Gondwanaland and Antipodal Histories
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Manchester
Department Name: School of Medical Sciences
Abstract
This research network will explore the past and present meaning of 'Gondwanaland' in Indian, South African and Australian contexts. The Austrian geologist Eduard Suess coined the term 'Gondwanaland' in 1885 to describe the ancient southern landmass, which he believed comprised southern Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. It was distinct from the northern landmass, which he called Eurasia (later named Laurasia), which comprised Europe and North America.
PI Chakrabarti has traced the convergences of geological and anthropological investigations in Indian Gondwana in the nineteenth century. During this research, he became aware that 'Gondwanaland' was strongly recognized today in Australia and South Africa, and saw the need for a global and comparative project.
Bringing together historians of science, cultural studies and environmental humanities scholars, alongside activists and artists, the network will collaboratively investigate what Gondwanaland has meant in the past and present. We investigate how the theory of Gondwanaland was envisaged and then contributed to the growing divide between southern and northern histories and ethnicities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will track more recent, and contemporary, significance of 'Gondwana' in environmental and indigenous activism, in popular culture, and (counterintuitively) in nationalist politics. In each of India, Australia, and South Africa 'Gondwana' is widely recognized as a term that signals deep time, but often without any awareness that it also does so in other regions.
We are interested in the potential of the real and imagined landscape of Gondwanaland to productively recast ideas of the global south and of histories of 'the antipodes'. Gondwanaland has a shared but diverse southern cultural, ethnological, geological, and colonial significance. Remarkably, it has current popular purchase too. For example, 'Gondwana' is a folk-rock band in Australia; a tourist resort in South Africa; and a political party in India, the Gondwana Gantantra Party. This all needs explaining and exploring, across disciplines, cultures, and knowledges. This research network brings Gondwanaland back together again.
Our questions are:
-What did Gondwanaland signify in earlier eras? How and why were distant and distinct regions of the earth imagined to be part of the same landmass?
-How were the connections between land and people or between geology and aboriginality constructed in the nineteenth century theories of a southern continent? ,
-What does Gondwanaland mean today? In what forms does it exist in southern political and cultural lives?
-How did and does Gondwanaland figure in changing narratives of human origins and of Indigenous origin and belonging - the geopolitics of 'homeland'?
-Does 'Gondwana' help us write an alternative history of a cultural, ethnological and colonial 'global south'? Does it offer a fresh way of considering 'antipodes'?
PI Chakrabarti has traced the convergences of geological and anthropological investigations in Indian Gondwana in the nineteenth century. During this research, he became aware that 'Gondwanaland' was strongly recognized today in Australia and South Africa, and saw the need for a global and comparative project.
Bringing together historians of science, cultural studies and environmental humanities scholars, alongside activists and artists, the network will collaboratively investigate what Gondwanaland has meant in the past and present. We investigate how the theory of Gondwanaland was envisaged and then contributed to the growing divide between southern and northern histories and ethnicities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will track more recent, and contemporary, significance of 'Gondwana' in environmental and indigenous activism, in popular culture, and (counterintuitively) in nationalist politics. In each of India, Australia, and South Africa 'Gondwana' is widely recognized as a term that signals deep time, but often without any awareness that it also does so in other regions.
We are interested in the potential of the real and imagined landscape of Gondwanaland to productively recast ideas of the global south and of histories of 'the antipodes'. Gondwanaland has a shared but diverse southern cultural, ethnological, geological, and colonial significance. Remarkably, it has current popular purchase too. For example, 'Gondwana' is a folk-rock band in Australia; a tourist resort in South Africa; and a political party in India, the Gondwana Gantantra Party. This all needs explaining and exploring, across disciplines, cultures, and knowledges. This research network brings Gondwanaland back together again.
Our questions are:
-What did Gondwanaland signify in earlier eras? How and why were distant and distinct regions of the earth imagined to be part of the same landmass?
-How were the connections between land and people or between geology and aboriginality constructed in the nineteenth century theories of a southern continent? ,
-What does Gondwanaland mean today? In what forms does it exist in southern political and cultural lives?
-How did and does Gondwanaland figure in changing narratives of human origins and of Indigenous origin and belonging - the geopolitics of 'homeland'?
-Does 'Gondwana' help us write an alternative history of a cultural, ethnological and colonial 'global south'? Does it offer a fresh way of considering 'antipodes'?
Planned Impact
This research network will connect community activists, journalists, and performance artists in three continents to enact and document Gondwanaland as sites of human habitation with deep histories. The impact will be to consolidate public understandings of southern aboriginal, environmental and deep historical experiences, though the idea of Gondwanaland.
The network will highlight that while most scholarly writings study Gondwanaland as a prehistoric geological landmass, it also exists as real and present landscapes in different parts of the world, where indigenous populations live. The inhabitants of different Gondwanas in Australia, South Asia and South Africa are acutely aware of their deep histories and their relationships with land, inextricably linked to their political struggles for identity, rights and resources. The impact will be to broaden this awareness - to internationalise it.
