In the book Beyond the World’s End published in 2020, TJ Demos considers ecology as an intersectional political category, like gender, race, or class. The term “creative ecologies” is coined in the context of art-making with ecology as a political category. Some key art theoretical terms that Demos introduces are reflective of this political sensibility, such as “eco-fictional aesthetics,” “indigenous futurism,” “eco-socialist environmentalism,” and “future solidarity.”

Demos posits importance to world-building as futurist imaginations, solidarity, where social movements are joined together. Demos arrives at this position while acknowledging the importance of neo-materialist philosophies such as speculative realism in articulating the non-human. But, at the same time, he also realizes the insufficiency of speculative realism/ neo-materialist philosophy/ object-oriented ontology in addressing the intersectional impact of ecological catastrophe on humans. Meanwhile, Demos also critiques posthumanism, cautioning against “eco-fascism’s blending of organic purity with ethnonationalism,” a warning that reflects his deep skepticism toward green capitalism.

In Demos’ scale of values, Afro-futurisms and indigenous futurisms are foregrounded as potent models for emancipatory world-building. Demos argues this position from a Occidental vantage point, primarily referring to artworks by artists based in Euro-American cities, such as John Akonfrah’s Vertigo Sea, Angela Melitopoulos’ Crossings, Allora & Calzdilla’s Blackout, Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather, Collectif Argos’ Climate Refugees, Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case, Public Studio’s What We Lose in Metrics, Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s The Trial: State versus Perho Hunters, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, as well as the aesthetics enactments of social movements such as Standing Rock’s #No DAPL, Not an Alternative, and the Zad. Notwithstanding, the theoretical references made by Demos have a wide range, from Latin American, like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and African-American like Fred Moten, to Chinese-American like Anna Tsing, to quote just a few from numerous multi-disciplinary citations.

Notwithstanding the compelling arguments in T.J. Demos’s book Beyond the World’s End, what lessons can we learn in the ambit of the Indian subcontinent, where ecological intersectionality is more layered with political categories like Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujan, besides universal categories like gender, race and class?

India being home to a heterogeneous indigenous and tribal knowledge systems, is it possible to imagine the emancipatory potential of adivasi creative ecologies? One must be careful not to uncritically jump into such a double-edged theoretical neologism, especially while taking into consideration Ngoru Nixon’s argument, that the term adivasi can’t be loosely used as a universal category to nominate Indian indigenous experience unless the community concerned decides to self-designate themselves as adivasis.

Ngoru Nixon critically examines the category of adivasi in India, questioning its universalization as a substitute for tribe or indigenous peoples. While recent scholarship seeks to privilege adivasi as a politically empowering term, Ngoru Nixon highlights conceptual ambiguities and the methodological risks of applying a singular category to diverse groups with distinct historical and geographical experiences. Ngoru Nixon traces the colonial genealogy of the tribe category, its legal-constitutional entrenchment in postcolonial India, and its later displacement by adivasi, particularly in Central India. However, Ngoru Nixon warns that this shift risks homogenizing disparate communities who may not self-identify as adivasi, particularly in Northeast India, where tribe and indigenous peoples remain more commonly used.

Ngoru Nixon critiques the emerging field of Adivasi Studies for its uncritical expansion, arguing that it often imposes an epistemological framework that may not align with the self-conceptions of various groups. Instead, Ngoru Nixon advocates for a nuanced approach that acknowledges historical contingencies, local self-identifications, and the varied political imaginaries of indigenous and tribal communities in India, rather than subsuming them under a singular adivasi identity. The argument ultimately calls for greater reflexivity in academic discourse and political activism surrounding indigeneity in India.

What Nixon critiques as a homogenization of adivasi category that subsumes the tribes of North East India may be true in the case of Wayanad, Kerala also. Particularly because, the name of the government department is the Scheduled Tribes Development Department in Kerala, or pattika varga vibhagam in Malayalam. Notwithstanding, in Malayalam the word adivasi is a part of everyday parlance, in civil society, politics, and media, where tribal villages are referred to as adivasi gramangal. So here I am using the term adivasi not as an academic discursive term or political activist term, but as a quotidian sound image that refers to a world view, aesthetic, world-building, cosmology, as it pertains to the oeuvre of contemporary artist CF John, who divides his time between Kerala and Bangalore.

Although, I don’t want to coin a term as adivasi creative ecologies as an art-theoretical category, I would like to describe the experiences I witnessed in Wayanad as an immersive installation called Ottamuriveedu: Where Herbs and Wounds Heal Each Other created by CF John and his artistic collaborators like contemporary artist T M Azis, Malayalam poet MP Pratheesh, Kala Chandran, and the youths from tribal communities, like Ramya CK, Prajita C, Pradeesh KR among many others. This art experience is notable for its creative ecologies paradigm, as a participatory art event with adivasi youth from nearby villages. Or can it be described as a site-responsive installation as a ground for creative ecologies?

Here, the term creative ecologies allude to the world-building of sacred forests which is central to the adivasi ethical being, that CF John mobilises as artistic energies into his art installation. The site where the installation was made is significant because, Valliyoorkkavu temple grounds had been a site of slave trade until the mid-20th century. The installation by CF John and artistic collaborators occupied one-third of the temple ground. The other two-thirds of the ground was utilized for vithulsavam or seed festival, a coming together of farmers in a co-operative way to share, showcase, sell and gift rare seeds and robust alternative agrarian biomes.

