Introduction

Ancient epics have played a significant role in the growth of modern nationalism. At the time of their conception, epics possessed no notion of nationalism. However, over the past three centuries, they have been routinely invoked in many parts of the world for fulfilling modern nationalist claims and aspirations. Political and cultural unity, key features of modern nationalism, were found to be described in ancient epics. Therefore, epics were routinely invoked either as repositories of a nation's past frozen in time (as with Homer or Virgil) or as a genealogical exercise meant to reconstruct an unbroken national–cultural lineage (as with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Both processes helped in nationalist revival.

The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were used by Indian subcontinental nationalists during the colonial and post-colonial periods to imagine a politically and ethnically (Hindu) unified image of the country. The study of Indian epics was facilitated by modern European Indology and the ‘discovery’ of India's ancient (largely Hindu and Buddhist) heritage during the late eighteenth century. Therefore, unlike the absolute devotional reverence and eschatological infallibility accorded to the epics during pre-modernity, Indians were open to investigating their historical context and using them for didactic–political purposes. History, coming to the aid of religious reverence, produced a strange concoction of nationalist rectitude and a strong antidote to colonial cultural hegemony. The fratricide depicted in the Mahabharata was seen as an act of reclaiming the unjust seizure of territory, rendering the epic's moral lesson ‘analogous to the colonial occupation of India’.

Epic studies developing during the nineteenth century drove European Indologists’ primary interest – namely, determining the remote antiquity of the Mahabharata, deciphering the urtext from latter recensions, and granting it lesser value in comparison to the Greco-Roman classics. European Indological discourses posited India as the opposite of ‘the West’ and hence inferior in character. Indian thought was presented as mythical and symbolic and therefore unworthy of the cold rationality articulated through logical arguments.

Indians attached multifarious significance to its epics. If the Ramayana was the adi-kavya (the original poem), the Mahabharata was varyingly rendered as an itihasa (history) and the ‘fifth Veda’ and even garnered equivalency to a Dharmashastra text. The Mahabharata also carried a powerful moral sermon on righteous violence (the Bhagavadgita), delivered by Krishna, the personification of the Absolute.

On the evening of January 24, 2015, I was in the midst of Baba Shah Jamal's urs festival at his shrine in Lahore. Stationed just outside the main entrance, I observed a succession of devotees approaching their saint in groups of different sizes. All of a sudden, a commotion erupted a few yards away, where some men seemed on the verge of a physical altercation. Along with other onlookers, I also rushed to this scene and soon discovered that a group of devotees had taken offense to a handful of teenage boys who had attempted to join their dhamal. All evening, I had been witnessing similar scenes in which small bands of teenagers would infiltrate circles of devotees and join in their dhamal by unfurling an array of Bollywood-inspired dance moves. So far, such incursions had been tolerated in the festive spirit of the occasion. After all, urs in South Asia, which are enacted annually on the occasion of a Sufi saint's death anniversary, are not just a ritual commemoration of saints but also a popular celebration. However, this particular group reacted differently. Two of the men violently grabbed the teenagers and literally tossed them aside. Given the serious intent and intimidating appearance – large and muscular build emphasized by an exaggerated swagger and aggressive manner – of these men, the rest of the teenagers beat a hasty retreat. Quite quickly, a circular space was cleared for the group to continue their dhamal uninterrupted. The message that these devotees took their dhamal very seriously and were not going to tolerate any interference in it had been delivered loud and clear.

As an audience started building around this circle, the devotee group promptly launched into a dhamal to the insistent beat of the dhol. Within a matter of seconds, their scowls had melted into expressions of joy. Driven on by one of the devotees (let us call him Pehalwan), who appeared to be the group leader, the men's movements began to pick up pace. They extended their arms with palms outstretched toward the tomb of their saint as if asking for supplication and stomped their feet with a thudding noise.

