This blog is a task assigned by Prof. (Dr.) Dilip Barad, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). It focuses on the Postcolonial Studies and the Anthropocene (Climate Change and Environmentalism)
Introduction
Dilip Barad's article, "Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future" examines the evolving relationship between postcolonial studies and environmentalism in an era increasingly defined by ecological crisis.
The article opens with two significant provocations: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's assertion that "postcolonial is the day before yesterday," signalling a field reconsidering its own boundaries, and Dipesh Chakrabarty's admission that decades of engagement with globalization theory, Marxist analysis, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism left him unprepared for the "planetary crisis of climate change." Together, these provocations frame Barad's central inquiry: how does the evolving landscape of environmental studies affect the trajectory and relevance of postcolonial studies today?
To answer this, Barad draws on a wide range of theoretical voices. He examines Vandana Shiva's work on the historical connection between colonialism and ecological destruction, alongside the differing perspectives within feminist environmentalism regarding pre-colonial cultures. He introduces Rob Nixon's concept of "spatial amnesia" to explain why postcolonial criticism has historically been reluctant to engage with environmental and "green" concerns, linking this to the wilderness obsession found in American environmental literature.
The article also highlights the real-world struggles of environmental activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa in the Niger Delta against multinational corporations in the Global South, and extends this into a discussion of internal colonialism within formally decolonized nations, using India's Narmada Bachao Andolan and tribal resistance movements in Central India as illustrative case studies.
Barad further situates these struggles within a broader theoretical framework: Karl Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, Rosa Luxemburg's extension of it through capitalism's dependence on non-capitalist social formations, and David Harvey's notion of accumulation by dispossession in the neoliberal era. The article concludes by turning to Chakrabarty's concept of the Anthropocene and his call for a "new universalism" grounded in species thinking — an ethical framework that moves beyond human-centred notions of freedom and justice to encompass the planet as a whole.
Ultimately, Barad argues that colonial patterns of extraction and dispossession have not disappeared with formal independence; they persist today through national governments, multinational corporations, and neoliberal development policy, demanding that postcolonial studies expand its scope to meaningfully engage with ecological crisis, indigenous rights, and global capitalism.
This is precisely the terrain dramatized by the 2022 Kannada film Kantara, directed by Rishab Shetty not as abstract theory, but as a lived conflict between a forest-dwelling community and the machinery of the modern developmental state.
Disproportionate Impact on Colonized and Formerly Colonized Peoples
Before turning to the film, it is worth foregrounding a claim that runs through Barad's article: ecological degradation and climate change do not affect all populations equally, and colonized and formerly colonized peoples bear a disproportionate share of the burden. This can be summarised across several dimensions:
- Historical extraction, present-day vulnerability. Colonial economies were built on extracting raw materials, forest produce, and labour from the Global South. The ecological depletion this caused deforestation, soil exhaustion, disrupted water systems left many of these regions structurally more vulnerable to present-day climate shocks.
- Displacement in the name of development. As Barad shows through the Narmada Bachao Andolan, large-scale infrastructure projects (dams, mining, industrial corridors) continue to displace indigenous and rural communities, often without adequate rehabilitation, echoing colonial-era patterns of land seizure.
- Corporate resource extraction in the Global South. The case of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people illustrates how multinational corporations frequently operating with state complicity extract resources (oil, minerals, timber) from formerly colonized nations while leaving local communities to absorb the environmental cost.
- Climate change as an amplifier of inequality. Chakrabarty's observation, cited by Barad, that there are "no lifeboats" for anyone in the climate crisis is qualified by the reality that wealthier nations and populations have far greater capacity to adapt, relocate, or absorb losses, while formerly colonized and economically marginalized communities face the most severe and immediate consequences.
- Erasure through "spatial amnesia." Rob Nixon's concept explains how the suffering of these communities is often rendered invisible in dominant environmental narratives, which prioritize "pristine" nature over the people who inhabit and depend on it.
These patterns set up the central argument developed through the film analysis below: that contemporary ecological conflict in formerly colonized nations is best understood as a continuation, rather than a break, from colonial-era structures of dispossession.
Postcolonial Critique: Reading Kantara Through Article's Framework
Synopsis and Central Conflict
Kantara follows Kadubettu Shiva, a young man from a coastal Karnataka village whose community has, for generations, held customary rights to forest land granted by a local king in exchange for a spiritual covenant. The covenant is enacted annually through the Bhoota Kola ritual, in which a chosen villager is possessed by the guardian spirit Panjurli, believed to protect and adjudicate over the land.
The film's conflict is not simply good versus evil. It stages a contest between two competing regimes of legitimacy over the same forest:
- Customary, spiritual, communal tenure rooted in oral memory, ritual, and an ancestral covenant.
- Bureaucratic-legal authority represented by the Forest Department, and manipulated by a local landowner seeking the land for private gain.
Internal Colonialism
Barad, drawing on the Narmada Bachao Andolan and tribal resistance across Central India, argues that the dynamics of colonialism persist within formally decolonized regions. Kantara stages this dynamic almost exactly:
- The antagonist is not a foreign coloniser but a postcolonial state apparatus the Forest Department whose officer treats the villagers' claim to the land as illegitimate encroachment rather than an older, competing sovereignty.
