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

Pathak, Kumar Sundaram; Huria, Sonali

doi:10.5194/sand-2026-1

Preprints

https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1

Preprints

02 Feb 2026

| 02 Feb 2026

Status: a revised version of this preprint is currently under review for the journal SaND.

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

Kumar Sundaram Pathak and Sonali Huria

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.

Received: 09 Jan 2026 – Discussion started: 02 Feb 2026

Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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Kumar Sundaram Pathak and Sonali Huria

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on sand-2026-1', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Mar 2026
A creative and promising approach to how politics and governance, in general, can be approached and analysed. There is also an emphasis on indigenous story-telling and newness which is a productive approach, as well as the inversion of the conventional logic of agent and affected through an attention to embodied processes and everydayness.

The abstract and paper would benefit from really honing into the conceptual themes that motivate the authors. For instance, “110: In thinking of how newness is configured in the everyday life of Jadugoda, our endeavour finds resonance ….” If the concept of “newness” per se is one of the main analytical threads, it should be brought into the picture much earlier. Same with “temporality”.

Use of the passive voice, multiple levels of nesting and lengthy sentences take away clarity where it is needed.

For instance, in the abstract, “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.” A suggested rewrite: Around the country’s oldest uranium mines, radioactive waste and contamination have configured life and its meanings. The Adivasi woman writer, Mahua Maji uses the multi-scalar violences and ruptures unleashed in the process as narrative fabric for ruminations.” Even if the authors prefer lengthy sentences, a simple ‘and’ inbetween would do the trick.
Revised: Around the country’s oldest uranium mines, radioactive waste and contamination have configured life and its meanings, and the Adivasi woman writer, Mahua Maji uses the multi-scalar violences and ruptures unleashed in the process as narrative fabric for ruminations.
310: peasant time (replace peasant with a more suitable word)

130: Repeated use of “In this regard” in two subsequent sentences in this paragraph.

It may be worth mentioning that in Indian tribal museums such as Madhya Pradesh, Adivasi cosmologies are subsumed under depictions of Shiva. That is, what you present as resonance and distinction between Marang Goda and Shiva has a counterpart which is the more nationalistic narrative of subsuming local deities within 'pan-Hindu' deities. Paragraphs 160 and 165 could be more carefully parsed in this regard.

Unclear what this following sentence means.

200: In recent years, such reflexive considerations have increasingly rendered modern novels as inherently restricting cultural apparatus.
The use of Adivasi rather than tribal is appreciated. But what does it mean when the term is used as a catch-all referring to Adivasis in the area in general, a choice that seems apparent when the term is qualified in this para. as Ho? Are there different Adivasis groups in the area who are being merged inadvertently by referring to them as a collective in the article, in general?

255: Ho Adivasi women,
255: In the real world, similar uncanny beliefs persist among Adivasi communities living around Jadugoda. (which communities?)
275: a physical and metaphorical tandem … (mixed categories being used here)
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Sonali Huria, 24 Oct 2026
  
