Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781666936414, 9781666936421, 1666936413

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Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India

ECOCRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI

Advisory Board

Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Katarina Leppänen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Recent Titles Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives, edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics, edited by Zélia M. Bora, Animesh Roy, and Ricardo Ballesteros de la Fuente The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters, by Stacy Hoult The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, by Dilek Bulut Sarikaya Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871, by Nicole C. Dittmer Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism, by Keita Hatooka Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth, by Bénédicte Meillon Indian Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Nicole Anae

Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India Essays in Critical Perspectives Edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Slovic, Scott, 1960- editor. | Ghosh, Joyjit, 1969- editor. | Maiti,     Samit Kumar, 1981- editor.   Title: Ecodisaster imaginaries in India : essays in critical perspectives /     edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh and Samit Kumar Maiti.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Ecocritical theory     and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary:     "Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives     contains 15 essays that approach contemporary literary and cultural     representations of ecological disaster in India from various theoretical     angles. The studies engage with many of today's pressing ecological     issues by carefully examining these diverse texts"-- Provided by     publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2023016090 (print) | LCCN 2023016091 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666936414 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666936421 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Environmental disasters in literature. | Natural disasters     in literature. | Ecocriticism. | Indic literature (English)--History and     criticism.  Classification: LCC PR9485.5.E385 E36 2023  (print) | LCC PR9485.5.E385      (ebook) | DDC 820.9/36--dc23/eng/20230609  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016090 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016091 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

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Chapter 1: Imagining Tropical Cyclones in Fiction: Representation of Cyclone Disaster in Selected Indian Novels in English Sk Tarik Ali

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Chapter 2: Green Criminology and the Himalayas: Revisiting the Ecodisaster in Kedarnath Valley Shruti Das

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Chapter 3: Mythical Imagination and the Young Minds: A Reading of Geeta Dharmarajan’s Ma Ganga and the Razai Box as a Metaphor of Hope in Disaster Dona Soman and Renu Bhadola Dangwal

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Chapter 4: ‌‌‌‌‌‌The Trope of the Imperilled Earth in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland 61 Sharada Allamneni Chapter 5: Land, Trauma, and Family: An Ecocritical Reading of Perumal Murugan’s Rising Heat in the Anthropocene Risha Baruah

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Chapter 6: A Vulnerable City, Environmental Apocalypse, and the “Politics” of Climate Disaster: A Comparative Study of The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay and A Cloud Called Bhura 89 Samrat Laskar

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Chapter 7: Negotiating Mourning and Trauma: Imagining the Repertoire in Kamala Markandaya’s The Coffer Dams 105 Richa Joshi Pandey and Dheeraj Pandey Chapter 8: Writing the Grotesque: Poisoned Bodies and Toxic Environment in Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale 125 Sonalika Chaturvedi and Renu Bhadola Dangwal Chapter 9: The Culture of Modernity and Ecological Change: A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 137 Joydip Ghosh and Tajuddin Ahmed Chapter 10: Romanticizing Greenness: A Reading of Rabindranath Tagore from an Eco-theological Perspective Goutam Buddha Sural Chapter 11: Ecological Violence, Peripheral Voices, and the Need for Climate Justice: Reading Jacinta Kerketta, the Voice of Contemporary Jharkhand Shreya Bhattacharji and Roshan Raj Singh Chapter 12: “Cry, children / cry the silence of the earth”: Representation of Climate Change, Environmental Disaster, and Species Extinction in Contemporary Indian Ecopoetry Joyjit Ghosh

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165

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Chapter 13: “The Mangroves are home to predators of every kind”: Performing Ecoprecarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban 199 Ashwarya Samkaria and Debajyoti Biswas Chapter 14: The Bollywood Representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis Debabrata Modak and Tarakeshwar Senapati

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Chapter 15: Radical Landscapes: Analysing Ecodisaster and Human Rights Violations in Irada and Kadvi Hawa 225 Devapriya Sanyal Index

