I am leather- I am cotton

3 Archival Inkjet Prints
30” x 20” (2) and 20”x20”
Edition 1 of 5 plus 2 AP (2024)

(Text from – Joothan- A Dalit’s Life, Om Prakash Valmiki and Reapers by Jean Toomers 1923)

“The colonized, underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense of the term” Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth.

“Oh! I so wanted to own some earth.” (Jean Toomers)

Whose Nature one may ask? That of the most oppressed. What is Nature, one may then ask? That which is not universal but produced through embodied relationships with environments.

More recent understandings of the idea of “nature,’ left out of the social contract for several centuries, force us to reformulate our histories through an ecological lens. The shaping of community identities, migrations, slavery, and the caste body itself as impure, etc. are all connected to relationships to nature. Colonization of plants, people, and erasures of complex and entangled ecosystems and commodities like leather, sugar and cotton have shaped our worlds of today. The current ecological discourse has still not acknowledged in any significant way, those for whom nature has been a place of survival, livelihood, and culture.

“Trapped in historical conditions of capitalist production, laboring bodies have toiled for centuries, as miners, waste pickers, leather tanners, cotton workers, factory workers etc. as part of those multitudes engaged in nature’s transformation for the new economies, but never gained by it. Lodged in histories of the slave trade or in lowly caste communities, they define histories of oppressions.” (Mukul Sharma)

In 1946 W.E.B Dubois, the leader of the Black Movement exchanged letters with the Dalit leader B.R Ambedkar, acknowledging the commonality of their respective struggles. The synergies continued with the Black Panther and Dalit Panther movements. The term Environmental Justice emanates from toxic dumping of waste on Black communities. Mukul Sharma writes about how nature was produced differently from caste locations, that “Caste has historically been naturalized in nature”. `To examine nature from this perspective is to enter the belly of the beast- of social hierarchies and histories of oppressions present everywhere.

Shifting gaze and perspective is critical. This ‘nature’ is far removed from the “beauty” of the wilderness of forests and parks. Can a new ecologically sustainable world be even possible without their inclusion? To do that implies another approach, not top down, but one based in equity, nonviolence, and acknowledgement. That itself is a radical shift.