The frontiers of the ongoing climate struggles are entangled with political crises, territorial conflicts, migration and citizenship. The roots of this can be traced back to colonial extraction. The colonising tendencies of state power reappear to marginalise and subjugate minority groups—as evidenced by India’s elevated number of ongoing land conflicts. This problematises the status of citizenship for indigenous and marginalised people, who continue to fight displacement and persecution.

The project addresses the contested inhabitation of fragile ecosystems in the Sundarbans, situated in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. It proposes a self-sustained productive settlement that fosters a construction of spatial identity, while elevating the significance of indigenous land stewardship. Additionally, it seeks to proliferate the ritual narrative practices of marginalised and hybridised identities as a means to resist erasure, through the apparatus of a travelling theatre.

Rituals of Resistance critiques the exertion of state power in the borderlands, while questioning the value of standard property and land rights in such a context. Opposing the continued subjugation of displaced and marginalised people, it seeks to elevate vernacular wisdom, and celebrate cultural identities and hybrid ecologies.