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About the Contributors



243

Acknowledgments

The genesis of the book is a Three-Day International Webinar on “Imagining Catastrophe: Literary and Cultural Representations of Environmental Disaster,” which was organized by the Department of English and Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, Jhargram, West Bengal, India in October 2021. The editors are thankful to the college authority, especially Dr. Deba Prasad Sahu, Principal, for his patronization of the event and generous institutional support. The editors would like to thank all the resource persons, chair persons, paper presenters as well as the keen audience who participated in the lively interactions, shared their knowledge, and offered their thoughtful comments and insights to transform the webinar into a vibrant and memorable academic platform. Special thanks to Prof. Pramod K. Nayar, Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, for his illuminating lecture on “Ecodystopias, Spectral Landscapes and the Ecological Uncanny,” and Prof. Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, India, for her wonderful deliberation on “The Continuum of Selves: Ecological Identity and the Function of Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene.” This book contains selected papers presented at the webinar and the papers invited from the experts in the field of environmental humanities. The editors hereby convey their cordial thanks to all the contributors, particularly Prof. Goutam Buddha Sural, Prof. Shreya Bhattacharji, Prof. Shruti Das, and Dr. Samrat Laskar, who, with a very short notice, contributed their articles, which helped to broaden the thematic range of the volume. The editors are grateful to Vinita Agrawal, the editor of Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020), Shruti Das, the editor of Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2020), Michael J. DeLuca, the general editor of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice (Lake Orion, MI: Reckoning Press), Jacinta Kerketta, the author of Angor (Kolkata: Adivaani, 2016) and Land of the Roots (New Delhi: Bhartiya Jnanpith, 2018), Sudeep vii

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Acknowledgments

Sen, the author of Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (London: Pippa Rann Books & Media, 2021), K. V. Dominic, the author of Contemporary Concerns and Beyond (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2016) for their kind permission to use lines from selected poems included in the anthologies for the respective papers in the volume. At the same time, the editors acknowledge their gratefulness to celebrated poets like Jayanata Mahapatra, Rohan Chhetri, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Usha Akella, Smita Agarwal, Paresh Tiwari, Sumana Roy, Bina Sarkar Ellias, Sudeep Sen, Kiriti Sengupta and Longbir Terang for their permission to use their poems in the essay on contemporary Indian ecopoetry (respectively “I Am Today,” “Fish Cross The Border In Rain,” “Tsunami Snapshots,” “Adam Walking Backward,” “Binsar Barahmasa,” “Milk,” “Global Warming,” “Ode to Planet Earth,” “Disembodied,” “Coterie,” “No One Knows When the Climate will Alter”) included in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose. The editors in this regard are also indebted to Shikhandin for her warm consent to use her poem “When the Haze Descends” included in Reckoning 4: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, ed. Arkady Martin, July 2020. Finally, the editors are hugely indebted to the Lexington Books team, especially Douglas Vakoch and Courtney Morales, for their very patient and competent support in letting the book see the light of day.

Introduction

‘“The aquifer is releasing water; 400 to 500 litres per minute. The slushy water is eroding underground rock, accelerating the subsidence in parts of the town,’ Rautela told The Telegraph on Sunday.” We can at once identify which disaster the very report (dated January 9, 2023) refers to.1 It’s the recent land subsidence in Joshimath, a pilgrimage centre in Uttarakhand in India. The newspaper reports along with pictures bring home the havoc the disaster caused including cracks in hundreds of buildings and roads and water seepage at several places of the town making people refugees overnight. People ask for rehabilitation and continue to protest against the rampant construction of tunnels, hydropower projects, and hotels in the areas, which have long ago been described by geologists as ecologically sensitive. Another report in The Telegraph (dated February 12, 2023) reads, “As days pass into weeks and the cracks in their town widen and deepen, hundreds of people displaced by land subsidence in Joshimath and forced into relief camps are battling against a range of mental health problems, say residents and experts.” The ‘mental health problems’ include “insomnia, anxiety, depression and crippling uncertainty about the future.”2 When we go through these reports, we are reminded of Pallavi Rastogi’s insightful observation that disaster can “bring about short- or medium-term psychological suffering as well as a permanent ontological crisis” (Rastogi 2020, 15). The “insomnia” and “depression” of the people of Joshimath, we may argue, come under the description of their “psychological suffering” whereas the “crippling uncertainty about the future” speaks about an “ontological crisis” of the victims of this ecological disaster. In future we may have narratives of this ecodisaster cutting across media. For instance, the ecodisaster in the Kedarnath valley in 2013 that took a toll of thousands of lives and erased multiple localities has already been represented both in fiction and film. The essays included in the present volume engage in critical and theoretically informed studies of some of the leading literary and cultural representations of ecodisaster in India from the early twentieth century to the present. As of now we have engaged ourselves with the media reports on the recent event of ecodisaster in India. But reports are not obviously stories. In his 1

