Whose Land Is It Anyway? Reading Kantara Through Barad Sir's Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Figure 1. Land as memory, community, and ecological belonging.
Introduction
At first, this blog looked like a simple comparison exercise. Put an academic article next to a popular film and see where they meet. But once one starts reading Barad Sir's article, "Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future," alongside Rishab Shetty's Kantara (2022), it becomes clear that the two texts are not just loosely related. They are, in fact, asking the same basic question in two different registers, one in the language of theory, the other in the language of story and ritual. That question is simple to state but not simple to answer: what happens when land is understood in two completely different ways at the same time, as property that can be surveyed, owned and sold, and as memory, ancestry, livelihood and sacred relationship that cannot be reduced to a market price? Barad Sir's article gives us the theoretical tools to ask this question with precision. Kantara gives us a narrative through which the question becomes felt, not just argued. This blog also brings in the documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) at one point, to show how the same problem of land and power appears outside fiction too, in real landscapes across the world. Together, these three sources, one academic article, one fiction film, one documentary, help build a reading that goes beyond simple description of scenes.
Video: Kantara - Official Trailer | A Story of Land, Ritual, and Resistance
Barad Sir's Article: Widening What Postcolonial Studies Can Ask
The most important move Barad sir makes early in the article is to say that postcolonial studies can no longer treat colonialism as a closed chapter of political history, kept separate from the environmental crisis of our own time. He shows how scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty have had to rethink the boundaries of the field once environmental questions entered the conversation, and he brings in Vandana Shiva's work to explain the historical connection between colonial era resource extraction and the destruction of ecological diversity (Barad Sir). This is a useful correction for anyone trained mostly to read postcolonialism through empire, identity and cultural resistance in literary texts alone. Barad Sir's article insists that colonial power was never only cultural or political. It also worked directly on soil, forests, rivers and the people who depended on them for their daily life.
What is equally important is that the article does not romanticise the past in any simple way. It notes that within feminist environmentalism there are real disagreements about how ecologically harmonious pre colonial societies actually were, and that some scholars remain cautious about assuming these societies were free of internal hierarchy or patriarchy (Barad Sir). This balance matters a great deal for reading Kantara, because the village community shown in the film is not presented as a perfect, conflict free world either. It has its own internal tensions, its own flawed characters, and a protagonist who is often reckless and even violent. Keeping this nuance in mind stops the whole reading from turning into a simple tradition is good, modernity is bad argument, which the film itself, on closer viewing, does not fully support.
The Anthropocene: A Planet Shared Unequally
Barad Sir draws heavily on Chakrabarty's idea that human beings have become geological agents, capable of altering climate and ecosystems on a scale once associated only with volcanoes or ice ages (Barad Sir). But the article does not let this large planetary framing erase historical responsibility. It keeps asking a harder question underneath the big picture: who actually caused this large scale transformation, and who is left most exposed to its results? This question feels genuinely urgent when thinking about Kantara. The village community in the film has contributed almost nothing to large scale ecological damage, no factories, no large scale extraction, no long supply chains, and yet it is exactly this community whose forest, farmland and water become the first casualties when outside economic interests move in. The Anthropocene, understood this way, is not a crisis experienced equally by everyone at the same time. It arrives earlier, and more harshly, for communities with the least power to resist it, and this is precisely the postcolonial complication that Barad Sir's article insists we must not ignore while discussing planetary scale problems.
This is also where the documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky, becomes useful to bring in alongside Barad Sir's article. The documentary shows, through images of open pit mines, deforested land and industrial landscapes filmed across several countries, how human activity has physically reshaped the planet's surface on a geological scale. What connects the documentary to Barad Sir's argument is that its footage, taken by itself, could suggest that this transformation is simply a shared human story, all of us equally responsible, all of us equally affected. Barad Sir's article pushes back against that flattening. Reading the documentary through his framework, one has to ask whose land appears in those mining and deforestation shots, who benefited from that extraction, and who was displaced to make it possible. Kantara's forest, seen next to the documentary's mined and cleared landscapes, is a reminder of what such places looked like before that kind of transformation, and what a community stands to lose when the same process begins closer to home.
Figure 2. Two competing grammars of land: property and memory.
