WHEN THE EARTH BECOMES A COLONY
Postcolonialism, Environmental Justice, and the Anthropocene in The Jengaburu Curse
From colonial extraction to corporate exploitation, the destruction of land is also the destruction of memory, culture, and community.
A Postcolonial and Ecocritical Reading, based on Dilip Barad's
“Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future” (JHERS, October 2022)
Opening Hook
What happens when colonialism ends politically but continues economically, through the extraction of land, minerals, forests, and human labour? The climate crisis is often described as a universal human problem, yet its causes, its histories, and its consequences are not distributed equally. Communities that were once subjected to colonial rule continue, today, to bear the heaviest weight of environmental degradation, displacement, and resource extraction. The Anthropocene, the age in which humans have become a geological force, cannot be understood in isolation from the age of empire that came before it.
Introducing the Article
Title: “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future”
Author: Dilip Barad, Professor and Head, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Journal: Journal of Higher Education and Research Society (JHERS), Volume 10, Issue 2
Year: October 2022
The article traces a shift within postcolonial studies itself. Scholars who once focused chiefly on colonial history and cultural domination are now compelled to ask whether their tools are adequate for a world facing climate change, ecological destruction, indigenous dispossession, and global capitalism. Barad brings together Postcolonialism, Environmentalism, Indigenous Rights, and the Anthropocene into a single, urgent conversation, and asks whether postcolonial theory remains equal to the crises of the present.
Article Summary
1. Postcolonialism and Environmentalism
Barad opens with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's provocative claim that postcolonial studies belongs to an earlier moment.
This does not mean colonialism has stopped mattering. It means postcolonial theory must evolve to meet a new, planetary emergency, one that Dipesh Chakrabarty admits even his decades of postcolonial and Marxist reading did not prepare him for.
2. Colonialism and Ecological Destruction
Vandana Shiva argues that colonialism, and later the rise of transnational capitalism, dismantled ecologically sustainable local cultures, particularly ones in which women's labour was intimately tied to the land.
3. Spatial Amnesia
Rob Nixon's concept of spatial amnesia describes how the West's romantic idea of 'untouched wilderness' erases the indigenous people who have always inhabited that land, along with the histories of dispossession and violence that made the land seem 'empty' in the first place.
4. Environmental Activism and Multinational Corporations
The article turns to Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer executed in 1995 for defending the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta against oil extraction. His death shows that environmental destruction, corporate power, and colonial legacy cannot be separated from one another.
5. Internal Colonialism
Perhaps the article's most important idea: colonial patterns of extraction persist inside formally independent nations. Barad cites India's Narmada Bachao Andolan and mining conflicts in Central India, where indigenous communities are dispossessed of ancestral land in the name of 'development,' echoing the very structures colonialism once imposed from outside.
6. Primitive Accumulation
Karl Marx's concept explains how capitalism was born: through the forced seizure of communal land and its transformation into private, commodified property.
Barad applies this directly to mining, where communal forests and hills become corporate assets overnight.
7. Accumulation by Dispossession
David Harvey's term for how capital expands today, not merely through production, but by stripping communities of assets, resources, rights, and livelihoods.
Harvey's insight connects directly to the mining-driven displacement at the centre of Barad's argument, and to Odisha's own tribal belt.
8. The Anthropocene
Dipesh Chakrabarty describes humans as having become 'geological agents,' capable of altering the planet's climate and geology itself.
Chakrabarty insists the crisis is both planetary and unequal at once, a paradox that sits at the heart of this blog's argument.
The Climate Crisis Is Not Experienced Equally
This is the question the assignment actually asks, and it deserves a direct answer before any theory is brought in: formerly colonized communities are disproportionately affected by ecological degradation because colonialism did not simply end, it changed hands. Colonial rule built the infrastructure of extraction, roads to the mines, ports to ship the ore, laws that decided whose land counted as 'owned' and whose counted as 'available'. Independence transferred the paperwork of that infrastructure to national governments and private companies, but rarely dismantled it. So when a mining company today moves into a tribal district in Odisha, or an oil company moves into the Niger Delta, it is not inventing a new relationship with that land. It is stepping into a relationship colonialism already designed: outsiders extract, locals absorb the damage.
