trajectories for recording and evaluating the most pressing concerns of the region, but also fundamental gaps between theorizing and understanding the various levels at which such history plays out: governmental vs. civic, terrestrial vs. oceanic, macro vs micro, etc.
We invite papers on 21st century environmentalism in SA; themes can include:
1. Local and vernacular environmentalisms: specific case studies
2. Collaborations and Co-operation: SA perspectives
3. SA Literatures: Environmental Intersectionalities
4. Environmental Histories: macro vs micro, the spectacular vs. the quotidian
5. Ecological Watersheds: Key Moments in SA Environmental History
6. Protest and the Postcolonial Environmental Movement
7. Women and Ecology: Feminist Revisions of SA Environmental Histories
8. Rural SA: Paradigms, Futures, and the Question of Environmental Agency
Please submit 300-word abstracts with title and a 50-word bio to: amohan@iitj.ac.in
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
While unraveling how environment as a matter of concern obtains multiple values, this paper interrogates whether port-centric contestations can be framed as political-ecological critique drawing on pragmatic sociological rendering of ‘critique’ hinged on socioculturally mediated ‘orders of worth’.
Paper long abstract:
Just as our planetary future is turning more ‘oceanic’ in the wake of the Anthropocene, there has been a simultaneous stride to reap economic benefits out of the oceanic ecosystems through a plethora of technocapitalist ventures clubbed together as ‘blue economy’. The geography of South Asia being attuned with the oceanic and littoral ecologies, the impetus for ‘blue growth’ has been pushed for with much fanfare in this region. Building of new ports as well as expansion and modernization of existing ones have featured prominently as one of the mainstays for this proliferating regime of blue growth - for instance, India’s mega-infrastructure project “Sagarmala” has been launched with the catchy objective of ‘port-led prosperity’. However, the growing disquietude materialized in the form of resistance and contestations against the globalized and corporatized port-making has been unsettling the dominant imaginary of port-qua-prosperity. Fixing analytical gaze on the many visions and volitions, tactics and multiple imaginaries that drive the unfolding of resistance and/or negotiations around port-making, this paper interrogates whether anti-port resistance and port-centric contestations can be framed as political-ecological critique drawing on pragmatic sociological rendering of ‘critique’ that hinges on socioculturally mediated ‘orders of worth’. Instead of viewing the instances of mobilization against infrastructuring of ports as discrete cases, the paper seeks to unravel the ‘modes of valuation’ and evaluative repertoires for understanding how the environment as a matter of concern obtains multiple values in the different evaluative registers of actors involved in the making and unmaking of port.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I investigate the use of geological time in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahānadi (2015) and its relation to the tradition of the Bengali regional novel to argue that the novel’s use of the Mahanadi river basin as a “region” helps us rethink the role of the regional novel in the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
The Bengali regional novel has a long and rich history of depicting how capitalist modernity transforms property relations of specific communities directly dependent on natural resources for subsistence. These transformations mark a shift from a commons based lifestyle to a capitalist or modern lifestyle centred around the idea of private property. Yet, as Amitav Ghosh’s critique of the realist novel in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) underscores, these novels remain bound to human time and space and have very little engagement with the geological. However, if we are to have narratives that address the current planetary crisis, the geological must be an integral part of storytelling. In this paper, I investigate the use of geological time in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahānadi (2015) and its relation to the tradition of the Bengali regional novel to argue that the novel’s use of the Mahanadi river basin as a “region” helps us rethink the role of the regional novel in the Anthropocene. The term “regional” invokes the idea of a remote land in opposition to the global or the metropolitan. Yet when the climate crisis is bringing down the opposition of the place and the planet, can the regional novel be the kind of narrative we need in the Anthropocene?
Paper short abstract:
Arunachal Pradesh forms one of the segments of eastern Himalaya. It is inhabited by 26 tribes. Lummer Dai(1940-2002) was the pioneer Literary Intellectual who represented the unique relationship between an old woman and his pet whom she nurtures and takes care of him.
Paper long abstract:
Lummer Dai (born on June 1, 1940) belonged to the Dai clan of Pasis, a sub-tribe of the Adis of Arunachal Pradesh. His literary production (authored five novels) is Phar Hile, Hile, Prithbi Hanhi Hanhi (The Earth smiles,1963) Mon aur Mon (1966), Konyar Mulya (The Bride-Price ,1978), amd Upar Mahal(published posthumously in 2002). He died on April 5,2002 at the age of 62. As a member of the literate group and an intellectual, Lummer Dai chose fictional narrative as a medium to articulate the cultural identity of his tribe. An attempt at Retrieval of their history formed an important aspect of forging the tribal cultural identity. Animals specifically dogs played an important role among the Tani group of tribes of Arunachal Pradesh. Lummer Dai’s novel novel Mon aur Mon (Heart to Heart) represents the unique relationship between an old Adi woman and her pet dog. This proposal is an humble attempt to show how literary texts can be read with a view to exploring their articulation of the animal world and the relationship of humans with that world.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the historical development of environmentalism in India as well as the legal regime surrounding it. It makes an attempt to delve into environmental histories, climate change advancements with reference to legal issues and institutions laying an emphasis on India and South Asia.
