Toxicities, Illegalities and Protest: A Landscape of Coal in South India
 

My research project focuses on the construction and operation of state-owned coal-fired thermal power plants in Ennore, a northern suburb of Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India). At the start of my doctoral fieldwork in 2018, Ennore was witnessing the development of nearly 2500 megawatts of coal-based energy projects, to add to the 3000 megawatts of coal-fired thermal power already being generated on the peninsula – a situation that stood in stark contrast to the Indian government’s official stance of moving away from fossil fuels. To unpack the effects of this seeming contradiction, my writing builds on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2019) in which I investigated the everyday interactions of coal and coal-based infrastructures with Ennore’s social, political, and environmental contexts. Exploring how local people made sense of the ubiquitous presence of coal in their lives, my research describes a ‘landscape of coal’ comprising three different yet related sites of interaction: people’s bodily engagement with the toxic substances produced by the combustion and circulation of coal; the financial and contractual illegalities that were part and parcel of the construction and operation of the power plants; and the mobilizations and protests staged by Ennore’s residents, trade unions, and health activists in reaction to coal's presence. 

In researching this ‘landscape of coal’, my project makes three interlinked arguments. First, by attending to the artisanal labour of the fishermen who lived near Ennore's power plants, my research explores the ways in which toxic coal and its by-products seeped through different bodies and environments. Using the analytic lens of “toxicity”, I argue that research on coal and its infrastructures must broaden its focus to consider the many porous relations that coal affects: between skin-born afflictions and the disappearing welfare state; between stilting rivers and changing labour markets; and between embodied physical skill and sub-contracted informal work. Second, my ethnography focuses on trade unions and how the ongoing presence of coal affected local labour relations. By following a union leader in his meetings with different stakeholders around the power plants, I trace the ways in which coal and its circulation facilitated a range of illegalities that preserved uneven power structures, made livelihoods increasingly precarious, and undermined contracts designed to guarantee renumeration or protect workers. Finally, I highlight the ‘politics of perceptibility’ pursued by Ennore’s residents, trade unions, and activists as they sought to draw the attention of different publics to this landscape of coal. My research shows how these groups oscillated between vehemently exposing the government's own illegal practices, and discreetly aligning themselves with other concealed illegalities that surrounded the power plants.

In engaging with a wide body of anthropological literature on environmental politics and toxicity to labour markets and democratic practice in South Asia, my research project makes original contributions to the growing scholarship that focuses on the politics of toxicity and the various means by which human and non-human beings live and confront chemically altered environments. Currently, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, I am working on a range of academic, non-academic and multimedia publications, while also reworking my PhD dissertation into an early draft of a book manuscript.