The Art of Disregard. Jaduguda and the Indian Nuclear Project

2009

India's nuclear expansion plan has resulted in the massive search for uranium (the basic raw material for nuclear power plants) throughout the country. Uranium mines are being opened up everywhere. Coincidentally, most of the uranium mining sites in India are also homes to indigenous tribes who are unjustly being displaced in the name of development. The Adivasis in Jharkhand too are being thrown out from their ancestral lands, stripped off their identity, collective community rights and livelihood, all for the sake of uranium mining. Several parts of Jharkhand have now been transformed into virtual battle grounds where the Adivasis are struggling for the last vestiges of their life and identity. Excessive mining has resulted in the depletion of natural resources, destruction of habitats, pristine forests, bio-diversity hotspots and river systems, gradually transforming the entire landscape into a devastated wasteland.

Proquest, 2022

Read the entire dissertation at: https://shorturl.ac/becomingirradiated Becoming Irradiated demonstrates that the dual epistemic conditions of self-reliance and nuclear safety neglect experiences of radioactive contamination across three varied irradiated facilities in India that comprise the nuclear fuel cycle under study. The Nuclear fuel cycle, as the study’s technoscientific apparatus, puts things, facilities, distinct entities, bodies and illnesses that are out of relations, back into relations and, capture the self-reliance conditions that shape India as nuclear country. The facilities include Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill and the Mayapuri Scrap Metal Market modelled on developmentalist, technological and neo-liberal self-reliance. The dissertation provides a map of self-reliance, exploring its multiplicity, to demonstrate the psychopathology of colonialism embedded in India’s conceptual practice of self-reliance. Through a discourse analysis of IAEA regulatory episteme, the dissertation’s regulatory intervention questions the epistemic premise of today’s international nuclear regulation—nuclear safety achieved in the facility’s technologies, operations and management protects health and environment from irradiation. It analyzes the ontological enactment of the nuclear safety episteme in the facilities, and critiques it through embodied, subjugated epistemologies of becoming irradiated around it based on situational, para-sited, sensory and multispecies ethnographic analysis. The dissertation is theoretically framed by Cognitive Justice which provides a space for thought experiments on how different knowledge systems from Global North and Global South come to coexist in tense and dialogical relations. Under Cognitive Justice creating knowledge is not a task marked off to technoscientific expertise and hence, in this dissertation, I treat experts and epistemically oppressed peoples who experience irradiation as “epistemic bodies” whose epistemic process is embedded in ways they relate with varied technologies. By putting the embodied knowledges of irradiation and the epistemology of nuclear safety that shapes regulation in the facilities in conversation, this dissertation demonstrates how nuclear safety with its material arrangements emerge as an epistemology of neglect, making neglect less of a moral/behavioral matter and more of knowledge issue in Agnotology. The embodied knowledges of radiation illnesses, the dissertation demonstrates, are made and legitimated by victims of irradiation through accounts shared in popular media and in village meetings, forging radioactive kinships—relations that are forged due to ionizing effects of irradiation. Through epistemic bodies, nuclear neglect, radioactive kinship and nuclear differentiation, this dissertation lays the grounds for Critical Nuclear Studies (CNS). The attention to the production and sharing of subjugated knowledges and as they challenge the official discourses of the nuclear order are components of the field of Critical Nuclear Studies. This dissertation pushes forward the frame of cosmopolitical and relational thinking by critiquing the move away from epistemology to ontology in STS and pivots STS, Study of Expertise, Cognitive Justice, Southern theory and Critical Nuclear Studies along the relational turn. The analyzes puts forth a demand for a regulatory apparatus namely Embodied Radiation Protection regime that attends to the epistemic agency of local people living around the facilities in knowing radioactive contamination. The embodied radiation protection regime relies on Ariviyal as pluralized embodied/specialized knowledge, alter-tracers as sensory apparatus, and is founded on the porous relations established with radioactivity on neglected epistemological grounds of nuclear operations and becoming irradiated. This dissertation frames sites of evasion as places where responsibility unevenly gets distributed onto the victims under an embodied radiation protection regime if the state is not held accountable in an increasingly capital centered regulatory apparatus.

