Extractive Economy and Planetary Change: Migration, Translation and Polyphony in Pundalik N. Naik’s The Upheaval

This paper examines the extractive economy in post-independence, neoliberal India which operates under the guises of sustainability, bioeconomy or low-carbon emissions (Kroger 2020; Balkan 2022[SB1] ), often at the expense of indigenous ecologies, epistemologies and material practices. The present paper contextualizes the above issues in Indian writer Pundalik N. Naik’s Konkani novel Acchev (1977), which was later translated into English as The Upheaval in 2002 by Vidya Pai. Against the backdrop of migration and climate crisis in the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) which designates humans as the primary actors of planetary change, Naik’s novel engages with the precarity and displacement of a self-sufficient agrarian community in the form of corporate land-grabbing and exploitation of the marginalized, especially with the arrival of the mining company in the Goan village of Kolamba. This paper analyzes the condition of these displaced farmers-turned-migrants by viewing them as ‘translated beings’, who often embody both agency and constraint (Schneck and Weise 2025) while noting how Naik’s novel uses their difference and polyphonic plurality (Bakhtin 1984) to reinstate their capacity to challenge the “dehumanizing nature of contemporary power” (Polezzi 2012, 354). The study also approaches the novel from the vantage point of ‘planetarity’ (Chakrabarty 2021; Pratt 2022) to take into account the agrarian struggle to preserve their indigenous epistemologies, the protection of which can significantly contribute to planetary solidarity in South Asia by combating the homogenizing force of Euro-American capitalism embedded in corporate bureaucracy and extractive economy.