  Thank you for your careful and constructive reading of the manuscript. The comments were particularly helpful in sharpening the paper’s conceptual framing and improving clarity.
  Conceptual framing
  In the previous draft, we had sign-posted an array of theoretical frameworks and concepts which admittedly overwhelmed the article. Our intention had been to flag neighbouring concepts pertaining to the broad commitments we had – exploring the nuclear mundane and thinking about it in the specific context of Mahua Maji’s novel. At multiple junctures, we referred to the wider concepts and notions in an attempt to foreground the peculiarities of the literary and empirical material we were working with. However, we realized that such a mapping was not really helpful, especially since we would have been unable to individually develop each of these. In the revised draft, we have let go of concepts that were not integral to the paper, such as ‘newness’. Instead, we have identified a leaner conceptual repertoire – transcorporeality and regimes of imperceptibility – to trace the incorporation of uranium into the everyday, and how its material, social and cultural transformations become knowable, legible, and politically consequential. There too, our attempt has been to allow the empirical discussions to lead and support our conceptual choices. Temporality remains relevant where it emerges from the novel and our analysis, but no longer appears as a separate organising concept.
  Clarity, sentence structure, passive voice
  We have revised the manuscript throughout to reduce overly long and nested sentences and improve clarity. The abstract has been substantially rewritten to state the paper’s conceptual interventions more directly. In some places, the use of passive voice is a deliberate choice to gesture at the emergent relations and agentialities and to avoid linear causal descriptions and claims.
  “Peasant time”
  We have replaced “peasant time” with “agricultural time.”
  Repeated “In this regard”
  The repetition has been removed in the revised manuscript.
  Adivasi cosmologies and Shiva
  We are genuinely grateful to the reviewer for this valuable suggestion. We have substantially revised this discussion on the novel’s title to distinguish more carefully between the resonance Maji creates between Marang Bonga and Shiva. We now also situate this distinction against the broader tendency within ethno-nationalist discourses to subsume Adivasi deities within pan-Hindu frameworks. Revisiting the novel’s title has also enabled a more nuanced and layered analysis on how it captures the nuclear mundane in ways we had not fully captured before.
  “Modern novels as inherently restricting cultural apparatus”
  The sentence and the larger conceptual detour in which it appeared have been removed.
  Use of “Adivasi” and distinctions among communities
  We have added a footnote explaining that we use “Adivasi” as a broader political-historical category without implying homogeneity among the communities gathered under the term. Simultaneously, we have reviewed our use of “Adivasi” in the paper and have identified specific communities relevant to the narrative and analysis. For example, while the term appears in the context of the collective indigenous encounters with the postcolonial state and modernity, we refer to specific Ho and Santhal practices as rendered in the novel.
  “Ho Adivasi women” / “similar uncanny beliefs”
  We have revised this passage to clarify that Santhali women warn Ho women who are newly settled in Marang Goda against venturing close to the landscape believed to adversely affect pregnancies. We have also removed the broader claim that “similar uncanny beliefs persist among Adivasi communities living around Jadugoda,” since the formulation generalised beyond what our sources allowed us to establish.
  “A physical and metaphorical tandem”
  We have removed this formulation. The revised passage describes Ho relations with the forest more concretely through “relations of dwelling, subsistence, cultivation, knowledge, and ritual.”
  We thank the reviewer again for these comments, which have helped us immensely in sharpening the manuscript.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on sand-2026-1', Armin Chiocchetti, 11 Apr 2026

See pdf.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Sonali Huria, 24 Oct 2026
  
