#ecocriticism

So when Nehru inaugurated the Bhakra Dam in 1954, he described the site as being (paraphrasing here) grander and more sacred than any temple, and that temple metaphor does two things at once in a way that pretty much describes Nehru himself spot on. Ie whilst covering everything in extremely ‘secular’ language where technology is the new religion, he also plays on religious sentiment to make the point itself, casting these enormous dams as this massive, almost spiritual expression of what a newly independent country should be doing, and himself as the lightbringer, so to speak.

Now the ‘advantages’ of these dam projects across India are characterised by distributional bias of in favour of India’s dominant proprietary classes, ie post independence India functioned, in practice, as a set of of elite grabs of land/water/forest resources… dressed up in Nehru’s ‘universalist’ development vocabulary. And what that does is erase the actual cost of these dams. Roy has written on this alongside others, but the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal deliberated for a decade before sanctioning the Sardar Sarovar Dam, yet the transcripts of these deliberations don’t involve discussions of adivasi or other indigenous communities, despite the fact that areas submerged by the construction of the dam were overwhelmingly inhabited by them.

Which is pretty much just colonial governmentality with a postcolonial face, wherein the colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894 was retained by the postcolonial Indian state, ie political orientalisation of indigenous peoples as ‘barriers’ to the extraction of natural resources… and more on Maedhros etc later but in Prayers, this exact dispersal of peoples is referred to in the scene where child Elrond had gone with Maedhros to the site of a ‘killed’ river (the often repeated ‘then his Baba, the terrorist, had wept’ bit from the first chapter)… except due to their own circumstances, Maedhros cannot see what was already happening then and only sees it as a premonition of what would eventually happen to his own people (Muslims) even though the implication re: ration cards and voter slips and promises and certificates make it pretty clear who the ‘scattered people’ actually are. Meanwhile Elrond, who was very young then and later grew up as an idealistic liberal holding on to an imagined vision of Maedhros as a kindly and benevolent figure, read it as his father weeping for the lack of care towards nature and clung on to that vague interpretation.

So, much like with the related Kakkayam Dam and police torture camp in Chapter 15, the ‘dead’ river that is front and centre of the story, is in actuality invisible to all the characters who see it and is the basis of Haleth insisting that no riot/protest at the police station would lead people to see it for what it is unless the body of the white/politically and narratively important/visible Elros is brought front and centre.

The snicksnick of ribbon-cutting and factory-opening, the construction of new statues to replace the broken scarecrows. And the scattering of people.

Across the backwaters and temple tanks, along the railway lines and shuttered depots, men and women disappearing into creases of the land, neither fleeing nor returning, but doing something stranger: withholding themselves. They take no songs, no slogans — only ration cards, voter slips, certificates promising this and that. They leave quietly past quieter mosques, drag their heels beside a deader river, and disappear without a sound. The tree cover thins and time curdles. The betrayal comes dressed in khadi cotton, bundle upon bundle of homespun atrocity waving subsidised flags. Redistribution turns into reconciliation, and textbooks outlive memory.

I wouldn’t call Prayers eco-lit by much of a stretch, the actual narrative focuses mostly on communal relations and state violence and Islamophobia, but there definitely is an ecological underpinning to the main plot, and that’s why the river, which had been killed by the dam, the dam itself, and the police torture camp in a very beautiful national forest just a stones throw from the dam, are all linked directly to the ‘human story’ — @tobermoriansass pointed out in the comments of Chapter 15 re: the provision in the Forest Conservation Amendment Act 2023 which allows for ‘defence’ structures in national forests. Essentially, the atrocity that happens to Elros which fuels the main narrative would never have happened without the existence of that dam, or the militaristic incursion of the Indian state into the forested territories… it just took it happening to Elros for them to get that.

Also another thing re dams and my preoccupation with rivers in general (similarly in The Star Tree) is that a river isn’t just a water delivery system! They’re entire ecosystems sustaining vast biodiversity, subsistence agriculture, numerous communities and hold hella cultural+cosmological meaning… and this is very much the case in Kerala too, where further south than Kozhikode, there’s an entire network of backwaters populated by houseboats and riverside villages etc etc. Which is again why I wanted to use the dead-river: everyone thinks the river means only what it means to them, and that leads to the official ‘meaning’ of a river becoming what it means to the most important person to whom it means something.