Introduction

Indian cities are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their rapid population growth, high levels of socioeconomic inequality, and the general inability of infrastructure and public services to adapt to projected impacts (Revi 2008; Sharma and Tomar 2010). Although the neoliberal reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have enabled the broader participation of non-state actors in decision-making, an ideological preference for entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance have largely led to the withdrawal of the state from delivering basic services (Datta 2015). Revenue shortfalls and lack of administrative capacity have further decreased the ability of cities to deal with climate impacts and risks (Cook and Chu 2018; Sharma et al. 2014). These effects are felt most acutely by the urban poor, who are disproportionately exposed (Michael and Vakulabharanam 2016; Satterthwaite et al. 2007).

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of climate change among government officials. For the next two decades, governmental interventions in Indian cities were confined to climate mitigation and targeted select manufacturing, construction, and energy sectors (Dubash et al. 2018). To be fair, climate adaptation was still a relatively nascent priority for India, and its policy focus was on furthering its geopolitical role in global climate negotiations. As a nation that saw itself as a rapidly industrializing global power, India aggressively pushed for the country's ‘right to development’ despite its significant exposure to climate change impacts (Gupta 2010). Indian negotiators highlighted how industrialized nations could support India through technology, resource, and capacity transfers that will allow it to ‘leap frog’ from fossil-fuel-intensive to more sustainable forms of development. Widespread awareness of climate adaptation only emerged in the late 2000s, spearheaded by transnational, civil society, and national scientific bodies that documented changing climatic patterns and advocated that subnational governments play a role in addressing climate risks (Khosla and Bhardwaj 2019b; Sharma, Singh, and Singh 2014; Sharma et al. 2014). Since then, and as climate adaptation has moved from the policy to the implementation space, there have been growing concerns that structural inequalities in urban development in India may dilute or even redirect the intended benefits of climate adaptation.

Introduction

The feminization of agriculture, or the sharp increase in the number of women in farming, is the result of a deep and ongoing agrarian crisis. Some scholars have more aptly named this phenomenon the ‘feminization of the agrarian crisis’ to capture how the ongoing agrarian crisis places a greater burden on women farmers than it does on their male counterparts. Patriarchal norms and attitudes prevent women from owning and controlling land, and women from marginalized castes and classes are the most disadvantaged (Pattnaik et al. 2018). Over 70 per cent of women in rural India are engaged in farming, but since the majority do not formally own land, they are not officially recognized as farmers and are instead considered as ‘farm helpers’ (Agarwal 2021). Given the substantial inequalities that affect women's ownership of and control over land, they cannot avail the benefits of land ownership – economic security, social status, and state support, among others.

This chapter looks at climate justice in the context of women in agriculture. Climate change and gender inequalities are deeply intertwined. Governments and civil society actors have launched various programmes aimed at climate resilience and adaptation in agriculture. However, when analysed through the lens of climate justice, these efforts do not always promote social equity. On the contrary, in some cases, mainstream climate solutions threaten women's land rights and farm-based livelihoods.

Using the novel framework of agrarian climate justice, which combines ideas from agrarian justice and climate justice, we explore women's land rights within agroecology programmes in India. We argue that advancing women's collective land rights through climate initiatives can achieve the twin aims of climate resilience and agrarian justice. We focus on agrarian land and do not look at forest lands, which, although equally important, are outside the scope of this chapter. Drawing from feminist scholars’ work on intersectionality, we emphasize the importance of an intersectional understanding of the differences between women based on intersecting identities of caste, class, age, education, and marital status, among others (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik 2011). Such an understanding is important to ensure that climate policies reduce, instead of reproduce, inequalities.

