Koodankulam, on India’s southern coast, has witnessed one of the country’s longest-running women-led antinuclear movements, which intensified in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima accident. The intimacies of shared community spaces, conventionally sites of communal childcare and traditional livelihood practices, transformed into sites of exceptional protest when confronted with the imposition of a nuclear power plant. It was through the affective intimacies of shared sisterhood that a sustained resistance against the Koodankulam nuclear project was mobilized. Through embodied and performative repertoires of dissent, women sought to render visible the precarities imposed by the project, even as legal, bureaucratic, and security apparatuses systematically dismissed their concerns. Even as women’s bodies became hyper-visible through spectacular protest imagery that drew global attention, the same bodies were excluded from formal dialogue, criminalised under colonial-era laws, and subjected to multiple forms of gendered violence and repression. Drawing on frameworks of performativity, space-making, and nuclear invisibilities, and based on fieldwork conducted in 2017 and beyond, this chapter traces the trajectories of the Koodankulam project and the protests against it, and argues that the women’s resistance constitutes a sustained refusal of erasure within India’s nuclear modernity.

The Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) on India’s southern coast has witnessed one of the longest-standing post-Fukushima resistance movements. Conceived during the Cold War years, its trajectories have been punctuated by transforming intermestic technopolitical, social, and economic developments. The first agreement in the 1980s between India and the erstwhile USSR for the project, was in effect, a subversion of the decades-long blockade of nuclear technologies to India following its 1974 nuclear tests. However, with the disintegration of the USSR and massive local resistance, the project was pushed into oblivion until it was revived with a fresh bilateral agreement at the turn of the century. The subsequent lifting of the nuclear embargo against India, persistent shadow of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, and an escalating mistrust of mega-projects domestically, have marked KKNPP’s meandering histories.

Through these staggered trajectories, water with its varied entanglements with coastal communities, nuclear infrastructures, and modern legal-bureaucratic institutions, has remained at the heart of the contestations surrounding KKNPP. The earliest opposition to the project came from farming communities against the diversion of water from the Pechipparai reservoir, the lifeline of this predominantly agricultural region, for supplying cooling water for the plant. Post-Fukushima, the surge in local resistance emerged from within fishing communities especially with the memory of the devastating 2004 tsunami fresh in their minds, and the palpable threat of loss of access to the sea once plant security measures were put in place. Based on insights drawn from extensive field work in and around Koodankulam, this presentation will trace the multi-layered histories of the project, key protagonists, the embeddedness of water in the contestations between India’s nuclear establishment and local communities, and their often-conflicting conceptualizations of risk, ecological intimacies, life, death, and justice.

Koodankulam on the southern-most tip of India has witnessed among the longest-standing women’s resistance movements against nuclear energy post-Fukushima. In the face of brutal state repression and surveillance, ‘letters’ became a compelling conduit for these women to communicate what was happening in their besieged villages to the outside world. Addressed to no one in particular, these open letters offer an affective narrativization of the intimacies of the fishing communities with their seas, fish, and land, and are imbued with hauntings of slow and undignified radiation-induced violences.

Their letters, translated into various languages by local and international activist groups, evoked visceral feelings of empathy and solidarity, especially from women’s collectives - the ‘Mothers of Fukushima’ in Japan wrote open letters to the Japanese and Indian governments appealing for the cancelation of their nuclear cooperation agreements. Through narrativizing the devastating impacts of the Fukushima accident on their own communities and ecologies, these mothers sought to express the kinship they felt for Koodankulam’s protesting women. Thus, apart from acting as artefacts of dissent and solidarity, the letters became important cultural archives of vernacular knowledges of the mundane experiences of living with radiation, and the challenges of making irradiated bodies, lands, and lives ‘visible’ to governments, nuclear technocrats, and broader publics.

This paper, based on academic research and earlier activist engagements with anti-nuclear movements in India and Japan, will seek to explore the various stories, agencies, and experiences embedded in these cultural artefacts, and the alternative knowledges and historiographies they compose in/of the nuclear age.

About 62 miles from Mumbai city, the 1969-vintage Tarapur Nuclear Power Station, built with US-supplied technology, has often occupied global headlines for its peculiar and ongoing historical controversies. The enormous stockpile of spent nuclear fuel which the US refuses to take back while disallowing India to reprocess it, thanks to the complexities of the IAEA’s Safeguards architecture, hangs uncannily on the material-temporal registers of the nuclear Anthropocene.

Tarapur, however, also provokes us to think about marginalized human communities and their material-cultural entanglements with assemblages of land, water, plants, fish, and other non-human life-forms which still get labeled as ‘the nature’. To conduct in situ ruminations about nuclear natures as embodied archives and their intersections with modern governmentality, we engage with the decades-long legal contestations between Tarapur’s fishing communities and India’s nuclear technocracy and legal-bureaucratic institutions. Engineering this nuclear geography entailed the production of nuclear natures and a forced displacement of fishing communities, for whom the loss of access to and intimacies with the sea meant colossal ruptures. Scrutinizing the protracted and labyrinthine litigation unravels questions surrounding compensation, rehabilitation, risk, life, death, and justice.

