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Abstract
This article urges a consideration of the atmospheric afterlives of fossil-fueled imperialism as not just accumulated gases and particles but also durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined. Focusing on the contemporary air pollution crisis in India, it analyzes how governmental responses to death-dealing airs today draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats, partaking in a climate of enclosure. Using archival, legal, and media sources, it excavates the imperial traces of three atmos-spheres, or spaces within which air is imagined, contained, or governed. The first is the Indian lung, an object of exoticized medical interest since the late nineteenth century. Tracing the reemergence of racialized claims of “deficient” Indian lung capacity, the article shows how a colonial epistemology of tropical otherness produces a strategic imperceptibility of today’s pollution-induced illness. The second is the colonial hill station, where colonial theories of medical topography shape present-day discourses of “lung-cleansing” hill vacations, casting atmospheric vulnerability as a natural condition of the tropical plains—the only solution to which is escape. The third is the privatized air offered through air pollution masks and purifiers, which draw from colonial practices of architecture and dress premised on a presumption that “the outside” is a zone of inherent biophysical risk. These three atmospheres together confirm that until the climate of enclosure is challenged, investments in sequestration will supersede structural efforts to produce air otherwise. The article also urges consideration of non-European atmospheres to understand how normative racial categories are reinforced through models of atmosphere.
本文认为, 化石燃料驱动的帝国主义对大气的影响, 不仅是日积月累的气体和颗粒, 还有持久的决定了大气的感受、管理和假想的空间布局。针对目前印度的大气污染危机, 政府对致命空气的反应, 是一种隔离身体与外界威胁的殖民逻辑、并参与实施了环境封闭。利用档案、法律和媒体资料, 本文挖掘了三种空气（或对空气进行假想、控制或治理的空间）的帝国主义痕迹。通过追踪印度人肺功能有缺陷的种族式言论的再次出现, 本文显示, 热带异质性的殖民认知论, 导致了对污染疾病的策略性掩盖。其次是殖民式山地避暑地。在那里, 医学地理学的殖民理论塑造了对“清肺”山地避暑地的描述, 并把大气脆弱性看作是热带平原的一种自然条件, 而唯一的解决方法就是逃离。第三是空气污染口罩和净化器产生的私有化空气, 来自于建筑学和衣着的、假设“外界”是生物物理危险区的殖民实践。这三种空气共同确认了：除非改变对环境的封闭, 否则对隔离的投资将会取代改变空气的结构性措施。本文还要求考虑欧洲以外地区的空气, 以便理解大气模式如何强化了标准种族类别。
Este artículo insiste en la consideración del más allá atmosférico del imperialismo movido con combustibles fósiles, no como simples gases y partículas acumuladas sino también en disposiciones espaciales durables que indican cómo son sentidas, organizadas e imaginadas las atmósferas. Centrándose en la crisis contemporánea de polución aérea en la India, el artículo analiza el modo como las respuestas gubernamentales para lidiar con la muerte en los aires de hoy se apoya en la lógica colonial del secuestro corporal de las amenazas externas, tomando parte en un clima de encerramiento. Usando fuentes de archivos, legales y de los medios, excava las huellas imperiales de tres atmo-esferas, o espacios dentro de los cuales el aire es imaginado, contenido y gobernado. La primera es el pulmón indio, objeto de interés médico “exotizado” desde finales del siglo XIX. Rastreando la reaparición de reclamos racializados sobre la capacidad “deficiente” del pulmón indio, el artículo muestra cómo una epistemología colonial de una otredad tropical produce una imperceptibilidad estratégica de la enfermedad de nuestros días inducida por polución. La segunda es la estación colonial de la colina, donde las teorías coloniales de topografía médica configuran los discursos de estos días de vacaciones para “limpieza del pulmón” en la colina, representando la vulnerabilidad atmosférica como una condición natural de las planicies tropicales––con el escape como la única solución contra la misma. La tercera es el aire privatizado que se ofrece a través de los tapabocas contra la polución y purificadores, que se apoyan en las prácticas coloniales de arquitectura y vestuario anticipados en una presunción de que “lo de afuera” es una zona de riesgo biofísico inherente. Estas tres atmósferas en conjunto confirman que hasta que el clima del enclaustramiento sea desafiado, las inversiones en secuestro suplantarán los esfuerzos estructurales para producir aire de otra manera. El artículo urge también la consideración de atmósferas no europeas para comprender cómo las categorías raciales normativas son reforzadas con modelos de la atmósfera.
Acknowledgments
I thank four anonymous reviewers and Nik Heynen for their critical comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of the arguments presented here were shared at the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut, the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina, the Urban Climates: Power, Development and Environment in South Asia workshop organized by Aparna Parikh and Nida Rehman at Dartmouth College’s Department of Geography and Urban Planning at Columbia University. I thank the audiences at these venues—in particular Aparna and Nida, as well as Jessica Barnes, Lalit Batra, Debanuj Dasgupta, David Fuente, Conor Harrison, and Payal Shah—for generous feedback, support, and commentary. Anjanette Vaidya provided research assistance related to the history of pulmonary medicine. Conversations at different stages with Amita Baviskar, Chie Ikeya, Suzy Kim, and Preetha Mani pushed my thinking creatively. I also thank the students in my Spring 2019 Urban Natures graduate seminar for engaging an earlier draft of the article. All errors remain my own.
