The Subverse

In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India. His childhood in Jharkhand's Palamu region, surrounded by the forest's flora and fauna, including tigers and leopards, ignited his passion for protecting these cats, and his connection with forest landscapes. Kazmi illustrates how industrialization and capitalism have threatened India's tigers and other wildlife. A web of mines, dams, and other infrastructure projects within forest areas and critical wildlife corridors pockmark the forests of East Central India. This has fragmented habitats and disrupted migration routes, disorienting animals like elephants and tigers and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Kazmi shares that the lack of charismatic wildlife makes it easier to divert forest areas for more mining projects. Both people and animals who depend on these forests are adversely affected.  He delves into the drastic decline of animals, including tigers and leopards, in Palamu due to hunting coupled with the expansion of industries, which has pushed these animals to the brink, crossing an ecological Rubicon, and making urgent conservation intervention critical. Kazmi also talks about the lack of charismatic wildlife, or animals with mass appeal like tigers and elephants, in the area and how that can make it easier to divert forests for more mining or urbanisation projects. The destruction of these ecosystems thanks to expansion and hunting, has led to desperate circumstances. Raza shares the story of a male tiger's five-year trek across multiple states in search of a mate. The tiger's struggle underscores how capitalistic development has fragmented natural corridors, forcing wildlife to navigate human-dominated spaces rather than the jungles they belong in. But not all hope is lost. Kazmi emphasizes the pivotal role that local communities play in conservation. They are essential for saving tigers and other wildlife from the destructive forces of industrialization. He believes that, “if the forests are there, there will always be the hope of the wildlife returning.” About Raza Kazmi Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer, wildlife historian, storyteller and researcher. His fields of expertise include India's wildlife and forest administration history, conservation policy and conservation issues afflicting the insurgency-ridden east-central Indian landscape. His writings appear in national newspapers (The Hindu, The Indian Express), online media houses (The Wire, FiftyTwodotin, RoundGlass Sustain) as well as various magazines and journals (Frontline, Seminar, The India Forum, Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Sanctuary Asia, Cheetal, etc.). He has also contributed essays to edited anthologies. A recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship for 2021, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled To Whom Does the Forest Belong? The Fate of Green in the Land of Red. He works as a Conservation Communicator with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and also teaches as a Guest Faculty for Wildlife Management at the Forest Guard Training Schools in Chaibasa and Ranchi in Jharkhand.  

In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist. Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn't, when and where.

In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing  books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more. Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint's 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.

In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the author of Plastic Matter, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, and  Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies. You can find Heather Davis on social media at Instagram: @theoryxdaddy and on X @heather_davish1. 

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump of orbiting rock into the world as we've known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology, regarding planet Earth essentially as a giant rock that happens to have some life, minimising the role of life in shaping the planet. Ferris Jabr has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham's Quarterly, McSweeney's, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. You can find him @ferrisjabr on all social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon).

We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker Aseem Shrivastava about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself. “Without Nature, we are not.”- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, “it appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us!” This earth is our only home, so he asks, “Are we ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother's dreams, the earth's hopes for us must have power.” Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the mythos is all there and you don't need to go to science to find the meaning of life. We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic, cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end, face some heart reckoning and atonement. Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of the books ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India' (2012), and ‘Prithvi Manthan  (2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:‘The Grammar of Greed:  Reflections on a Fatal Ecology', ‘The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity', and ‘For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore'. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

Vajra Chandrasekera returns to Arcx for our season finale. Since we last spoke, Vajra has won a Nebula award, as well as Crawford and Locus awards for his debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors. He has also been nominated for Le Guin, Ignyte, Hugo, Lammy, and British Fantasy Awards—and we're sure there are more in the pipeline!  Vajra's short stories, poems and articles have appeared in many publications over the years, including Clarkesworld and West Branch. He has also worked as an editor for Strange Horizons, and Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories.  In this episode, we delve into his second cross genre novel, Rakesfall, exploring the complexity of this fascinating novel that follows two characters across space, time, and life cycles and explores themes of power, resistance, and connections. We also discuss political oppression, genocidal playbooks, shifts in the publishing industry, South Asian writers, the flattened postcolonial world we live in, and much more.  You can follow Vajra Chandrasekera on X @_vajra   

This week, host Anjali Alappat chats with SF author, physicist, and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change, Vandana Singh. A professor of physics, Vandana's writing combines science and social issues in thought-provoking ways. In recent years, her work has been climate focused, a stark acknowledgment of the crisis we are currently enduring.  Her work includes Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018), the first work by a South Asian author to be a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award; The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet and Other Stories (2008), part of Zubaan's Classic series, and most recently Utopias of the Third Kind (2022). Vandana was a Climate Imagination Fellow at Arizona State University in 2021. In addition to her contributions to science fiction, she has also written for children, most notably her Younguncle books. She has also been recognised with Parallax and Otherwise Honor awards for her work.  In this episode, we discuss the micro and macro of the ever-evolving climate crisis, the commercialised space race, techno billionaires, writing character led stories, acknowledging privilege and learning from marginalised peoples, the capitalist desire to maintain the status quo, and socio-economic death cults. You can follow Vandana Singh on X @singhvan.  Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of , a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media , or visit for episode details and show notes.

In today's episode of Arcx, we're in conversation with sci-fi and fantasy author, R.R. Virdi.  Virdi published his first book, Dangerous Ways, an urban fantasy novel, in 2016. He is also the author of the Grave Report series, and Star Shepherd, a space western. The First Binding, the first in his new epic high fantasy series, The Tales of Tremaine, was released in 2022. The sequel, The Doors of Midnight, will be out in August 2024. Join us as we discuss stories within stories, the beauty and breadth of South Asian myths, the high cost of becoming a legend, complex magic systems, and complicated relationships.  You can follow R.R. Virdi  on X at rrvirdi or http://rrvirdi.com.   Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

Kritika H. Rao, speculative fiction and children's book author, joins us to discuss her critically acclaimed novel, The Surviving Sky, and its recently released sequel, The Unrelenting Earth. Having lived across the world in India, Australia, Canada, and the Sultanate of Oman, Kritika's stories are heavily influenced by her own experiences.   In her books, she often explores deep philosophical themes such as self vs. the world, the nature of consciousness, and the vagaries of identity.   Join us as we discuss main character syndrome, toxic relationships, the importance of community, complex magic systems, writing fantasy novels at thriller-like pacing, and what society really values.  You can follow Kritika on Instagram @kritikahrao.  