Devotion on the Margins

In my first meeting with Meedan, she handed me an old, fading photograph of herself. Stylishly dressed in a fitted white dress and contrasting green dupatta with a golden border, she was unrecognizable from the worn, gray-haired woman in baggy clothes sitting in front of me. Golden earrings, which she wore two in each ear, a clutch of hair framing the top half of her face, and liberally applied pink lipstick completed her carefully arranged look in the photograph. Her stiff expression and the awkwardness with which she held a long metal tong as a prop in both hands further cemented the impression that much thought and effort had been expended for this pose (see Figure 4.1). Meedan had been reminiscing about her trips to Shahbaz Qalandar's mela in her younger years when she brought out this photograph. Pointing to it, she chuckled, “Now you know how I used to go to sarkar.” “You should have seen her dhamal. She was known for it,” Meedan's younger brother, Azeem, chimed in. Meedan went on to elaborate that she had been hearing stories of Qalandar from her father when she was a child. These tales stirred a growing desire, which quickly turned into an obsession, to visit his shrine herself. She then started putting aside 5 rupees from her daily earnings in a pot that she kept hidden under her charpoy. After doing this for a whole year, she finally had enough money to attend Qalandar's urs in Sehwan. In subsequent years, Meedan made a habit of saving money to attend this annual festival to celebrate her saint.

Meedan's story is not, by any means, unique in her community, as many others express similar sentiments of devotion to Shahbaz Qalandar and other Sufi saints. She identifies as a member of the Muslim Sheikh, a low-caste pakhi waas tribe of Punjab. Literally, camp dwellers, the pakhi waas describe themselves as former nomadic tribes that historically existed outside the social structure of caste-based Punjabi society. As a result of the gradual collapse of the nomadic economy and systematic efforts to curb their mobility and regulate their lives by the British colonial state (Major 1999; Schwarz 2010), these tribes were coerced to join settled society and adopt its ways.

Syndicates in Bangladesh are felt in many ways. They are felt in the higher prices when the supply of goods is manipulated. They are seen in the shoddy quality of public infrastructure when contractors skim contracts and skip on inputs. They are felt in the hefty sums demanded for jobs in the public sector. They are felt in the violence and conflicts between rival political leaders and their followers when they compete for dominance. But perhaps most pressingly, they also felt in the relationships that people sustain to get by in everyday life. The core argument developed here has been that behind many of the diverse dependencies that people rely upon to get work, seek security, find opportunities and other resources, lie syndicates. Syndicates are the coercive control that a particular group or network exercises over a resource to their advantage. Many syndicates are embodied by individuals sustaining that coercive hold on a resource and mediating access to it. Many intermediaries are thus racketeers.

For some, the syndicates that carve up the lanes of Kawran Bazaar could be seen as somehow peripheral to life in the city, distant from where the real capital or authority lies. These dirty streets feel much like the city's other creases and crevices such as the bastis, transport terminals, parks or footpaths where the lower classes live and work. Similarly, when syndicates come to public light, we could easily get the impression that these are a scattered phenomenon, examples of particularly egregious politicians or officials. In drawing together odd combinations of actors such as the leader of an Awami League affiliate body and opaque lineman, as well as a very wide range of sectors, they seem idiosyncratic. Others might also characterise the politics we find here as that at the ‘margins’ of the state. Yet the story told here is that syndicates should be seen as fundamental to Bangladeshi politics. Though the labourers may be poor, and the streets may be dirty, there is nothing marginal about the politics we find here. This is the lifeblood of the nation's politics in microcosm. This is the core, the unstable bedrock on which politicians build and parties rest. Syndicates are not merely the whims of greedy people in power but serve to sustain the authority of political leaders.

Introduction

Rightly or not, the governments’ engagements with memory policies are often met with a shadow of suspicion. Victims’ associations, intellectuals, and activists from different parts of the world tend to warn their publics of possible abuses of memory and manipulations of the past made by political leaders. Argentina, with a dense history of mobilization around its dictatorial past, is no exception to this rule. During the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the discussion about the role played by the state in public remembrance was subject to much contention.

In this chapter, we focus on the way Kirchnerism engaged with the memory of the repression and forced disappearances that took place during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Our goal is to analyse Kirchnerist governments’ involvement in public remembrance by considering the main aspects of their narrative together with the political–institutional approach they unfolded towards memory.

