The Moth and the Flame

This chapter discusses how the author was first inspired by the everyday geographies of survival of farm workers, informal labor, and slum-dwellers, but this experience clashed with an elitist geography curriculum that mimicked the imperial stance of the discipline even in post-colonial India. It is only through an accidental encounter with the book, Social Justice and the City, that the author came to the realization that geography exemplified a holism that could reveal, address, and alleviate the exploitative human condition and hence disrupt the injustices of capitalism. Inspired by David Harvey and other radical geographers, the author moved away from her chosen sub-field of geomorphology and began her journey as a Marxist geographer. The chapter discusses the failures, the lapses in understanding, and the unique challenges faced by a post-colonial woman academic within the elitist academia in India, as well as within mainstream institutional structures of the U.S. university system until intellectual struggle became a way of life. The author demonstrates through her personal journey how her geographic praxis evolved from geomorphology to human geography, to Marxist geography, into “geography as Marxism.” Her narrative provides insights into negotiating and transcending injustice and oppressive power within the academy and beyond.