Imaging ‘Slow Violence’ in the Jharia Coalfields of India: Disrupting Energy Modernity through Photography

Abstract

The paper contributes to the field of Energy Humanities from an often under-discussed Global South perspective, foregrounding cultural productions around coal extraction as a potential tool for disrupting energy modernity. Using photographs from the Jharia coalfields in Jharkhand, India, as primary sources, we examine coal extraction as a form of ‘slow violence’. The discursive ploy of energy modernity has been to make fossil fuels an emblem of socio-economic progress. The paper adds to critiques seeking to reframe this narrative and argues that the framework of slow violence reconfigures coal mining as a form of eco-social dispossession. The paper traces how the photography of Sebastian Sardi and Ronny Sen give visibility to those spaces—both somatic and geographical—which are not considered a legitimate part of the country’s development rhetoric but are nonetheless necessary for its creation and maintenance.