In this episode, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gourav Mohanty, lawyer, writer, and stand up comedian. Born in Bhubaneshwar, the City of Temples, it's perhaps unsurprising that Gourav seeks to reimagine and redefine the myths and magic of the past. In his first novel, Sons of Darkness, Gourav plunges headfirst into the grimdark genre with an epic retelling of the Mahabharata. Filled with political power plays, ambiguously grey characters, mythical monsters emerging from the mist, history being written by victors, and assassins who do yoga—it's where India meets Westeros.  Join us as we discuss the ugliness of war, the freedom to create backstories, charming anti-heroes, George R.R. Martin and more.  You can follow Gourav on Twitter @MohantyGourav7 or on Instagram @thekingbeyondthewall. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Today's guest is award winning author and journalist, Bina Shah. Her first sci-fi novel Before She Sleeps was published in 2018, followed by the sequel The Monsoon War in 2023. Bina's work explores women's rights, societal issues, technology, education, and freedom of expression.  Additionally, Bina has authored four novels as well as two collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into several languages including English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Urdu, Sindhi and Italian. Bina's writing has also been carried in major publications like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Dawn, and more. She has won Pakistan's prestigious Agahi Award for excellence in journalism twice. Her short story, The Living Museum, won the Dr. Neila C. Sesachari prize from Weber University's literary journal, Weber - The Contemporary West. And in 2022, she was presented with the insignia of a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an honorary award granted by the French government.  Join us as we discuss grappling with grief through writing, the nuances of feminism, seeing the world through the western gaze, women in politics, future federations, and A.I You can follow Bina on Instagram at @Bina_Writer or on X @BinaShah. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In epiode two of this season, host Anjali Alappat speaks to Indian sci-fi legend, Manjula Padmanabhan. A prolific author, playwright, journalist, and comic strip artist, Manjula's latest collection, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities (2023), is filled with short stories written between 1984 and today - and more relevant than ever.   We discuss the collection in depth, wherein a vampire discovers an endless feast in the subcontinent, an atheist reporter attends a divine conference, a man frozen in time catches a glimpse of the future, an enterprising philosopher experiences the bureaucracy of the afterlife, and much more.  Join us as we chat about unconventional upbringings, the arrogance of youth, what it takes to shape characters and scenarios, religion, tolerance, and Alice in Wonderland.  You can follow Manjula on Instagram @manjulapadmanabhan. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. We're kicking off this season with debut novelist Prashanth Srivatsa to discuss his debut epic fantasy novel, The Spice Gate (HarperCollins 2024).  Prashanth lives in Bengaluru, India, and is a longtime sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast. His short stories have been published in a variety of prestigious publications such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more.  The Spice Gate is a sweeping, exciting first novel, featuring a young man from the lowest rung of society, who, through a series of strange events, changes the world. Amir, the protagonist, is desperate to save himself and his family from a life of exploitation spent painfully transporting spices between kingdoms. Despite his dire circumstances, Amir dares to dream of a different life and soon becomes embroiled in political plots, resistance movements, and more. Throw in a love story, a socio-religious revolution, magic, mayhem, and you have a recipe for something truly special.  Join us as we discuss South Asian pirates, white saviour complexes, the best biryani, the many aspects of resistance, and generational trauma.  You can follow Prashanth on X where he's at prashatsa. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, we are in conversation with Dr. Craig Walton, a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig's work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe.  In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day', and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil's Element”. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes. In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic intensity speaks to their incredible durability.  We then moved on to Craig's PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can't end well. Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on a wide range of topics. If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X @lithologuy for updates. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.  

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024). The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins. Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were categorized as ‘inhuman'. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns) that reveal subterranean currents. Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations. Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison complex. For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don't start from the division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being. The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene, where we have what she terms as a “white man's overburden” with tech bros or predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and archiving of those struggles. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India. Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India. Susan and Ambika speak of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth' means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land. The ‘environment' is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice has ignored these communities and their knowledge. The conservation model of ‘protected areas' is offshoot of the dominant ‘development' practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees.  The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country. In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioner, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism. Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters' degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

We start Season 4 of The Subverse, which will focus on “Earth”, with a conversation with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We focus on his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, which explores the story of sound on Earth. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In it, David writes about how, three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. The wonders of Earth's living voices emerged after hundreds of millions of years of evolution that unfolded in communicative silence. From the ancient cricket Permostridulus which bears the earliest known sound-making structure, a ridge on its wing, this sonic creativity was spurred on by some amazing marvels, anatomical and otherwise. They range from insect wings and flowering plants to ciliary hair and even human milk. Now, both land and water are far from silent; fish drum and twang, whales sing, birds chirp and wings buzz. The sonic diversity of the world is rooted in the divergent physical worlds and social lives of animals and the happenstances of history. Every species has a logic, a grammar, to its sound making. And still, the process of hearing is one of unity at the cellular level. Sound also travels across oceans, creating a sort of global unity in sonic communication.  Sound is ephemeral, instantly dissipating, and yet can be older than stone. So, in listening to animal voices around us, we are taken back into deep time and legacies of sonic geology. But it is also a ledger of loss. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world's acoustic riches. As we get noisier, we diminish sonic soundscapes, bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. This sensory crisis is an important measure of the environmental crisis, and a powerful untapped tool for environmental justice. How do we create a poetics and politics of listening? We tend to think of experiences of beauty and of creativity as somehow separate from politics and ethics, but Haskell points out that they are deeply intertwined. We are embodied sensory beings. As a species, we need to gather and celebrate the voices of non-human beings. Technological advances have allowed us to record these soundscapes to check on the health of ecosystems. But when we get too reliant on technology, we ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived in the forest for centuries and don't need gadgets to gauge the health of the forest, or to protect it. David spoke of the generative capacity of sound which comes from life and interconnection. He closed with an invitation to take a few minutes of each day and listen, without judgement or expectation, and let sound do its work. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In today's episode, we bring you Stories from the Subverse. Siddharth Pandey, a writer, artist, and historian, extols the wonders of moving, and allowing oneself to be moved. The simple act of walking becomes radical, with the potential to shirk Nazi commands in Munich, to reclaim fresh air and majestic mountain views from imperial exclusivity in Shimla, to change, create and stir the imagination. As he moves through the mountains, Siddharth challenges their apparent immobility, not just in the liveliness that they host and nurture, but in their very genesis. Every step he takes literally shaping perceptions and perspectives, the scene constantly adjusting itself, illustrating another gift of movement: the affordance of variety, of diversity, and of perpetual newness. A transformative magic Siddharth explores in his book, Fossil. Attuned also to non-generative transformation, Siddharth tackles the ostensible contradiction in celebrating the glory of mountains as we hurtle forward into the maw of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the work of Harvard critic Elaine Scarry, he shows how beauty “decentres”, for we are no longer the focus. Our initial focus on the beautiful object is followed by a cultivation of care; an act of movement in a growing field of relations. Music is an important expression of the innate rhythms and cadences of these landscapes. From the Himachali folk songs that Siddharth's mother sang to him in his early childhood, to the sense of vastness and longing so typical of the desert panoramas of Rajasthan, or the uplands of Celtic Europe. Earthy tunes that seemed to literally stem out of the landscape they sang of. Mountains far near and far inspired a need to compose. And Siddharth heeded that call, creating tunes that captured journeys through his beloved Himachali landscape and beyond. Some of these tunes are generously intertwined in this story. This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website. We also thank Vaaka Media for their logistical support. Music in this story: The piano compositions in this story, A Ride to Annandale and a fragment of Flow, have been composed and performed by Siddharth Pandey. The Himachali folk song Udi Jaaya has been performed by the folk artist Anita Pandey (on the vocals) and Siddharth Pandey (on the piano). About Siddharth Pandey: Siddharth Pandey is a writer, cultural historian, visual practitioner and musician hailing from the Shimla Himalayas. Educated in India and the UK, he holds a PhD in Literary and Material Culture Studies from the University of Cambridge. His first book Fossil was published in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2022 Banff Mountain Literature Awards.

