Indian Films and Env Justice

“Justice” has been a concern of philosophers since Aristotle. Ideas about what is “just” and what is not has acquired wider and more layered meanings when they have been applied to animals other than humans, as well as in relationship to habitats. Environmental justice offers a specialized space for further expanding the purview of justice to specific natural and cultural elements such as rivers, trees, mountains, rocks, and seas. This can even be traced to movements of protest for the environment, often interlocked with the protesting community’s livelihood. In most cases, environmental injustices are suffered by the most vulnerable communities/individuals in the locality. When resources are unequally distributed among different groups of people, then environmental injustice can become an issue as well. Given the diversity of cultures and natures that India boastfully possesses, tensions about who gets what, which cultural values about environments are most important, and who gets to say, are abundant. Environmental justice movements that common people have organized have been common in India – some have created templates for global environmental justice initiatives. Many of these have been analytically and systematically recorded by environmental historians such as Madhav Gadgil, Ramachandra Guha, Mahesh Rangarajan, Vinita Damodaran, and several others. This course will offer instead environmental injustice stories of Indian subaltern through film narratives. A slate of fiction and documentary films representing/presenting environmental concerns, based on the environmental issue narrated/suggested in each film, has been carefully curated for discussion in the course. Ecocinematic, environmental justice, and environmental humanities theories will be employed to analyze the films methodologically. The course is rationally divided into two streams: theory and praxis. The theory stream of the course will include watching films and critiquing them environmentally with a focus on environmental justice. The “praxis” stream will be an ecofilmmaking component, which will take a cue from the ecocinema scholarship with which we will become familiar during the theory stream of the course. Readings: Readings will be available in the Wilson Library. The reading assignments for the course are listed below in the course schedule. Some of the assignments will change as we proceed and the course settles in. 1. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. Ed. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. 2. Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. Eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona, 2002. 3. Martinez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2002. 4. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. (available as an e-book).