In her introduction to Living with the Weather: Climate Change, Ecology, and Displacement in South Asia, Piya Srinivasan emphasizes that the focus of the essays in the collection is to “imagine and investigate non-human spaces: charlands, crumbling coastlines, land facing desertification.” (7) In a reportage-based essay in this anthology, investigating climate migration from the Sundarbans, Dipanjan Sinha discusses the present condition of these marshlands. He argues that the unique ecological and economic challenges faced by the land and its people include salination of water, challenges of relocation in fast-disappearing island communities, and climate migration – all being results of colonial policies of land degradation.
Colonized land, as Sugata Ray defines it, is a tangible matter and a medium, instead of as “an abstract philosophy of space” (Ray 65), and has been subject to various forms of violence by the colonizers; mining for coal and silver, extracting spices, forced farming for tea and opium, terraforming, tourism, and even chemical and atomic bombing. This kind of violence makes refugees out of the original inhabitants of these “Neo” Europes (Ghosh 52), as Amitav Ghosh calls these terraformed and colonized lands, therefore, forcing the native and Indigenous peoples, flora, and fauna, to migrate to other ‘safer’ lands.
In the light of these ever-growing global crises like migration and climate change, this panel aims to bring forth innovative ways in which we study migration and degraded land in order to highlight the implications of colonialism on both--the human and the nonhuman. The panel includes 4 presentations, 12 minutes for each, with 15 minutes of unstructured question and answers/discussion time.
Priyanka's paper discusses the effects of tourism on natural mountain ecologies like the Himalayas. The Himalayan Mountain range is one of the world’s premier destinations for mountaineering and pilgrimage tourism, drawing thousands of climbers, adventurers, and religious devotees every year. At the core of these expeditions are the Sherpa guides and Nepalese/Gorkha porters, whose labor is indispensable in navigating the region’s treacherous terrain. However, there is a repeated idealized and romanticized notion about these guides and porters that they are “genetically programmed” to perform well at high altitudes and thus become representatives of labor and servitude. Priyanka's paper will highlight that despite their indispensable roles, the sherpas are trapped in economic dependency, structural exploitation, and state-legitimized marginalization as the capitalist tourism industry in Nepal and India thrives at their expense, consolidating their subordination and reinforcing their subaltern status.
Rashi and Sarah discuss Jesmyn Ward's two novels in their individual presentations--Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Let Us Descend (2023) respectively. Where on the one hand, Rashi's paper focuses on the systemic racial oppression and ecological exploitation that makes the Mississippi landscape emerge as a living repository of memory, bearing the scars of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration within prison systems, Sarah's paper introduces us to the idea of 'spiritual ecologies'. She defines these as literary tools shaped by ecological language that insist on spiritual, religious, or theological connections to non-human nature or center ideas of spirit and spiritual wellbeing--to critique the 'capitalocene' and its epistemologies. Through her paper, she focuses on using this framework to attempt a shift in the way we see climate crises and environmental/natural disasters.
Finally, Ananya's paper looks at human migrations to study forced plant migrations as a result of the various colonialisms. This paper studies Janice Pariat’s novel, Everything the Light Touches (2022), to highlight the role of colonial migrations of ‘discovery’ and ‘enlightenment’ in mass deforestation, forced plant and seed migrations, and arboreal decay, on colonized lands. She argues that the disjointed narrative style of Pariat itself embodies both folklore and survival across centuries, and becomes a potent symbol of climate resistance. It hints at cultural resilience and indigenous strategies to preserve ecological heritage. Through indigenous perspectives and folklore, Pariat challenges readers to consider flora as part of a living, migratory continuum shaped by both human and environmental forces (Pitelka & Plant Migration Group 466).
Therefore, this panel brings together not only diverse human voices advocating for climate justice and migrant justice but also non-human ways in which our actions are affecting ecosystems beyond the category of the human.