Chronopolitics of Slow Violence: Reading Indigenous Environmental Resistance in Neoliberal India

This paper foregrounds the temporal dimension of capitalogenic discourse to examine how time serves as an instrument of violence, its harms unfolding incrementally and dispersed across spatiotemporal contexts. Through an analysis of two illustrative yet underexamined texts from regional Indian eco-fiction, Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior and The Toxic Tribal Land of Marang Goda: A Novel Based on Tribal Struggle Against Radiation, Pollution, Displacement and Neo-Capitalism, this paper examines how extractivist regimes instrumentalize the historical residues of colonial and feudal power structures to sustain new forms of domination. The selected narratives of grassroots activism serve as discursive sites for examining how capitalist and state powers weaponize time to minimize accountability and maximize profit, exposing the slow violence, death-worlds, and temporal exploitation faced by indigenous communities. They further articulate the imperative to bring the emergent field of Dalit Ecologies into dialogue with the critical framework of the Capitalocene in order to re-evaluate contemporary Indian environmental politics.