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Recent scholarship on world literature has called for an increased focus on asymmetries of materialist conditions. This article considers “world ecological literature” with a focus on the capitalist world-systems and colonial energy extraction. It invokes Imre Szeman’s periodization of culture according to the use of energy resources to acknowledge the immense global impact of fossil fuels and examine Shailajananda Mukhopadyay’s 1934 Bengali colliery fiction,  Patalpuri . The novel is read here as a part of the “world-system literature” that responds to the era of coal as the primary energy resource of capitalist modernity. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s use of Trotsky’s concept of “combined and uneven development” and their proposal for a “new materialist basis for a revivified literary comparativism”, the article reads  Patalpuri  as offering a view of colonial environmental extractivism from the “periphery” through diverse literary forms including European social realism and native mythologies and folklore.

Colonial coal and peripheral modernity: Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay’s Patalpuri as world-ecological literature