In this episode, Susan Mathews narrates an eccentric story of fire, an intangible and odd element. She begins with lines from William Blake's “The Tyger”, which invites us to partake of creation and the paradoxes of the divine, with an equal measure of wonder and terror evoked through fire. But fire is more than just combustion and volatility, a chemical reaction or an ecological stimulus. The history of fire and the history of life are twin flames. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write in their wonderful book What is Life? that one answer to the titular question is that life is the transmutation of sunlight. It is the sun become the green fire of photosynthesizing beings, the natural seductiveness of flowers and the warmth of the tiger stalking the jungle in the dead of night. The character of burning over deep time is one with twists and turns. It started with a spark of lightning but for fire to become a planetary force, it needed oxygen and fuel. Stephen Pyne, a prolific historian of fire and the first guest in this podcast season, outlines three fires. Plants set ablaze by lightning were the first, humans aiding and abetting fire the second and the third fire is where humans  burn lithic landscapes. No longer bounded by season, sun or natural rhythms, this fire without limits made us geological agents. It is also a fire of empire and slavery, of loss and destruction. From a celestial and originary green fire we now see terrifying red plumes and a rising blue fire of the  oceans. The world is out of pyric balance. So how do we rewrite this story? In the second half of this episode, Susan introduces some exciting ideas that help us think through fire differently, starting with the myth of Prometheus. In this tale, the role of Pandora is often ignored, downplayed, or forgotten. Elissa Marder, in an article entitled Pandora's Fireworks describes Pandora, created out of clay and water, as a kind of counterfire (anti puros), a technological counterpart to divine fire. Pandora establishes the defining limits of the human and reminds us of our connection with the rest of the biosphere. From Pandora's pyrotechnics, we move to the ‘pyrosexual', a term she borrows from the work of Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff in their article titled Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire. Clark and Yusuff peel back the metaphors of fire and sex and suggest instead a deep, conjoint history of sexual desire and fiery consummation. By contextualizing the ‘pyrosexual' within the wider economy of earth and cosmos, they seek ways to escape industrial capitalism's current hyperconsumptive cycles of accumulation. They remind us that plants are sexual beings and challenge more ‘orthodox' environmentalisms that curb desire and renouncing of pleasure. Fire being a boundary between biologic life and inhuman materialities, it offers a track that restructures the asexual-sexual binary with lateral forms of agency and modes of desire. What else, they ask, can we do with a planet of fire? Susan ends with a tribute to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a poet and writer who inspired much of Season 2 on water and this one on fire. In a powerful piece published in Harper's Bazaar this year, she writes that menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis. Apart from the similarities, such as planetary hot flashes caused by toxic environments, menopause is also a liminal space of possibility. She asks whether underneath all this heat, we are meant to learn something about change. Special thanks to Tushar Das and Brown Monkey Studio who added the wonderful effects and sound designed the episode. 

