Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia

Featuring contributions from 15 leading and emerging scholars of the environmental humanities, this groundbreaking volume explores human creativity and artistry in the face of climate change through a focus on multiple narratives, mediums, and forms in South Asia.

Home to a quarter of the world’s population and rich in cultural and geographic diversity, South Asia offers a compelling case for exploring the impacts of climate change on diverse cultural forms. From the river deltas of Bangladesh, megalopolises in India, mountain tops of Nepal, glaciers in Pakistan, and cities in Sri Lanka, climate change has indelibly altered landscapes and people. Bringing together a rich array of methodologies from different disciplines―including ethnography, creative nonfiction, visual analysis, and ecocriticism―this book positions climate change discourse within everyday practices, epistemologies, and infrastructures. Showcasing multidisciplinary perspectives, chapters explore the profound impacts of environmental change, centering human creativity as a vital lens for understanding one of the most urgent crises of our time. Ultimately, this book underscores the necessity of cultural, collaborative, and cross-border practices in addressing climate change.

This important volume will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of art and visual culture, South Asian studies, human geography, architecture, and environmental anthropology. It will also appeal to NGO, multilateral, and international institutions investigating the cultural and creative ramifications of climate change in South Asia.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license

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) and 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). Her 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, housing, repair, gender, and spatial practices through writing, drawing, installations, curation, and spatial interventions. Recent publications focus on pedagogies of spatial justice, the theorization of small forces that shape cities, and the reconceptualization of housing as “inhabitation.” Her articles have been published in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Journal of Housing and the Built Environment.

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.