ABSTRACT
This is a transcript of the Keynote Lecture delivered at the annual conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Chicago on January 8th, 2018. The talk, opening with the devastation caused in the nineteenth century by the British cultivation of opium in India, closes with a discussion of the current opium production in Afghanistan and its widespread consequences. Both these cases show the ways in which political entities (whether nation-states or non-state actors) and private interests collude, often resulting in harm to vulnerable populations. In this discourse, I am interested in thinking about the human toll of changing ecologies, of climate change and of the impact they have on violence and the attendant migration.
