We're proud to introduce you to the work of our 2019-2020 cohort, the Feminist Collaboratory Fellows. The year's research theme is Feminist Futures. We asked each fellow to participate in a video or written project to display their work and explore the theme further. This is the seventh installment in the series.

We interviewed Anuj Vaidya (Performance Studies) by email in the summer of 2020.

Question: How would you describe your #FeministFutures research project?

Answer: Forest Tales, my practice-as-research project funded by FRI, centers on Sitayana: my queer, science fiction, eco-feminist retelling of the South Asian epic Ramayana. Its female protagonist Sita emerges as a forest in this work-in-process, a choice I made to help find the mycelial undercommons in the tradition. I aim to transport the epic from the realm of religious imagination to that of speculative docu-fiction, and to update the political context of the narrative to the present.

Q: What inspired you to pursue this subject?

A: The Ramayana is a story that bookended my childhood and adolescence. In the late 70s and early 80s, it was a bedtime story on my grandmother's tongue. From 1987-88, it was a state-sponsored television series. And on the eve of my immigration to the US in 1993, politicians weaponized it, leading to the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque -- it allegedly stood on Rama's birthplace.

These were the early years of an ascendant Hindu nationalist movement in India, which has now matured, with a Hindu fundamentalist party firmly entrenched in government. But a look back at the 2,500 year old Ramayana tradition shows us that the epic has been used towards political ends since its very beginning – whether by kings to justify empire building (in its mainstream versions), or by oppressed communities who have repurposed the epic in order to speak truth to power (in its minor strains).

“Speaking with Sita” is a method that has been used historically by adivasis (tribals and indigenous peoples of the region) and by Dalit women to make visible their suffering and dehumanization at the hands of Vedic Brahminism. This religious tradition seeks to devalue the feminine in body (by controlling reproduction), mind (by controlling knowledge), and in spirit (by controlling nature), and to capture labor through the normalization of patriarchy and the caste system, for the benefit of empire.

Historians note that the South Asian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, document a historical process of settlement over a 1,000-year period (1500-500BC), during which time the entire Indo-Gangetic plain was deforested and put to the plough. The resurgence of Brahminism, given new life by Western colonialism, only increases the rate of deforestation and ecological plunder currently underway in South Asia in the name of development. As living storytelling traditions, the epics (especially the Ramayana) have spawned thousands of counter-narratives over time, which in turn have sparked revolutionary thought and action. It is imperative that we reclaim these counter-herstories, and generate new ones, so that they may guide us towards feminist futures, and not the necrotic ones peddled to us now.

Q: What are the key ideas and themes of the project?

A: Following my method of speaking with Sita, I spent six months in India last year, studying forests as part of my fieldwork. One of the outcomes of this fieldwork is an experiment in speculative multispecies ethnography in the form of a podcast, Of Forests and Floods, where I imagine the city of Bombay in the year 2042, with a landscape returned to its prior amphibious ecology by a great flood. By imagining the 'now' from the vantage point of a not-so-distant dystopic future, the present becomes a moment of possibility where a different kind of politics were possible.

Given that the Ramayana has deeply informed the relationship between forest and settlement in the South Asian context, I chose to undertake my research in the Aarey forest – which is located inside the megacity of Bombay. While the original environs of the Ramayana depict a city surrounded by the forest, in contemporary times, it is more often the forest surrounded by the city. Such is the case with Aarey,  now one of the last remaining urban old growth forests completely inside a city, which is home to wild leopards. The Aarey forest has been the frontlines of a battle between indigenous communities/environmentalists and the State since 2014 (#SaveAarey), over the proposed construction of a service shed for Bombay's up-and-coming metro system. As the last green lungs of a increasingly polluted city, and as the floodplains of the Mithi River in a city prone to flooding, the Aarey forest is a particular example of deforestation in the name of development, which represents the universal condition of forests across the world – whether in urban centers or far away from them.

Q: What has your experience as an FRI graduate fellow been like?

A: I have really enjoyed the opportunity to interact with faculty, graduate students, and FRI staff over the course of last year, as it has allowed me to be in conversation with others who share a similar commitment toward a feminist future. The inclusion of the arts, alongside the humanities and the sciences, as a valid knowledge-making practice dovetails with my own interests in de-centering hegemonic ways of knowing, describing, and engaging with the world. What has been most invaluable, however, is the opportunity to witness first-hand and learn from the different methods and strategies employed by other collaboratory fellows in different disciplinary locations.

Q: What can your research offer to us as we grapple with COVID-19?

A: The pandemic is as much a public health crisis and a labor crisis as it is a symptom of ecological collapse due to excessive deforestation. While the pandemic is apocalyptic for many, for others it merely intensifies the risks they have always faced under capitalism, Western colonialism and the enlightenment. But if one looks further back into history, it is clearer still that issues of labor and of ecological collapse are not new to the modern era. They have appeared repeatedly, in different times and different places, under different guises. What is different now is the scale of the unraveling and its attendant violences. What is different now is the speed with which such revolutionary shifts happen. What is different now is that the very basic principles of ecology are being undone.

In my own research, I have learnt that the rise of Buddhism as a revolutionary discourse around 400BCE in South Asia was a direct result of its critique of Hinduism's caste system exploitation of labor, and its ecological destruction, both in terms of excessive beef consumption, and the ritual burning of forests. The crisis we see today in terms of the pandemic is similarly an outcome of unbridled deforestation, which has had the most devastating effects on frontline workers, migrant laborers, and racialized, impoverished, and houseless communities.

One of the reasons that Buddhism succeeded was thanks to its massive political and spiritual (while remaining resolutely atheistic) re-education campaign, free for all, open to all castes and genders, and undertaken largely in public spaces – in groves, in parks, in sanctuaries.

It is clear to me that education and educational institutions must play a central role in cultivating the conditions necessary for our transformation.  Our systems of public education – from K-12 to higher education – are failing us in this regard. We must remediate public education, and we must do it urgently, if we are to have the capacity to face the coming storms.

Q: How can folks learn more about your work?

You can check out Of Forests and Floods, at: https://kpfa.org/episode/apex-express-july-9-2020-forestsandfloods/. Join us on September 17, 7-8pm, at Berkeley's KPFA 94.1 or kpfa.org for the live broadcast of the followup documentary episode about the Aarey forest.

For more information about my projects, you can check out my website: http://handspuncinema.wordpress.com

You can read more about my Forest Tales project through these two publications:

QED: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.14321/qed.5.3.0130.pdf?seq=1

Performance Matters: https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/issue/view/15

You can check out my larval collaborations with artist/scholar Praba Pilar at:

https://www.prabapilar.com/larval-rock-stars