- Dispossession in the film does not require a foreign agent to be colonial in structure; it only requires treating indigenous relationships to land as unlawful, irrational, or an obstacle to "development" and revenue.
- This mirrors Barad's citation of Arundhati Roy on the Ho, the Oraon, the Santhals, and the Gonds communities who resisted the British and continue to resist the postcolonial state's extractive logic, often without the word "colonialism" ever being applied to their new opponents.
Spatial Amnesia and the Wilderness Obsession
Rob Nixon's concept of "spatial amnesia," as summarised by Barad, describes how narratives of "pristine" wilderness erase the histories of the people who have long inhabited and shaped that land. In Kantara, this amnesia operates institutionally:
- The Forest Department reclassifies inhabited, ritually maintained forest as an empty ecological resource to be surveyed, fenced, and administered.
- The land's spiritual and communal history becomes illegible to the bureaucratic gaze.
- The film repeatedly stages a contest between two forms of evidence: legal paperwork (survey maps, land deeds, colonial-era decrees) versus oral memory and ritual possession.
This is precisely the tension Vandana Shiva identifies when she argues that colonial and capitalist modernity discredits ecologically embedded ways of life as backward, rather than recognizing them as viable and sustainable alternatives.
Accumulation by Dispossession
David Harvey's concept, as summarised in Barad's essay, describes how capital accumulates today by forcibly stripping communities of assets under the guise of legality privatization, "development," or bureaucratic reclassification. The land-grab subplot in Kantara is a clear illustration:
- A powerful local figure conspires with sympathetic officials to seize communal forest land for private profit.
- This is not a violent colonial conquest in the nineteenth-century sense it is a paperwork conquest, using survey documents and administrative power.
- It mirrors Harvey's description of contemporary dispossession, where formerly common resources are privatized through legal and institutional channels rather than open warfare, though here the pressure comes from local capital rather than international finance.
The Commons and the Broken Covenant
Barad closes his essay by invoking Ania Loomba's insistence that indigenous histories, premodern cultures, and the ongoing colonization of land by capital together demand fresh thinking about colonial history. Kantara's central symbolic device supports this reading directly:
- The covenant between the king and the village deity is later violated by the king's descendant, who attempts to reclaim land his ancestor had gifted.
- This functions as an allegory of the commons betrayed a communal ecological covenant, once treated as sacred and binding, reinterpreted through the modern, individualist logic of private property.
- This echoes Marx's account of primitive accumulation as the "forcible usurpation of communal property," achieved here through legal enclosure rather than only through violence though the film insists that violence remains latent beneath the paperwork, ready to erupt when the community's claims are pushed too far.
Beyond the Secular Framework: Species Thinking
Where Kantara moves beyond Barad's Marxian and Harveyan vocabulary is in its refusal to resolve the conflict through secular, rights-based redress alone:
- The film's climax does not end in a courtroom or a policy reform.
- It ends in ritual possession, where the human protagonist becomes the deity and enacts justice outside the frameworks of both colonial-derived law and postcolonial bureaucracy.
- This resonates with Chakrabarty's call for a "new universalism" rooted in species thinking an ecological ethic that cannot be fully captured by human property law or human sovereignty, since the film locates ultimate authority over the land in a non-human, spiritual register that exceeds the state's categories entirely.
Broader Implications for Postcolonial Thought Today
Beyond the Colonizer/Colonized Binary
Kantara and Barad's article together suggest that postcolonial critique in the Anthropocene cannot remain fixated on the binary of colonizer and colonized, metropole and periphery. The more urgent battles now unfold within nations that are formally free, whose own states, corporations, and legal systems continue to treat indigenous and rural communities as obstacles to extraction. Consider the structural continuity across the following cases:
- Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution in the Niger Delta, following his resistance to multinational oil extraction.
- The Narmada Bachao Andolan's struggle against large-dam construction and tribal displacement.
- The fictionalized forest-land conflict dramatized in Kantara.
These are not separate stories; they are variations on a single structural pattern the persistence of primitive accumulation and internal colonialism under a postcolonial flag.
Implications for Reading Environmental Cinema
For students of literature and film, this analysis carries a practical implication:
- Environmental storytelling from the Global South should be read not simply as "nature writing" or folklore, but as a form of postcolonial testimony.
- Such narratives indict the state's own inherited colonial habits of surveying, classifying, and dispossessing land.
- Films like Kantara, alongside dramatized or documentary accounts such as Bastar: The Naxal Story and Dandakaranya, extend this conversation into contested territories like Chhattisgarh, where mining, insurgency, and tribal displacement replay the very dynamics Barad traces through Marx, Luxemburg, and Harvey.
Concluding Reflection
Barad's article and a film like Kantara, read together, converge on the same claim: a genuinely sustainable future requires postcolonial studies to take seriously the ecological and spiritual claims of communities the modern state has learned to treat as illegible. As Ania Loomba insists in the essay's closing lines, postcolonial critique remains meaningful only when it stays in conversation with the scholarship and activism actually being fought for on the ground a conversation that contemporary Indian cinema, in its own register, is now visibly joining.
References:
Shetty, Rishab, director. Kantara: A Legend. Hombale Films, 2022.
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