  Thank you for your detailed and critical engagement with the manuscript and for your positive assessment of its contribution to scholarship on Hindi/Adivasi literature and ecocriticism. The comments prompted substantial revisions to the paper’s theoretical framing and to the ways in which we distinguish between the representational and political commitments of Maji's novel and our own analytical claims.
  Situating the novel within a broader literary context
  The focus of our article as well as the special issue is the ‘nuclear mundane.’ In this context, the selected novel has been deployed as a thought-companion. The broader commitments allow only limited space for an extensive literary contextualisation. However, we agree that briefly situating Marang Goda Neelkanth Hua within the larger body of Adivasi literature will help strengthen the manuscript. We have therefore added a brief and overarching survey that places Maji’s novel within the broad literary field, while clarifying what makes its sustained engagement with uranium mining and radioactive harm particularly generative for our analysis.
  Ontology, transculturation, and theoretical framing
  We thank the reviewer for prompting us to reconsider whether the theoretical apparatus of ‘onto-cultural’ difference and ‘transculturation’ was necessary for the argument we wished to make. In the revised manuscript, we no longer frame the encounters represented in the novel in terms of distinct ontologies and transculturation. Instead, the revised analysis remains closer to the historically and culturally situated practices, relations, and forms of knowledge represented in the novel, and examines how these encounter are transformed by uranium extraction. This has also allowed us to sharpen the paper’s principal conceptual focus on the nuclear mundane, nuclearity, and the material and epistemic processes through which radioactive transformations become lived, apprehensible, and contestable.
  In the previous version, we referred to the wider ontologically-oriented conceptual frameworks to foreground the peculiarities of the literary and empirical material we were working with. Our intention had been to flag neighbouring concepts pertaining to the broad commitments we had – exploring the nuclear mundane and thinking about it in the specific context of Mahua Maji’s novel. However, we realized that such an eclectic mapping was not helpful, especially since we would have been unable to individually develop each of these. In the revised draft, we have let go of concepts that were not integral to the paper. Instead, we have identified a leaner conceptual repertoire – transcorporeality and regimes of imperceptibility – to trace the incorporation of uranium into the everyday, and how its material, social and cultural transformations become knowable, legible, and politically consequential. There too, our attempt has been to allow the empirical discussions to lead and support the conceptual discussions.
  Adivasi relations with nature, romanticisation, and the novel’s ideological position
  We appreciate the reviewer’s concern that the original manuscript at times insufficiently distinguished between Maji’s representation of Adivasi ecological relations and our own analytical position, thereby risking reproducing a romanticised image of Adivasis as inherently ecological subjects. Again, ruminating in-depth about Adivasi relations with nature and engaging with various philosophical frameworks attending to them was beyond the purview of our article.
  Rather than positing an intrinsically harmonious Adivasi relationship with “nature,” the revised manuscript attends to specific relations and practices that Maji represents – including dwelling, subsistence, cultivation, hunting, ritual, forest gathering, and relations with particular plants, animals, landscapes, and sacred presences. We have correspondingly removed formulations such as the “physical and metaphorical tandem” with the forest and have been more careful to attribute ecological and planetary claims to Maji and her characters, rather than treating them as self-evident characteristics of Adivasi communities.
  We have also revised the ending. Sagen’s claim of an Adivasi mode of ecological coexistence is explicitly treated as a claim made by Sagen within the novel, rather than adopted as our own normative conclusion. The revised discussion asks what Maji’s narrative does by making Marang Goda the situated location from which such planetary claims becomes articulable.
  Fukushima and the comparison between nuclear worlds
  This section has been revised. The revised analysis follows the particular relations that Maji constructs between differently situated nuclear worlds while explicitly resisting their equivalence. As we now argue, “Marang Goda becomes comparable without being rendered interchangeable.” Fukushima therefore does not function as a universalising or revelatory moment for Sagen; rather, he understands Fukushima through Marang Goda. We have also removed the earlier transculturation-based claim about a “change of directionality” moving beyond unspecified dichotomies.
  Nuclear power and uranium extraction
  As this article contributes to the emerging scholarly literature on the nuclear mundane, it has sought to avoid engaging in arguments for or against nuclear power. However, irrespective of one’s position on uranium mining or nuclear technologies per se, they alter Adivasi everyday lives in profound and often asymmetric ways that require careful attention. Our concern is how Maji’s novel represents uranium extraction, radioactive exposure, evidentiary uncertainty, and the expansion of Sagen’s political concerns from Marang Goda towards wider nuclear questions.
  Globalisation and the “obliteration of identities”
  We realise that the scope of the article did not allow for in-depth engagements with neoliberalism and globalisation. The claim about the “obliteration of identities under a homogenizing global market-economy” occurred within the manuscript’s earlier discussion on neoliberalism and transculturation. That discussion has now been entirely removed, including this formulation, as part of the broader conceptual restructuring of the paper.
  We thank the reviewer again for these comments. They were particularly useful in helping us distinguish more carefully between the novel’s representational and normative commitments and our own analytical claims, while simplifying a theoretical framework that had become more elaborate than the argument required.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-AC2
RC3:
'Comment on sand-2026-1', Anonymous Referee #3, 28 Apr 2026
This is a well-written and incredibly interesting article which engages with a semi-fictional novel to explore uranium mining in India. I found the focus on the nuclear mundane and everydayness particularly compelling. Moreover, I think that the article is quite innovative in the way it approaches the novel and empirical findings.
My comments & questions for article:
Are the authors folding together heterogenous communities under the banner of Adivasi?

On culture: the authors argue in line with the ontological turn (not different perspectives on the same world but different worlds altogether); however, they seem to uncritically reproduce notions of what modern and nonmodern forms of subjectivities are. I think the article would be on stronger ground if it rigorously reflects on and engages with critiques of the ontological turn (for example, the one put forward by David Bond and Lucas Bessire in ‘Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique’).

