Postcolonialism in the Anthropocene: Environmental Injustice and Indigenous Dispossession in The Jengaburu Curse
Introduction
The environmental crisis of the twenty-first century has created an important challenge for postcolonial studies. If colonialism historically involved the control of land, resources, labour, and people, contemporary environmental destruction raises a similar question: who controls natural resources, and who pays the price for their exploitation? Dilip Barad’s article, “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future,” explores precisely this relationship between postcolonialism, environmentalism, indigenous rights, and global capitalism. The article argues that environmental problems cannot be separated from histories of colonial exploitation and contemporary structures of economic inequality.
This relationship can be effectively examined through Nila Madhab Panda’s 2023 web-series The Jengaburu Curse. Set against the background of mining, indigenous displacement, ecological destruction, and corporate exploitation in Odisha, the series presents environmental degradation not simply as the destruction of nature but as a form of social and political violence. The Jengaburu Curse on SonyLIV Through Barad’s theoretical framework, the series can be read as a postcolonial critique of the ways in which colonial patterns of resource extraction continue under the structures of modern capitalism.
Understanding Barad’s Postcolonial-Environmental Framework
Barad begins by pointing out that traditional postcolonial studies must rethink its concerns in the context of the planetary environmental crisis. He refers to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that even his extensive engagement with globalization, Marxism, Subaltern Studies, and postcolonial theory had not prepared him adequately to confront the “planetary crisis of climate change.” This is significant because climate change changes the scale of postcolonial analysis. Earlier postcolonial criticism often concentrated on the relationship between colonizer and colonized, whereas the Anthropocene requires us to consider the relationship between human societies and the planet itself.
However, this does not mean that all human beings are equally responsible for, or equally affected by, environmental destruction. The environmental crisis is deeply connected to unequal economic and political power. Barad therefore brings environmental concerns into conversation with thinkers such as Vandana Shiva, Rob Nixon, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, David Harvey, and Chakrabarty.
Vandana Shiva is particularly important because she identifies a historical relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and ecological destruction. According to Barad, Shiva argues that the expansion of capitalism and transnational corporations has intensified processes that began during the colonial period and has contributed to the erosion of local ecological practices and communities. The environment, therefore, cannot be treated as an independent subject divorced from questions of history, culture, power, and livelihood.
Environmental Destruction and Indigenous Displacement in The Jengaburu Curse
The Jengaburu Curse provides a striking fictional representation of these theoretical concerns. The series follows Priyamvada “Priya” Das, a London-based financial analyst who returns to Odisha after her father, Professor Das, disappears. Her investigation gradually exposes a much larger conflict involving mining, displaced indigenous communities, corporate interests, and environmental destruction. The series is officially described as a climate-fiction thriller dealing with bauxite mining, displaced tribal communities, unexplained deaths, and the exploitation of natural resources.
The central conflict of the series is therefore not simply nature versus humans. It is more accurately a conflict between different ways of understanding nature. For corporations and powerful economic interests, the land is primarily a source of minerals and profit. For indigenous communities, however, the land is connected to livelihood, cultural identity, memory, and collective existence. The fictional Bondria community's relationship with its environment makes this distinction particularly visible. Their displacement demonstrates how environmental destruction can simultaneously become cultural and social destruction.
This is where Barad's concept of internal colonialism becomes especially useful. Although India is formally independent, Barad argues that colonial patterns can continue within formerly colonized nations when indigenous communities are dispossessed for resource extraction and economic development. The series presents precisely such a situation: a marginalized indigenous population becomes vulnerable when powerful economic and political interests seek control over its resource-rich territory.
“Spatial Amnesia” and the Erasure of Indigenous Voices
Rob Nixon's concept of “spatial amnesia,” discussed by Barad, offers another important way of understanding the series. Spatial amnesia refers to the tendency to forget or erase the histories of colonized peoples and their relationships with particular landscapes. When a forest is represented only as an undeveloped area containing valuable minerals, the people who have historically lived there can become almost invisible.