The first generation of displaced fishing communities fought an arduous legal battle to be returned to their coasts, ecologies, and their modes of knowing and being. Yet, by the time the courts, decades later, acquiesced, the generation of fisherfolk had passed their working lives, and their second generation possessed neither fishing skills nor affective ties with the seas. Further, the reactors had also irreversibly altered the lives and environs of the fish. As we argue, this rather ironic legal episode offers opportunities to visibilize the material-temporal scales at which fish, sea waters, landscapes and other non-humans and their human companions confront nuclear infrastructures and epistemes in rather violent re-configurations of nuclear natures. More specifically, we juxtapose the legal proceedings vis-a-vis nuclear natures imagined as living archives which remain embedded in what Isabelle Stengers calls ‘Gaia’ - “a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects”.

For the Bishnoi, among the earliest eco-conservationists in the Indian subcontinent, encounters with the atom have been encounters of colossal ruptures. Their histories, geographies, ecological intimacies, and nonhuman worlds have collided with India’s nuclear trajectories at two sites – in the arid deserts of Pokhran where India conducted atomic tests in 1974 and 1998, thus forcing the Bishnoi into the ranks of the Global Hibakusha, and in Gorakhpur, where India is setting up a 2800Mwe nuclear power plant. In both instances, the storied landscapes of the Bishnoi – assemblages of humans, heritages, and revered nonhuman animals, trees, plant species, and water bodies – have been irradiated (Pokhran) and appropriated (Gorakhpur) by India’s nuclear establishment through narrativizing these lands as ‘barren’, ‘unpeopled’, and ‘infertile’. As Karen Barad notes, the narrativization of landscapes as 'untended' and 'empty' has been a well-worn tool in the service of nationalism, scienticism, colonial appropriation, and the erasures of indigenous presence. The landscapes of the Bishnoi, embodying palimpsestic layers of local histories, community traditions and post-colonial land-holding practices in India on the one hand, and the human, nonhuman bodies and materialities that have populated these lands on the other, have shaped Bishnoi claims on and belongingness to these lands. By contrast, the nuclear establishment’s forcible appropriation of Bishnoi lands for the nuclear plant may be seen as claims on place that imagine futures by the Indian state through unimagining the presence of Bishnoi lifeworlds. Bishnoi resistance against the Gorakhpur nuclear project thus, can be understood as a means to assert that their lives and landscapes, and intimacies with their nonhuman worlds are both visible and grievable. Unraveling multiple layers of this fascinating episode from India’s recent nuclear historiography, this paper will seek to think about/with land as Bishnoi heritage, and a resource in India’s (colonial) nuclear enterprise. 

Bishnoi identity and world-making, engendered through everyday practices of ecological conservation and religious worship, have made this Vaishnavite sect exemplary grassroots environmentalists in the Indian sub-continent. Bishnoi settlements, as sites of abundant green cover and wildlife, are protected and deeply revered by the community. However, their placid lives and shared spaces across villages in Gorakhpur in the state of Haryana, India, transformed into sites of exceptional protests in the last decade. The totalising impulses of the Indian nuclear state threatened to decouple the efficacious intimacies of the bodily-material and human-(non)human through the acquisition of traditional Bishnoi lands and the fencing off of their sacred groves and pastures. When their material world and its inhabitants were threatened by the imposition of a nuclear power plant in their vicinity, the Bishnoi also became political and legal activists. Based on extensive interactions with the Bishnoi community in Gorakhpur and discursive explorations of the legal texts pertaining to the proceedings of the case filed by the community in court, this chapter explores contestations between the Indian state, besotted with the nuclear age, and the intimacies of ecological subjects, deeply committed to protecting their sacred material worlds, and how these discordant enchantments are articulated. 

In its current avatar, with the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC) at its fulcrum, the global architecture on nuclear liability under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has decisively normalized the indemnification of international nuclear suppliers.

However, India remains an aberration to this de jure universalization ofthe CSC-based regime. The domestic nuclear liability law that India enacted in 2010 allows for liability to be channeled to nuclear suppliers, both domestic and international private entities. This anomaly is owed in large part to grassroots voices, particularly the women of Bhopal in central India. The decades-long struggles for justice and accountability of these women, survivors of the world’s worst chemical industrial disaster in 1984 in Bhopal, shaped India’s domestic liability debate in significant ways. Both, their active protests against the liability law, as well as expressions of solidarity with anti-nuclear grassroots mobilizations in India at the time, led to this important aberration.

This paper will seek to engage with the various conceptualizations surrounding gender, technology, progress, risk, justice, and ethics implicated in these fascinating developments. When contrasted with organizational discourses on nuclear liability led by the IAEA, the abstractions and the “tendency to forget the vulnerability of flesh” (Mensch 2009, 5) in thinking of ‘liability’ primarily in terms of financial risk and potential losses to nuclear corporations, become glaringly evident. This paper will explore the challenges thrown up to such disembodied notions of what it means to be entangled with harm in the nuclear age through the discursive intrusions of the women of Bhopal. In so doing, they bring our attention to the asymmetrical ways in which risk, dispossession, harm, and exposure are distributed (and compensated), and thus, compel us to re-examine how international legal, political, and technical regimes respond to the challenges of living with toxic legacies in the Global South.