Deeply entangled in the commons, indigenous lives in Bangladesh, a country known to be at the frontlines of the climate crisis, bear the brunt of development. In 2004, the Government of Bangladesh undertook a project to build an eco-park in the forests of Madhupur by displacing the indigenous Garo people. A movement grew to stop the project and in one protest Piren Snal, an indigenous activist, was shot dead by the police. Although the project was suspended, the indigenous activists carry legal charges brought against them to this day.
In 2011, the “Save Sundarbans Movement” was born and carried on for a decade, also to save a forest. The Sundarbans is a large mangrove forest with complex ecological networks of tidal waterways and small islands. The movement mobilized against the construction of a 1320-megawatt capacity coal-fired power plant within the forest’s ecologically sensitive area. A collaboration between Bangladesh and India, the plant began operation in 2022. Besides resisting the development fetish of the government, the movement extended the commons discourse in a multispecies framework.
In this paper, I read of a song and a digital artwork representative of those two movements to examine how commons are conceptualized in resistance art. The song composed by a band of indigenous Garo musicians named Madol commemorates the Madhupur Movement and the environmental martyr Piren Snal. The artwork by Mita Mehedi representing the “Save Sundarbans Movement” posits simultaneously a scathing critique of development narratives and a call for multispecies justice. Here, I investigate how politics for reclaiming the environmental commons intersects with the struggle for democracy for the postcolonial nation-state of Bangladesh. I further examine how reclaiming the commons in the Anthropocene informs the struggle for justice and what political imaginations of a habitable and collective future are discernable in thinking about the commons.
