When the forest becomes a sacrifice: postcolonial studies and the Anthropocene in three Indian screen narratives

Assigned article: Dilip Barad, “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future”
Screen texts: Rishab Shetty’s Kantara (2022), Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh (2012), and Nila Madhab Panda’s The Jengaburu Curse (2023)
Key concepts: Anthropocene, environmental justice, spatial amnesia, internal colonialism, accumulation by dispossession, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological sovereignty

Promotional image for The Jengaburu Curse web-series — **Figure 1.** Promotional image for Nila Madhab Panda’s *The Jengaburu Curse*. Image source: SonyLIV promotional artwork; used for educational discussion.

Introducing the article and the Anthropocene

Dilip Barad’s “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future” asks what happens to postcolonial theory when ecological crisis becomes a condition of everyday life. Postcolonial studies examines empire, representation, identity, and resistance, but climate change forces it to think simultaneously about species, oceans, forests, minerals, and the material systems that sustain life. Referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “day before yesterday” formulation and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s admission that climate change unsettled earlier historical frameworks, Barad argues that the field must expand rather than disappear (202–03) [1].

The Anthropocene names an age in which human activity has become a geological force. However, the word “human” can conceal the unequal histories behind that force. Colonial powers extracted land, labour, timber, minerals, and agricultural wealth on a planetary scale; industrial capitalism then intensified that process through fossil fuels, infrastructure, and global trade. The consequences are not distributed equally. Formerly colonized communities often live closest to mines, dams, plantations, polluted rivers, and climate-sensitive forests, while the profits travel to distant cities, corporations, and investors. A postcolonial reading therefore asks not only whether humanity is damaging nature, but also which histories made that damage possible, who benefits from it, and who is made to bear its costs.

Colonial histories in environmental crisis

Barad develops this argument through Vandana Shiva’s account of colonialism’s attack on ecological diversity and Rob Nixon’s concept of “spatial amnesia,” the forgetting of the histories and inhabitants of landscapes represented as empty wilderness (203–04) [1]. When a forest is described as unused or a mineral-bearing hill as a national asset, the people whose lives are tied to those places become invisible. Development language can then convert inhabited territory into a resource frontier.

The idea of internal colonialism is especially important. Political independence does not automatically end colonial relations. A formally decolonized state may still treat Adivasi and other marginalized regions as internal colonies: sources of minerals, hydroelectric power, timber, labour, and land for national growth. Barad connects this process to Marx’s “primitive accumulation” and David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” through which capital appropriates commons and turns land, water, forests, and cultural resources into commodities (205–08) [1]. Environmental destruction is thus not an accidental side effect of development. It can be a method of reorganizing ownership and authority.

Flow diagram linking colonial extraction, global capital, ecological degradation, disproportionate Indigenous impacts, displacement, and environmental justice — **Figure 2.** The postcolonial Anthropocene links historical extraction to present ecological inequality, displacement, and resistance. Original visual created for this blog.

The poisoned commons in The Jengaburu Curse

Trailer

Official trailer link: Watch the trailer on SonyLIV. If the embedded player is unavailable in your region, use this authorized SonyLIV page.

The Jengaburu Curse makes Barad’s concepts visible through a climate-fiction thriller set in a fictional region of Odisha. Priyamvada Das, a London-based financial analyst, returns to Odisha after her father disappears. Her investigation takes her to Jengaburu, where the Bondria community lives beside the Hatidhara River and a forest containing valuable minerals. As the mystery develops, mining, political corruption, violence, and environmental illness become inseparable. The river turns red, homes are destroyed, people disappear, and residents suffer bodily harm connected to the poisoned environment (Banerjee) [2].

The series refuses to separate ecological damage from social damage. The mine rearranges the community’s relationship with water, food, health, memory, and mobility. The river is a shared commons rather than an abstract commodity, and the forest is not empty space waiting for investment. When the water becomes toxic, the community loses livelihood, cultural landscape, and future. The red river visualizes what extraction tries to hide: wealth moves outward while contamination moves inward.

Nixon’s spatial amnesia is useful here because Jengaburu is treated by distant authorities as a remote zone available for sacrifice. Its distance from metropolitan centres makes suffering easier to ignore. The series corrects that erasure by making the affected community part of the story’s knowledge system. Bondria residents are not only victims waiting for rescue from an urban investigator. They remember what has happened, identify the structures behind the violence, and resist the attempt to describe them simply as criminals or “naxals.” Their struggle is a struggle over interpretation as well as land: who has the power to name a community, a mine, a disease, or an act of resistance?

