Two analyses of Pratik Chakrabarti's Inscriptions of nature: geology and the naturalization of antiquity

Faced with the urgent threat of ecological collapse and climate change, the status of our geological present has been the subject of intense debate and theorization in recent years. Whether termed the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene (or the Plantationocene or the Chthulucene), the recognition of human economic and political systems as a geomorphic force, capable of creating inscriptions onto the Earth’s geological record, has produced significant scalar shifts and prompted the reconsideration of theoretical and disciplinary frameworks that separate nature and culture, science and the humanities, the non-human and the human. In his book Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity, Pratik Chakrabarti presents a rich historical account of the production of Indian antiquity that traces and critiques the naturalization of these epistemic and methodological boundaries. The book examines the origins and evolution of geological thinking in the nineteenth century showing the early co-presence of natural and historical imaginations, firmly grounding the emergence of “deep time” within the violent frameworks of European colonial governance and resource extractivism.

In the first chapter, Chakrabarti explores the way the colonial engineering of the canal of Zabita Khan unearthed a pursuit for understanding Indian antiquity, collapsing antiquarian projects with those of scientific modernity. He narrates that when engineers visited the site in northern India to survey the land, they found evidence that an ancient canal (indistinguishable from a river in the present) had existed there. This triggered a quest that spanned many interpretive traditions, analyzing mythological texts, monuments, and geological formations, to produce an imaginary of “deep time” in India and connect modernizing projects with long and naturalized visions of the past. Through the analysis of these methodologically-distinct attempts to excavate a lost past, Chakrabarti begins to dissolve the boundary between the practice of geology and history and to point to the entangled means necessary to access the past from a present fractured by colonial violence and environmental decay.

The book then turns to the theories proposed in the 19th century by British geologists about the geological evolution of the Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic Plain, examining their origins in fossil discoveries in the Indian subcontinent and considering the relationship between these “natural history” narratives and trends in Orientalist scholarship at the time. Following Hugh Falconer’s research into the ecology of the Ganga river basin and his collection of fossils from the Siwalik region, the second chapter traces the connection between these particular regions and much larger questions about the origins of humans and human civilization. Here, Chakrabarti illuminates the way early geology imagined close relationships between the emergence of humans and the landscapes around them. Far from the naturalized and objective narrative that geology presents today, this history reflects the overlapping meanings and questions that have informed and continue to define the discipline.

By attending to Hindu interpretations of animal fossils and their socio-cultural life in Indian modernity, Inscriptions of Nature also allows us to think through the sacred and mythical dimensions that inform modern imaginings of nature, evolution, and geological time. In the book’s third chapter, Chakrabarti’s discussion of “shaligrams” exemplifies this coexistence of sacred mythology with a geohistorical conceptualization of the past. Shaligrams, black ammonite fossils found in the Gandak River, are associated with a Hindu legend set in this precise region, according to which Vishnu hid inside a rock in the form of a worm to escape the influence of Saturn. The stones are worshipped in honor of Vishnu as his material sanctuary, bearing the imprint of his non-anthropomorphic form. For Chakrabarti, these artifacts capture the co-existence of religious traditions and scientific objects while pointing to the existence of geological practices far preceding the advent of modern geology. The chapter further cites Hindu scholarship from the late 19th century which began to articulate affinities between the notion of reincarnation in Hinduism and Darwinian evolution. This historiographical analysis further demonstrates the reinterpretation of sacred geographies to comply with the dominant scientific theories as articulations of an evidenced past.

Chakrabarti’s discussion of these hybrid and co-constituitive modes of understanding geological time and the origins of nature challenges narratives that track the progressive secularization of “deep time,” which conform to characterizations of modernity as defined by the absolute displacement of cultural semantics in favor of universal principles of objectivity and reason. These cases illustrate the implications of Chakrabarti’s proposition of a “past unlimited” for thinking through Indian antiquity outside of the strict epistemological and methodological norms of academic disciplines like archeology, anthropology, history, and geology. While the term borrows from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “politics unlimited,” which argues for an expansion of the political field of struggle for marginalized and oppressed peoples in India, it also extends these indiscriminate approaches to the imagination of a pre-historic past as entangled and “out of joint with itself” as the present (Chakrabarty 2008, 16).