Maedhros, much like Elrond, is unfortunately (in literary terms at least) from Kerala. Water has forever been the state’s tired, tried-and-tested all-purpose tool. In cinema and books and poetry, songs across centuries from Vadakkan paatu to film-tunes, the rise and fall of the sea and all its naughty children had become a recognisable switch, a familiar sting on the buttock, a whip for self-flagellation and a side-mouthed behave yourselves or else. Mess up and the sea would take you, or send its little friends, the rivers, to do its dirty work. Everything set in Kerala with even the skeleton of an emotional narrative will have a drowning, either a dramatic one in some sunset-stained sea or a quiet little pond-feeding in someone’s back garden, or anything in between. No wonder Elrond is writing a book about bloody rivers, he snorts dryly even in the dream, no wonder he called his magical storybook Sea Stories. Literary histories like his, he’d have written about the closest puddle.

Anyway, the Nehruvian planning apparatus pretty much reclassified rivers from entire ecosystems to hydraulic resources to be ‘rationalised’, again reproducing that colonial pattern I mentioned above: treating any unused or unmanaged natural resource as unproductive + restructuring native environments to serve economic ends, where indigenous peoples are severed from their livelihoods and relationships to place. Arundhati Roy's The Greater Common Good is a very incisive literary-political intervention here at the time it was written and catalogues the ecological fallout ie waterlogging, salinity, the spread of waterborne disease, reservoir-induced seismicity etc etc while making clear that the displaced were overwhelmingly the poorest: farmers, Adivasi, Dalits, herded out of their rich natural habitats in the name of development… very much worth a read. [And at the same time also worth keeping in mind while reading, Roy’s own positionality, vantage point and the audience she’s writing to — Roy and Ghosh are good starters into Indian ecocrit, especially for people outside India, but the whole ‘who speaks in whose register’ thing is just as relevant in oppositional movements as it is within the state itself… not critiquing how they write but how theyre read, especially overseas].

The long shadow of all this probs most visible in a mainstream politics sense is in India's interstate water conflicts, where the infrastructural decisions of the colonial and postcolonial eras continue to generate live political crises, and the Mullaperiyar dispute between Kerala and Tamil Nadu is a good case study. Where the entire dispute has basically turned into a political clusterfuck that, to put it very simply, plays out through MPs and CMs and electoral gains and bargaining chips, wherein the people actually affected by the conflict are turned into case studies for said political plays, where legal intervention repeatedly substitutes for cooperative dialogue and millions of peoples safety and access to resources are contingent on Supreme Court orders and political brinkmanship.

And that’s why I really wanted to use the river -> dam -> torture camp site as a thruline in the fic, to showcase the postcolonial contradiction of a state that genuinely believed it was ‘modernising and liberating’ its people while replicating the spatial-legal logics through which colonial power had already extracted value from the same land and same bodies… and because the post-Nehruvian river-dam issue is one that plays out repeatedly all over India in many incarnations… the stone also hits the bird known as Kozhikode exceptionalism of being somehow ‘outside’ India. Wherein it’s not that I dislike the concept of dams or think that irrigation/electricity/flood control are non issues lol, but rather I’m just pointing out the institutional silence around which the development apparatus was built and to some extent continues to operate under.

Ultimately, Prayers is fundamentally a reckoning with Nehru’s India as experienced belatedly by a contextually privileged group of people—where the Fëanorians are Muslims, ie ‘undesirable citizenry’ in a national context, yet operate as politically powerful local figureheads within an insular culturally Muslim region, hence them only perceiving state violence when it affects them personally, everyone from Fëanor to Maedhros to Arwen (the canonical reasons for this are pretty self-evident, I hope…)—and the belatedness of the experience is pointed out several times by Haleth, who knew full well that the most shocking instances of said state violence in the fic have been going on for years, if not decades, almost entirely unnoticed by the Comrade Maedhroses of the world.

Essentially, just a case of ‘first they came for the X, but I did not speak because I am not an X’ playing out — where the Fëanorians, and Kozhikodan political society in general — were in fact the group who benefited from these state development projects and thus the institutional silence around them, hence, they either ‘never saw it coming’ or ‘saw it coming but did fuckall about it’ until it finally came for them. And that’s pretty much why I structured the story like I did, to parallel that wilful blindness: the site of the Kakkayam dam being only a momentary presence in the story, narratively relevant only for its role in the tragedy of Elros Tar Minyatur, the son of a powerful local politician and a high ranking British official, rather than for the widescale systemic brutality meted out by both dams and police camps.

Some quotes from Chapter 15 that might make my point clearer now:

“(Malayalis) like to imagine ourselves the last blameless bastion of virtue in this country, and so blind ourselves to all the silent ways we become architects of the suffering meted out to others.”

