Kudankulam

Abstract

The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.