Imaging ‘Slow Violence’ in the Jharia Coalfields of India: Disrupting Energy Modernity through Photography

Abstract

The paper contributes to the field of Energy Humanities from an often under-discussed Global South perspective, foregrounding cultural productions around coal extraction as a potential tool for disrupting energy modernity. Using photographs from the Jharia coalfields in Jharkhand, India, as primary sources, we examine coal extraction as a form of ‘slow violence’. The discursive ploy of energy modernity has been to make fossil fuels an emblem of socio-economic progress. The paper adds to critiques seeking to reframe this narrative and argues that the framework of slow violence reconfigures coal mining as a form of eco-social dispossession. The paper traces how the photography of Sebastian Sardi and Ronny Sen give visibility to those spaces—both somatic and geographical—which are not considered a legitimate part of the country’s development rhetoric but are nonetheless necessary for its creation and maintenance.

Keywords:

• Coal mining
• energy modernity
• environment
• Jharia
• labour
• photography
• slow violence

Acknowledgements

We thank the photographers, Sebastian Sardi and Ronny Sen, for giving us permission to reproduce their photographs in the paper. We also thank the editor of South Asia, Kama Maclean, and the two anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reviews, from which we have greatly benefitted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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