Adivasi and the Atom: Exploring the transculturality of uranium mining in India

Abstract. Boundaries of the mundane and the exceptional, sacred and profane, and natural and cultural, become blurred in Jadugoda, a small mining town in eastern India inhabited by indigenous Adivasi communities and their non-human kin. The radioactive waste and contamination that have configured life and its meanings around the country’s oldest uranium mines, and the multi-scalar violences and ruptures unleashed in the process, offer the narrative fabric for ruminations by the Adivasi woman writer, Mahua Maji. Through an eco-critical engagement with Maji’s semi-fictional novel, Marang Goda Neelkanth Hua (lit. Marang Goda turns blue-throated) we explore the forms of nuclearity that emerge along the variously entangled institutional, material, and socio-cultural lives of uranium extraction. In this paper, we triangulate the scholarly conversations around the nuclear mundane, the eco-critical affordances of Maji’s novel, and secondary empirical studies. In doing so, we deploy transculturality as a post-colonial, indigenous, and eco-critical conceptual device, in conjunction with the emerging post-human frameworks in the Nuclear Humanities that attend to multi-scalar entanglements, hybrid existences of naturecultures, and situated negotiations of nuclearity.