20/10/2026 - Guardians and Suspects

WHEN: 20 October 2026, 13:30–15:00

WHERE: MUP Prague-Strašnice building, Dubečská 900/10, room 021

SPEAKER: Mukul Sharma (Professor, Environmental Studies, Ashoka University, India)

Please kindly confirm your attendance at registrace.mup.cz

In spring 2026, an Indian Muslim biologist won one of the world’s most prestigious conservation prizes for saving a river bird, while in Assam, a north-east state, politicians blamed Muslims for the state’s floods. No one connected the two stories. This lecture asks why. Over recent decades, Black, feminist, Indigenous and Dalit ecologies have transformed environmental thought by showing that who counts as an environmental subject is a political question: marginalised groups bear environmental harm unequally and also hold their own ecological knowledge. India’s more than 200 million Muslims have remained outside this expanding frame. The lecture traces a double erasure: in public politics, Muslims are made hyper-visible as ecological threats through narratives of cow slaughter, ‘flood jihad, ‘land jihad’ and urban disorder; in scholarship, they remain invisible as environmental actors, even as segregation and neglect leave them among the most exposed to polluted water and degraded neighbourhoods. Drawing on cases from saint-and-tiger cosmologies in the Sundarbans and Islamic water law in Ladakh to a three-decade river struggle in Kerala, it proposes ‘Muslim ecologies’ as a way of seeing how minorities are not only victims or villains of environmental change, but its makers.