Centre for Historical Studies
Special Lecture
Are Environmental Histories of South Asia still possible in the Epoch of the Anthropocene?
Rohan D'Souza
Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies
Kyoto University
12-1pm, Room No. 326, CHS, SSS-III
18 August 2018 (Saturday)
Abstract: As a genre, environmental histories of South Asia have been largely occupied by efforts to explain the complicated and troubled relationships between dramatic ecological change and British colonial rule. The first framework ─ widely referred to as the ‘colonial- watershed thesis’ ─ claimed that British colonialism profoundly undermined the previous ecological harmony that characterized social organization in South Asia. In contrast, the ‘continuities-with-change’ advocates argued that while the ‘pace of change’ was undoubtedly ‘rapid and epochal’, radical environmental transitions were not entirely new to the Indian sub-continent. In effect, rather than treating British colonial impacts as the only and most decisive ecological encounter , the ‘continuitieswith-change’ view underlined the need for long term histories about human-nature relationships in the subcontinent. Whilst these two dominant frameworks have over the years duelled, debated and generated a rich and productive scholarship, recent concerns about global warming and anxieties about climate change are urging us to reconsider whether conventional plot lines for environmental histories on South Asia are possible. In particular, I discuss how ideas about the ‘Anthropocene’ have begun to unsettle some of the conceptual givens in South Asian environmental history writing. Notably, with concepts such as the ‘Great Acceleration’ and the Earth Systems Sciences, the orientation and efforts now are to reconsider periodization in term of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere and to emphasise threats and alarms at the planetary scale. Will saving the planet require us to now obscure and side step local and regional histories about South Asia’s experience with colonial resource extraction and environmental changes brought on by European modernity ? A second, but equally telling challenge, is what Haraway terms as the problem of ‘futurism’. Will the task of ‘saving the future’ ─ by the unequal and forced institution of carbon forests (REDD programmes) and other regimes that define carbon access ─ end up turning the present into a mere hostage of the future ? Armed thus with notions about planetary scale and futurism in the Anthropocene, can writings on South Asian environmental history still survive the loss of the regional, the local and, above all else, the colonial in its narrative design ?
