The Subverse

In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, delves into the conflict between big cats and humans. Nayanika’s book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021), was a key source of inspiration for Cataplisms, which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens. In this piece, Nayanika focuses on the governance of nonhuman animals, their entanglements with humans, and what the consequences are.  Mathur talks about the two types of big cats—the seeda saada (straightforward) ones who are scared of humans and keep their distance, and the crooked cats – the adam khor (maneaters) who prey on people. The reasons why some cats become man-eaters, while others avoid humans,  are widely debated. Hypotheses include that the cats have come from elsewhere, due to hunting and poaching, or that they’re children of other man-eaters. This uncertainty has consequences. For example, the tiger Ustad, who resided in Ranthambore, was moved out of the sprawling environment of the national park to be confined in a zoo on the suspicion of being a man-eater. This move stirred a national controversy, eliciting an emotional outpouring and contradictory viewpoints. Ustad’s life may have been restricted without cause. How does one govern the unknown?  Given the precarious status of most big cat species, the fact that hunting crooked cats is the standard solution of the Indian state becomes even more fraught. Especially, as Mathur underlines, when it is difficult to identify which cat is the crooked one. Drastic measures are often taken posthumously to ostensibly abide with the laws of the land and justify a kill.  Mathur emphasises the need to think more deeply about our entanglements with the non-human, revise our laws and institutional practices, and give up our crooked ways.  This audio story is part of the Cataplisms project. You can learn more about it here.  This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website.    About Nayanika Mathur Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies as well as Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, UK. Educated at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge she is an anthropologist with an interest in studying the state, ethnographic methods, nonhumans, and the climate crisis. At Oxford Nayanika is co-director of a research network ‘Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences’ which explores the ways through which climate change poses a profound challenge to how the academy – from forms of writing and modes of teaching to disciplinary divisions – operates. Nayanika is the author of two monographs – Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (Chicago University Press, 2021). The first is centred upon the study of bureaucrats and the second on big cats, though they are often confused. In her argument on the governance of big cats this connection - between the paper tiger that is the Indian state and the crooked cats that are entangled with the planetary crisis – becomes, one hopes, clearer. 

In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India. His childhood in Jharkhand’s Palamu region, surrounded by the forest’s flora and fauna, including tigers and leopards, ignited his passion for protecting these cats, and his connection with forest landscapes. Kazmi illustrates how industrialization and capitalism have threatened India’s tigers and other wildlife. A web of mines, dams, and other infrastructure projects within forest areas and critical wildlife corridors pockmark the forests of East Central India. This has fragmented habitats and disrupted migration routes, disorienting animals like elephants and tigers and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Kazmi shares that the lack of charismatic wildlife makes it easier to divert forest areas for more mining projects. Both people and animals who depend on these forests are adversely affected.  He delves into the drastic decline of animals, including tigers and leopards, in Palamu due to hunting coupled with the expansion of industries, which has pushed these animals to the brink, crossing an ecological Rubicon, and making urgent conservation intervention critical. Kazmi also talks about the lack of charismatic wildlife, or animals with mass appeal like tigers and elephants, in the area and how that can make it easier to divert forests for more mining or urbanisation projects. The destruction of these ecosystems thanks to expansion and hunting, has led to desperate circumstances. Raza shares the story of a male tiger’s five-year trek across multiple states in search of a mate. The tiger’s struggle underscores how capitalistic development has fragmented natural corridors, forcing wildlife to navigate human-dominated spaces rather than the jungles they belong in. But not all hope is lost. Kazmi emphasizes the pivotal role that local communities play in conservation. They are essential for saving tigers and other wildlife from the destructive forces of industrialization. He believes that, “if the forests are there, there will always be the hope of the wildlife returning.” About Raza Kazmi Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer, wildlife historian, storyteller and researcher. His fields of expertise include India’s wildlife and forest administration history, conservation policy and conservation issues afflicting the insurgency-ridden east-central Indian landscape. His writings appear in national newspapers (The Hindu, The Indian Express), online media houses (The Wire, FiftyTwodotin, RoundGlass Sustain) as well as various magazines and journals (Frontline, Seminar, The India Forum, Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Sanctuary Asia, Cheetal, etc.). He has also contributed essays to edited anthologies. A recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship for 2021, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled To Whom Does the Forest Belong? The Fate of Green in the Land of Red. He works as a Conservation Communicator with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and also teaches as a Guest Faculty for Wildlife Management at the Forest Guard Training Schools in Chaibasa and Ranchi in Jharkhand.  