In the Argentinian public debate, the discussion concerning Kirchnerist engagements with the past has so far been dominated by a dichotomous approach that swings from considering Kirchnerist uses of the past as illegitimate ‘appropriations’ to considering their engagement as a sort of automatic ‘enshrinement’ of the human rights movement's claims into the national state. We will argue that, instead, we should understand the dominant Kirchnerist memory frame in Argentina as an outcome of an ‘articulation process’ between the government and the human rights movement, formed by an ensemble of heterogeneous organizations that had historically led the struggle for memory and transitional justice in the country. As suggested by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), by ‘articulation’, we do not merely mean an alliance between two preformed entities, but rather a mutual constitution where both the Kirchnerist movement and the human rights organizations (HROs) were transformed in time. As we will argue, this articulation made it possible for memory and human rights to become an object of public policy in an unprecedented way for Argentinian democracy.

Following Laclau (2005a), we adopt a formal approach to populism. According to this perspective, a movement or government is not ‘populist’ because of its ideological contents but due to a specific logic of articulation of contents, whatever these may be.

Introduction

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have significantly shaped South Asian norms of gender roles. The ideals transmitted through them are still often considered the proper mode of conduct by many actors and social groups, especially those influenced by Sanskritic varna–jati (the Indian caste system) norms. While the most popular female prototype among many actors is Sita from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offers a number of exemplary characters as well. Not only Draupadi but also characters such as Damayanti and Savitri play an important role in shaping the myth of the ideal woman. The French philosopher Roland Barthes explains in his book Mythologies (1957) that myth is born out of history but disconnects from it and evolves into nature. As the content of the myth seems like an eternal truth, its motive appears invisible. The Mahabharata shaped an understanding of women and their role in society, which was accepted for centuries as the natural rule. The gendered basis of this discourse was rarely explicitly questioned until recent times.

This chapter begins by first tracing the origin of how mythological women became the ideal prototype in the nationalist discourse, which will be followed by a focus on M. K. Gandhi's politics regarding women. Traits which most of the epic female characters share are that they suffer silently and resist through loyalty and devotion – characteristics that modern reformers like Gandhi foregrounded in an attempt to mobilize women for the Indian nationalist cause. While his discourse elevated the status of women to a higher position, it came at a cost, and by fortifying the image of the ideal Indian woman, he put them in a gilded cage. The rest of the chapter will focus on feminist revision of myths, necessary to deconstruct the female prototype born out of the epics, based on the theoretical framework offered by Adrienne Rich's ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1972) and Alicia Ostriker's ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ (1982). For this, I will take into account several literary texts. Pratibha Ray's (b. 1943) Odia novel Yajnaseni (1984) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's (b. 1956) novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) are two important landmarks in this paradigm shift.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Introduction

In 1909, the Sino-Japanese poet Su Manshu painted an image of Cai Yan (Lady Wenji), a poetess of the late second century who had spent 12 years in captivity abroad before returning to the Han Empire, and sent it to his friend, the art collector Liu Jiping (also known as Liu San). Liu wrote a series of poems to appreciate Su's gift, including the following verses:

Why would a Chinese literatus at the turn of the twentieth century write a poem mentioning the Indian epic Mahabharata to match a seemingly unrelated painting?

Until well into the twentieth century, the name of the Mahabharata had been mostly unknown in East Asia, except for a few isolated references in Buddhist texts. Against the sheer preponderance of Buddhist thought in the intellectual flows between India and China, it might even have seemed futile to look for an East Asian reception of the Mahabharata. Yet, over the centuries, various elements related to the Mahabharata circulated between South Asia and East Asia and played significant roles within East Asian culture itself.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian thought continued to play a major role in East Asia amidst intense contact between China, Japan, Europe, and India itself. In close interdependence with the notion of the ‘West’, the category of ‘Asia’ emerged in the Japanese and Chinese imaginary by the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals developed a globalized sense of their position in the world. India became a renewed object of study but, at the same time, also a ‘method’ to deal with the challenges posed by modernity. Interest in India and its role within ‘Asia’ was a significant element not only in understanding the geopolitical realities and ‘catching up’ with the ‘West,’ but also in the quest for a ‘world beyond the material and epistemological constraints’ posed by Western modernity. While Buddhism still played a crucial role as the connecting bond between the two macroregions of East Asia and South Asia, some intellectuals came to understand it in a wider framework that also encompassed other traditions such as that of the Mahabharata.

