One of the difficulties we face is how to characterize the current regime headed by Narendra Modi, which has won back-to-back victories in three elections (2014–2024). The terminology within which we understand the regime is important, as what to expect from the regime flows from its nature and how to resist it will emerge from an understanding of its character. What is apparent about the regime is its pronounced authoritarianism, with the regime increasingly unaccountable to any constitutional authority.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz called such regimes, in which the leader has arbitrary and unlimited discretion, ‘sultanist’ and a species of authoritarianism. Linz (2000, p. 259) defines an authoritarian regime as ‘ruler-centred’ where the

What ‘sultanism’ implies is captured indelibly by Girish Karnad in his play Tughlaq. Karnad captures Mohammad Bin Tughlaq, who embodied this form of arbitrary and whimsical decision-making, be it the decision to issue currency in brass or the decision to shift the capital to Daulatabad. Clearly, the Modi regime has ‘sultanist’ characteristics, based on the personalized and arbitrary decision-making which characterizes the regime.

Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of so it reads Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of drought intenstified in Australia as settler farmers drought intensified in Australia as settler farmers cleared land to plant imported food crops and, in particular, rain-dependent wheat. Local ecologies were drastically changed by colonial occupation. Dryness and dust increased where there had previously been the biodiverse sources of food depicted in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations) performance and drama. Different meanings for meanings for home and homeland exemplify the genocidal conflict between First Nations Country and settler farmsteads. Plays by, for example, Noongar writer Jack Davis and the pre-eminent Dorothy Hewett feature ecologies drastically altered by wheat farming in conjunction with oppressive race and gender relations. Drama about mining similarly shows a combination of ecological damage and social inequity. As Jill Orr performs in a vast monocrop of wheat and amidst gypsum mine waste, her bird-like action evokes in a vast monocrop field of wheat grief over an ecocidal loss of multispecies habitats.

Introduction

Haiti, 2004; USA, 2005; Myanmar, 2008; Pakistan, 2010; Thailand, 2011; Philippines, 2013; Brazil, 2014; Caribbean, 2017; Tonga, 2018; India, 2018; Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, 2019; Australia, 2019–2020; Germany, 2021; Pakistan, 2022; Europe and the United Kingdom (UK), 2022; China, 2022; the United States (US), 2023; Libya, 2023; Kenya and Tanzania, 2024; Brazil, 2024; Poland, 2024; Bangladesh, 2024.

In recent decades, different regions of the world have experienced disasters that are increasingly attributable to the climate crisis (cf. IPCC 2021).1 These disasters, though differing in scale and geographical location, share common characteristics. In all these cases, those affected are at varying degrees of risk, both globally and in the place where the disaster occurred.2 In all of these cases, the slippery slope of vulnerability correlates closely with prior marginalization based on race, gender, class, education, and other factors (cf. Méjean et al 2024; Cappelli, Costantini, and Consoli 2021; Belkhir and Charlemaine 2007; Giroux 2006). These disasters are not only ‘non-natural’ because they occur in the context of anthropogenic climate change, but also because they overlap with politically determined preconditions (cf. Dawson 2010, 317). As the human rights activist and actor Danny Glover graphically illustrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (cited in Akuno 2006, 34),

From the mid-eighties of the last century, the neoliberal economic model, devised by the anti-collectivist theorists,1 which conceptually elevates competition as a high principle, has been favoured by the ruling classes. It remains nothing but a social Darwinist contrivance for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004). Since the collapse of the Soviet system, it has become almost the default model sans alternative. The endemic crises it entails and the alienation it engenders necessitate increasingly authoritative responses and demagogic strategies from the rulers, using existing social divisions in the form of castes, religions, ethnicities, and so on, which lead to the fascization of societies.

While this trend is visible everywhere today, some countries have congenial ideological resources for the fascization of their societies. India, with a hegemonic Brahminist ideology (with its hierarchical ethos and the organizational dominance of its hegemons in the state apparatus as well as in civil society) is uniquely positioned. While fascization has been discernible since the 1990s in the overt majoritarian communalism whipped up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it was somewhat muted by the lack of political consensus and the moral scruples of constitutional decencies.

Theatrical performance engages with the material consequences of rising hot temperatures and severe bush fires as it continues to reflect changing beliefs about the weather. Verbatim theatre outlines some of the contradictions surrounding fire, which both regenerates and destroys as it conveys the gradual realisation that fire changes weather. Theatre points to how temperature-reducing tree preservation paradoxically becomes blamed for increasing the bush fire risk. The discussion foregrounds the clash of values in a liberal democratic society between the ongoing exploitation of environmental resources for economic gain and the longstanding efforts of activists and protestors to protect forests that store carbon and counteract rising temperatures. As characters and personae confront the life and death dilemmas posed by hot weather and fire including those from the social risk of arson, theatrical performance must grapple with ethical constraints surrounding the depiction of these events that cause fatalities.