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foreword to Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that “an essential ingredient of the process by which humans make sense of crises in public life—or feel inspired to work towards solutions—is stories: narratives we tell ourselves in order to find our bearings in a new situation” (Chakrabarty 2015, xiii–xiv). This “new situation” in the current context is disaster—ecological disaster. The focus of the present volume is the “ecodisaster imaginaries” in India. Let us therefore clarify the idea of imaginary in the context of disaster. Gregers Andersen’s discourse on various “imaginaries” of cli-fi (climate fiction) may be a starting point for the present discussion.3 But before we discuss these imaginaries it is essential to revisit the concept of disaster. According to Elizabeth Temin, disasters “can be categorized as natural or manmade, sudden onset or slow onset.”4 Thus, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes are sudden onset examples of natural disaster whereas droughts or epidemics are the slow onset examples. The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2019 and in some form or other continues still across the globe obviously falls under the second category. It erases the conventional divide between the Global North and the Global South and warns us about the terrible consequences of the anthropogenic activities of mankind. Regarding “manmade disasters” Temin cites wars (slow onset), bombings or terrorist activities (sudden onset) (Rastogi 31). This is more or less a sound categorization of disaster. But anthropogenic factors (unchecked expansion of mankind, burning of fossil fuel, burning of stubbles, destroying forest cover, ocean acidification, etc.) contributing to climate change and global warming may also come under the description of “slow onset” manmade disaster. This is exactly where Gregers Andersen’s definition of different types of cli-fi fits in. According to Andersen, “we should make a distinction between fiction depicting climate change worlds in a broad sense and fiction explicitly employing the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming.” Andersen discusses (with suitable examples) five imaginaries or themes in cli-fi: the imaginary of “Social Breakdown,” the imaginary termed “Judgement,” the imaginary termed “Conspiracy,” the imaginary described as the “Loss of Wilderness,” and the last imaginary is that of the “Sphere.” Among these imaginaries, the imaginary of “Judgement” and the imaginary termed as the “Loss of Wilderness” throw light on the central themes of two novels, which the authors of the volume have discussed. The first narrative is Hridayesh Joshi’s Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster (2016), which shows that the river assuming a “monstrous agency” not only gives a judgement on humans for their “reckless behaviour” but punishes them as well for the same. And the second one is Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017) that represents how the actual

Introduction

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event of capitalism-induced toxic disaster in the Indian state of Kerala signals “the end of nature,” borrowing Andersen’s phrase. But are “imaginaries” confined to themes in cli-fi alone? Do they not refer to the themes/tropes of disaster (whether natural or anthropogenic) in ecopoetry as well? When we read such lines in contemporary poetry like “Ice-caps are rapidly melting—too fast to arrest glacial slide”5 or “a white bear thinned to pity on a sliver of ice,”6 we acknowledge that the “edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller” (Haraway 2015, 161). Actually, this signals a paradigm shift from nature poetry to environmental/ ecological poetry. We are referring to the poems included in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (2020), edited by Vinita Agrawal, and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (2021), edited by Sudeep Sen, that deal with burning “imaginaries”—the imaginaries of climate change, global warming, smog and other forms of pollution including plastic pollution, unchecked urbanization, deforestation and species extinction and so on. They signal that “the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present” (Chakrabarty 2021, 35–36). So, we must do something in order to save the planet. One may in this context also speak of the poems included in Reckoning, an online open access magazine (general editor: Michael J DeLuca) published from the United States. The poems often alert us to the fact that it’s a time of reckoning planetary crisis. The subtitle of Reckoning is “creative writing on environmental justice.” The magazine in its own way champions the idea of environmental justice and spreads ecological consciousness. The present volume contains a critical essay on contemporary Indian ecopoetry with references and quotes from the anthologies just mentioned. We have here also an essay on the poetry of Jacinta Kerketta, a poet from the Oraon community in Jharkhand. Her poems poignantly portray ecological violence and environmental degradation posing a threat to the existence of the Adivasis who for centuries have a symbiotic relation with nature. Therefore, we want to give a space to environmental/ecological poetry in the realm of disaster studies that our volume engages with. We have also two thought-provoking essays on the representation of environmental disaster on celluloid. But we shall speak about them later. At the moment let us briefly discuss some of the major literary representations of ecodisaster in India from certain theoretical perspectives. In “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” Anthony Carrigan shows how the “materialist-inspired geographers, anthropologists, and historians” like Kenneth Hewitt, Anthony Oliver-Smith, and Ben Wisner give new directions to disaster studies. While summarizing their views Carrigan argues that it is not adequate to identify “just the agents of ‘natural’ disasters” like cyclones, earthquakes, and floods, among others but it is essential to address “the social, political and economic processes that put

