‘Void’ land and nuclear colonialisms: Storied landscapes of the Bishnoi as untended spaces in India’s nuclear imaginaries

• In Event: Extractivism, Energy, and Environmental Justice

Abstract

For the Bishnoi, among the earliest eco-conservationists in the Indian subcontinent, encounters with the atom have been encounters of colossal ruptures. Their histories, geographies, ecological intimacies, and nonhuman worlds have collided with India’s nuclear trajectories at two sites – in the arid deserts of Pokhran where India conducted atomic tests in 1974 and 1998, thus forcing the Bishnoi into the ranks of the Global Hibakusha, and more recently, in Gorakhpur, where India is setting up a massive 2800Mwe nuclear power plant. In both instances, the storied landscapes of the Bishnoi – assemblages of humans, heritages, and revered nonhuman animals, trees, plant species, and water bodies – have been irradiated (Pokhran) and appropriated (Gorakhpur) by India’s nuclear establishment through narrativizing these lands as ‘barren’, ‘unpeopled’, and ‘infertile’. As Karen Barad notes, the narrativization of landscapes as 'untended' and 'empty' has been a well-worn tool in the service of nationalism, scienticism, colonial appropriation, and the erasures of indigenous presence. The landscapes of the Bishnoi, embodying palimpsestic layers of local histories, community traditions and post-colonial land-holding practices in India on the one hand, and the human, nonhuman bodies and materialities that have populated these lands on the other, have shaped Bishnoi claims on and belongingness to these lands. By contrast, the nuclear establishment’s forcible appropriation of Bishnoi lands for the nuclear plant may be seen as claims on place that imagine futures by the Indian state through unimagining the presence of Bishnoi lifeworlds. Bishnoi resistance against the Gorakhpur nuclear project thus, can be understood as a means to assert that their lives and landscapes, and intimacies with their nonhuman worlds are both visible and grievable. Unraveling multiple layers of this fascinating episode from India’s recent nuclear historiography, this presentation will seek to think about/with land as Bishnoi heritage, and a resource in India’s (colonial) nuclear enterprise.

Author

• Sonali Huria, Friedrich-Alexander University, Germany