The disproportion is not accidental, it is structural. Communities that colonialism first pushed to the geographic and political margins, forests, hill tracts, riverbanks, are, for that very reason, the same communities sitting on the coal, bauxite, and timber that industrial economies still need. Their marginality is what makes them available for extraction a second time. Add to this the racial and economic hierarchies colonialism entrenched, whose knowledge counts as 'science', whose farming counts as 'development', whose objection counts as 'obstruction', and it becomes clear why the same populations who suffered dispossession under empire are the ones now suffering displacement under climate change and resource extraction. Mining leads to deforestation, deforestation leads to displacement, displacement leads to pollution and lost livelihood, and lost livelihood leads to deeper ecological vulnerability. The chain is old; only its machinery has modernised.
The Jengaburu Curse: When Development Becomes Dispossession
The Jengaburu Curse (SonyLIV, 2023), directed by Nila Madhab Panda and written by Mayank Tewari, bills itself as India's first cli-fi, climate fiction, web series, and the label matters: it signals a show that wants ecological collapse read as thriller, not backdrop. Priya Das, a London-based financial analyst, is pulled back to Odisha's mining belt near Kendujhar district when her father, Professor Das, goes missing. What begins as a personal search for a missing parent widens, episode by episode, into something much larger: a buried conspiracy linking illegal bauxite mining, the fictional indigenous Bondia tribe, a string of unexplained deaths, and a corporate-political nexus that reaches from a small Odia town all the way to London boardrooms.
The series is deliberately built around a landscape doing double duty. The Jengaburu hills are, on one register, a mineral-rich asset a mining conglomerate wants opened up; on another, they are the Bondia's ancestral home, carrying a local legend of a sleeping Dragon King whose disturbance is said to bring ruin. The show lets both registers sit on screen at once, the geologist's survey map and the tribal elder's warning, and refuses to let the audience treat one as superstition and the other as fact. That refusal is the show's real achievement: it does not romanticise the tribe as timeless and pure, nor does it treat the mining company as a simple villain in a morality play. It shows a machinery, permits signed in distant offices, water turning the colour of rust, illness with no clear diagnosis, protest quietly recast as insurgency, and lets the audience watch how each part of that machinery depends on the others.
Read against Barad's article, what the series stages is not a single dramatic act of destruction but a slow accumulation of small, almost bureaucratic violences: a survey here, a permit there, a well that stops running clean, a village elder who is suddenly a 'person of interest' to the police. It is precisely this machinery, land turned into asset, resistance turned into criminality, memory turned into folklore, that the article's vocabulary of internal colonialism, dispossession, and slow violence allows us to name and connect back to a much longer history.
Reading the Series: How the Article's Argument Plays Out On Screen
The value of Barad's article is not that it hands us eight separate labels to stick onto eight separate scenes. It is that, read together, its concepts describe a single continuous process, and The Jengaburu Curse dramatizes that process from the inside out. What follows traces that process through the series rather than through the theory alone.
From Independence to a New Extraction: Internal Colonialism
The most important thing the series gets right is refusing to give its extraction plot a foreign villain. There is no colonial officer, no obviously external corporation. The permits are signed by Indian officials, the police who brand Bondia protestors as 'Naxals' are Indian police, the geologists are Indian geologists. This is what Barad's article means by internal colonialism: the machinery of dispossession has been fully indigenised, run by the postcolonial state itself, while producing exactly the outcome colonial rule once produced, land moving out of indigenous hands and into distant ones. The series therefore forces an uncomfortable question the article also asks: can a nation call itself decolonized while its own government reproduces, almost unchanged, the extractive relationship colonialism invented?
