The Subverse

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.