The fourth and fifth chapters of the book turn directly to the significance of convergent evolutionary and mythological discourses in the production of racialized categorizations of aboriginal peoples in India. The deployment of scientific reasoning to naturalize racial categories and to justify the dehumanizing and exploitative treatment of non-white populations is a well-documented feature across structures of European imperialism throughout the 19th century and the subject of an extensive critical literature in the history of science. Chakrabarti’s approach, however, emphasizes the geological dimensions that informed the emergent characterization of aboriginal tribes in the Indian sub-continent as “prehistoric humans,” rather than “savages or barbarians.” He points to particular accounts which emphasize the fact that aboriginal tribes lived in dense forests and isolated hills, and to Hindu texts which seem to associate these groups with monkeys, prior to the emergence of Darwinian evolution. Without discounting the cruel and problematic dehumanization of marginalized groups within the Indian caste system prior to the period of European colonial rule, Chakrabarti draws on these particular examples to give nuance and historical detail to the development of ideological frameworks that fix indigenous populations “as fossilized relics in the ostensibly pristine and prehistoric landscapes that surround them” (p. 125)

In the final chapter, the book turns to the geological imagination of a prehistoric continent called Gondwanaland, an accretion comprising the portions of Earth's crust, which would become the modern continents of Southern Asia, Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica. Named after the Gond tribe and the Gondwana region of central India that they inhabited, Gondwanaland reflects the dual pursuits that informed 19th-century geology: the economic search for minerals and fossil fuels and the intellectual search for “deep time” (p. 188) The colonial appropriation of tribal lands and their exploitation for mineral riches in central India, but also across the Southern hemisphere, paradoxically coincided with the imagining of these places as sites of pristine nature where the prehistoric past was most accessible to the modern gaze. While Chakrabarti focuses on the production of the Gondwana region as an exemplary landscape for colonial projections of a pre-history, this chapter provides key openings for thinking across regions of the global South and examining the contradictions produced by colonial relationships to land.

The concept of Gondwanaland is also discussed in the context of contemporary movements for Adivasi sovereignty, capturing the political potential and deployment of geological naturalism as a discursive and historical tool in anti-colonial and emancipatory struggles. Narratives which emerged in the context of the European naturalization of antiquity then become absorbed by contemporary Gond cultural and political identities. As Chakrabarti asks us to critically denaturalize these geological narratives, recognizing their emergence within particular historical conditions and in the interests of colonial projects, I wonder about the political and methodological affordances of “Gondwanaland” as a way of articulating common histories of transformed and affected landscapes in the Southern hemisphere, and repairing the fractures and devastation inscribing our geological present.

Geology as a discipline dwells in scales, both temporal and spatial, that seem to far exceed the lenses of the cultural and the historical. Geological claims, like the theory of continental drift or the observations of global climate change in the last decades, require an engagement with these scales. Inscriptions of Nature, however, reminds us of the deeply local sites that inform these universal claims. By locating 19th-century geological thinking in the contexts of colonial landscape, Chakrabarti breaches the apparent enclosures of these disciplinary scales to consider the co-presence of natural and historical imaginations in the study of Indian antiquity. With this regional specificity, the book provides a valuable model for thinking through the history of science from the global South and alongside persistent systems of mineral extractivism and their associated labor practices. By looking at the past, it prompts us to reconsider the status of the local, as defined by uneven political histories and material distributions, under global conditions of ecological crisis and to recognize the limits of differentiated academic disciplines for thinking through collective futures.

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Pratik Chakrabarti’s Inscriptions of Nature provides an impressive study of the development and deployment of geology and deep time in imperial India during the nineteenth century. He contends that where other historical studies of geology have been concerned with how the Earth became historical, he instead investigates how history itself became naturalized in India through colonial geology. Consequently, the book makes two overarching arguments. First, geology, archaeology, paleontology, comparative mythology, philology, and ethnology, among other colonial knowledge practices, collapsed together in the colonial pursuit of India’s human, non-human, and environmental antiquity. And second, in their pursuit of deep, mythic, and historical pasts of India, these “epistemic consiliences” (p. 18) rendered natural and cultural landscapes together rather than separate and lodged the deep past in the historical imagination of India in a unique manner. In alignment with his past work, he both brilliantly develops these central premises and closely attends to their relationship to colonial power.