Introduction

In our warming world, energy provision is not simply about technology but also politics (Hughes and Lipscy 2013). Energy systems are the result of intensely contested political battles in the domains of technology selection, ownership of capital, environmental externalities, access, and siting. The geographical reach, terms of access, and forms of ownership of electricity infrastructures reflect the prevailing distribution of political and economic power (Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan 2018). Consequently, this gives rise to injustices such as uneven electricity access, displacement, and voicelessness among marginalized communities. Control over energy infrastructure is not just the result but often also the source of political and social power (Amin 2014; Larkin 2013) – that is, energy shapes politics just as much as politics shape energy.

India is facing the twin imperatives of tackling historic energy poverty through an expansion of its energy system on the one hand and pursuing climate mitigation on the other. India's electricity sector is dominated by coal-fired thermal power, which in turn drives the country's carbon emissions. The energy sector as a whole contributed around 74 per cent of India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2015, of which 38 per cent was from public electricity generation (GPI Secretariat 2016). On the other hand, India's average monthly residential electricity consumption is only 90 kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is one-third of the global average and one-tenth of that of the US (Chunekar and Sreenivas 2019). Despite official estimates of 100 per cent electrification, many households still receive poor quality electricity for only a few hours each day (S. D’Souza 2019). The growing feasibility of renewable energy (RE) indicates a potential opportunity to address both climate mitigation and energy poverty challenges. India announced a target of 450 gigawatt (GW) of RE by 2030 as against a total installed capacity of 370 GW in April 2020 (PMO India 2019). As we progress towards a low-carbon system, what are the implications of this transition, given existing patterns of injustice and the prospects of their reproduction in our twenty-first-century energy infrastructure?

India's electricity system can be characterized by its gigantic scale; the primary state ownership of its generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure; cross-subsidization from commercial and industrial consumers to agricultural consumers; and its federal nature.

Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

‘If you want to know what it is really like here you must come at night,’ I was often told when first getting to know the jhupri labourers. They spoke of the mess (jhamela) and the fighting (ganjam). The image they draw upon most to convey life here is the sight of labourers competing for work. By day the bazaar and adjacent avenue are clogged with imported Japanese cars, dilapidated buses, CNGs and rickshaws, all slowly inching forward in the shadows of the new metro rail, protesting each metre gained with a cacophony of horns. By late evening the traffic around Kawran Bazaar calms but is replaced with a different jostling for space. As labourers catch sight of arriving trucks, they speed their flat-backed rickshaw vans towards them. Rather than face forward, they often reverse, running while swivelling the handlebars so as to arrive ready to receive sacks. With neither brakes nor chains, the labourers are masters of weaving and dodging obstacles at high speed, forcing each other off course and lobbing insults at rivals. Those who arrive first wait the least, are likely to get more of the goods to deliver and hence higher payment at the end of the night. Fights and injuries are common. Liton described the scene as: ‘The van drivers barricade the truck[s] like an army.’ The image then suggests chaos, a ruthlessness and precarity for people relying on their health and needing to work here day to day to survive and support families. In reality, however, the majority of the trucks are not unloaded in this manner and the jhupri labourers rarely race for work. Instead, most labourers wait in a queue (serial) or follow instructions from a labour leader. Work, in other words, is highly ordered. Yet the claims of precarity that the jhupri labourers evoke with these images are still very real, only materialised in a different way. Risks stem not so much from the need to race and jostle for work, but rather from the dependencies which give order to work.