Land Into Asset: Primitive Accumulation and Accumulation by Dispossession
Watch how quickly the Jengaburu hills change status in the series, from ancestral home, marked by legend and grave-sites, to 'mineral reserve', marked by survey pegs and permit numbers. That change of status is not incidental to the plot; it is the plot. Marx's primitive accumulation describes exactly this kind of overnight transformation of communal land into private capital, and Harvey's accumulation by dispossession describes what happens next: a mining conglomerate's wealth grows in the series in direct proportion to how much the Bondia lose, land, water, health, and eventually lives. The show never states this equation outright, but its editing keeps returning to it, cutting between boardroom numbers and village suffering, until the audience does the arithmetic itself.
Whose Nature Is It? Environmental Justice in the Plot
Environmental justice asks a blunt question, and the series keeps asking it too: who benefits, and who is poisoned? Almost no one who profits from the Jengaburu mine lives near it. The people whose wells run rust-coloured, whose children fall unexplainably ill, whose forest thins year on year, are the same people who see none of the profit and almost none of the decision-making. The series' politics live in that gap. It is not simply a thriller about a missing father, it is a thriller structured entirely around the question of who pays for whose development.
An Empty Hill or a Home? Spatial Amnesia
Official language inside the series, in permit documents, in news reports the characters read, in the mining company's own promotional material, treats the Jengaburu hills as empty terrain waiting to be developed: mineral reserve, GDP, jobs. The Bondia's own relationship to the same hills, their legend of a sleeping Dragon King, their burial grounds, their memory of who cleared which forest path, is treated by that same official language as folklore, an obstacle to be managed rather than a history to be reckoned with. This is Rob Nixon's spatial amnesia made visible: development discourse does not deny that people live there, it simply refuses to let their history count as a reason to stop.
Damage Without a Headline: Slow Violence
The series' most disturbing moments are quiet ones. A child's unexplained fever. A well that used to run clear. A hillside a little barer than it was the year before. None of these register as a single dramatic catastrophe, no explosion, no single day of disaster, and that is exactly Nixon's point about slow violence: harm that is gradual and dispersed struggles to become news, or evidence, or a court case, even while it is killing people. Arguably this is where the series is most successful as an adaptation of Barad's argument: it makes visible, through accumulation of small details across seven episodes, a form of violence that resists being seen all at once.
Who Carries the Weight? Gender and Ecology
The series gives its resistance a strongly gendered face, through Priya, who returns from London to fight for land she once left, and through the Bondia women who are shown carrying water further each season and watching harvests fail. Vandana Shiva's argument, that industrial development falls hardest on women whose daily labour is tied most directly to land, food, and water, is not stated as theory anywhere in the show, but it is visible in who does the carrying, the walking, the waiting, throughout it.
A Shared Planet, An Unshared Burden: The Anthropocene
Chakrabarty's Anthropocene asks us to think of humanity as a single species altering a single planet. The Jengaburu Curse agrees with the premise and quietly refuses the comfort of it: yes, the climate crisis is planetary, but inside that planetary crisis, the Bondia are made to absorb the damage first, and hardest, while the profits and the decisions travel elsewhere, to London, to boardrooms, to distant capitals. The Anthropocene may be a shared epoch. The series insists it is not a shared experience.
Development for Whom?
Economic development is too often treated as automatically equal to social progress. The Jengaburu Curse refuses that equation. Development for whom? Who owns the resources, who receives the profits, who loses the land, who breathes the dust, who gets represented in the decisions made about their own home? Global capitalism does not ask these questions; postcolonial ecocriticism must.
Colonialism → Capitalism → Climate Crisis
This is an interpretive chain, not a claim that one simple sequence explains every dimension of the climate crisis. It offers a way of seeing how extraction, once colonial, becomes corporate, without losing its logic of dispossession.
