Narratives of Environmental Justice and State-Making at the Margins in 2020s Indian Cinema

Abstract

In recent years, Indian cinema have produced a rising number of films foregrounding conservationist themes. For instance, the 2022 Kannada language film Kantara follows a tribal community in Karnataka fighting to keep their forest against greedy loggers while the 2022 Hindi film Bhediya, set in Arunachal Pradesh,shows how a road contractor develops an environmental conscience after being bitten by a local ‘werewolf’. Significantly, in both films the environmental crisis is averted as the central state emerges as a benevolent presence whose conservational politics protects both the environment and historically marginalised communities. This cinematic framing of the state’s role in environmental justice stands in contrast to lived realities of development and the state, as the films are set in locations and include communities who often hold a precarious position in the pan-Indian imaginary. By bringing environmental and development scholarship from South Asia into conversation with cinema and media studies such as Peter Sutoris’ work on developmental documentaries, in this paper I consider what it means when Indian cinema imagines environmental justice as a battle occurring at the margins. I argue that as films like Kantara and Bhediya use conservationist narratives to reinvent the central state as a guarantor of environmentally just development, they risk erasing historical and ongoing violences perpetrated by the state in the name of development