Ecologies of Blame: Religion, Commerce, Conspiracy, and the Climate Crisis

The Anoop Mandal is a century old anti-Jain Hindu religious sect centered throughout the arid and drought-prone districts surrounding the border between Rajasthan and Gujarat. According to devotees (bhāviks), the Jain merchant castes, baniyas, control all the world’s governments, the economy, and even the weather; they are the source of the current climate crisis. Critics contend that this is evidence of the backwards status of the group’s members, who are mostly low-caste, and the underdevelopment of the region. This paper argues that the Anoop Mandal’s beliefs represent not a pre-modern prejudice, but a form of Hindu theorizing which connects anthropogenic climate change with the demands of a specific economy; it is a theory of the Capitalocene.  Why, this paper asks, do the causes of ecological devastation become conceptualized as personal rather than systematic? How does religion facilitate this process? And why is the target of this theory an ethnoreligious group?