The Jengaburu Curse challenges this idea by presenting the landscape as inhabited and historically meaningful. The fictional Jengaburu is not simply a mining site. It is a home connected to the Bondria community and its cultural traditions. The series also uses the legend of a sleeping “Dragon King” beneath the land, whose awakening would threaten the environment. This myth gives the landscape a cultural meaning that contrasts sharply with the extractive logic of mining.
Yet the series itself can be critically questioned here. A postcolonial analysis should not automatically assume that representing indigenous people means giving them genuine narrative agency. One review of the series observes that although the show focuses on tribal displacement, it does not always give the indigenous community sufficient opportunity to articulate its own history, political perspective, and socioeconomic reality. This criticism is important because postcolonial representation involves more than simply placing marginalized people inside a story. The question is also whether they are allowed to speak, or whether their suffering is primarily narrated through outsiders.
Capitalism, Resource Extraction and “Accumulation by Dispossession”
David Harvey's concept of “accumulation by dispossession” further strengthens the connection between the article and the series. Barad explains that neoliberal capitalism can accumulate wealth by dispossessing communities of their land, resources, and rights. This concept helps explain why environmental destruction in The Jengaburu Curse is connected to corporate and political power.
Mining transforms natural resources into commodities. The economic value generated by those resources, however, does not necessarily remain with the communities living on the land. Instead, the benefits can move toward corporations, investors, political networks, and other powerful institutions, while local communities experience displacement and ecological damage. The series therefore questions the conventional assumption that resource extraction automatically represents “development.”
Barad makes a similar point when discussing Central India, where mining for resources such as iron and bauxite has produced environmental degradation and conflict with local communities. The broader implication is that the language of development can conceal relationships of power. A project can be economically productive while simultaneously being socially destructive.
The Anthropocene and Unequal Environmental Vulnerability
Chakrabarty's idea of the Anthropocene introduces an additional complexity. Human beings have become powerful enough to alter the planet's ecosystems and climate on a geological scale. Yet Chakrabarty warns that climate change cannot simply be reduced to a story about capitalism because ecological catastrophe ultimately affects the entire human species. At the same time, he recognizes that global capital intensifies existing inequalities.
This tension is crucial. Environmental destruction is universal in its potential consequences, but environmental vulnerability is not universal. Indigenous and economically marginalized communities often depend directly on forests, rivers, agricultural land, and other ecological resources for survival. When these environments are destroyed, they cannot simply relocate or purchase technological solutions. Their vulnerability is therefore connected to both ecological conditions and historical inequalities.
The Jengaburu Curse makes this inequality visible. The environmental crisis is experienced by the indigenous community not as an abstract global problem but through displacement, illness, violence, loss of land, and the destruction of their relationship with their environment. The series consequently transforms climate change and ecological degradation from distant scientific concepts into immediate political and human experiences.
Conclusion
Dilip Barad's “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene” demonstrates that environmental criticism becomes incomplete when it ignores colonial history, indigenous communities, capitalism, and unequal power. The Jengaburu Curse provides a useful cultural representation of these theoretical concerns by connecting mining and ecological destruction with indigenous displacement, corporate power, and political corruption.
The most important insight emerging from this comparison is that environmental destruction in formerly colonized societies cannot be understood simply as a consequence of humanity's general impact on nature. It must also be understood through the history of who owns land, who controls resources, whose definition of development is accepted, and whose suffering is considered expendable. The series exposes how colonial patterns can survive after formal colonialism has ended, particularly when global capital and state power combine to exploit resource-rich territories.
At the same time, the series reminds us that postcolonial environmental criticism must also examine its own representations. Speaking about indigenous communities is not the same as allowing them to speak. This makes the question of environmental justice inseparable from the question of narrative and political agency.
Ultimately, the Anthropocene does not make postcolonial studies irrelevant; it makes it more necessary and more complicated. As Barad concludes, postcolonial scholarship must bring together environmental concerns, indigenous histories, colonial legacies, and the continuing colonization of territories and resources by global capitalism. The Jengaburu Curse illustrates why this expanded perspective matters: there can be no genuine ecological justice without social justice, and no meaningful postcolonial future without confronting the unequal costs of environmental destruction.
0 Comments