Dushkal Temporalities: Reframing Time in Planning for the Climate Crisis

CASI Seminar

in partnership with the South Asia Center & Dept of Anthropology

Lalitha Kamath
Professor, Centre for Urban Policy & Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; Penn Fulbright-Nehru Scholar
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

About the Seminar:
When five cyclones hit the Arabian seas in 2019, the Maharashtra Government sought to deal with each in isolation as a spectacular climate event in line with its ahistorical, technocratic approach to the climate crisis. But fishers across the region organized politically to articulate their experience of this slow disaster through what they called matsya dushkal (fish drought). At the heart of the contestation between more expansive fisher framings and reductive, official narratives is the notion of time and temporalities that are conjured up by “dushkal,” one that blurs the line between the everyday and the eventful disaster and foregrounds the messy heterotemporalities integral to fisher life. How might we learn from the time of long dyings or world endings that fishers are living in intimate relation with? And if we read Dushkal politics as a politics of life in the face of death, how might we plan differently for this crisis?

About the Speaker:
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist and planner, working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance, and the environment. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South—both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. Her work demonstrates the agency of marginalized groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, storytelling, and multimedia formats. She is deeply interested in reimagining planning practice by drawing from fisher knowledge and the liquidities and temporalities of the ocean. She teaches in the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. In 2024-25 she is a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.