“Maedhros had not known. Neither of the rising of the dam, nor of the boy-after-boy taken into it. The arrogance of permanence, in a state shaped by flood, monsoon, drift, and typhoon. From the air, it looks almost peaceful, a necklace of grey tucked into green folds. Still, the dam does not belong to the land, but to a fever-dream of control. The forest had borne witness to violence long before they started dragging boys into its foliage. The boot would not have kicked, had it not had cement to rest upon.”

“The Indian Emergency was no dark night, it was the solar cycle itself. The rot did not begin with its proclamation, nor will it end with its repeal. The tiger is the national animal of India. And Kozhikode too, is full of tigers.”

Yes, yes, Arcane was a story about Piltover oppressing the undercity, but unlike a lot of other stories about social stratification, Arcane was very explicit about the methods Piltover uses to disenfranchise Zaun. Season one was clearly a story about eco-apartheid maintained through extractivist practices.

WHAT IS ECO-APARTHEID?

Ecological apartheid (also known as enviromental racism) is a form of disenfranchising and spatially separating a class of people through pollution, exploitation, and abuse of their local environment.

[E]nvironmental apartheid was largely instituted through rural marginalization, the use of rural space as an environmental means of marginalization... - Environmental apartheid: Eco-health and rural marginalization in South Africa

Topside and the undercity are basically one nation state with a blindingly stark fence between them. Piltover and Zaun are simultaneously connected and separated by the Bridge of Progress. Progress unites them and alienates them from one another. Progress is why Piltover is wealthy and clean, and it is why Zaun is impoverished and polluted. It is was on the Bridge of Progress that Silco incited the riot that led to Vi and Powder's orphaning and Vander's betrayal. It's where Ekko and Jinx have their standoff, and where the Hextech core is exchanged. In other words, progress is a border.

WHAT IS EXTRACTIVISM?

Prior to the proliferation of shimmer and the chembarons, industry in the undercity appears to be heavily centralized around one thing — fissure mining. Vi and Powder's parents used to be miners along with Vander and Silco. Jayce and Vi visit one of these mines and she explains the masks the workers use. Oh, and let's not forget the children don't have to yearn for the mines when they're dying in the mines!

The Zaunites' livelihood being dependant on the extraction of natural resources for the benefit of the Piltovans is what is known as extractivism — the exploitation of a resource-rich land and its people by a separate "global North."

In practice, extractivism has been a mechanism of colonial and neocolonial plunder and appropriation. This extractivism, which has appeared in different guises over time, was forged in the exploitation of the raw materials essential for the industrial development and prosperity of the global North. - Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse

The "North," in this case, clearly being Piltover. The resources being abused and exploited here aren't only the fissure mines, but also the bodies of the workers and those born around them. Viktor's illness, for example, is a product of growing up around the gaseous waste of the fissure mines. The Zaunites take the brunt of the side-effects of the pollution so that the topsiders don't have to. The "dregs" are kept below while materials, both people and things, that are deemed useful get to rise to the top. The processing of raw materials and shipping happens in Piltover, so it's the Piltovans who get a final say on the profits.

Silco and the chembarons establish their power by creating an industry that operates outside of fissure mining that doesn't rely on the patronage of the global North. Needless to say, drug dealing isn't exactly a noble trade, but extraction, processing, and distribution are mainly controlled and operated by Zaunites, which allows them a source of wealth and power that they can leverage against Piltover. To use a more recognizable phrase, they own the means of shimmer production.

I find it fascinating that shimmer is made by killing innocent underground creatures. Cannibalizing your own kind for a temporary boost of strength that eventually turns the user into a monster? It's a poignant metaphor about the infighting of not just the chembarons' gangs but of oppressed groups in general. And while shimmer offers power and brings in wealth, that's not what the undercity truly needs and only corrupts it even further.

Nah, the show has been very clear that what Zaun needs is breathable air.

SEASON 2 FORGOT ABOUT AIR

Even outside of the air pollution caused by fissure mining, the theme of breathing and air is everywhere in season one. Ekko and the Firelights' community is built around a tree — the clean air it provides is the reason they've been able to sustain themselves. It is considered an oasis in polluted Zaun. Jinx's is often heralded by brightly colored smoke, and the way she signals to Violet is through a flare that emits it. Silco's altercation with Vander involves him almost drowning — Vander literally choking the air out of him. Silco, in reponse to this traumatic event, teaches Jinx to willingly submerge herself in a place without air by baptizing her in the same filthy water he was choked in.

In other words, air is life and purpose. Zaun's aesthetics are defined by gas masks and smoke. Meanwhile, the scenes in Piltover are clean and clear. Ekko and the Firelights' tree represented hope and the possibility of clean air in Zaun. Viktor was similarly associated to flowers that grew in the underground, symbolizing how beautiful things can live even in the harshest circumstances.

