Resource Extractivism, ‘Resource Curse’ and Mining Catastrophe in Hari Kurissery’s Manalazham

The historical roots of resource extractivism can be traced back to the colonial times when various European powers had ceaselessly plundered the human resources, predominantly in the form of slaves, and natural resources like minerals, gold, diamond, ivory, and wood mainly from the African and Asian countries, and brought them to their native lands in order to accelerate the growth of the Industrial Revolution. Extractivism, as defined by Naomi Klein in the book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), connotes “a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking” (Klein, 2014, p.168). She, further, adds that extractivism is “directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones- places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed” (Klein, 2014, p.169). However, the couple of terms – “resource extractivism” and “resource curse” are closely linked, and the latter can be unequivocally called an inevitable byproduct of the former. The term “resource curse”, as theorized by Richard M. Auty in his highly acclaimed work, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economics: The Resource Curse Thesis (1993), refers to the “problem of plenty”/ “paradox of plenty”, which foregrounds that “the countries that are rich in natural resources, and whose economy is based primarily on extracting and exporting those resources, find it more difficult to develop” (Lang et al.,2013, p.61). However, in my research paper, I shall closely examine the renowned Malayalam journalist cum writer Hari Kurissery’s novel Manalazham (2015), translated into English by Santosh Alex in 2021 as Sandy Depth, through the theoretical framework of resource extractivism and “resource curse”, as they largely fit into the context of the unbridled and illegal sand excavation from agricultural fields, the thoughtless destruction of hills in the name of road construction, and the ever increasing level of air pollution owing to open brick kilns in the imaginary village called Mannida located in the present-day state of Kerala, as depicted in the novel.