The network will create an online platform called 'Stories of Global Gondwana', which will be a collective resource of Gondwanaland experiences. Drawing from this documentation, 'Stories' will seek to inform political and public debates about aboriginality and environmental rights in the Global South.
The network will thus enquire into and disseminate knowledge about how the deep history of Gondwanaland merges with everyday lives and politics in different parts of the world. It will also ask if experiences in South Asia, Africa and Australia have any shared domain, which can relate as a Southern experience.
To give an example, since the 1990s, the Gondwana homeland movement in Central India became more politically active with demands for a separate Gondwana state for the Gonds. These demands have been in response to the growing sense of loss of tribal land, culture and rights within the modern Indian political economy and the dominant Hindu and Brahmanical cultural assertions. These demands of a separate Gond state regularly refer to the deep past of Gondwanaland. A contemporary Gond poet writes about Gondwanaland as the original southern homeland of the Gonds, distinct from that of the Aryans who he suggests are from Angara (Patankar, 2016). The network will record such creative re-enactment of deep history in contemporary politics, in South Asia as well as in southern Africa and Australia.
With partners and stakeholders - 'Humans of Gondwana' of India, the 'Gondwana Link' of Australia, and the 'Environmental Humanities South' of South Africa - the network will further investigate how an imagined Gondwanaland exists today in diverse forms and sites of aboriginal politics and traditions in different parts of the 'southern continent'.
We have three pathways to impact:
1. Through workshops in Manchester, Sydney and Cape Town, we will bring together historians, journalists, environmentalists, and performance artists to develop strategies of a greater understanding among different stakeholders about what Gondwanaland means as deep past and politicised present.
2. We will organise two field trips in South Africa and Australia to understand and record contemporary environmental concerns, their deep historical roots, and the various strategies being used to deal with various political and ecological challenges faced in these regions.
3. We will incorporate these in our platform, 'Stories of Global Gondwana'. The online platform will be linked to several similar platforms and Youtube channels belonging to and used by environmental activists and indigenous rights activists in the global south. This will have two impacts. First, it will highlight that Gondwanaland, which is usually depicted as a geological entity, is also about people and their relationship to the land. Second, it will help to connect different stories across the southern continents, which in turn will assist understanding and establish new connections across the Gondwanas, about deep time, human lives and politics.
The network will highlight that while most scholarly writings study Gondwanaland as a prehistoric geological landmass, it also exists as real and present landscapes in different parts of the world, where indigenous populations live. The inhabitants of different Gondwanas in Australia, South Asia and South Africa are acutely aware of their deep histories and their relationships with land, inextricably linked to their political struggles for identity, rights and resources. The impact will be to broaden this awareness - to internationalise it.
The network will create an online platform called 'Stories of Global Gondwana', which will be a collective resource of Gondwanaland experiences. Drawing from this documentation, 'Stories' will seek to inform political and public debates about aboriginality and environmental rights in the Global South.
The network will thus enquire into and disseminate knowledge about how the deep history of Gondwanaland merges with everyday lives and politics in different parts of the world. It will also ask if experiences in South Asia, Africa and Australia have any shared domain, which can relate as a Southern experience.
To give an example, since the 1990s, the Gondwana homeland movement in Central India became more politically active with demands for a separate Gondwana state for the Gonds. These demands have been in response to the growing sense of loss of tribal land, culture and rights within the modern Indian political economy and the dominant Hindu and Brahmanical cultural assertions. These demands of a separate Gond state regularly refer to the deep past of Gondwanaland. A contemporary Gond poet writes about Gondwanaland as the original southern homeland of the Gonds, distinct from that of the Aryans who he suggests are from Angara (Patankar, 2016). The network will record such creative re-enactment of deep history in contemporary politics, in South Asia as well as in southern Africa and Australia.
With partners and stakeholders - 'Humans of Gondwana' of India, the 'Gondwana Link' of Australia, and the 'Environmental Humanities South' of South Africa - the network will further investigate how an imagined Gondwanaland exists today in diverse forms and sites of aboriginal politics and traditions in different parts of the 'southern continent'.
We have three pathways to impact:
1. Through workshops in Manchester, Sydney and Cape Town, we will bring together historians, journalists, environmentalists, and performance artists to develop strategies of a greater understanding among different stakeholders about what Gondwanaland means as deep past and politicised present.
2. We will organise two field trips in South Africa and Australia to understand and record contemporary environmental concerns, their deep historical roots, and the various strategies being used to deal with various political and ecological challenges faced in these regions.
