Desire, Ruin, and Ecological Resistance: Reading Sanduk Through Eco-socialism and Eco-feminism

Abstract

This study examines Siddhartha Chanakya’s SandukFootnote1 (2025), an independent Indian film that transforms the imagery of war into a radical ecological allegory of life at the limits of the Anthropocene. Set in a post-nuclear wasteland stripped of history and national identity, the film depicts conflict not between states but between forms of life – human, alien, and material – that persist after civilisation's collapse. Rejecting the hyper-nationalist and hyper-masculine tropes of recent Indian war cinema, Sanduk reimagines war in the form of ecological annihilation. Through its desolate landscapes and temporal ambiguity, the film enacts a politics of refusal – an aesthetic resistance to neo-nationalist militarism and anthropocentric modernity. The Sanduk, a chest that promises fulfilment yet remains empty, becomes a metaphor for extractive capitalism’s false promise of abundance. Yet amid desolation, Sanduk sustains a messianic hope – not of redemption but of coexistence and survival – inviting reflection on desire, ecology, and the Anthropocene’s persistent fear of extinction. This paper presents an eco-Marxist reading of Sanduk’s aesthetics, arguing that Sanduk’s imagery, one of its own kind in South Asian context, can be interpreted as positing radical questions challenging our limited imagination about environmental degradation.