Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005). In the context of India, Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier represent cases of grassroot environmentalism, which they term as “environmentalism of the poor” (1997). They cite the instance of the 1970s Chipko Movement in the Himalayas, which sought to oppose the felling of trees to establish a factory. They differentiate grassroots environmentalism, emphasising that environmental degradation affects the poor the most (Guha and Martinez Alier 1997). Moreover, rapid urbanisation and massive developmental projects by multinational corporations, frequently in collaboration with the state machinery, have led to ecological destruction in India. These endeavours have turned India into a “veritable cauldron of social conflicts,” many of which pertain to controlling and using natural resources (Gadgil and Guha 1995). These early scholarly discussions highlight that ecological concerns in non-Western contexts, especially in India, require distinct introspective lenses that consider the history, politics, and social dynamics of the region. These perspectives are crucial in combating the Western universalisation of Green movements and the elitism of the West in dealing with environmental issues (Huggan 2004). The ‘green’ turn in analysing non-Western ecologies often leads to a critique of the principle of ‘developmentalism,’ which essentially results from fetishising development (Dirlik 2012). The ideology of fetishising development, based on the Western idea of neoliberalism, has been a tool in shaping the narrative of progress in the postcolonial Indian nation-state. This ideological drive frequently marginalises communities deemed not to contribute to development; therefore, they are considered redundant to the narrative of national economic ascent. Such discriminatory practices exacerbate social inequities, causing environmental hazards and subjecting the poor to those hazards disproportionately.

Development-driven ecological degradation marks the current proposed epoch—the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, perceived as the ‘age of human beings’, dismantles the age-old differentiation between environmental history and human history (Chakrabarty 2009). Such a ‘convergence of histories’ (Chakrabarty 2015) denotes that the Anthropocene is not only a marker of geological changes, but also a pointer to sociological differences among humans who are disproportionately exposed to the environmental degradation characterising the epoch. Initially, Anthropocene discourses focused on global warming and its broader climatic impacts on the Earth system. Later, with the advent of planetary thinking, which seeks to decentre humans from the Anthropocenic concerns, the focus has shifted to large-scale ecological degradation, causing biodiversity loss and affecting planetary stability. Thus, Anthropocene discourses have broadened to encompass non-human entities and subaltern humans, overtly de-recognised by the dominant epistemologies.

In the context of India, relentless deforestation, unregulated industrialisation resulting in industrial waste and pollution, natural resource crises, the subjecting of oceanic and riverine ecosystems to toxic waste, and the building of massive infrastructure, which has marginalised the ‘ecosystem people’ (Gadgil and Guha 1995) or the Indigenous populations, have defined the Anthropocene. The various manifestations of the Anthropocene in the humanities are grouped under the rubric of Environmental Humanities. The Environmental Humanities as a discipline is relatively recent and focuses on addressing pressing environmental questions. The proposed book seeks to explore the multifaceted environmental issues concerning India. For this purpose, the book proposes analysing the Anthropocenic concerns in India through literary representations. For a long time, literature has represented various scenarios that address urgent environmental issues. Narratives are powerful media for raising awareness about the preservation of our environment, and in some cases, they also narrativise lesser-heard voices.

The proposed book endeavours to examine the literary narratives from India with perspectives that include but are not limited to following areas:

• Environmental history and non-fictional narratives
• Environmental philosophy and literary responses
• Energy humanities, extractivism and literary work
• Planetary waters and Blue humanities
• Eco-aesthetics and graphic narratives in India
• Indigenous and Dalit ecologies and literary mediums
• Environmentalism, climate justice and activist narratives
• Climate fictions in India
• Waste, toxicity and precarious narratives
• Ecological vulnerability and Indian literature
• Multispecies/more-than-human narratives and Indian literature
• Postcolonial ecocriticism and Indian literature
• Radical and decolonial ecologies and literary responses

Submission instructions:

Abstracts should be 500 words (excluding bibliography and 100-word bionote) and sent as a single MS Word file to volume editors Goutam Karmakar (goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in), Somasree Sarkar (somasree.2008@gmail.com),and Payel Pal (payel.pal@lnmiit.ac.in) no later than May 31, 2026. The subject line of the email should state: Submission of Abstracts for the Edited Volume on “Environmental Humanities.”

A decision on the submission of the abstract will be communicated by the volume editors by July 15, 2026. 

Note: It will be highly appreciated if the potential contributors discuss the aims and scope of their abstracts to avoid repetitive and extensively discussed issues, given that unnoticed and overlooked areas/text(s) should be considered. Thus, if you have any notes of interest, please contact the volume editors via email before the submission of your abstract.

Publisher: We are currently in discussions with major publishing houses, and once the selection of abstracts is finalised, we will proceed with the next steps and communicate the results to the contributors.