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particular groups at risk and underpin the scale of disasters” (italics in original, Carrigan 2015, 120). The portrayal of ecological violence in Mahasweta Devi’s novella Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha largely fits in this discourse. The author in her conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (who translated the text into English) states, “Whatever has come in the name of development has spelled disaster for the tribes” (Devi 2001, xvi). The novella shows that these tribal people belonging to an obscure village in Madhya Pradesh are “nowhere implicated in Indian education, development, science, industry, agriculture, technology” (Devi 178). But “the worst product of postcoloniality” exploits them with “the alibis of Development” and destroys the “life-system” of this forest-dwelling indigenous community (Spivak 2001, 208). The depiction of ecological disaster here is simply chilling: “The rain fell on the fields and fallow lands on the hillside and the poisonous water flowed into the wells they had dug. They died of drinking that very water. The fleshy tuber of the Khajra is their chief hope. The roots sucked up that water. They died eating the fleshy tuber of the Khajra” (122–123). Mahasweta Devi thus depicts how the people of a particular tribal community, who are always segregated from the mainstream society from the beginning of civilization, face poverty, distress, and famine leading eventually to death in the postcolonial context of ecological disaster. The idea of “postcolonial disaster” is essentially complex because it can involve “mixtures of civil strife, famines, genocidal activities, epidemics and large-scale displacement and movement of refugees.”7 Thus, it is close to the idea of “compound disasters.”8 At this point, one may be reminded of The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019)—the two much discussed novels of Amitav Ghosh. The Hungry Tide offers a virulent critique of the implementation of colonial/neo-colonial environmental projects including conservation of tigers that never attach importance to local needs and specificities pushing the socio-economically disadvantaged people of the Sundarbans to the edge of disaster infamously called the “Marichjhapi Massacre.” Gun Island is an ecodisaster fiction from another perspective. The chapter titled “Tipu” in the novel gives a horrid account of the “long-term consequences” of Aila, a cyclone that devastated the Sundarbans in 2009. We read in the novel that “vast tracts of once fertile land had been swamped by salt water, rendering them uncultivable for a generation, if not forever.” It had a terrible impact on the communities. And it disintegrated the families. Some (the young in particular) drifted to cities and the aged resorted to begging. But worst of all, the traffickers “descended in swarms, spiriting women off to distant brothels and transporting able-bodied men to work sites in faraway cities or even abroad” (Ghosh 2019, 48–49). So, the cyclone resulted in the “displacement” of the islanders at various levels of understanding. The novel reflects that the catastrophic event of Aila is entwined with “slow onset” disasters (which

