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This paper offers an Anthropocene reading of Deepa Mehta’s Videsh – Heaven on Earth (2008), a film usually approached through diaspora studies, adaptation theory, and feminist criticism. It argues that the film’s cobra, transplanted impossibly from Punjab to a frozen Canadian garden, figures the Anthropocene condition in which human systems of labour, migration, and patriarchy displace non-human nature alongside human bodies. The paper traces three interlocking ecologies: the displaced ecology of the cobra and its climatic impossibility; the extractive domestic ecology of the overcrowded immigrant household; and the psychic ecology of the protagonist Chand’s imagination. Drawing on Chakrabarty, Nixon, Haraway, and Brah, the paper situates Videsh as an early instance of diasporic ecological cinema.
Dr Sunman Kaur. “Cobras in the Cold: An Anthropocene Reading of Deepa Mehta’s Videsh – Heaven on Earth.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 157-170. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.9.
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