In this episode, host Susan Mathews has a revealing conversation with Professor Pompa Banerjee on fire and gendered and ritualised violence in historical and current practices.  Prof. Banerjee teaches courses in early modern literature and culture at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her work focuses on the literary and cultural dimensions of Europe's cross-cultural encounters in the global Renaissance, especially in the ways they shape identity in the age of discovery. She also studies the unexpected crossings between European witches and Indian widows, and has written extensively on these subjects as well as early modern literature and travel, Shakespeare, and modern Indian adaptations of Shakespeare. In this episode, we spoke of fire's symbolism and its role in ritualised violence, embodying and enforcing socio-political ideologies that dictate gender roles for women. We refer specifically to her book Burning Women: Widows, Witches and Early Modern European Travellers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), where she pores through European travel narratives from 1500 to 1723, where representations of Sati were conventional, even de rigeur, in travelogues of India, and which coincided with successive waves of witch-hunts in Europe. Despite these synchronous occurrences, the ritualised burning in both cases and the burning as public spectacle, these early travel narratives make no correlation between widow burning and witch burning, what Prof. Banerjee terms as a ‘literary haunting'. One reason for this erasure is that practices were coded very differently—the sati's burning as a heroic sacrifice and the witch's burning as legitimate retribution. While both women were considered insensible to pain, one was through ascension to literal divinity while the other was through the machinations of the devil. In these theatrical burnings, female bodies become sites of storytelling and ideological reformation. In both practices, the woman is placed centre stage, as it is the witnesses who provide validation and who receive the story being told. The Sati's deathless love for her husband, itself a tool of economic control, became instrumental in recasting the ideal European wife. We also speak of how the British, in the later colonial period, used narratives of the barbaric practices of brown people to assert their moral right to rule. Finally, we delved into the possible origins of this connection between female subjectivity and deviance. We spoke of the exclusive power women held and hold over the hearth and life-sustaining domestic functions and how these were reconstructed through male fantasies as dangers. Fire has been used in contradictory motifs of resurrection, purity, cleansing, punishment, deification and transcendence, a running theme of course being the disciplining of female desire and sexuality. Women's bodies become the sites of dispute every time society undergoes upheaval. And the only way to counter these narratives are understanding them and remembering how they've been used in the past. You can find more about Prof. Banerjee's work at the University of Colorado at Denver website: https://clas.ucdenver.edu/english/pompa-banerjee The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at www.darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Dear listeners, this week we return to The Subverse. In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Bhumika Saraswati, an independent photographer, journalist and filmmaker. We look at how extreme heat is embroiled in caste and labour in India. We speak about Bhumika's present visual project which focuses on dalit women in agriculture in Uttar Pradesh, India and the impacts of heat, and an earlier short film she had done on workers in crematoriums during the covid-19 pandemic in New Delhi, India, an occupation which is surrounded by fire and heat hazards. The presence of both the women in the fields and the workers at cremation sites is a consequence of various historical, social and economic conditions and even government practices that reinforce caste-based labour practices. Whether it is discussions of those who are ‘most vulnerable' to heat in air-conditioned rooms, or people visiting a crematorium only interacting with the priest, these are people made invisible or seen through a mainstream gaze, in life and in media. Bhumika navigates the restrictions placed on her as a single woman visiting places with high crime rates, to explore the intersections of caste, class and gender that dalit women in agriculture contend with. In the midst of life-threatening levels of heat, limited protective gear and restrictive clothing, they grow the food that sustains us all. Bhumika captures the sisterhood between these women and the ingenious ways they make their limited resources work. We also briefly touched on how the caste system has restricted access to water and how certain kinds of violence are tied to the lack of basic amenities provided to certain citizens. In 2022, Bhumika was awarded a UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Work and in 2023, she was awarded a Human Rights Press Award by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Journalism School of Arizona State University, United States of America for her short documentary film, Lives of Sex Workers and Their Children. You can find her on Instagram @bhumikasaraswati and on X at @Bhumikasara, and for the project on women, heat, communities see @heat.southasia. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this episode, we speak to short story writer, editor and novelist, Vajra Chandrasekera. Vajra's work is largely in the realm of speculative fiction, and he has published over a hundred pieces since 2012 in various formats. Notably, his work has been featured in Analog, Clarkesworld, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times. He has also been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short story, The Translator, at Low Tide. Additionally, he was also nominated for the British Science Fiction Association award for Best Non-fiction. His debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors was released in July 2023. His short stories have been featured in several anthologies including The Best Science Fiction of the Year, The Apex Book of World SF, and Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction. Vajra was also part of the editorial team at Strange Horizons, and in his role as fiction editor, worked closely with several writers from all over the world. He's also passionate about initiatives that protect the political and artistic freedoms of Sri Lankan writers and artists who have been censored and imprisoned by the state.   In this episode, we sit down to discuss some classic desi themes: colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and overblown family drama. We also touch on destiny, friendships, revolution, and terrible science fiction adaptations.   You can follow Vajra on Twitter at @_vajra and on his website Vajra.me. Read Vajra's Work:  The Saint of Bright Doors (Novel) The Translator, at Low Tide Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labour Rhizomatic Diplomacy Terminus  Running the Gullet On the Origin of Specie Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

  Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this episode, we speak to doctor and speculative fiction writer Usman T. Malik. Usman's work has been published extensively, and featured in platforms such as Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Black Static, and Nightmare.  In 2014, he became the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for his work The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family. He also won a British Fantasy Award in 2016 for The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn. The story was also nominated for Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. He has also received Locus award nominations for his stories In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro and The Fortune of Sparrows. In 2018, he received another Stoker nomination for Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung. In this episode, we discuss the importance of accurate history, authentic storytelling, the often missed nuances of desi stories, and the horror of everyday realities.  You can follow Usman on Twitter @usmantm Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In the sixth episode of this season, host Anjali Alappat talks to journalist, editor, and author Payal Dhar.  Payal Dhar primarily writes for middle grade and young adult audiences, and her extensive catalogue of work includes Satin: A Stitch in Time, Slightly Burnt, Hit for a Six, There's a Ghost in My PC, and It Has No Name. More recently, Payal has published two books in the Sands of Time series: The Prophecy and The Key. Payal's work has also been featured in anthologies like Shockwave! and Other Cyber Stories, Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014, and Music of the Stars and other Love Stories. Payal also edited Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a collection of short stories by Indian and Australian writers. In this episode we chat about retelling and redefining stories, the difficulties of being the chosen one, found family and the dynamics of those relationships, and physics of world building. You can follow Payal on Instagram at @Payal.dhar Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In the fifth episode of this season, host Anjali Alappat speaks with Saad Z. Hossain, the author of the best-selling Djinn series, which includes Djinn City, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Kundo Wakes Up and Cyber Mage.  Saad's debut novel, Escape from Baghdad! was a finalist at the Grand Prix de L'imaginaire in 2018. The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday also received critical acclaim and was a finalist at the Locus Awards and the IGNYTE awards in 2020. Kundo Wakes Up, the sequel to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, was published in 2022, and made it to the Locus list of Best Novellas for 2022. It was also longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards that year.  In this episode, we discuss classic literature, writing for fun, the importance of a snarky protagonist, Jane Eyre vs. Jane Austen, A.I in developing countries, philosophy, broken people, and of course, djinn. You can follow Saad on Twitter @saadzhossain Authors, books and media referenced in this episode: The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Mansfield Park by Jane Austen Persuasion by Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas  Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In episode four, host Anjali Alappat chats with author and editor, Shweta Taneja. Shweta is best known for her urban fantasy Anantya Tantrist series, but has also received recognition for her work in children's books. Her non-fiction book—They Found What?/ They Made What?— was a national best-seller. She also recently published a new sci-fi novel for kids called Kungfu Aunty vs Garbage Monsters.  Additionally, Shweta's short story, The Daughter That Bleeds, was nominated for the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in France in 2020. She also won the Editor's Choice Award for Best Asian Science Fiction (2018) in Singapore for the piece.  Her book They Made What? They Found What? Earned her the Publishing Next Award in 2021 and nominations for the Valley of Words Awards and the AutHer awards. She was also honoured with the Best Writer Award at ComicCon India in 2013 for her graphic novel, The Skull Rosary.  In this episode, we discuss world-building, dark humour, writing urban fantasy for an Indian audience, Tantrism, patriarchal power structures, and forging your own destiny,  You can follow Shweta on Twitter @shwetawrites Authors, books and media referenced in this episode: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Going Postal by Terry Pratchett Buffy the Vampire Slayer Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In episode three, host Anjali Alappat talks to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, science fiction author, data scientist, and researcher. Yudhanjaya is the author of The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, Numbercaste, The Inhuman Peace, The Inhuman Race, and The Salvage Crew.  More recently he was awarded the Gratiaen Prize for Literature for his yet-to-be published book The Wretched and the Damned. Yudhanjaya has been nominated for a Nebula award in 2022, and in 2021, he was featured in Forbes' 30 under 30 list.  Yudhanjaya is also the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organisation created to counteract misinformation and propaganda in Sri Lanka.  In this episode, we discuss A.I, his non-traditional road to publication, how real life can be as absurd as fiction, colonialism, space economics, the horrors of reality TV, poetry, and the importance of forging connections.  You can follow Yudhanjaya on Twitter @yudhanjaya Read Yudhanjaya's work: The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne Numbercaste The Inhuman Race The Inhuman Peace The Salvage Crew  Omega Point The State Machine   Authors, Books and media referenced in this episode: The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett The Dark Tower series by Stephen King Dark Souls  BioShock System Shock Final Fantasy 7 Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson The Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In Season 2, we continue our conversations with South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In the second episode of this season, Anjali Alappat speaks with author and editor Tashan Mehta. Her debut novel, The Liar's Weave, is a wonderful mix of myth and magic, chronicling the exploits of a teenage boy in 1920s India who has tremendous power and poor judgement — a potent mix. We discuss relearning how to write, plurality in storytelling, astrology taken very seriously, the desire to shape your own destiny, the complexity of sibling relationships, and the power of lies. We also touch upon her soon-to-be released book, Mad Sisters of Esi, an epic story that includes god machines, a festival of madness, a museum of collective memory, a whale of Babel, and of course, sisters. Tashan's short stories have been featured in several anthologies including the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume 2 and Magical Women. Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In Season 2, we continue our conversations with South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In the first episode host Anjali Alappat chats with author, editor, lawyer and critic Gautam Bhatia. Gautam's debut novel, The Wall (2020), and its sequel, The Horizon (2021), are filled with fascinating world building, complex characters, and fabulously convoluted plotlines. If you love twists and turns, beautiful prose, and some good old fashioned anti-establishment thinking, these are the books for you. Additionally, Gautam is part of the editorial team at Strange Horizons magazine, and his work with them has resulted in several award nominations. His writing has also featured in publications like Interzone Magazine, Mint, British Science Fiction Association Magazine, Scroll.in, The Caravan, and more. In this episode, we discuss how all fiction is political, unlikable protagonists, urban revolution, the foibles of human nature, betrayal, and origin myths. You can follow Gautam on Twitter @gautambhatia88 Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, The Subverse explores the progression in the use of metals and its impact on the trajectory of human evolution,the role of fire and its symbolism in understanding artefacts, art history, culture, and dance. Susan Mathews speaks with Prof. Sharada Srinivasan, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, who studies archaeological artefacts and metallurgy.  Through the study of artefacts, we can better understand the history of technology and the progression of metals in civilization. This also helps inform the conservation of artefacts and get better insights into archaeology and art history. In her own work, she has made landmark contributions such as the analysis of bronzes in South India using lead isotopes to identify its metallurgical characterisations and studies on ancient mining and metallurgy in South India. We looked at the fire element in several ways. First, we explored the trajectory of human evolution and its intrinsic links to the increasing ability to master fire. The progressive use of metals and metallurgy was pivotal, and we find that presently no device or pursuit lacks an element of combustion technology. From the hearth to kilns and fiery furnaces, unknown forms and embellishments were forged for the good and for the bad. We spoke about some of these contradictions in the application of heat to metal and some of the gender divides that followed this fiery progression. Prof. Srinivasan brings up interesting illustrations of the ancient art of lost wax casting in India, the making of carnelian beads and the role of women in ceramics, such as Kota women from the Nilgiris. The conversation covered fire symbolism and cultural references in Vedic literature, Buddhist iconography, Tamil Sangam poetry and the Nataraja bronzes. Professor Sharada Srinivasan was elected as an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Archaeology in 2021. She received the Padmashri, India's fourth highest civilian award, in 2019 and has made pioneering contributions to the study of archaeology and history of art from the perspective of engineering applications.  