3. We will incorporate these in our platform, 'Stories of Global Gondwana'. The online platform will be linked to several similar platforms and Youtube channels belonging to and used by environmental activists and indigenous rights activists in the global south. This will have two impacts. First, it will highlight that Gondwanaland, which is usually depicted as a geological entity, is also about people and their relationship to the land. Second, it will help to connect different stories across the southern continents, which in turn will assist understanding and establish new connections across the Gondwanas, about deep time, human lives and politics.
| Description | After conducting networking exercise with participants from Australia, South Africa, South America and South Asia, the key findings are that the concept of Gondwanaland has direct implications into the contemporary world, offering an important substantive case for the current historiographical interest in deep time and with relations between human and geological history, and indeed between historians and geoscientists, fellow scholars-of-time. There are different findings for different regions In India, Gondwana remains active in the movement of plates, in digging for minerals, and in tribal politics. Here it moves to the history of colonial coal mining at the heart of Gondwana and in the process the discovery of deep historical "coal swamps," which were depicted as the primal prehistoric forests of the Gonds. In Australia today there are more than one hundred companies registered with the name Gondwana: amongst them the Gondwana Choirs, Gondwana Gemstones, Gondwana Environmental Consulting, Gondwana Dreaming Earth Science Tours. The term Gondwana as well as the common awareness of the continent's geo-historical link to Gondwanaland has become part of a quotidian cultural and conceptual nationalism. This chapter explores why this is the case and what work "Gondwanaland" does in the context of settler-colonialism. A misapplication of the term Gondwana to Indigenous culture and language in Australia is a curiosity that signals what is at stake. While deep time belonging is typically and rightly an attribute of First Nations' culture and politics, connection to an ancient land mass offers a way for settler-colonials also to claim, experience, sense, or even own, deep time. In South Africa, Alex Du Toit, book, Our Wandering Continents: An Hypothesis of Continental Drifting (1937), made a strong case for Africa's pivotal role in the splitting up of Gondwanaland. Du Toit had a particular interest in the stratigraphy of the Karoo area and was quick to see connections between mineral resources, paleolithic fossils (animal and homin) and paleobotanical evidence of glossopteris ferns suggestive of links with India and Antarctica. His work overlapped in time with pioneering research conducted by comparative anatomists Robert Broom and Raymond Dart, leading to the discovery and naming of Australopithecus in 1925. Although Du Toit himself was disinclined to enter into political debates, his ideas had important ideological ramifications. Jan Smuts, the South African scholar statesman, linked contemporaneous scientific work on hominin evolution, botany and Du Toit's work on Gondwanaland in a remarkable address to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925. |
| Exploitation Route | • Based on this, we are co-editing a book with offers a new methodology of writing the deep past. This book is under consideration with Chicago University Press The first book on Gondwanaland written collaboratively by historians, human geographers, and geoscientists. - Brings together leading historians of, and from, each region of former Gondwanaland: South Asia, South America, Australasia, South Africa, Australasia, Antarctica. - A substantive study of the modern history of deep time in different national and continental contexts. - An argument for the history of geology to be told from the southern hemisphere. • |
| Sectors | Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| Description | • Based on this, we are co-editing a book with offers a new methodology of writing the deep past. This book is under consideration with Chicago University Press The first book on Gondwanaland written collaboratively by historians, human geographers, and geoscientists. - Brings together leading historians of, and from, each region of former Gondwanaland: South Asia, South America, Australasia, South Africa, Australasia, Antarctica. - A substantive study of the modern history of deep time in different national and continental contexts. - An argument for the history of geology to be told from the southern hemisphere. • |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
| Description | The Gondwana/Land Workshop |
| Organisation | University of New South Wales |
| Country | Australia |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We organised the workshop and presented papers. We are currently developing plans for the publication of the book based on this collaboration |
| Collaborator Contribution | The New Earth History Centre at the University of New South Wales, under the leadership of Professor Alison Bashford, has been a key collaborator in this network project. It provided key expertise from Australia on Australian Gondwanaland. It also hosted the weeklong international workshop and tour in Sydney, Australia in August 2022, The Gondwana/Land Workshop. Sydney 31 July - 3 August 2022 + Field Trip 4/5 August. The workshop brought together scholars from India, Australia, South Africa and South America. |
| Impact | We aim to push forward the conceptual and substantive work that thinking Gondwanaland enables: what was the precise geological and paleontological history of Gondwana geology post c. 1870 in different contexts? How does Gondwanaland help us conceptualise deep time in modern history? What are the different national histories of/for this ancient supercontinent? How is it connected to various colonial and settler colonial histories, to coal and energy histories? How does Gondwanaland prompt a southern hemisphere history of geosciences? We are aiming for an edited collection and will likely propose this to Karen Darling at University of Chicago Press. |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Description | The Gondwana/Land Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | The Gondwana/Land Workshop held in Sydney 31 July - 3 August 2022 + Field Trip 4/5 August. This was the main in-person meeting of the project. We aim to push forward the conceptual and substantive work that thinking Gondwanaland enables: what was the precise geological and paleontological history of Gondwana geology post c. 1870 in different contexts? How does Gondwanaland help us conceptualise deep time in modern history? What are the different national histories of/for this ancient supercontinent? How is it connected to various colonial and settler colonial histories, to coal and energy histories? How does Gondwanaland prompt a southern hemisphere history of geosciences? We are aiming for an edited collection and will likely propose this to Karen Darling at University of Chicago Press. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://gondwanaland.net/thinking-gondwana-land/ |