June 4, 2021: 8 – 10:30 pm
Keynote:
Pankaj Sekhsaria, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay, and a long term member of environmental action group Kalpavriksh. He has a graduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, a master’s degree in Mass Communication from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
He has worked in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for your 25 years and is author of five books based there. These include ‘The Last Wave’ (HarperCollins 2014), his debut novel deeply embedded in the history, ecology and people of the islands, ‘Islands in Flux – the Andaman and Nicobar Story (HarperLitmus 2019), which is a collection of his
journalism related to the islands for over two decades and the about to be released ‘Waiting for Turtles’ (Karadi Tales 2021) an illustrated story book for children that will be published simultaneously in English, Hindi and Telugu.
His current research interests lie at the intersection society, environment, society and technology. His recent books on these themes include ‘Instrumental Lives – an intimate biography of an Indian Laboratory’ (Routledge 2019) and ‘Nanoscale – Society’s deep impact on science, technology and innovation in India’.
Abstract:
At the tri-junction of fragility and vulnerability, the Andaman and Nicobar story
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are an unique and complex island chain in the Bay of Bengal. They are extremely rich from an ecological point of view and are also home to a number of indigenous communities who have been here for thousands of years but are today among the most marginalised and vulnerable. Very importantly, the islands are located in Seismic Zone V, the most seismically active zone on the planet. Earthquakes here are a regular occurrence and the 9.3 richter scale earthquake that caused the giant tsunami of December 2004 had its epicenter not very far from the Nicobar islands.
The talk will present a range of examples of how recent developmental interventions in the islands – for infrastructure development, defence installations and tourism promotion – are wilfully ignoring the dynamic and sensitive social, ecological and geological realities of this remote island chain and increasing manifold their vulnerability. It will also engage with the issue of language in the policy and other documents in the islands to illustrate how language conceals (or perhaps reveals) some of our fundamental biases and also the critical performative role played.
The presentation advocates for a re-framing and re-understanding of these islands and other such systems as pivoted on three intersecting axes of the geological, the ecological and the socio-cultural, all of which need to be accounted for to ensure development interventions do not increase vulnerability.
Panel: Post-Anthropocentrism:
Soumili Das is pursuing her Postgraduate Diploma in Sustainability Science (IGNOU, ongoing). She is a PG Guest Lecturer at Bethune College. She has a Master of Arts degree in English from Presidency University. She is interested in Queer Theory
Abstract:
Gender and Caste Hierarchies
Drawing from the historical fact of the Racist non-Indian origin of the word “caste”, which still remains one of the burning topic of concerns in the Indian society and culture, when anthropocentric human activities are resulting in a global ecological catastrophe, I propose to examine 1. How the concept of ” Casta” Boosted in european colonial/anthropocentric faiths that paved the path to the Anthropocene
- Why Gandhi retained his reservation for caste hierarchies ( as shown by Kancha Illaiah Shepherd and Sujata Gilda) even in his non-anthropocentric environmental doctrines,
- If his reservation for caste hierarchies acted in the ultimate failure of his Sarvodaya doctrine
Ishtiaque Ahmed Levin is a Ph.D. researcher in Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His current research work is on the multiple ontologies of the Anthropocene. His research areas include Anthropocene studies, Postcolonialism and Environmental Justice, Indigenous Studies, Posthumanism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism. He can be reached at levin.ahmed@gmail.com
Abstract:
Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Perspectives from South Asia
This paper engages with various ontological responses to environmental (in)justice in the subcontinent in the context of Anthropogenic climate change. Considering what it signifies to live in the Anthropocene, it engages with various struggles for social justice to understand the ethics of justice in the new climate regime. Through these intellectual encounters, the paper develops an ontological framework for addressing the question of human agency in the Anthropocene considering the long history of decolonization in South Asia which was shaped by figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Phule, and so on. Many of them revivified indigenous spiritual traditions by popularizing concepts like ahimsa, swaraj, and satyagraha to counter western modernity. Listening to these swadeshi (indigenous) voices who are making themselves heard after generations of oppression enacted by colonialism would help us to identify western modernity’s prejudices, blind spots, and cognitive arrogance. In the Anthropocene, we may find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a mirror image of those anti-colonial thinkers who countered the universal claims of modernity. Many of them tried to counter the universal claims of modernity with the integrity of their own vision. With the advent of the Anthropocene, we must again question the universal claims of colonial modernity which is the root cause of the Anthropocene. There is no reason to deny the fact that the condition of the global south is deeply unjust- still colonial. As western modernity can be identified as the cause of the Anthropocene, this connection marks the definitive end of the legitimacy of the history of colonial modernity. Therefore, the task of reading these anti-colonial thinkers in the Anthropocene is also a task of radical ecological imagination. The paper elaborates on this project of radical ecological imagination by drawing the works of contemporary thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour.
