Subir Sinha focuses on extractivism and the expanded state in the context of Hasdeo Aranya (forest) in the state of Chhatisgarh. Hasdeo Aranya has been the site of a protracted struggle by local tribal populations against a coal-extraction project operated by the Adani Group in collaboration with the public sector firm, the Rajasthan Electricity Generation Corporation Ltd. Based on the narratives of the campaign to save this bio-diversity rich forest which also has deep cultural meanings for tribal people, Sinha suggests that extractivism needs specific forms of state intervention, including the creation of fake state entities, and the outsourcing of the state’s formal monopoly over the use of violence to vigilante groups and ‘informal violence entrepreneurs’. Referring to this expanded apparatus of coercion as ‘the expanded state’, Sinha argues that ‘the expanded state’ is a necessary condition of possibility for extractivism in India and elsewhere.
Rashmi Varma takes the discussion of extractivism into the domain of literature, arguing that extractivism is as much grounded in cultural extraction as it is in material accumulation to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, she argues, offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism mines and seeks to exploit for profit.
This seminar is in-person only.
About the speakers
Rashmi Varma is reader in English and literary studies at the University of Warwick.
Subir Sinha is reader in the theory and politics of development at the School of Oriental and African Studies.