Desert(ed) nuclear scapes: a geontological reading of Uday Singh’s Pokhran: a novel

This paper argues that the nuclear deserts of Pokhran in Northwest India are appropriated under ‘developmental regimes’ that employ wastelanding and erasure as strategic tools. Mobilizing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontopower’ and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we read Uday Singh’s fictional treatment Pokhran: A Novel (2020), which deals with the Pokhran-I nuclear test carried out in 1974, as narrating a tale of power that not only seeps through institutions related to human/life/bio but also as probing socio-materialities through active geo/nonlife/nonhuman entities. These critical taxonomies frame Pokhran-I as a complex site of human-nonhuman entanglements. Human agency has predominantly informed the prevailing discourses on desert(ed) scapes as ‘sacrifice zones’ devoid of agency. However, we interrogate Pokhran as a discard scape, first, via geontopower which evidences wastelanding and erasure, and second, as a potent agential nonhuman entity.