In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist. Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn’t, when and where.

In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing  books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more. Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint’s 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.

In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the author of Plastic Matter, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, and  Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies. You can find Heather Davis on social media at Instagram: @theoryxdaddy and on X @heather_davish1. 

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump of orbiting rock into the world as we’ve known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology, regarding planet Earth essentially as a giant rock that happens to have some life, minimising the role of life in shaping the planet. Ferris Jabr has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. You can find him @ferrisjabr on all social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon).

We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker Aseem Shrivastava about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself. “Without Nature, we are not.”- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, “it appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us!” This earth is our only home, so he asks, “Are we ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother’s dreams, the earth’s hopes for us must have power.” Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the mythos is all there and you don’t need to go to science to find the meaning of life. We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic, cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end, face some heart reckoning and atonement. Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of the books ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India’ (2012), and ‘Prithvi Manthan  (2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:‘The Grammar of Greed:  Reflections on a Fatal Ecology’, ‘The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity’, and ‘For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore’. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

Vajra Chandrasekera returns to Arcx for our season finale. Since we last spoke, Vajra has won a Nebula award, as well as Crawford and Locus awards for his debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors. He has also been nominated for Le Guin, Ignyte, Hugo, Lammy, and British Fantasy Awards—and we’re sure there are more in the pipeline!  Vajra’s short stories, poems and articles have appeared in many publications over the years, including Clarkesworld and West Branch. He has also worked as an editor for Strange Horizons, and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories.  In this episode, we delve into his second cross genre novel, Rakesfall, exploring the complexity of this fascinating novel that follows two characters across space, time, and life cycles and explores themes of power, resistance, and connections. We also discuss political oppression, genocidal playbooks, shifts in the publishing industry, South Asian writers, the flattened postcolonial world we live in, and much more.  You can follow Vajra Chandrasekera on X @_vajra   

This week, host Anjali Alappat chats with SF author, physicist, and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change, Vandana Singh. A professor of physics, Vandana’s writing combines science and social issues in thought-provoking ways. In recent years, her work has been climate focused, a stark acknowledgment of the crisis we are currently enduring.  Her work includes Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018), the first work by a South Asian author to be a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award; The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet and Other Stories (2008), part of Zubaan's Classic series, and most recently Utopias of the Third Kind (2022). Vandana was a Climate Imagination Fellow at Arizona State University in 2021. In addition to her contributions to science fiction, she has also written for children, most notably her Younguncle books. She has also been recognised with Parallax and Otherwise Honor awards for her work.  In this episode, we discuss the micro and macro of the ever-evolving climate crisis, the commercialised space race, techno billionaires, writing character led stories, acknowledging privilege and learning from marginalised peoples, the capitalist desire to maintain the status quo, and socio-economic death cults. You can follow Vandana Singh on X @singhvan.  Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of , a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media , or visit for episode details and show notes.

In today's episode of Arcx, we're in conversation with sci-fi and fantasy author, R.R. Virdi.  Virdi published his first book, Dangerous Ways, an urban fantasy novel, in 2016. He is also the author of the Grave Report series, and Star Shepherd, a space western. The First Binding, the first in his new epic high fantasy series, The Tales of Tremaine, was released in 2022. The sequel, The Doors of Midnight, will be out in August 2024. Join us as we discuss stories within stories, the beauty and breadth of South Asian myths, the high cost of becoming a legend, complex magic systems, and complicated relationships.  You can follow R.R. Virdi  on X at rrvirdi or http://rrvirdi.com.   Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.