Paper long abstract:
Environmentalism, as a concept has grown heaps and bounds around the world. South Asia as a region has seen ingenious developments relating to it in the past decades. Legal developments on top of the historical developments are quite significant in mapping the histories and growth of environmentalism in South Asia. Climate change is one pressing issue in the field of environmental law. South Asian countries are highly vulnerable to climate change. We are witnessing direct consequences of it including soaring high temperatures, floods, droughts. India among the other countries in the region is one of the most vulnerable due to its high population, large and varied geographical area. India has diversified laws for environmental protection and the very constitution of the country has articles for environmental welfare and protection. The country has enacted numerous legislations towards such goals and is also a party to key international agreements. It is pertinent to analyze the historical development of the present legal regime of environmentalism in India and the paper aims to do so. It makes an attempt to delve into environmental histories, climate change advancements with reference to legal issues and institutions laying an emphasis on India and South Asia.
Paper short abstract:
Indian writers have used realism as a mode for writing on ecological themes from the early 20th century. Postcolonial ecocriticism’s neglect of this body of writing and their histories needs to be addressed through critiques of anti-mimetic literary theories and a focus on non-Anglophone literature.
Paper long abstract:
A defining feature of literature and cinema in modern Indian languages was the espousal of realism—sometimes described as “peripheral” realism—by many leading writers and filmmakers of the last century. In this regard, modern Indian artists were markedly different from their Western counterparts in their aesthetic and political aims. Through their espousal of realism, Indian writers sought to represent, analyze, and critique social issues, including human beings’ relationship with nature. Consequently, works of ecological fiction came to be written in Indian languages from the early twentieth century, their origins going further back in the past. Yet, neither the relationships of human beings with the environment that these texts sought to analyze, nor the impact of these texts on readers has been of interest to postcolonial ecocriticism because of the peripheral status of modern Indian languages, their literary histories and milieus, and, most importantly, postcolonial ecocriticism’s methodological rootedness in postmodernism (with its attendant suspicions regarding the representation of a world existing outside of language). Consequently, histories of non-Anglophone writings on the environment and the ecologies described in these texts have, at best, been studied in a piecemeal fashion. Taking my cue from recent critiques of anti-mimetic theories of representation (e.g., Lazarus, Buell, Gikandi, Esty and Lye), I argue in my paper that a renewed—albeit qualified—engagement with mimetic theories of representation is necessary if ecological fiction from the Third World, in general, and those in modern Indian languages, in particular, are to receive the critical attention they richly deserve.
Paper short abstract:
This research aims to read selected Bangla novels from the late colonial period in India, within an Eco-Marxist framework. A realist representation of rivers and riverine communities narrates their metabolic relationship and historicizes the responsibility of colonial ecocide on colonial Capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
Bengal is home to critical riverine systems, housing the Sundarbans forest in its deltaic region. The entangled lives of humans and nonhumans along these riverine systems have found space within Bangla literary and cultural productions. This research deals with Bangla fiction from the late colonial era that carries the river as a central motif. Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi, Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam, and Samaresh Basu’s Ganga deals with humans and nonhumans, whose lives are forged within the entanglements of economic and ecological relations. This research studies the interdependencies and vulnerabilities of human life in the natural world, represented in the realist narratives, and connects it with the ecological rupture caused by colonial Capitalism.
This research also historicizes the debate between Ecological Marxists and New Materialists that has been raging since before the ‘material turn’ in Environmental Humanities. This research tries to situate the selected narratives of ecological entanglements onto the frameworks offered by the Ecological Marxists. Empirically testing the fictional narratives of human-nature representation, using the Marxist frameworks of ‘historical-materialism’ and ‘dialectical analysis,’ requires us to recognize the necessary boundaries within the natural world that those human characters populate. However, this Marxist framework of ‘metabolic rift’ instead of the ‘social metabolism of Capital’ helps our understanding of ‘metabolic interactions’ and ‘ecological rifts’ between humans and their environments, in this case, the rivers and their riverine communities. An Eco-Marxist reading of the narratives gives birth to the possibility of demanding accountability from colonial Capitalism for colonial ecocide.