Land, Memory and Kantara
Kantara opens with a land agreement between a local king and the village community, an arrangement that the villagers remember as a covenant tied to the deity Panjurli and the forest itself, not merely as an ordinary legal document. This opening scene, one can argue, states the film's central problem in the clearest possible terms: the same piece of land can be described in two entirely different languages at the same time. For the descendants of that original agreement, the land is inseparable from ritual, ancestry, and the figures of Panjurli and Guliga who appear during the Bhoota Kola. For institutions like the forest department, and later for the landlord figure Devendra Suttooru, the land is a bounded territory to be measured, fenced and, wherever legally possible, expanded further.
It is worth being careful here, because the film does not simply place a good village against a bad institution. The forest officer Murali is shown genuinely trying to enforce ecological protections, not merely harassing the villagers without reason, and Shiva himself begins the film as a poacher, someone who also uses the forest for his own convenience rather than out of pure devotion alone. What the film insists on, despite this complexity, is that legal ownership recorded on paper does not automatically settle the deeper cultural question of who this land actually belongs to. Ownership and belonging, the film suggests, are not always the same thing, and the gap between the two is exactly where the story's conflict lives.
Video: Understanding Bhoota Kola - Ritual, Identity, and Sacred Ecology
Spatial Amnesia and the Question of Who Gets to Define the Forest
This is where Rob Nixon's concept of spatial amnesia, as discussed in Barad Sir's article, becomes genuinely useful. Nixon's point, in Barad Sir's presentation of it, is that environmental narratives, especially those shaped by outside institutions rather than local communities, tend to forget the histories and the continuing presence of the people who actually inhabit a landscape (Barad Sir). A forest reduced only to hectares, boundary lines and species counts stops being the place where generations of a specific community buried their dead, performed seasonal rituals and organised their agricultural calendar around the seasons. The forest department scenes in Kantara can be read as dramatising exactly this kind of erasure. When conservation policy is discussed only in terms of land classification and legal jurisdiction, the film quietly raises a question worth sitting with: can this landscape really be understood without also understanding Shiva's family, Leela, and the community whose collective memory is written into every sacred grove and ancestral stone shrine? Who, in other words, is allowed to define what a forest actually is, the surveyor holding a map, or the community that has lived inside that map for many generations before the map was even drawn?
There is also a smaller but important detail worth noting. Spatial amnesia does not only erase the community from official records, it also erases the difference between kinds of knowledge. A forest guard's training in wildlife regulation is treated as expert knowledge, while a village elder's understanding of the same forest, built through decades of lived experience and ritual, is often treated as mere belief or superstition. Kantara keeps returning to this imbalance without stating it directly, letting the audience notice it through the film's structure of confrontation scenes.
Figure 3. When official maps overwrite ancestral memory.
Internal Colonialism After Independence
Barad Sir's discussion of internal colonialism is, arguably, what saves this whole reading from becoming a lazy villagers versus government story. His article explains that formal decolonisation does not automatically dissolve older patterns of domination. Land dispossession, resource extraction and cultural marginalisation can continue well within a nation that is no longer under any foreign rule at all (Barad Sir). This is analytically more precise than simply labelling every conflict in Kantara as colonial, because there is, of course, no foreign coloniser anywhere in the film. Instead, there is a domestic landlord turned antagonist, Devendra, whose family's authority over local land predates independence and continues to operate through legal manoeuvring rather than open conquest. The forest department represents a different kind of power altogether, a modern, rule bound state apparatus that is not villainous by design but can still override local knowledge simply through the weight of bureaucratic authority and procedure.
Internal colonialism lets us name this pattern with more accuracy than a vague word like oppression would allow. It reminds us that domination does not need an empire to survive, it only needs an unequal structure of land ownership, legal authority and decision making power to keep reproducing itself, generation after generation, even after independence has been formally achieved on paper. Kantara is useful here precisely because it shows this continuity without needing a colonial era villain at all. The film's conflict belongs entirely to the present, and yet the underlying structure of unequal power over land is still recognisably colonial in shape.
Figure 4. Land, authority, and internal colonialism.