The series also illustrates why formerly colonized peoples are disproportionately affected by climate change and ecological degradation. Dependence on local forests and rivers makes injury immediate, while political marginalization makes remedy difficult. Resource-rich territories are targeted despite weak institutional protection. Climate change therefore includes polluted water, unstable livelihoods, forced migration, food insecurity, disease, and cultural loss. The burden falls on those who contributed least to industrial accumulation and possess the least authority over development decisions.

Sacred ecology and contested land in Kantara

Trailer

Authorized source: Hombale Films’ official YouTube trailer.

If The Jengaburu Curse presents extraction through toxic realism, Kantara presents ecological conflict through myth, ritual, and sacred geography. Set in the cultural world of coastal Karnataka, the film links forest land to local deities, community memory, customary rights, and the Bhoota Kola ritual. Its narrative moves across generations: a king’s exchange with a local deity establishes a moral relationship between land and the people who inhabit it, while later heirs, landlords, and state forest officials attempt to redefine ownership. The film’s central question is not simply who possesses a legal document, but what kinds of knowledge are allowed to count as evidence of belonging.

Karmakar and Pal argue that Kantara foregrounds Indigenous knowledge systems, local customs, demigods, and the sacredness attributed to the forest. They read the film as a representation of epistemic and environmental injustice because the community’s relationship with the land is repeatedly treated as irrational, illegal, or backward by official institutions (Karmakar and Pal) [3]. The forest department’s boundaries and conservation rules may claim to protect nature, but they can also exclude the people who have lived with the forest for generations. This is the contradiction of exclusionary conservation: an apparently green policy can reproduce colonial authority when it imagines human presence as pollution and local residents as encroachers.

The film’s ecological insight is its refusal to separate culture from environment. The forest is livelihood, sacred presence, archive, and social world. The Kola is therefore not decorative folklore but a different way of imagining authority: land is a relationship that imposes obligations on rulers, descendants, officials, and villagers. Kantara consequently challenges the state’s tendency to recognize only written title and administrative control.

At the same time, the film should not be romanticized. Its community is not represented as perfectly ecological, and Shiva’s hunting and masculine violence complicate any simple image of Indigenous harmony. Panigrahi identifies several competing narratives of encroachment in the film: feudal inheritance, state forest control, and the community’s ancestral relationship to land. The review also notes the film’s patriarchal “male saviour” structure and Leela’s difficult position between government employment and community loyalty (Panigrahi) [4]. This criticism matters because a postcolonial environmental reading must avoid turning “the tribal” into a single pure figure outside history. Communities contain gender, caste, class, generational, and political differences. Respect for Indigenous knowledge must coexist with critical attention to internal inequality.

Extraction and militarization in Chakravyuh

Trailer

Authorized source: Eros Universe’s uncut official trailer.

Chakravyuh offers a third register: political realism shaped by mining, corporate development, state violence, and Maoist conflict. The film follows police officer Adil Khan and his friend Kabir, who infiltrates a Naxalite group. Their friendship becomes the narrative route through which urban and state-centred viewers encounter a mineral-rich region where the language of national development coexists with poverty, displacement, and armed struggle. A businessman in the film, Mahanta, is widely read as a fictional echo of Vedanta, linking the story to corporate mining and the land-grab politics of resource-rich central India (Gupta) [5].

The film’s environmental politics are inseparable from its political economy. Forests become terrain where the state, corporations, police, and insurgents compete for authority. The question is who controls the land required for development and who survives its implementation. The Henry L. Stimson Center similarly links mining to pollution, unusable water, displacement, weak forest-law enforcement, and grievances that sustain insurgency (Falkenhagen) [6]. The Anthropocene is therefore also an uneven history of accumulation.

Yet Chakravyuh requires critical distance from its framing. Adivasi suffering reaches viewers largely through two educated male characters and Kabir’s transformation, rather than through sustained attention to displaced people’s everyday voices. Prathamesh argues that the film makes corporate land grab visible but personalizes a complex movement through a few leaders, leaving the rank and file underdeveloped (Prathamesh) [7]. Its sympathy for rebellion is not a complete account of Maoist politics, and resistance is not morally homogeneous. Armed groups, state forces, corporations, and communities occupy unequal positions, but each can produce coercion. A responsible reading preserves that complexity.

