‘Futures without a Past’, Are Environmental Histories of South Asia still possible in the Epoch of the Anthropocene ?

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 a previous ecological harmony that characterized 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 subcontinent. While these two frameworks have over the years duelled, debated and generated a rich and productive scholarship, recent anxieties about climate change urge for a total conceptual reconsideration. Will saving the planet require us to side step local and regional histories about South Asia’s experience with colonial resource extraction and European modernity?  A second, but equally telling challenge, is what Haraway terms as the problem of ‘futurism’. Will the irrelevance of the past turn the present into a mere hostage of the future?

Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90), on the political platform of the All India Student’s Federation. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley), besides having had visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University). He holds honorary affiliation as Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short Term Chair at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies.

He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and the joint editor of The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011). He has also edited the Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive essays (2012) for the Economic and Political Weekly Series. His research interests and publications cover themes in environmental history, political ecology, sustainable development  and modern technology.