Ecology, Migration, and Spirituality 

Venue: Mehaboob John Talkies, Uru Art Harbour, Jew Town, Mattancherry

Date: 14 December 2025 4:00 PM

How do we sense, narrate, and imagine life in a time of climate collapse, migratory displacement, and spiritual search? This conference offers an understanding of art in the age of precarity through relationships between ecology, migration, and spirituality. This speaks eloquently of evanescent ecologies, forgotten histories, travels, and transformations, and unique forms of spiritual explorations. The panel assembles a diverse group of thinkers to explore amphibian aesthetics—a frame that can precisely make sense of hybridity, adaptation, and fragility across environments, histories, and belief systems.  

James Onley is a historian of South Asian diasporas, examining the early migrations of Indian communities and their aesthetic legacies—especially in music and visual culture—across two centuries of movement, labor, and transformation.

Dr. Varuni Bhatia is a scholar of South Asian studies whose research explores the intersections of religion, politics, and history in colonial and postcolonial India. She is the author of Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2017), and her work engages deeply with questions of memory, identity, and nationalism.

Dr. Susmita Mohanty is a spaceship designer, entrepreneur, and cultural collaborator whose work spans space architecture, climate advocacy, and art–science engagements. Her works link the precarity of planetary life with speculative imaginaries of living beyond Earth, bridging ecological, technological, and artistic futures.

Moderated by M.H. Ilias, the discussion will traverse shifting landscapes—biological, historical, and spiritual—inviting us to consider art and thought as amphibious acts of survival, memory, and reinvention.