“Everything Emits Heat”: thermal injustice, climate apartheid, and the Indian Anthropocene

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of climate apartheid has entered India’s environmental discourse, sparking debates on climate inequality and injustice, as deeply entrenched social hierarchies exacerbate the challenges of living through extreme weather events. This seminar traces the cultural imaginary of climate (in)justice in contemporary India. It focuses on how literary and visual narratives represent climate precarity and vulnerability, exploring how these texts can open up new ways of thinking about the poetics of climate apartheid. Some key questions to consider include: How do literary/visual narratives represent climate apartheid? Does the scale of this emerging, yet ambiguous concept pose particular representational challenges? What are the literary and cultural tropes used to represent climate apartheid in its multiple forms? 

Building on these broader questions, the discussion focuses on the question of thermal injustice in contemporary India, framing it as an everyday experience of climate apartheid. India has experienced increasingly severe heatwaves in recent years, disproportionately impacting certain sections of the population more than others. The seminar examines everyday experiences of enduring heat as represented in contemporary Indian narratives, asking how class, caste, and gender intersect to produce different forms of thermal vulnerabilities.  Drawing on Zoe Hamstead’s call for reconceptualizing heat as “thermal (in)security” (Hamstead 2023), Eva Horn’s idea of heat as a “hyper-metaphor” (Horn 2017), and Emily McAvan’s theory of “subaltern discomfort” (McAvan 2025), I consider multiple sites that document thermal injustice as an embodied and everyday expression of climate apartheid. Through close readings of novels such as Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (2017) and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), alongside documentaries on recent heatwaves in India and a range of media reportage, the seminar situates literary and visual cultures of heat in dialogue with recent scholarship in postcolonial ecocriticism and the emerging field of the heat humanities. 

Places are limited and so any academic colleagues or students interested in attending in person must register here for a place

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