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Research Article Volume 10 Issue 3
Postcolonial ecocide and subaltern resistance in Telangana’s Kancha Gachibowli forest
Anurag Paul, Dr Saddam Hossain Sarkar
Independent Researcher, Jadavpur University, India
Post-Doc Fellow, ICSSR, Jadavpur University, India
Received: November 12, 2025 | Published: November 24, 2025
Citation: Paul A, Sarkar SH. Postcolonial ecocide and subaltern resistance in Telangana’s Kancha Gachibowli forest.J His Arch & Anthropol Sci. 2025;10(2):87‒94. DOI: 10.15406/jhaas.2025.10.00330
Abstract
This paper investigates the 2025 destruction of the Kancha Gachibowli Forest, a vital ecological zone within the University of Hyderabad, carried out by the Telangana state government under the banner of IT-led development. I argue that this act of state-sponsored deforestation is not a mere policy misstep but a paradigmatic case of postcolonial ecocidewhere neoliberal developmentalism reproduces colonial logics of extraction under the guise of progress. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak, Rob Nixon, Ramachandra Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Frantz Fanon, the paper situates this event within the longer history of ecological violence, environmental clearance rituals, and the erasure of subaltern ecological knowledge. Yet the forest resists. Through protest poetry, student uprisings, digital testimonies, and activist performance, Kancha Gachibowli becomes a crucible for insurgent cultural texts that echo the legacies of the Chipko movement while articulating new forms of radical ecology. These aesthetic and political practices are read as decolonial epistemologies in which human and nonhuman entanglements-trees as witnesses, viral videos as ecological testimony- generate posthumanist imaginaries that disrupt anthropocentric and statist narratives of land use. By theorizing the forest’s destruction as both ecological violence and cultural production, the paper contributes to debates on grassroots ecosocialism, environmental justice, and the literary articulation of subaltern ecologies in South Asia. It locates Telangana’s ecocide within a broader Global South cartography of dispossession, while foregrounding the insurgent potential of ecological resistance to reclaim democratic, socialist, and planetary futures.
Keywords: postcolonial ecocide; radical ecology; subaltern resistance; posthumanism; decolonial epistemologies
©2025 Paul, et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.