It is ingenious of CF John the artist who is immersed in the agrarian lifestyle as a farmer himself, to mobilize the economies of scale of a seed festival to activate a site-responsive installation, a project implemented by India Foundation for the Arts under the Arts Practice programme, supported by Parijat Foundation. CF John is a master of creating affects, in layering the topography of the wall of votive lamps, the photographs of forest explorations with adivasis installed on coir curtains, restaging of forest affects, and spaces demarcated to symbolize the predatory-sacred dimensions of the forest experiences in the site-responsive installation. The earthy tonal balance as the visual aesthetic aspect of the installation is not incidental but subsidiary to the mobilization of artistic energies and affects of the forest life in its interface with indigenous lives.

T.J. Demos describes Black radical traditions, decolonial praxis, and climate justice as creative ecologies, a conceptual mutation in ecology parallel to contemporary transformations in art as sites of expanded creativity, unbound by commercial institutions. TJ Demos says,

“In my reading, art defines the experimental practice of world-making, generative of  justice-based cultural values and creating thinking-feeling places of radical sensibility. Its practice includes speculative and critical knowledge creation, situated within or allied with communities of action and social movements, and always, most ambitiously, provoking and furthering an entanglement of insights, perceptions, affects. In other words, these are what I have termed creative ecologies— practices that make new sensible materializations and connections (aesthetic, practical, jurisgenerative) between otherwise discrete realms of experience and knowledge, and that cultivate just worlds to come.”

Sidestepping the bounds of the commercial art world, CF John’s practice can be described as an exemplar of creative ecologies in the Indian subcontinent, in a precarious habitat such as that of Wayanad, prone to natural calamities, human-animal conflict, precarious tribal livelihoods at the mercy of invasive modernization efforts by liberal nationhood and surveillance procedures against perceived dormant insurgencies.

Although CF John is a highly regarded contemporary artist in India, outside the confines of the art market, the world-building that he enables as participatory art in collaboration with the Paniya tribes in Mananthavady is an exemplar of what TJ Demos would like to call creative ecologies. Collaboration is integral to CF John’s art practice, and Ottamuriveedu has been actualized with artistic contributions from many tribal villagers, farmers, and cultural activists, including Malayalam poets, most notably MP Pratheesh, who makes object poetry, with found objects foraged from nature, blurring the categorical distinction between poetry and contemporary art.

CF John (left) and John Xaviers Arackal (right) in front of the installation Ottamuriveedu: Where Herbs and Wounds Heal Each Other at Valliyoorkkavu, Wayanadu, on Jan 24, 2025. Photograph by Malayalam poet MP Pratheesh

Tribal poet Sukumaran Chaligatha, was also present in experiencing the art project by CF John and his artistic collaborators. Chaligatha is also an ooru mooppan or the tribal chieftain of the Ravula tribes, and he writes poems in both Malayalam and Ravula languages about precarious plantation worker experiences. Sukumaran Chaligatha’s memoir Bethimaran recounts his harrowing experiences as a child labourer in the ginger farms of Kodagu, Karnataka, where many Adivasis from Wayanad migrated for work. The journey was arduous, with workers crammed into jeeps, their wages deducted for basic needs, and their lives controlled by mesiris or head workmen. Labourers, including children, worked under extreme conditions, handling pesticide-laden seeds without safety gear, enduring exploitative wages, and facing rampant alcoholism and sexual harassment. The seasonal migration was marked by a cruel cycle of debt, exploitation, and fleeting moments of joy upon returning home, only to be replaced by another round of hardship. Despite these struggles, they found solace in storytelling and songs. Chaligatha’s poem Soundless Tata captures the bittersweet reality of adivasi labourers, their sacrifices, and the systemic oppression they endured in Kodagu. His work stands as a crucial testimony to this ignored history.

The immersive, site-responsive installation Ottamuriveedu: Where Herbs and Wounds Heal Each Other by CF John and his artistic collaborators, implemented by India Foundation for the Arts supported by Parijat Foundation, exemplifies the generative possibilities of creative ecologies within the Indian subcontinent. By engaging adivasi youth, poets, and artists in a participatory practice deeply rooted in local histories and ecologies, the project embodies the world-building ethos that TJ Demos describes. However, as Ngoru Nixon warns, the term adivasi itself demands careful contextualization, resisting homogenization while acknowledging its everyday resonance in Kerala. CF John’s approach, grounded in collaboration and ethical engagement, sidesteps both the commercial art market and state-mediated narratives of indigeneity, instead foregrounding lived experiences, artistic affect, and ecological interconnectedness. In this precarious landscape, shaped by environmental vulnerability, agrarian uncertainties, and histories of displacement, the project opens space for dialogue, resistance, and alternative futures. In doing so, it not only reframes artistic practice as a form of participatory jurisgenerative aesthetics but also reimagines ecology as a deeply political creative category.

 

References 

Chaligatha, Sukumaran. “A Kerala Tribal Poet Recounts Life as a Child Labourer in the Ginger Farms of Kodagu.” Translated by Binu Karunakaran. The News Minute, June 14, 2023.  https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/kerala-tribal-poet-recounts-life-child-labourer-ginger-farms-kodagu-178470

Chaligatha, Sukumaran. Bethimaran. Kozhikode: Olive Publications, 2022. 

Demos, T. J. Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

 John, CF, and Thomas H Pruiksma. Body & Earth. Kozhikode: Elements Media Initiative, 2015. https://www.amazon.in/Body-Earth-First-2015-C-F/dp/8193052501

Nixon, Ngoru. “Limits of the Adivasi Category: Critical Notes on Writing the ‘Indigenous’ in India.” _The Indian Economic & Social History Review_, January 20, 2025, 00194646241307223.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00194646241307223