Capitalism, Dispossession and the Limits of Market Value
Barad Sir's article also brings in David Harvey's idea of accumulation by dispossession, where wealth accumulates through the privatisation of common resources and the conversion of shared land into market assets (Barad Sir). Read alongside Marx's older concept of primitive accumulation, which the article also discusses, this pattern becomes quite recognisable in Kantara. Devendra's attempt to extend his claim over the forest edge is, in effect, an attempt to convert communal and sacred land into private economic territory, using legal and administrative means rather than open violence. This is precisely the kind of dispossession Harvey describes, not always dramatic or visibly brutal, but steady, procedural, and backed by paperwork rather than weapons.
What the film resists, one could say, is any easy suggestion that this land could be adequately compensated through money, or through relocation to some other piece of ground. When a community's relationship with land includes ritual, ancestry and everyday livelihood together, reducing that land purely to its market value misses almost everything that actually makes it meaningful to the people who live there. Barad Sir's article is careful to note that this kind of dispossession does not end with formal colonial rule, it continues through neoliberal development, and Kantara seems to be making a similar point in its own narrative language. Dispossession is not only the loss of property, it is the loss of an entire relationship with a place, a relationship that cannot simply be bought back once it is gone. The documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch shows this same process at a much larger scale, where entire landscapes are cleared or excavated for resource extraction, and the film's aerial shots of scarred land make the point without a single word of dialogue.
Figure 5. Communal land under the pressure of market conversion.
Resistance and Sacred Ecology
The film's climactic Bhoota Kola sequence, where ritual possession becomes an act of direct confrontation against Devendra's land claim, is the moment that can be read as the community's clearest assertion of authority over the land, an authority grounded not in legal paperwork but in continuous ritual practice and inherited memory. It would be too simple, though, to call this scene a straightforward triumph of tradition over modernity, because that framing flattens what is actually happening. It is better understood as the film insisting that legal ownership and cultural legitimacy are not automatically the same thing, and that a community's ecological knowledge, passed down through ritual rather than recorded in survey documents, deserves to be taken seriously as its own form of authority, not dismissed as mere superstition standing in the way of development.
This scene also raises a difficult question that the blog itself points towards: can environmental conservation, or development in general, ever be called genuine progress if it ends up destroying the very relationship between a community and its land? Kantara does not give a neat answer, but it clearly leans towards saying that any development which ignores this relationship comes at a real and lasting cost.
Figure 6. Ritual as an assertion of ecological and cultural authority.
Environmental Justice and the Weight of History
Barad Sir's article also gives space to think about how environmental harm is never distributed evenly, and this connects directly to the blog's core question about historically marginalised communities. Colonial era resource extraction laid down patterns of land dispossession that did not simply disappear after independence. They continued as economic marginalisation, which in turn left these same communities more exposed to further ecological degradation, loss of livelihood, and cultural displacement. Each stage in this chain makes the next stage more likely. A community that has already lost land once is in a weaker position to resist losing it again the second time.
Kantara fits this pattern quite closely. The village community's vulnerability in the film is not accidental or timeless, it is the direct result of an unequal structure of land control that has been building for generations, well before the events shown in the film even begin. Reading the film this way answers the blog's question in a fairly direct manner: it is not that marginalised communities are somehow naturally closer to nature and therefore more affected by ecological change. It is that a long history of land dispossession has left them with fewer resources, less legal power, and less institutional protection whenever new ecological or economic pressure arrives. Vulnerability, in this sense, has a history behind it. It is produced, not natural.
Land: Property vs Memory - Competing Perspectives on Ecological Belonging
A Short Reflection
Working through this blog, it becomes noticeable how differently Kantara reads once Barad Sir's theoretical vocabulary is available. Without terms like spatial amnesia or internal colonialism, the film's forest department scenes could easily be read as a simple hero versus villain plot, entertaining but not saying very much. With these terms in hand, the same scenes open up into a genuine argument about competing forms of authority over land, legal, institutional and ritual, none of which can be dismissed too quickly or too easily. This, perhaps, is what theory is actually meant to do in a case like this, not replace the film with an abstract argument, but give the reader sharper and more careful questions to bring to it.
Conclusion
Kantara does not resolve the tension between land as property and land as memory, and it should not be expected to. What the film does instead is show that both claims are real, and that ignoring the second one, the claim built from ritual, ancestry and continuous presence, produces a thinner and more dangerous idea of what development actually means. Reading the film through Barad Sir's article, alongside brief points of contact with Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, shows that the Anthropocene cannot be approached only as a planetary emergency measured in carbon and rising temperature. It must also be approached historically, by asking who was dispossessed first, whose knowledge was dismissed as mere superstition, and whose memory of a forest gets left off the official map. Holding the planetary and the historical together, without letting either one erase the other, is the real intellectual task that both this article and this film are quietly asking readers to take up.
