ABSTRACT
India's energy scenario begs some critical research questions: 1. What does a history of India's energy regimes, especially the systems of fossil energy, entail? 2. How do we critically understand India's present energy networks as socio-political structures of labor extraction? 3. How is energy labor represented in cultural texts of working-class realisms?
I address these questions through the tropes of social and cultural ramifications of energy or, as Szeman and Boyer would put it, “the why and how of energy”, taking my cues from the fairly recent field of energy humanities but also by postcolonizing it. Echoing Jennifer Hamilton who argues that our work in the environmental humanities must invoke “the sweaty, material and embodied effort invested in making the crisis” and should invite “speculation as to what kinds of labours it will take to actively create a different future”, the primary focus of my inquiry is the condition of human labor in energy and the way cultural texts represent the all crucial but oft-neglected paradigm of energy labor along with energy systems. More than conclusive answers, I plan to offer a roadmap to the various avenues in the field and the critical questions we might seek in the context of energy through the lens of humanities or, more particularly, literary and cultural studies.