In this episode, Susan Mathews speaks with Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat about the unequal distribution of the effects of heat. For this, we travel to 19th and early 20th century colonial India where heat is a persistent problem for the British empire and a burgeoning climate science is sutured to racial difference. These histories inform contemporary crises as knowledges of heat continue to evolve in an unequal world. Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an associate professor at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics with joint appointments in the Departments of History and Anthropology. His current work focuses on the experience of thermal inequality in contemporary India and the United States, the history of how heat has been studied and its effects over the long twentieth century. He is also director of the UCLA Heat Lab. With accelerating climate change, one of the fallouts is extreme heat. In this conversation, Dr. Venkat defined thermal inequality, which is not just the differential impact of heat, but the unequal distribution of heat effects. These effects are filtered or mediated by our environments, by our lives and by the social and political infrastructures that determine how vulnerable we are to heat. The UCLA Heat Lab employs interdisciplinary methods to study the experience of thermal inequality. We spoke in some detail about a journal article he wrote in 2022 on race and thermal sensation in late colonial India. We discussed ‘tropicality', how central the problems posed by heat were and how various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. Meteorology and racial ideology intersect in the late 19th and early 20th century and climate science is sutured to racial difference. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at  for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Prof. Robert Romanyshyn—an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and an author of eight books including Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies (Frankenstein Prophecies). Romanyshyn's special area of concern is the psychology of technology, especially in terms of the climate crisis and impact of digital media on our social structures. Much of his life's work has been devoted to understanding Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a gothic horror tale that, as he points out, has been prophetic in many ways. In his book Frankenstein Prophecies, he asks eight questions that uncover how Shelley's classic work haunts our world. Combining Jungian theory, literary criticism, and mythology, he seeks answers to the query at the heart of this book: who is the monster? In keeping with the theme of fire in this podcast season, we spoke of the symbolism of fire—both ambiguous and double-edged. In Greek myth in particular, the symbolism of fire is bound up with the myth of Prometheus, one of many stories which explains how humankind came into possession of fire. We zoomed in on the fire related metaphors in Frankenstein (exemplified in the subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus', alluding to the Greek fire myth), and how many of these speak to our present ecological crises. There's fire as lightning that struck down a tree early in the book; the use of electricity and galvanism; the digging up of the dead in cemeteries and charnel houses as analogous to the mining of fossil fuels; solar light versus moonlight; and the Monster running away to the Arctic north, promising to burn in a pyre after Victor Frankenstein's death. We also discuss a different kind of fire, which is not just a burning down or a melting away or extraction of fossil fuels, but a counter-fire. Counter-fire as in the hope left in Pandora's jar. In speaking of this fire, Romanyshyn also speaks of splendour of the simple, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miracle in the mundane, fire as living spirit, and Natura Naturans, the Anima Mundi. Robert Romanyshyn has published essays in psychology, philosophy, literary and education journals, written a play about Frankenstein's Monster, done radio and TV discussions as well as online interviews, webinars, podcasts and made a DVD movie of his trip to Antarctica. In addition, he has given keynote addresses at conferences, lectured at universities and professional societies, and conducted workshops in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand. Check out his website at https://robertromanyshyn.jigsy.com. For his courses, check out www.jungplatform.com . The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at www.darknlight.com  for episode details and show notes.

In Season 3 of The Subverse, we are journeying into ‘fire'. In this opening episode, we speak with Prof. Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, U.S.A. Pyne has written over 40 books, most of which are centred around fire. In this conversation, we focus on his book The Pyrocene: How we Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, published in 2021. Apart from being such a prolific scholar of fire, Stephen J. Pyne spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park, 12 as crew boss, with another three seasons writing fire plans for other national parks.  He lives in Queen Creek, Arizona. His next book is a fire history of Mexico. Susan and Stephen discuss how fire is, for humans, our defining ecological trait. We are unique fire creatures on a unique fire planet, and as keepers of the flame, we need to somehow get the right mix of fire in the world to balance our interests and those of others. In his book, Pyne proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. The book renames and redefines the so-called Anthropocene according to humanity's primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. As he states in the book, “the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene.” In the narrative he lays out, the pyric prism he uses is what he terms as an ecological three-body problem. The history that Pyne narrates chronicles three fires. First-fire is the fire of nature that appeared as soon as plants colonised continents, about 420 million years ago. Thanks to cooking, a dependence on fire became coded into hominin DNA. Second-fire was an act of domestication, perhaps the model for all pyrotechnologies, in which people had transformed wildfire into hearth and torch. Third-fire is qualitatively different. Pyne points out that third-fire burns lithic landscapes no longer bounded by ecological limits. With a source of combustibles, which are essentially unbounded, inadequate sinks for the effluent, from cooking food and landscapes, we are now cooking planets. The sum of Earth's three fires is creating the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age, and instead of ice amassing more ice, fire is generating more fire. This pyric transition also means that fire vanished as a serious object of inquiry. Fire with its flame, glow, heat, and crackle has been reduced to the most elemental chemical and physical expressions, each isolated and engineered, so that what had been ‘fire' became ‘combustion,' and combustion has become only its constituent parts. What we erased were traditional and indigenous knowledges of living with fire. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In part two of our Water and Caste series within the Stories from the Subverse, anti-caste intersectional feminist researcher-activist Swati Kamble speaks with four remarkable Ambedkarite anti-caste creators on how Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Mahad march inspired and shaped their lives, artistic journeys, and creative repertoires. We are introduced to Madhubani artist Malvika Raj, Padma Shri awardee and photojournalist Sudharak Olwe, artist Rajyashri Goody, and folk artist Shahir Nandesh Umap. All four guests discuss using art for resistance, how to archive and retell forgotten and often erased stories of anti-caste resistance, and how to retain these events in collective memory. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Stories from the Subverse, where we uncover hidden and marginalized stories through a more personal storytelling lens, returns with a two part series. Part one of this series has been conceptualised, scripted, and hosted by Swati Kamble, an anti-caste intersectional feminist researcher-activist. In part one, Swati guides us through the history of Mahad Satyagraha, the march for equality, dignity, and access to water, led by anti-caste leader and statesman, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar on 20th March 1927. Swati speaks to advocate Disha Wadekar who provides legal and historical perspectives on how the Mahad Satyagraha influenced the anti-caste movement and played a pivotal role in the making of the Indian Constitution and how the framing of Articles 15 and 17 of the Constitution was grounded in the people's struggle to have equal access to water.  Swati also speaks to Hira Kanoje, or Grandma Hira, whose fiery speeches Swati grew up listening to on the birth anniversaries of anti-caste revolutionaries at the labourers' colony in Mumbai where they both lived, as neighbours.  In this moving conversation, Hira ajji narrates her experiences as a young child who experienced untouchability but defiantly fought against it. Whether it was by drinking water from a forbidden pot at school or sneakily entering a village temple, she and her cousins were silent revolutionaries, whose stories remain undocumented. By including her narrative, we seek to honour her, and the unsung feminists and anti-caste activists like her. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Susan Mathews speaks with architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2017, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha founded a design platform called Ocean of Wetness. The organisation is dedicated to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. Our chat was a wide-ranging one, starting with the premise in many of his works: the line which separates land from water, which he terms “as one of the most fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of human habitation.” He calls this the first colonialism, which took a wetness that is everywhere and turned it into a land and water binary. This led to the invention of rivers and source, course, and flood, leading us to see a river that flowed between two lines and flooded. Alexander's eye represents the cartographer and surveyor, and Ganga's descent is rain, colonised by river. Rain is no longer seen as feeding wetness but contained in gutters. Da Cunha invites us to acknowledge wetness all around us, not contained in a place, and embrace living between the clouds and aquifers. He writes that “water is the first principle in the nature of moist things.” The city reinforces the line which separates water from land on the earth's surface and it has become the quintessential settlement while reducing other modes of habitation to less settled or unsettled, creating hierarchies. He writes, “those educated with the map, inhabit a surface articulated with rivers, and their extension in pipes and drains.” All this calls for a new imagination, driven by the celebratory event of rain — a re-heralding — and gradual steps, including learning from indigenous and other communities who have extended and nurtured ways of living with wetness. Dilip da Cunha is based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He has authored several books, such as Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), co-authored with Anuradha Mathur. His most recent book (and the subject of our conversation), The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. In 2020, he received the ASLA Honour award and the J.B Jackson Book Prize for his work. To learn more about his remarkable work, visit www.mathurandcunha.com. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

