Waste has become a productive critical category across environmental humanities, medical humanities and cultural studies. Yet it is still approached largely as an object to be managed, represented or discarded. We open the horizon and ask: what if waste is understood not simply as a subject of literary representation but as a literary and critical method? How do South Asian texts invite us to read through and read with residue, excess, fragmentation, repetition, contamination and disposability? And how might such readings reshape the conceptual frameworks and vocabularies of Waste Studies itself? 

Bringing together literary and cultural studies, medical and environmental humanities, we argue that South Asian literature reveals waste not simply as a material condition but as a cultural and political process that shapes bodies, histories and environments. Across histories of caste, colonial sanitation, epidemic disease, industrial catastrophe and ecological crisis, waste emerges through regimes of governance, labour and knowledge that produce disposability. Literature records these exclusions and exposes their limits by recovering marginal lives, fractured histories and neglected environments. Examining waste in this way shows how practices of disposal shape literary themes, disrupt narrative structures, determine what must be archived and generate new modes of storytelling that challenge dominant histories.

We are particularly interested in the multiple gradients of waste that emerge across literary and cultural texts: material waste and wasted bodies; toxic landscapes and discarded archives; polluted environments and failed infrastructures; obsolete languages and memories. Such gradients invite us to rethink waste as a generative condition through which literature imagines care, survival, repair and resistance. In this sense, waste becomes a comparative method for reading the entanglements of bodies, medicine, ecology, labour, gender, caste and capital across texts, genres and media.

The seminar welcomes papers on literature, film, visual culture, performance, archives and digital media from South Asia as well as comparative work that places South Asian contexts in dialogue with other linguistic, geographical and theoretical traditions. By positing waste as an aesthetic practice, a narrative principle and a critical method, we seek to open new conversations on these possible themes and also beyond:

• Waste as literary form and aesthetic practice
• Narrative residue and archival afterlives
• Waste, genre and experimental writing
• Caste, purity and the politics of disposability
• Disease, contagion and biomedical imaginaries
• Toxicity, environmental crisis and industrial modernity
• Labour, infrastructure and everyday waste
• Gender, care, reproduction and domestic waste
• Disability, vulnerability and the wasted body
• Epistemic and linguistic marginalisation
• Climate change, ecological grief and planetary waste
• Comparative and decolonial approaches to Waste Studies