The Introduction explains the purpose of this book about the way natural ecologies are centrally configured in twentieth- and twenty-first century drama and innovative theatrical performance. It explains the book’s argument that ecology and climate need to be understood as consequences of a combination of social and natural forces, and that drama and theatrical performance often stage such entangled ecologies. We find that weather-related events function like protagonists in twentieth-century and twenty-first century Australian theatrical work, reflecting contemporaneous human attitudes towards nature. The plays and performances discussed in this book reveal a paradigm shift from a white settler belief in a righteous human dominance over nature to a more contemporary understanding of mutual entanglement and reciprocity in multispecies ecologies.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of achievement books is crafted through images and numbers as well as words. I argue that these media have two purposes. On one hand, they act as symbolic fragments of the nation, constituted by a recognisable Nasser-era iconography. Peasants and workers, students and soldiers, factories and machines, land and buildings – all these elements are marshalled to depict a cohesive national mosaic. On the other hand, each photograph and statistic acts as an index of the state’s achievements; the picture and the number become, on their own, an inarguable demonstration of the state’s ability to achieve. After describing the typical content of Nasserist iconography, the chapter moves to analyse it in relation to the master narratives of industrial modernisation and revolutionary responsibility. The chapter concludes with an analysis of what images exclude, what lies beyond their frame, and how these exclusions are telling about what constitutes ‘the state’ under Nasser. Governmental images and numbers are not a peripheral epiphenomenon to Nasser-era politics, but they are symbolically and indexically central to the state’s construction.

Fear-inducing tragedy encompasses the deadly consequences of contaminating the atmosphere, including through nuclear radiation. Theatrical works juxtapose the threat of extinction with the benefits of energy obtained from nuclear, coal and oil power sources as they indicate that the earth’s atmosphere can no longer be regarded as an exploitable resource. The degradation of breathable air is life-threatening for human and nonhuman species alike. The depiction of human-induced contamination from mid twentieth-century theatre encompasses life-threatening atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean region and on mainland Australia. First Nations theatrical performance about nuclear-damaged ecological systems broadens the emotional commons of climate change theatre in which characters confront atmospheric contamination and the threat of annihilation.

No figure did more to promote the myth of blood and soil than Richard Darré, the Nazi minister of agriculture. Darré’s environmental legacy is disputed; current scholarship recognizes his racial obsessions while typically denying any substantive ecological orientation. This chapter takes a different perspective, arguing that Darré’s views on race and on care for the soil were inseparable ideologically as well as in practice. Moreover, his environmental allegiances shifted significantly over time, reflecting a series of fierce debates about the politics of nature that involved competing Nazi factions. Peering below the level of famous Nazis, the core of the chapter presents a detailed appraisal of often neglected mid-level officials in interaction with conservationists, organic adherents, and life reform activists, with particular attention to the increasingly influential biodynamic representatives on Darré’s staff. The resulting profile of blood and soil principles in action casts Nazi environmental efforts in a new light: never fully at the center of power but never entirely marginalized, ecological politics played out in tandem with conflicting economic priorities and overarching racial objectives.

With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in India in 2014, and over the following years, questions around the nature of this regime and its increasingly close links to large Indian corporates have drawn attention. That these links exist is beyond dispute. However, their specific nature and what they can tell us about the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)–BJP combine, the Sangh Parivar (the family of organizations led by the RSS, including the BJP), is less clear, as in what they might mean for its future trajectory and for the future trajectory of Indian politics.

This chapter, a preliminary exploration of these questions, is largely confined to specific aspects of this government's economic policies. In this context, it will argue that these links are embedded within a specific political trajectory and that this trajectory may lead to eventual possibilities that are neither easy to predict nor necessarily in line with intuitive expectations. Indeed, I will argue that, instead of the apparent stability and supposed strength of the corporate–BJP–state nexus that currently exists, the years to come are likely to see more challenges to this nexus than are usually expected— and a key reason for this is the dynamic produced by this nexus itself.

The historical relationship between the Sangh Parivar and Indian big capital

The relationship between Indian big business and the Sangh Parivar is not a recent one, but arguably such a relationship also did not characterize the RSS's history for most of its existence.

This chapter reflects on the book’s exploration of drama and performance that reveal the entanglements of natural phenomena and human behaviours in society, each shaping one another in dynamic interplay. The book concludes by considering how artists continue to want to make work about anthropogenic ecological change. We suggest here that performative actions of dissent can offer shared optimistic moments. This chapter looks at the tactics of tactics of artists and activists who perform actions to physically resist, slow or block ecological damage, attempting to hold big corporations and politicians to account and keep urgent ecological issues under public scrutiny.