Notes
1 Source apportionment of Delhi’s air pollution has become highly contentious in policy debates, with more than fifteen different apportionment studies carried out in the past decade. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry claimed in 2015 that only 6.6 percent of particulate matter pollution came from cars, whereas the Ministry of Earth Sciences found cars responsible for 45 percent of fine respirable particles (PM2.5); some studies say cars contribute up to 80 percent of Delhi’s pollution load (Chandra Citation2018). The seasonality of air pollution greatly shifts pollution sources, with crop burning a large contributor to winter air pollution (with most studies suggesting at least a 25 percent contribution) and dust a larger component of summer pollution. Delhi has barely had a hundred days annually since 2015 that meet the “good” or “satisfactory” air quality standards set by the Central Pollution Control Board (Roychowdury and Somvanshi 2020). Mean annualized PM2.5 concentrations have been around three times above the Central Pollution Control Board’s upper limit for safe air and six times above the WHO limit.
2 An earlier round of court-driven air pollution regulation prompted by high pollution levels in millennial Delhi—particularly the early 2000s conversion of all taxis, autorickshaws, and city buses to compressed natural gas and the adoption of improved fuel emissions standards—did nothing to stem the rapid growth of private automobility. In this sense, these actions—successful in achieving a reduction in diesel emissions and overall ambient pollution from 2001 to 2006—worked within rather than against the climate of enclosure. Véron’s (Citation2006) prescient observation that the environmental activism driving this action had a middle-class bias helps make clear why the private car has remained an object endowed with attributes of symbolic and physical defense.
3 Arjun Gopal & Others v. The Union of India & Others, Writ Petition (Civil) 728 of 2015, Supreme Court of India.
4 W. Anderson (Citation1996, 118), emphasizing the resilience of hereditarian thinking into the twentieth century, noted how the focus of racial pathology shifted from genetic inheritance to race culture, or the “behavioral predisposition organized fundamentally by racial descent” for contracting and circulating disease pathogens.
5 Daily orders issued on 18 and 20 July 2016, in Vardhaman Kaushik v. Union of India and Others, O.A. 95 of 2014, Chairperson Bench, National Green Tribunal. See Ghertner (Citation2020) for a discussion of this influential case.
6 Written argument by Pinky Anand, ASG before the Chairperson Bench on behalf of Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises in Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises v. Union of India and Others, M.A. 567 of 2016 in the matter of Vardhaman Kaushik v. Union of India and Others, O.A. 95 of 2014, National Green Tribunal, New Delhi.
7 Oral testimony of Pinky Anand before the Chairperson Bench, 31 May 2016, in M.A. 567 of 2016 in the matter Vardhaman Kaushik v. Union of India and Others, O.A. 95 of 2014, National Green Tribunal, New Delhi.
8 Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change affidavit in Writ Petition (Civil) 13029 of 1985, Supreme Court of India, filed on 26 April 2017.
9 Final Judgment in M.A. 567 of 2016, National Green Tribunal, 14 September 2017. The Supreme Court, in an order issued on 5 April 2002, in Writ Petition (Civil) 13029 of 1985, had already accepted global IERs as grounds for air pollution abatement decisions in India. It rejected the MoEFCC’s specific denial of these IERs in the same case on 26 October 2017.
10 Harrison (Citation1999) attributed medical topography’s growing influence in the nineteenth century to colonial claims of European vulnerability emerging first from reports of high British troop mortality due to environmental exposure during the First Burma War, which ended in 1826, and again following the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Roe’s (Citation1859, 226) post-1857 “Annual Report of the Sanitarium” of Mount Abu reflected medical topography’s core assumption: “That the climate of India is prejudicial to the constitutions of Europeans, and also that Europeans … [do] derive very considerable benefit from residing at hill stations are facts that are well known and incontrovertible.” Although the “idea that climate had different biological effects on people of different skin color lost its legitimacy with the defeat of fascism” in the late colonial period (Kennedy Citation1990, 136), medical topography continued to map tropics as inherently enfeebling, for Indians and Europeans alike.
11 Naraindas (Citation1996) elegantly summarized the mechanism of atmospheric disease of the period: “The consubstantiation of the physical, the social and the moral are seen to engender disease … premised upon the principle of acceleration: a luxuriant vegetation with rapid growth, productive of rapid decay, leading to a high amount of organic and inorganic substances floating in the air, staining it, and hence productive of disease: a concept encapsulated in the word miasma, meaning stain” (22).
12 The sense of historically constituted mahaul is concisely evoked in Niranjana’s (Citation2020, 88) discussion of early-twentieth-century mehfils, small performances of Hindustani classical music, where it was the shared conventions of audience response that created the conditions for a particular kind of charged affective atmosphere (e.g., intuitive uses of Hindi words and sounds to express appreciation or awe, even among non-Hindi speakers; joint swaying or stillness; crowd goosebumps). Mehfil maarna, literally meaning to kill the concert but closer to “capture the crowd” by leaving it in silence, was the aim of performers. Niranjana (Citation2020) also noted how the rise of microphone use changed both the kinds of voice that were aesthetically valued and the styles of audience and ambience they cultivated. What she called the “metropolitan unconscious stands for the sedimented repertoire of ways of living and experiencing that people brought into Bombay and that underwent transformation in engaging with the conditions of the present” (Niranjana Citation2020, 10).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
D. Asher Ghertner
D. ASHER GHERTNER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08854. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on informal urbanization and land and environmental politics in India.