Anthropology Matters, 2005

This paper examines the dynamics of anti-nuclear campaigns in the Sundarbans of West Bengal. By focusing on a voluntary agency's (in this case, the Development Forum) engagement with the anti-nuclear protest, it seeks to interrogate the standard environmental narrative in South Asia, which frequently characterizes the environmental movements as the people's spontaneous emancipation from a destructive and monolithic state. This paper argues against such dualistic notions of state and society and documents local level negotiations in the wake of plans to set up a nuclear power plant; negotiations that render problematic theories treating the state or people as some kind of unified and monolithic unit.

This article discusses two prominent protest movements in India responding to nuclear energy expansion, protests related to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project in Tamil Nadu and the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project in Maharashtra. Partly based on ethnographic fieldwork at both sites, the article argues that these protest movements are substantially different from antinuclear mobilisations outside South Asia. Indian nuclear-related protest movements problematise the tensions of development and environment from a grassroots perspective but struggle with opposing claims that more energy is needed. Locally, projectaffected people do not trust government agencies to protect them and the local environment against creeping pollutions and potential disasters. Above all, local grievances are directed against high-handed procedures of compensating project-affected persons. Seen from this angle, these protest movements are in effect contributing to the arduous process of democratisation of governance regarding the constantly changing modalities of expanding energy provisions in India.

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2018

The article analyzes the role of the documentary form in building pronuclear narratives around the Indian nuclear project. It situates the nuclear films made by two state institutions, Films Division of India (Films Division) and Vigyan Prasar, as part of a network of expert statements, documentary assertions, and state violence that bring into being a pronuclear reality. Through the insights gained from my practice­based enquiry, which led to the production and circulation of a film titled Nuclear Hallucinations, I argue that the certainty of the pronouncements of such documentaries can be unsettled by approaching them as a tamasha. I rely on the multiple connotations of the word tamasha in the South Asian context and its ability to turn solemn assertions into a matter of entertainment or a joke. This vantage point of tamasha vis­à­vis the Indian nuclear project builds upon the strategies of antinuclear documentaries that resist the epistemological violence of pronuclear assertions. In this article, I explore the role of comic modes and irony in forming sites of tamasha to create trouble within the narratives that position nonviolent antinuclear protestors as " antinational " elements. The article also expands on how the point of view of tamasha can engender new solidarities, which can resist the violence of the Indian nuclear project by forming new configurations of possibilities.

The Book Review, 2023

2017

This practice-based research uses the context of the documentary assertions around the Indian nuclear project to examine how comic modes and irony can be employed to undermine authoritarian knowledge claims that make use of the epistephilic dimensions of the documentary form. An analysis of the pro-nuclear assertions in the documentary narratives of two state institutions in India, Films Division and Vigyan Prasar, was done as part of this enquiry. The diverse ways in which Indian anti-nuclear films engage with these narratives in humorous and ironic ways was also studied. The insights gained from this analysis contributed to the production and circulation of a film I made titled Nuclear Hallucinations, which is centred around the Kudankulam anti-nuclear movement in South India. Through its processes, the research develops a specific configuration of the vantage point of what I call tamasha in order to unsettle the certainty of pro-nuclear knowledge claims in documentary. Nuclear Hallucinations experiments with the use of satirical impersonations, irony, hallucinatory voice-overs and comic appropriation of pro- nuclear arguments to arrive at strategies that can elicit a response from the realm of tamasha. These experiments are informed by a framework that treats film as a process that goes beyond the limits of the edited film; the sites of engagement created during the production and circulation phases of the film are treated with equal importance. The research argues that the interventions created by the vantage point of tamasha offer new ways to resist the epistemological violence of documentary narratives that privilege the documentary form’s ability to authorize assured knowledge claims.