We continue to explore relationality when it comes to water, and learn more from three women who have made water, and bodies of water, their life's work. The politics of kinship can be complicated, but how would we approach our bodies of water if they were kin?  In this episode we go deeper into what fascinates them about water - the flow of tides; properties like its solvency; its creative force; acoustic camouflage that can soothe us; and the thrill of bioluminescence. Not all memories are pleasant, and we hear more about the fears that being in water, or in deep spaces, can invoke, and what it takes to let go. We also hear more about underwater acoustics, and how the sonic signatures of marine creatures are chaning with the the changing climate.  Our guests are: Sejal Mehta, an author and editor based in Mumbai, India who has a debut non-fiction book on intertidal wildlife called Superpowers on the Shore, published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2022;  Divya Panicker, an oceanographer whose work focuses on cetacean distributions, habitat use and behaviour off the southwest coast of India and Tasneem Khan, a biologist, photographer, adventurer, and educator who has spent the last decade facilitating interdisciplinary initiatives in the fields of ecology, conservation,education, and science communication.  The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Water has played a central role as a resource and property in our dominant worldviews. It has made and unmade empires. In our nation-building, watercourses, waterways, oceans, rivers and freshwaters have all played leading roles, part of a continued and relentless drive to choreograph and subjugate our waters. But it is the indigenous, the subjugated, and the oppressed who seem to best recognise water's power as both a life force and a catastrophic threat. For them, water is kin, creator, and protector. In this episode, we wanted to explore relationality when it comes to water. The politics of kinship can be complicated, but how would we approach our bodies of water if they were kin? So, we asked three women who have made water, and bodies of water, their life work a range of questions. We wanted to see through their eyes how water has shaped them and how they have shaped their relations with water.  In part one of this episode, we will hear descriptions of their work and play as it relates to water, how it has shaped them as people, and why they consider their projects or interventions so important. Our guests are: Sejal Mehta, an author and editor based in Mumbai, India who has a debut non-fiction book on intertidal wildlife called Superpowers on the Shore, published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2022;  Divya Panicker an oceanographer whose work focuses on cetacean distributions, habitat use and behaviour off the southwest coast of India and Tasneem Khan, a biologist, photographer, adventurer, and educator who has spent the last decade facilitating interdisciplinary initiatives in the fields of ecology, conservation,education, and science communication.    The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, Susan speaks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a writer, independent scholar, poet, activist, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.  Her most recent book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 2020, part of adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press, flows from her previous works in a poetic continuum, with water playing a central role. In Undrowned, Alexis takes us through 19 thematic movements, lessons from marine mammals, and kindred beyond taxonomy. From echolocation to the evolution of dorsal fins, each movement takes us deeper into listening, breathing, practicing, surrendering, refusing, honouring our boundaries, slowing down, and taking care of our blessings, amongst a range of other meditations. Gumbs disrupts and critiques our mostly unthinking and unexamined acceptance of capitalist narratives and discourse. As a queer Black feminist love evangelist, as she describes herself, and a marine mammal apprentice, she draws on archives of Black feminist practice and theorists. Gumbs asks in the book, “What indentation am I making on the surface of this Earth, even if it is so far underwater no one can see?”, something we all need to be asking ourselves. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, Susan Mathews speaks to Dr Kartik Shanker, who was inspired to begin a career in ecology by an ancient reptile, a sea turtle that crawled ashore late one night in Madras (now Chennai). As faculty at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, his focus is the ecology and evolution of frogs, reptiles, birds, plants, and marine fauna. His group works on evolutionary biogeography of different taxa, and on the ecology and behaviour of mixed species groups of birds and reef fish. He has recently initiated work on sharks and rays off the Indian coast, and on reef associated organisms in the Andaman Islands. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about how he started off with evolutionary ecology around three decades ago, through sea turtle walks which continue till date. We discussed conservation in India, the often exclusionary and elitist ways in which programmes and schemes are rolled out, the differences between terrestrial and marine paradigms, and the importance of working with local communities. Shanker spoke of his love of writing, both fiction and non-fiction and the research and collegiality at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, the joy it gives him, and the sea change ethos of the work they do at the Dakshin Foundation. He also talks about the new book he is working on in the area of paleobiogeography. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