Environmental degradation, more specifically air pollution, is the raison d'être of topside-undercity conflict. Silco says as much when he threatens the other chembarons and reminds them of why he's in charge.

Have you forgotten where we came from? The mines they had us in? Air so thick it clogs your throat — stuck in your eyes. I pulled you all up from the depths, offered you a taste of topside and fresh air. I gave you life. Purpose. But you've grown fat and complacent, too much time in the sun. We came from a world where there was never enough to go around. That is why we fight. Do you remember? - The Boy Savior, Arcane S01E07

But by the second and third acts of season two, pollution may not as well exist in Zaun. How does Viktor's commune plant its flowers and grow its fruits? Does the Firelights' tree ever get cured of its corruption? Did everyone forget that the undercity is literally suffocating? Seriously, why is Ekko's storyline with the tree never resolved? Why give Jinx that monologue about a wispy goddess of air the fissurefolk pray to and never go anywhere with it?

JINX SHOULD HAVE BEEN ASSOCIATED TO JANNA

The Grey presented an opportunity for Jinx to be the revolutionary hero Arcane wanted her to be. The enforcers have clearly aligned themselves with pollution and poison, and Jinx could have been the herald of their wind goddess come to answer the people's prayers for relief. But the people don't rally behind Jinx because of her association to Janna, clean air, or her repelling the invading cops using bioweapons.

I firmly believe that Jinx being a symbol of the revolution because she blew up a government building is missing a few steps. She'll get radicals who already hated Piltover behind her, sure, but the everyday Zaunite would more likely blame her for causing chaos and bringing trouble to their streets. Because the average person doesn't really care who's on the council or if a politician so far from them dies. But they do care if the cops are suddenly at their door with tear gas because an extremist junkie decided to commit arson.

The first act of season two had me very optimistic that the show was picking up where it left off with its enviromental themes. The enforcers use The Grey, polluted air, to surpress dissent and hunt down Jinx. Jinx fights back under a mural of Janna, the goddess of clean air. Her plan involves her using air to push back The Grey and send the gust up to Piltover. After being actively gassed by the enforcers, Jinx and her association to colorful wind becomes a symbol of hope and revolution to the people of the undercity.

Except that's not what happens. The Grey is only shown affecting targeted criminals with no collateral damage to civilians despite it being deployed all over the trenches. The gusts of wind Jinx pushes up to Piltover don't make topsiders experience the air pollution Zaunites suffer. Instead, it just midly inconveniences them with paint splatters. In the end, The Grey is forgotten and has nothing to do with their fight in front of Janna's mural. Caitlyn gets a promotion despite gassing the entire underground with nothing to show for it, and the undercity idolizes Jinx despite her being the reason they were gassed in the first place.

ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION IS INTERPERSONAL RESTORATION

Unlike in the game, Arcane chose topside and the undercity to be originally established as one city — and I don't think that was done without reason. The nation of Zaun and its identity is established as a reaction to the suffering of those underground. A community developed centered around helping one another cope and survive through the pollution. In short, Piltover created Zaun.

Thus, the interplay between Piltover and Zaun extended to all plotlines and the relationships they explored and developed. Jinx and Vi, Vi and Caitlynn, Viktor and Jayce, Ekko and Heimerdinger — these are all relationships that reflect the tension between Zaun and Piltover. Family torn apart by civil war, bitter ex lovers, different ideological approaches to scientific advancement, intuitive inventiveness and practiced genius. Their relationships are born from a common desire and degrade because of that looming border inflicted by the pursuit of progress.

Piltover and Zaun is a single house fractured because of how it threw all its detritus in the basement as it sought to build a tower that will reach the skies. The whole building is threatening to crumble, especially now that someone threw a bomb at it like in the finale of season one. The status quo Arcane and we as a globalized eco-apartheid have is extremely precarious as is any foundation built on abuse and exploitation. A lot of people will cheer on the Jinxes who don't care so much about fixing it than they do burning it all down to express their understandable rage and grief, but that doesn't really fix the problem of having breathable air, does it?

Unfortunately, we'll never know how the show will wrap up the Zaunite plight because it was all but forgotten in season 2. The problem of Zaun was never that they needed to evolve or be perfect — it's that their environment and the people by extension were being suffocated.

In my perfect world, the finale would have addressed the lack of light and clean air in the underground. It would have mirrored how some bodies and relationships can never truly fully recover the damage that has been done. As in real life, restoration is not a substitute for not doing harm in the first place. But it could have ended with a hopeful message that burning it down and running away isn't the answer either.