📊 Key Concepts: A Comparative Framework
| Key Scholar/Figure | Concept/Term | Definition and Context | Historical or Cultural Example | Connection to Global Capitalism | Environmental Implication |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rob Nixon | Spatial Amnesia | The tendency to overlook or erase the histories, geographies, and continuing presence of colonized or indigenous peoples within a landscape, treating land as "empty" or purely statistical. | Romanticized American environmental literature (e.g., Thoreau or Jack London); Forest department scenes in Kantara where land is reduced to hectares, ignoring ancestral burial sites. | Allows for the erasure of indigenous histories to facilitate the celebration of "empty land" or market-driven land classification for capital exploitation. | Leads to the displacement of communities in the name of "wilderness" rhetoric; treats forests as bounded territories rather than integrated ecosystems. |
| David Harvey | Accumulation by Dispossession | The process where capital accumulates through the forced privatization of common resources, assets, and rights, turning shared land into market assets. | Privatization of water in Mexico and India; the subprime mortgage crisis; Devendra's attempt to convert communal forest edges into private territory in Kantara. | Central to neoliberal development; turns essential protections into profitable securities and shared resources into enclosed private economic gain. | Privatization of the commons and the takeover of farming by agribusiness; converts sacred ecosystems into commodities, leading to loss of biodiversity. |
| Dipesh Chakrabarty | Species Thinking / Geological Agents | The recognition of humans as a collective geological force capable of altering the planet's climate and ecosystems on a scale once associated with natural forces. | The Anthropocene epoch; planetary climate crises (e.g., droughts in Australia); large-scale transformations depicted in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. | While climate change accentuates capital inequality, this crisis transcends the logic of capital, representing a planetary-scale transformation. | Requires a shift from human-centric approaches to considering the well-being of all species to address anthropogenetic ecological instability. |
| Medha Patkar / NBA / Dilip Barad | Internal Colonialism | The persistence of colonial-style dynamics within formally decolonized nations, where the state and domestic elites encroach upon indigenous lands for resource extraction. | The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) movement against large dams in India; the character Devendra Suttooru in Kantara using legal maneuvering to claim forest land. | Global capital acts with nation-states and domestic landlords to despoil land and use bureaucratic procedures to reproduce unequal resource control. | Irreversible damage to river ecosystems and loss of biodiversity; the override of local ecological knowledge by modern state apparatuses. |
| Vandana Shiva | Colonial-Environmental Nexus / Resource Extraction | The historical and ongoing connection between colonialism and the destruction of ecological diversity, where market forces erode sustainable local cultures. | Sustainable local cultures in India where women's roles were tied to food production; historical patterns of land control that marginalize communities. | Transnational corporations exacerbate resource exploitation patterns set during the colonial era, treating land primarily as property to be sold. | Erosion of ecologically attuned cultures; wanton destruction of environmental diversity and the severing of indigenous links to the soil. |
| Ken Saro-Wiwa | Environmental Activism vs. Multinational Corporations | The struggle of marginalized peoples against ecological devastation caused by corporate resource extraction and checked corporate power in the Third World. | The advocacy for the Ogoni people against oil extraction by multinational companies in the Niger Delta. | Highlights the collaborative exploitation between multinational corporations and nation-states at the expense of local rights. | Severe environmental devastation of homelands and local ecosystems due to oil extraction and industrial pollution. |
📚 Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. "Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future." Journal of Higher Education and Research Society: A Refereed International, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 201-13.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364346084
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky, Mercury Films, 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene:_The_Human_Epoch
Kantara. Directed by Rishab Shetty, performances by Rishab Shetty, Sapthami Gowda, and Kishore, Hombale Films, 2022.
www.imdb.com/title/tt15327088/
This analysis examines Kantara through the postcolonial ecocritical framework developed by Prof. Dilip Barad, exploring how land operates simultaneously as legal property and as ancestral memory, ritual space, and ecological relationship in the context of the Anthropocene.
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