India, colonialism and “energy justice”: Dinabandhu Mitra, Rudyard Kipling and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Book section : Chapter

The praxis of justice is central to the processes of both decolonization and post-capitalism. But the desired transition from colonialism and capitalism is hampered because such praxis often confines itself within the classical limits of “distributive justice”. While distributional issues are self-evidently important, justice cannot be wholly equated to them since they are finally determined by historical conditions of domination, resistance and recognition. The contemporary movement for “energy justice” has been one important source of reconfiguring a praxis of justice aligned to such conditions. Ranging from the examination of racial and ethnic dimensions of toxic hazards and “natural disasters” to offering new structural analyses of colonialism and capitalism, “energy justice” compels a twinned recognition of the historicity of environment and the environment of history. But such contemporary models of “non-distributive energy justice” also have a long genealogy rooted in nineteenth-century anti-colonial and colonial imaginations. Hence, this chapter reads Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge Builders” (1898), Dinabandhu Mitra’s Neel Darpan (1858) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) to trace some aspects of this genealogy. Across a variety of forms and genres, these texts test out the relationship between energy, justice, colonialism and capitalism as well as the limits and possible mutations of their current configurations. Such fictional experiments and registrations are indispensable to our collective efforts to live in a world where climate change has now decisively redrawn the boundaries and extents of both power and resistance.

Authors: Mukherjee, P

• Publication status: In press
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Routledge
• Host title: Routledge Companion to World Literature and Environment
• Chapter number: 32
• Edition: 1st
• ISBN: 9781032010151
• Language: English
• Keywords: “energy justice”; “energy humanities”; Rudyard Kipling; Dinabandhu Mitra; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.
• Subtype: Chapter