Pitch Deadline: 25 November 2023

What does nature writing look like in India? Nature writing has historically grown out of industrial backdrops that reflect upon various anxieties around the development of cities and urban landscapes. ‘Nature writing’ in India has largely not been consolidated, though many researchers have worked on gaining semblance of the field that spans across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, reportage, scientific writing, and so on. While an official history of nature writing begins with civil servants and bureaucrats of the British Raj, one can see pre-colonial regional literatures and epics where nature is not removed but a primary part of storytelling. Ecocriticism is a branch of literary and cultural theory that engages with literature, media, culture and the environment. Perhaps a symptom of ecological crisis, the porosity of the genres is something worth exploring and experimenting with, where the etymological divide between the natural and the manmade is a crisis of definition and real experience. 

Do we fear nature? In a post-pandemic era, it also becomes pertinent to address our realities through the axes of contamination and toxicology, as we come to grips with the ongoing environmental calamity that only creates further precarities that are socio-economic as well as political. Social and political atomisation as well as marginalisation of identities is cumulative in the current state of unencumbered exploitation and extraction. 

‘Nature and its Speculations’ is a developing proposition around how one experiences, acknowledges, resolves, relates with, creates connections and knowledge around nature in relation to one’s own situated context. Can you identify a distinct species (plant, animal, insects, fungi, microbes et al) or natural substance or location in your surroundings? What are the terminologies and vocabularies that we can excavate? Does nature haunt? Can we examine our surroundings through the lens of politics and ritual? What are the landscapes we find ourselves embedded in? What can we learn from nature? While ‘nature’ is an all-encompassing term and value proposition, we hope to initiate a dialogue with the various vernaculars, and in turn breaking up nature into personal, local and regional narratives, whether in urban, semi-urban or rural settings, and looking at its representations in media. We invite critical essays, text and image compositions, fiction, comics, scripts, reportage, personal essays, poems, photo essays, texts, research-led and experimental writings.

Shared Ecologies is a program by the Shyama Foundation supporting initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology – through critical, creative, aesthetic approaches, and collaborations with various disciplines and knowledge systems. Through grants, programmes, and conversations, we aim to facilitate a regional and international ecology of individuals, practitioners and institutions, who share overlapping concerns, philosophies and methodologies.