Shreyas Sreenath

In my teaching and research, I reflect on how the environments we inhabit accumulate untimely histories of collective life in forgotten artifacts. I am interested in how such histories offer a counterpoint to our alienated present, which is marked by a dissonance between our disposable habits and their non-degradable afterlives. My fieldwork concerns people who tend to untimely things in various locales: littered streets, clogged sewers, peri-urban landfills, recycling sheds, abandoned forests, derelict libraries, old markets, medieval shrines, and agrarian landscapes. I am interested in how such neglected archives can illuminate a future life in common, as the present contradiction between disposability and non-degradability threatens to manifest as an ecological apartheid. I currently locate my fieldwork in the South Indian state of Karnataka, although it may extend elsewhere in the future.

In such inquiries, I am influenced by Marx’s critique of the secular theology implicit in the commodity form and the logic of capital, the Lingayat mystics of South India who envisioned a collective life forged through meaningful toil (kāyaka) and shared experience (anubhava), and the untimely histories provoked by India’s various anti-caste traditions. My writings meld these influences with scholarly inheritances from anthropology, history, and the environmental humanities. As an anthropologist, I see in ethnography the radical potential to understand everyday life and reconstruct what is possible in it.

My current research investigates the relationship between caste power, disposable desires, and urban waste in postcolonial Bangalore, a city whose IT firms serve as signposts for a ‘modern’, ‘caste-less’, India. It does so through an ethnography of solid waste collection, small scale recycling, and sewage maintenance, performed overwhelmingly by Dalit communities under the supervision of landed castes. Focusing on unforeseen ‘black spots’ in municipal waste management, I explore how the volatility of waste both reinforces historic caste relations and opens new avenues to politicize them. While the disposability of contemporary waste facilitates a certain caste-blindness among the city’s inhabitants, I argue that its non-degradability sparks a renewed reckoning with caste history and its various futures.

My subsequent research focuses on the moral ecologies of a small town in Shimoga district, Karnataka as its inhabitants navigate an uncertain agrarian future. It explores the anarchic ways in which ancestral desires inhabit ‘forgotten’ places, practices, and memories, informing ethical ties with an agrarian landscape increasingly made disposable to commodity production. Here, I am interested in the possibility of a vernacular ‘survival text’, to borrow a term from the Dalit thinker Kotiganahalli Ramaiah, inherited through ancestral visions of a desirable everyday life rooted in language, ecology, and craft.

When I am not teaching, writing, or studying, I enjoy nothing more than getting lost. I hope my students do the same from time to time, preferably with a like-minded friend.