COLONIAL EXTRACTION
↓
RESOURCE APPROPRIATION
↓
CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
↓
DISPOSSESSION
↓
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
↓
ECOLOGICAL DEGRADATION
↓
CLIMATE VULNERABILITY
↓
INDIGENOUS / MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES
Theoretical Toolkit: Understanding the Ecological Anthropocene
Who Speaks for the Land?
Spivak's question of the subaltern asks: who is represented, who represents them, and who controls the narrative? Not every indigenous character in a screen text is automatically 'subaltern' in Spivak's precise sense; the term describes a structural exclusion from representation, not simply an identity. In The Jengaburu Curse, the Bondia tribe's suffering reaches the audience largely filtered through Priya, an educated, London-based outsider returning to her own roots. This is not a flaw unique to the series, it is the recurring difficulty of environmental storytelling: can marginalized communities be given a voice without that voice being spoken through someone else?
Environmental Justice and Postcolonialism
Environmentalism cannot simply say 'save nature.' It must ask: whose nature, whose land, whose resources, whose survival? Environmental justice, understood this way, must include social justice, indigenous rights, economic justice, historical accountability, land rights, and cultural survival together. This is the central argument this blog has tried to build: that ecological harm and colonial history are not two separate stories but one continuous one.
From Colonialism to the Globalized Anthropocene
Barad's argument remains relevant well beyond Odisha. Multinational mining, fossil-fuel extraction, deforestation, and climate migration continue to strike hardest at the Global South, even as decisions about them are frequently made in the Global North. Indigenous resistance movements, from the Niger Delta to Central India, share a common grammar: land as identity, extraction as violence, resistance as survival. The article's conclusion calls for postcolonial studies to expand toward environment, indigenous history, premodern cultures, and the ongoing colonization of territories and peoples by global capital, a call this blog has tried to answer through a single Odia web series.
My Reflection: The Earth Remembers What History Forgets
A forest is not only timber, minerals, and land. It can be home, ancestry, livelihood, spirituality, and collective memory all at once. When a hill like Jengaburu is mined, what is lost is not measured only in tonnes of bauxite; it is measured in a community's severed relationship to its own past. This is why the Anthropocene should be understood not only as a geological crisis but also as a crisis of justice and historical memory. To damage the earth in these terms is also to damage the archive of a people's belonging.
Comparative Table
Questions for Further Reflection
● Can colonialism truly end when patterns of extraction continue?
● Who pays the ecological price of development?
● Can environmental justice exist without indigenous justice?
● Is climate change really a universal crisis if its effects are radically unequal?
● Can capitalism solve an ecological crisis produced partly through endless extraction and accumulation?
● Who has the authority to define what counts as ‘development’?
● What happens when forests are treated as resources rather than homes?
● Can cinema give marginalized communities a voice without appropriating their experiences?
Conclusion
Colonialism gave way to capitalism, capitalism drove dispossession, dispossession produced ecological degradation, and ecological degradation now defines the unequal terms of the Anthropocene. Read through Dilip Barad's theoretical framework, The Jengaburu Curse becomes more than a story about a mining conspiracy in Odisha. It becomes a story about power, land, memory, capitalism, indigeneity, and survival, told through a genre India had not yet used to tell it.
The Anthropocene, then, requires postcolonial studies to ask not only what humanity has done to the planet, but which histories of exploitation made this planetary crisis possible, and who is being asked to pay for it first.
Works Cited
- Barad, Dilip. “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 201–213.
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222.
- Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015.
- Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by Agnes Schwarzschild, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.
- Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, 1867.
- Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, edited by Ania Loomba et al., Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 233–251.
- Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
- Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India. Kali for Women, 1988.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Bring Down the Power Structures.” Powision, 18 Feb. 2013.
- The Jengaburu Curse. Created by Nila Madhab Panda, written by Mayank Tewari, performances by Faria Abdullah, Nassar, and Sudev Nair, Studio NEXT, SonyLIV, 2023.
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