The idiom ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’ situates our city particularly well. Where the devil incarnates as an invasive tree from south and central America—Prosopis juliflora—first introduced by the colonial authorities to the hilly tracts of the Central Ridge around 1915. The hardy mesquite has since spread like a scourge through the city forests, smothering native species and defying any attempts by current authorities to check its vengeful growth. Its tenacity and reproductive vigour has earned it sobriquets like baavlia or the mad tree elsewhere in the country. On the other hand, the Delhi version of the deep blue sea would doubtless point to the darkly slithering Yamuna along the city’s eastern edge. When the British decided to move the imperial capital from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911, they picked the area between these two flanks—the recalcitrant Ridge to the west and the unpredictable river to the east—to establish the seat of their government. Hoping to turn the overgrazed Central Ridge into an amenity forest for the newly proposed Viceregal Palace (presently the Rashtrapati Bhavan), they tried to coax a variety of flora to take to its acidic soils, mostly in vain. In fact, accounts of their trial and error in pursuit of the Ridge’s rejuvenation can furnish enough material to weave a tale worthy of that queer subgenre of Victorian fantasy literature, the botanical gothic with its groundings in colonial fears of foreign environments. Its climax would unfold a diorama with the colonisers caught between the hammer of maddened mesquites decsending down the Ridge—like the ominous Birnam Wood from Macbeth to avenge the jackal genocide conducted in the name of the viceroy and his wife who abhorred the sound of their howling—and the anvil of a raging river. Can you picture it? While colonial laments about not-quite-human agencies conspiring against the empire have not gone entirely unregistered, it is the post-colonial legacy of their beliefs, attitudes, and fears of the worlds colonised that bears further scrutiny. For we have accepted uncritically and unreservedly certain notions of hierarchy, competition, selection, as well as the resulting exceptionalism as natural. Unsurprisingly then, these unwitting inheritances remain haunted by a taxonomical terror—a lurking apprehension that the silenced, the backgrounded, and the subdued would one day refuse their assigned places in the order of things, leaving the supremacist and speciesist pyramid on shaky grounds. Indeed, as the background around us erupts insistently and indiscriminately these lurking fears are becoming ever harder to ignore. What thrillers does our disquieted background dictate? In an era dubbed as the ‘anthropocene’—a coinage meant to underscore the disproportionate human hand behind recent catastrophic biospherical shifts—it is no longer tenable to maintain the myth of humanity as discreet from its surroundings, of the world being a garden that we’re divinely (or should we say Darwin-ly?) entitled to ravage with impunity. Through its engagements of the eerie lurking at the periphery of our vision, the exhibition seeks to bring attention to other-than-human agencies and vitalisms that animate our environs, half-known phenomena of which ‘we’ are an inextricable part. In other words, the defamiliarising gaze trained by the exhibition exposes our sanitised worlds as foldings of the contagious outside, leaving the human shivering in all his porous vulnerability, unholy origins and impure constitution. Ecological horror would then appear to stem not only from ponderings of alien motivations at large that are indifferent to our own but also from the revelation of our own motivations as inherently alien. These considerations of the natural weird are thus calculated to confront us with the weird within our natures. How does our ecological awareness shift when we can no longer rely on notions of familiarity and nurture in our framings of ‘nature’? What kind of relationality and ‘humanity’ is cobbled together in the face of a hostile host? Can horror be used to expand our comprehension of causality, enabling better responses to catastrophe as well as processing of ecological existentialism? These are possible lines of inquiry that the exhibition illuminates.