Three forms of environmental resistance

Read together, the three screen texts show that ecological destruction is a struggle over land, identity, sovereignty, and development. Their differences are productive. The Jengaburu Curse uses climate fiction and investigative suspense to make contamination and corporate secrecy visible. Kantara uses sacred memory and ritual performance to challenge the authority of state and feudal property claims. Chakravyuh uses political action and militarized conflict to show how extraction can generate insurgency and counterinsurgency. None of these narratives should stand for all Indigenous experiences, but each reveals a different dimension of the postcolonial Anthropocene.

Screen text	Dominant ecological conflict	Form of resistance	Critical question
The Jengaburu Curse	Mineral extraction, toxic water, illness, and displacement	Collective memory, investigation, and community resistance	Who benefits when a remote landscape is treated as expendable?
Kantara	Forest boundaries, customary rights, sacred land, and feudal encroachment	Ritual authority, community solidarity, and defence of ancestral territory	Can law recognize relationships to land that are not expressed as private property?
Chakravyuh	Mining, corporate development, poverty, and militarized conflict	Political rebellion and refusal of dispossession	What happens when development is enforced without justice or consent?

Barad’s discussion of Chakrabarty’s “species thinking” adds a final layer. Climate crisis requires us to understand humans within a larger planetary system, but a universal species perspective becomes unjust if it erases history (Barad 209–11) [1]. People facing a polluted river or seized forest experience a state, company, police force, landlord, or policy—not an equal humanity. Planetary thinking must therefore be joined to environmental justice: ecological protection, land rights, health, consent, and accountability are inseparable.

Conclusion: from sacrifice zones to ecological sovereignty

Barad’s article demonstrates that postcolonial studies and environmental humanities need one another. Colonial extraction did not end with political independence, and global capitalism continues to organize formerly colonized landscapes as sources of cheap resources and disposable labour. Climate change intensifies this inequality, but it also exposes the limits of a development model that treats forests, rivers, and communities as sacrifice zones.

Kantara, Chakravyuh, and The Jengaburu Curse ask us to see ecological crisis as a crisis of power. They show that sustainability cannot mean simply protecting nature from people, attracting investment, or increasing mineral production. A sustainable future must protect the people whose lives are entangled with ecosystems while also confronting patriarchy, caste hierarchy, state violence, and the internal differences within communities. Postcolonial environmental justice requires historical memory, Indigenous sovereignty, ecological repair, and a broader definition of progress—one in which no community is asked to lose its river, forest, health, or future so that another society can call itself developed.

Works cited

Banerjee, Preetha. “The Jengaburu Curse Review: Intimate Thriller Compellingly Brings Environmental Crises into Mainstream.” Down To Earth, 1 Sept. 2023, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/mining/the-jengaburu-curse-review-intimate-thriller-compellingly-brings-environmental-crises-into-mainstream-91501.

Barad, Dilip. “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 201–213.

Falkenhagen, Andrea. “Mining and the Maoists.” Henry L. Stimson Center, 14 Mar. 2011, https://www.stimson.org/2011/mining-and-maoists/.

Gupta, Trisha. “Movie Review: ‘Chakravyuh’ Is an Honest Attempt to Decode Maoism.” Firstpost, 26 Oct. 2012, https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/movie-review-chakravyuh-is-an-honest-attempt-to-decode-maoism-503368.html.

Karmakar, Goutam, and Payel Pal. “Examining (In)justice, Environmental Activism and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Indian Film Kantara (Mystical Forest).” Socio-Ecological Practice Research, vol. 6, 2024, pp. 117–130, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-024-00180-2.

Kantara. Directed by Rishab Shetty, Hombale Films, 2022.

Panigrahi, Kumuda Ch. “Film Review: Who Is Encroaching? Narratives of Land Encroachment in Kantara.” Rupkatha Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n2.07.

Parekh, Dhruval, and Bhagirath. “Ken-Betwa Link Leaves Tribal Families Fighting for Fair Compensation.” Down To Earth, 8 July 2026, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/ken-betwa-link-leaves-tribal-families-fighting-for-fair-compensation.

Prathamesh, T. V. H. “The Maoist Movement: Chakravyuhs of Our Times.” Sanhati, 30 Dec. 2012, https://sanhati.com/excerpted/5948/.

Chakravyuh. Directed by Prakash Jha, Prakash Jha Productions and Eros International, 2012.

The Jengaburu Curse. Created by Nila Madhab Panda and Mayank Tewari, SonyLIV, 2023.