Historicizing Indic collectives’ ‘solidarities’ in the age of the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Anthropocene introduces a new ‘universal collective’ – the human species seen as a group and acting as a global geophysical agent. This ‘universal collective’ has usually been written about from a Western perspective. It has rarely been explored in relation to what a ‘collective’ might mean outside the Euro-American zone. The challenge is to rethink ‘universal’ from within local traditions of intellection so as to, in a sense, ‘provincialize’ it (after Dipesh Chakrabarty). Highlighting some of the recent anthropological literature on debates about the environment and the nonhuman in the Indic sphere, this article critically examines how contradictions about this ‘collective’ often return us to deep-seated ideas about what it means to be human – especially in relation to segregating beliefs about caste, gender and, ultimately, also nonhumans. In other words, this article attempts to underscore what lies at the heart of the complex endeavour of making sense of the ‘collective’, from an Indic perspective, in a time of climate breakdown.