Chitrangada Deb is a Full-time College Teacher at The Bhawanipore Educational Society College, Kolkata. She has previously taught at Brainware Group of Institutions, Shri Shikshayatan College and Calcutta University, Dept of Law. She completed her MA and Mphil from the University of Calcutta, Dept of English. Her interest areas pertain to Indian Drama in English, Films, Speculative Fiction and Posthumanism.
Abstract:
Indra’s Web and the Return to the Posthuman
My paper intends to investigate the ways in which Vandana Singh’s Indra’s Web employs Indian mythology to foreground alternative templates of the future and offer a fervent critique of the man-made transgressions that have rocked the Anthropocene. Singh’s narrative deliberates on the perils of ecological disaster and critically considers alternate forms of energy production and conservation to empower the posthuman subjects. It envisions a frightfully realistic Indian subcontinent enmeshed within the actual power crisis. Project Ashapur has revolutionized living conditions offering sustainable livelihood to the climate refugees of Bangladesh, who occupy a slum on the outskirts of Delhi. However, the Suryanet , the symbol of raw technology, has disastrously failed. Consequently, a group of young scientists turn towards the natural systems of the Earth to figure out “ a fungal network… a secret connection between the planets of the forest.” Singh contends techno-madness not with extreme technophobia, but advocates a Posthuman balance where tradition and technology mingle. Her fiction explores a new world where sustenance is possible only through a return to its aboriginal primitive links. This lost world of indigenous wisdom is indicated by the cosmic web of the great God Indra, whose mystical web functions as a filter net, as elaborated in the Vedic philosophies. Evolution through adaptation is the key to survival. Singh therefore derives from the pages of Indian mysticism and advocates environmental justice through the synthesis between the ancient and the contemporary.
Trishala Dutta has completed her Master’s degree from SOAS, University of London, in South Asian Studies, where she passed with a distinction. During her postgrad, she worked with her chosen archive of queer theory, disability studies and transformative justice theory to deliver her MA thesis titled, “Memoir, Storytelling, And Survival: A Queer Femme Of Color’s Guide To Healing”.
She have taken the year off to prepare for Graduate School. During this time, she has taken to reading, knitting and thinking. Through her engagement with this symposium, she wishes to expand into other areas of interest.
Abstract:
The Things We Leave Behind: Thinking Through The Body and Its Discards
This paper rests on the idea of re-experiencing the body sensorium and working towards the establishment of the body as an archive while meditating on the things that leave it. It meditates on the idea of the body opening up and letting go to negotiate the relationships between the body, the self and others and understands the body and its products to be imbricated in radical networks or entanglements with human and non/post-human actors.
Reading into this concern can also allow us to understand the waste metaphors that carry cultural significance in the everyday lives of those affiliated with it: garbage pickers, sanitation workers, manual scavengers, animals. Those who live among the disposable themselves often become dispossessed wherein waste itself becomes a metaphor for Otherness. It explores the precarity of the surplus populations who are considered to be disposable to hegemonic powers, keeping in mind the global pandemic. Through my engagement with waste, I insist on ascribing meaning to think about how we amass, discard and at whose expense while questioning the radical porosity of our being and our entanglement with the environment and others. It asks: what is the vocation of reading the body and its messy expulsions in the space of the postcolonial? Is it possible to reimagine intimacy with others through the body and its discards?