The Ravi is Dying and So Are We: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor in Malik’s #Spring Love #Pichal Pairi
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines Usman T. Malik’s #Spring Love #Pichal Pairi (2021) through Rob Nixon’s concepts of slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. It argues that Malik’s speculative short story transforms South Asian folklore into a politically charged narrative form for depicting ecological degradation. Moving beyond existing critical approaches on Usman T. Malik’s work that foreground postcolonial Gothic, genre conventions, and linguistic hybridity, this paper examines the short story as a point of convergence of South Asian folklore, ecological crises, and the gradual accumulation of violence across bodies, atmospheres, and societies. This paper traces Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence across three registers: The ecological degradation of the river Ravi, Farah’s bodily and social marginalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis exposing existing social, political, and economic and ecological inequalities. This paper also examines what Nixon identifies as the environmentalism of the poor practiced by marginalized communities in the Global South. In its analysis of slow violence, it also highlights the representational role of writer-activists to render otherwise imperceptible forms of violence visible. The paper demonstrates that Pakistani speculative fiction functions as literary mode of challenging obscure forms of violence and environmental injustice, while critiquing neoliberal imperatives of growth and progress.
Authors: Uswa Sehar, Noor Ul Qamar Qasmi
Institution: Government College University, Faisalabad
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7225379210