Mining, Child Agency, and Collective Resistance

Pedru and the Big Boom (henceforth PBB), published in 2021, blends the writing of Nandita da Cunha and the impactful illustrations of Niharika Shenoy to tell the story of Pedru, a young boy in the fictional Indian village of Rotnagaon, and the village’s plight following the sudden arrival of Digdeep Explorer, a mining company pursuing iron ore. This article scrutinizes PBB through green criminology, arguing that mining and its ill effects in Rotnagaon constitute an environmental crime. It examines how the story maps the perceptible as well as invisible violence of capitalist extraction upon people and the land. Furthermore, the article positions the child protagonist, Pedru, as a passive crime witness who evolves into an accidental activist and a green crime fighter, studying how the author has used the playful motif of Khoj, an exploratory outdoor game in the text, to bring out the theme of child agency. It also assesses the transition of individual agency to collective resistance leading to restorative justice against the green crime. Ultimately, this study proposes that PBB offers a critical intervention in children’s literature by integrating ecocritical perspectives of socio-political urgency into fiction, where the stakes are not merely moral but planetary.