The opening chapter begins with the story of colonial surveyors and engineers unearthing the remains of a medieval canal network while working to irrigate the Upper Doab region of Northwest India. Chakrabarti deftly argues that the subsequent archaeological and geological dimensions of the project drew the riparian landscape and canals of past and present together, and, further, erased the boundaries between disciplines investigating Indian antiquity. The second chapter explores the construction of the geological narrative of “ancient alluviums” (p. 55) which emerged from the shifting evidentiary norms, consequence of paleontological evidence from the Himalayan foothills, in the debate over what environmental conditions early humanity emerged from – geologizing human evolution. The third chapter geologizes mythology, following colonial geologists as they bring together paleontology, alternatives to Darwinian evolution, mythology, and philology to argue that the mythological creatures and sacred landscapes of Hindu myth were exaggeratory descriptions of real creatures and environments witnessed in the remote, static, prehistory of India.

The fourth chapter traces how colonial ethnology framed certain populations of India through a global frame of Aboriginal primitivism aligned with geological, i.e. evolutionary, time scales. Chakrabarti argues that the debate over ancient humanity was equally shaped by the construction of anthropological and geological knowledge in colonial contexts. The concluding chapter reviews the history of comparative studies by colonial scientists of the flora, fauna, and geology across the global south in scientific history underlying the theorization of the post-Pangea supercontinents. Chakrabarti follows British expeditions into the Upper Deccan heartland of central India, paying special attention to their extractive motivations, to demonstrate how colonial ethnologists and geologists viewed the Gonds’ culture and society within this geologized perspective and, ultimately, attempted to create theories which naturalized the inequity of colonialism through the deep time of geology and ethnology.

In terms of its stated goals, Inscriptions of Nature is a grand success. Chakrabarti provides plentiful textual evidence to support his overarching argument for the unstable disciplinary boundaries of colonial knowledge practices and subsequent merging of India’s past and present in the crucible of deep time. He achieves this while also closely attending to the integration of colonial knowledge practices and rule, as well as the bi-directional effects of these colonial encounters. This is not a story of Western science conquering another terra incognita but a dynamic rendering of how the study of Indian antiquity profoundly shaped, and was shaped, by European scientific debates about history, myth, and race globalized via colonialism and imperialism. For historians of science and the environment interested in the mutual conditioning of knowledge, environment, and colonialism, these core strengths make this a must-read text. However, beneath the expressed structure of the book lies a limitation to its brilliance.

Curiously, Chakrabarti firmly asserts he is not suggesting “a cultural construction of nature” (p. 5) with this study, but only seeks to historicize geo-historical thinking in India. The conclusion even highlights how the book is “simultaneously about rights over nature: who owns nature and the right to narrate its past” (p. 193). Narration, not enactment, being key here. Is not narrating and owning nature also defining and imposing a particular nature beyond the epistemic realm? In his introductory and concluding remarks, Chakrabarti even observes the climate crisis to frame how the awareness of deep time helped create and identify the global precarity of the climate crisis. Even more contradictory, the last page observes that the book, in part, contributes to our understanding of how the global establishment of a deep “time regime” (196) framed some as primitive to be abused as nature and others as human to use nature. Does this relationality not have performed consequences, to the point that the culturally constructed nature or time becomes enacted as naturalized nature and time? These questions enigmatically lurk in the background of Chakrabarti’s text and the lack of clarity about them requires that the study be limited by the constraints of publishing or there are elements left hanging and undeveloped throughout the book which do not totally synchronize together when assessed outside of a larger thematic vision. This critical assessment is compounded by Chakrabarti’s coining of “pasts unlimited” (p. 9) to conceptualize the lack of firm epistemic boundaries between the deep past and present society in India. While a part of the introduction, the concept appears to fade and is not concretely followed up with robust examples of the present. I genuinely do not see how the concept serves the book on the whole despite making a significant effort to understand it. At best, it feels underdeveloped and, at worst, forgotten. Ultimately, the safety of focusing on the epistemic seems to betray the book in the end by, I believe, restraining the author from developing this text into a truly pathbreaking study of the relationship between environment, power, and the past.