Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia

Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art. He has authored Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), and edited the Lahore Biennale 01 Reader (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He has co-edited the Lahore Biennale 02 Reader (2024) and Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and Their European Diasporas (2023).Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work in the ILR School at Cornell University and the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (2014), Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (2020), and How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (2019, co-edited with Alex Blanchette). Articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Antipode, and Environmental Humanities.Rupali Gupte is an architect, urbanist, and artist, and a founding member, Professor, and Director at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai. Her interdisciplinary work engages South Asian architecture and urbanism, urban form, housing, repair, gender, and spatial practices through writing, drawing, installations, curation, and spatial interventions. Her recent publications focus on pedagogies of spatial justice, the theorization of small forces that shape cities, and the reconceptualization of housing as “inhabitation” in South Asia.Sonal Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (2015) and editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (2023). Her monograph The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia will be published in 2027.

"Imaginative artworks and projects engaging with monsoon rains, rivers, mangroves, dams, and other environmental actors create a vital lens for confronting climate change in South Asia, a region that bears its severest brunt. Multi-national, multi-disciplinary, and historically conscious, this volume demonstrates the importance of the humanities and the arts in understanding and acting upon the most urgent environmental crises of our age."-- Esra Akcan, Professor, Department of Architecture, Cornell University"Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia is a welcome addition to the environmental humanities of the Global South. Its focus on human creativity explores a neglected dimension of the experience of climate change. Its attention to topographies, materialities, and mediatic forms is innovative in bringing forward the formal qualities of the creative expressions that climate change has already engendered.-- Naveeda Khan, Professor, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University"I read the essays collected in Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia with intense interest and deep admiration. They demonstrate that responding to ecological devastation requires locally grounded practices shaped by human creativity, intellectual rigor, and cross-border collaboration. Committed to a pedagogy of life, this volume offers a generous invitation to learn, rethink, and imagine more just futures."-- Elke Krasny, Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Co-editor of Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet."This remarkable collection cuts skilfully across South Asia’s diverse and uneven geographical infrastructures, humanising the many granular reactions to techno-neoliberal climate change adaptation and opportunism. It offers critical and poetic insights into ecological vulnerability, exploitation and displacement, emphasising more-than-human agency and social activism in a unique framing of the untapped creative potential of landscape-centred epistemes."-- Anoma Pieris, Professor and Associate Dean Research, Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne.

• Introduction: Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South AsiaPart I EpistemologiesChapter 1 Silt, Dredge, Embankment, Pond: Taxonomies of a Delta DispositifChapter 2 Misreading Climate Change and Sea Level Rise: An Environmental History of Embankments and Floods in BangladeshChapter 3 Socio-environmental Imbrications and Epistemological Borderlands in Mumbai’s Mangrove LandscapesChapter 4 Movement Artifacts and Academic Exclusion: DairaPart II LineagesChapter 5 El Niños and the Architecture of Drought: The Dig ExperimentChapter 6 Messenger Poems and the Cultural Politics of Migration: Monsoon MediaChapter 7 Impermanence, Repair, and Practices of Habitation in South Asia: A Pedagogy of LifePart III TransformationsChapter 8 Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change Adaptation in Uzma Khan’s Thinner than Skin: Reading IceChapter 9 Climate Translations and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Indian MediaChapter 10 Burst Pipes, Developmental Hubris, and Dissident Art in an Unnamed CityChapter 11 The Country and the City in the HimalayaPart IV PracticesChapter 12 The Complexities of “Climate Migration” in Mustang, NepalChapter 13 Mediatic Environments of Resistance and ImaginationChapter 14 Towards Architectures of ExfoliationChapter 15 Climate Crisis in Contemporary Bangladeshi Architecture: Living on the EstuaryAfterword