Welcome to Stories from The Subverse, where we uncover hidden and marginalized stories through a more personal storytelling lens. In our first story we listen to Yuvan Aves—naturalist, educator, and writer who is certain to transport you, at least briefly, to Chennai's beaches. Painting a vivid portrait of what a meaningful education should be, Aves is convincing in his point of view of why it's crucial for a child's learning to be rooted in real-world engagement and lived experiences.  Having been a nature educator for a decade now, Yuvan speaks eloquently about the need to design learning in such a way that it allows children to connect to their natural environment, and make their own discoveries. He reminds us of how important it is for schools to tap into children's innate sense of curiosity, and keen sense of observation, which the dominant classroom in India has unfortunately failed to do. Acknowledging his own past traumas, Aves makes a strong case for nature's ability to heal, and instill in us a deeper sense of empathy.  At the heart of education should be ecological and human values, states Aves, who was awarded the Green Teacher Award (2021) by Sanctuary Nature Foundation. Join him on his shore walk to get a taste of his school of thinking, and listen to children's gleeful reactions as they spot creatures in their outdoor classroom. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of assault and the depiction of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised. In this episode we are in conversation with Indra Das, author, critic and editor. Indra's work crosses genres and creates intricate worlds. His writing is exploratory, fresh and fantastical. The Devourers, his debut novel, was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The same year, he was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Crawford Prize. And in 2017, he won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Science Fiction, Fiction and Horror. Indra's short fiction has been featured in publications like Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine to name a few. We discuss Stephen King, the power of sensory writing, Gods and immortality. Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of abuse, and the depiction of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised. Today, we talk to Kuzhali Manickavel, author, editor and columnist. Kuzhali's short fiction is beautiful, bizarre and haunting in the best way.Her short story collections Things We Found During the Autopsy and Insects Are Just Like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings are wonderful mix of themes spanning genres.  She has also written chapter books like 'How to Love Mathematical Objects' and ‘Eating Sugar, Telling Lies'. Kuzhali has written for Granta, Strange Horizons, Agni, Subtropics, Michigan Quarterly Review and DIAGRAM. We discuss her love of scary movies, the reality of unresolved trauma, using dark humour, and everyday horrors.  Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. Today, we're in conversation with SB Divya, author, editor and engineer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of sci-fi and speculative fiction. Divya's work is a fascinating mix of her professional and personal backgrounds, with great science and even better storylines. Her debut novella, Runtime, was nominated for a Nebula award and her first novel Machinehood also received Hugo and Nebula nominations. She has been recognized for her work on the Escape Pod and her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies.  Stay tuned for a conversation about the books that she grew up with, how being an editor helped her as a writer, privacy, healthcare and religion in sci-fi.  You can follow Divya on Twitter at @divyastweets Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In this episode, we're talking to one of India's best known Sci-fi and fantasy authors, Samit Basu. An incredibly versatile writer, Samit's work has spanned mediums, with comic books,  film scripts and children's and YA novels. Samit's first novel, the Simoquin Prophecies, was published in 2003, when he was just 23. It evolved into the bestselling Gameworld Trilogy.  His latest novel, The City Inside was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020.  We chat with Samit about how he got started as a writer, his refusal to be bound by genre, and the not-so-distant future depicted in his novel.  Follow Samit on Twitter at @samitbasu. Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In this episode, we speak to Lavanya Lakshminarayan, award winning author and games designer. Her work is interesting, layered and tackles some really hard topics with ease. We discuss the books that set her on her writing journey, the importance of literary representation, access to technology, and the extremes of productivity culture. Lavanya's debut novel ‘Analog/Virtual and other simulations of your future' netted her the Times of India AutHer award  and a Valley of Words Award in 2021. She was also a Locus Award finalist and made the longlist for the British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her short fiction has been featured in anthologies like A Flash of Silver-Green, Third-eye and the Gollancz book of south asian science fiction. You can follow Lavanya and learn more about her work on Twitter at lavanya_ln.  Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes. 

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this six episode mini-series, we talk to six South Asian sci fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. We begin the series with author, storyteller and Twitter sensation, Shiv Ramdas. Shiv's work explores serious and often historical themes in nuanced and deft ways. His debut work, India's first mainstream Cyberpunk novel, Domechild was released in 2013. Shiv's short fiction has been featured in Slate, Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Podcastle, and more. In 2020, he was nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula and an Ignyte Award.  In this episode, Anjali and Shiv discuss Shiv's influences, AI, magic, and his work-in-progress paranormal PI novel.  You can follow Shiv Ramdas on Twitter where he's @nameshiv  Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

At Dark ‘n' Light we're deeply interested in stories and the people behind them, and our podcast The Subverse is a fortnightly journey into weird and wonderful conversations with creators and thinkers.  Our new six part mini-series Arcx is all about literary inspiration, tracing its roots from conception to execution. We aim to arrive at the root of that inspiration, and find the spark that ignited ideas. We seek to peel away layers of perception, memory, and impressions  to find the story, line, characters or even a word that inspired a writer to set forth on their journey. Join us over the course of the next six episodes as we uncover what writers loved, what they hated, and what prompted them to tell their own stories  as we dissect art, influences, the process of writing, and what shaped it all.  The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Susan Mathews interviews Catarina de Albuquerque, Chief Executive Officer of Sanitation and Water for All (SWA), a global partnership which has positioned SWA as a vital contributor to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 6. In a wide-ranging conversation, they speak of what human rights as a discourse brings to water and sanitation, the realities on the ground, and the backdrop in which the General Assembly recognised not only water as a right, but sanitation also in 2010. Together, they are vital for reducing the global burden of disease and improving the health, education, and economic productivity of populations. Susan and Catarina also discuss the need to link the right to water with water injustices, particularly the politics of water governance and equity. If not connected to social  movements, the right to water risks being an empty signifier. Commercialisation, privatisation, and the commodification of water have resulted in a situation in which those who can pay for water have it readily, leaving many without affordable, or accessible water sources. We spoke at length about inequalities, with her outlining issues around access to water and how gender, caste, class, and disability determine access to water . Women often suffer the most from water scarcity, given that the responsibility of collecting water, and managing this scarce resource to meet diverse household needs rests with them. We also touched upon how the existing legal arena and human rights discourse may not allow for discussions around existential questions, focusing our gaze on narrow, human frames.  Catarina de Albuquerque was previously the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on safe drinking water and sanitation, appointed by the Human Rights Council in 2008. In 2010, she played a pivotal role in the recognition of water and sanitation as human rights by the United Nations General Assembly. Her work also helped ensure that the rights to water and sanitation were incorporated into the language of the Sustainable Development Goals. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

From Asia's mountain core flows ten great rivers that run through 16 countries, serving a fifth of humanity. The struggle for water in modern history is a global story, but nowhere has the search for water shaped or sustained as much human life as in India and China. In this episode, Susan Mathews speaks to Sunil Amrith, historian and writer, about his book Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons have Shaped South Asia's History published in 2018. Unruly Waters tells the story of how the schemes of empire-builders, the visions of freedom fighters, the designs of engineers, and the cumulative actions of hundreds of millions of people across generations, have transformed Asia's waters over the past 200 years. In the conversation, we also cover some of our parched histories, and the histories of the empire. The catastrophes of the late nineteenth century left many people—Indian economists, British administrators, water engineers and humanitarian reformers—with an acute anxiety about climate and water. Climate was at the heart of a new ecology of fear', something we also face in our contemporary contexts: old and new anxieties and fears. How does reading these parched histories equip us now, or can they? In this wide-ranging conversation, we also speak about hydro-colonialism, the many names of rain, signs of hope, and taking from Zadie Smith, how there is a sense of loss that climate change brings with it. We also examine our relationship with animals, trees, our kinship, our duty of care, elements now animating environmental history, and his own scholarship. Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His books include Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013), and Unruly Waters (2018). He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and has recently been awarded the A.H. Heineken Prize for History (2022).  The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.