The treatment of ‘neoliberalism’: the article adopts quite a simplistic view of neoliberalism—which also appears in the article without a thorough analysis of capitalist development in South Asia. What this does is attribute aspects of capitalist economies to neoliberalism. I think this discussion ends up weakening the argument of that section which is that the novel discusses precarity and uncertainty . But, to make an argument about neoliberalism, the authors would have to situate their analysis of the novel in a political economic analysis of nuclearity rather than the angle they choose now. I would suggest to stay focused on how the novel approaches themes such as uncertainty and precarity.

The article would also be stronger if the authors justify why they chose this novel in particular. What is it about this novel (among others) that makes it an interesting and unique artifact to explore nuclearity with?

Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. "Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique." American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (2014): 440-456.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-RC3
- AC3: 'Reply on RC3', Sonali Huria, 24 Oct 2026
  
  We thank the reviewer for their generous and thoughtful engagement with the article, and particularly for their encouraging assessment of its focus on the nuclear mundane and its approach to Maji’s novel. The comments were very helpful in prompting us to clarify the conceptual framing and scope of the paper.
  1. Are the authors folding together heterogeneous communities under the banner of Adivasi?
  We thank the reviewer for raising this concern. We have reviewed our use of “Adivasi” in the manuscript and now distinguish more carefully between its use as a broader political-historical category and references to particular communities. We have added a footnote (no. 2) stating that our use of “Adivasi” does not imply homogeneity among the communities gathered under the term, and identify specific communities, wherever relevant to the narrative and analysis. For example, while the term appears in the context of the collective indigenous encounters with the postcolonial state and modernity, we refer to specific Ho and Santhal practices as rendered in the novel.
  2. Ontological turn and modern/nonmodern subjectivities
  On revisiting the manuscript, we agreed that the ontological framing risked reproducing precisely the modern/nonmodern distinctions that the reviewer identifies and would have required a much fuller engagement with debates surrounding the ontological turn. Rather than adding another theoretical debate to an already conceptually dense paper, we have substantially reworked this aspect of the argument. The revised manuscript no longer relies on the ontological turn or on a modern/nonmodern opposition as an organising framework. Instead, we rely on the overarching scaffoldings of the special issue, and remain closer to the specific relations, practices, and forms of knowing rendered in Maji’s novel, and to the heterogeneous registers through which transformations in Marang Goda become apprehensible and consequential.
  3. Treatment of neoliberalism
  We realise that the scope of the article did not allow for in-depth engagements with neoliberalism and globalisation in South Asian and Adivasi contexts. That discussion has now been entirely removed as part of the broader conceptual restructuring and decluttering of the paper. The revised paper remains focused on the forms of precarity, dependence, uncertainty, and uneven capacities to distance oneself from radioactive harm that emerge within the novel.
  4. Why this novel?
  The focus of our article as well as the special issue is the ‘nuclear mundane.’ In this context, the selected novel has been deployed as a thought-companion. The broader commitments allow only limited space for an extensive literary contextualisation. However, we agree that briefly situating Marang Goda Neelkanth Hua within the larger body of Adivasi literature will help strengthen the manuscript. We have therefore added a brief and overarching survey that places Maji’s novel within the broad literary field, while clarifying what makes it particularly generative for our analysis, including its unusual form, melding of fictional narration and documentary, historical, scientific, and political material, and its sustained engagement with everydayness surrounding uranium mining.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/sand-2026-1-AC3

Kumar Sundaram Pathak and Sonali Huria

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May 2026	48	28	1	77
Jun 2026	13	7	1	21
Jul 2026	22	99	3	124
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Sep 2026	43	85	14	142
Oct 2026	54	38	9	101

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Short summary

In Maji’s novel, readers encounter the many enchanted worlds of uranium mining in central India. Here, the Indian state and Adivasi communities classify and understand nuclear materials, processes and institutions as exceptional or mundane in distinctive ways. We argue that in these encounters, choices are shaped by the spiritual and material continuities of Adivasi life and political and cultural forces of mainstream India arising from extractive economies, modernity & postcolonial conditions.


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