Introduction

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are composite in nature) that include environmental degradation, poverty, famine, and even prostitution. It is interesting to note that the author does not depict the cyclone as a natural disaster in Gun Island, which he does in the closing chapters of The Hungry Tide. But both of them may be classified as precautionary fiction. Because they are “oriented backward to past catastrophes and forward to potential ones” (Wallace 2019, 21). In other words, The Hungry Tide and Gun Island largely fit in Molly Wallace’s discourse of “precautionary reading in an age of environmental uncertainty.” In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) Amitav Ghosh writes that the scene of cyclone in The Hungry Tide “was extraordinarily difficult to write.” The author, as he tells us, took “preparations for it” and in the process of writing the fiction he could make the “plight” of the characters “frighteningly real” (Ghosh 2016, 44). We all agree with the author. We tend to identify with Fokir and Piya in the scene where they are caught in the fury of the cyclone. But in The Great Derangement Ghosh makes a significant observation that climate change is largely absent from serious fiction of contemporary times. He also alludes to his own fiction in this regard. This is what he describes as “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (12). In Ghosh’s view, the different catastrophes that climate change evokes seem too “improbable” (“unthinkable”?) to be represented in stories about everyday life. Climate fiction generally warns us of the catastrophe of imagined futures “as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (7). But we acknowledge that climate change is a part of everyday reality. Actually, the representation of climate change or climate disorder that is “inherently uncanny” (40) is a challenging task for any fiction writer. But Pankaj Sekhsaria courageously attempts that in chapter 23 (titled “26 December 2004”) of the novel The Last Wave, and he is enormously successful in this regard. The novel can’t be rigidly categorized as a cli-fi because its focus is the story of endangerment of a community and its culture perfectly entwined with the story of love of Harish and Seema. But ecodisaster imaginary takes the upper hand toward the close of the novel as we see that a monstrous natural force comes back and shatters the fabric of life when everything runs smoothly. The portrayal of the “strange sight” of tsunami is awfully compelling”: “And then Harish sensed an ominous movement. The wall of water, even as it kept building up, started to move—towards them. He thought that he heard an angry hissing. It was an irate, petulant sea that was coming back” (Sekhsaria 2014, 260–261). This description of the return of the “angry” sea may remind the informed reader of the concluding lines of Sukrita Paul Kumar’s “Tsunami Snapshots”: “the sea came rushing back / thundering and roaring, / its gurgling lips announcing the tandava.”9 The Sanskrit word “tandava” is almost synonymous with disaster. The description

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of tsunami in the realm of fiction and poetry here thus reveals how “literature provides insights into the imaginative struggles involved in capturing and representing catastrophic events” (Wybranowska 2021, 12). Indian ecodisaster fiction portrays the horror of catastrophic events but at the same time it captures the idea of Anthropocene that speaks of “the emergence of humanity as a dangerous geological force” (Clark 2014, 80). We often state that our entanglement with the earth has turned toxic. We continually commit what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” on the earth—“a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon 2011, 2). Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017), to which we have already made a passing reference, narrates how endosulfan toxicity inflicts “slow violence” on the flora and fauna in the Kasargod district in Northern Kerala when the poisonous pesticide is sprayed over the cashew plantations there. We read in the novel, “Most of the biodiversity disappeared. The water sources dried up. The land is filled with sickly people” (Mangad 2017, 155). But the “calamitous repercussions” of chemical poisoning did not happen overnight. They were slow in operation—slow like the slow and strange death of Pareekshit as narrated by Neelakantan in the novel: “Not dead . . . killed . . . and not with a single blow. Inch by inch. Or millilitre by millilitre.” The remark made by Neelakantan at this critical moment is noteworthy: “the killer is gloating somewhere, invisible” (163). This is how the disaster assumes an active agency in the narrative. The “slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes,” Nixon observes, “present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively” (Nixon 2011, 2). But the novel shows that the victims of the disaster acted “decisively” by organizing a collective protest against the pesticide lobby and the state machinery that formed a nexus among themselves. This certainly adds a positive edge to the narrative. One may be reminded of another leading disaster fiction in this context. It is Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) that deals with the toxic aftermath of the Bhopal disaster in 1984. The novel shows how the “slow violence” of the poisonous gas made a teenager permanently disabled and set him “apart from other characters in the novel who never question their own status as human” (Singh 2015, 137). “Animal” (the name with which the children of the street mocked him when he became disabled) and his people living in the slums of the fictional town of Khaufpur did not get any compensation from the “Amrikan kampani” (American Company), responsible for this horrid industrial tragedy. They were denied the basic human rights by the pesticide plant representing the ugly aspect of globalization. Rob Nixon beautifully writes that the novel reveals how “a neoliberal ideology . . . erodes national sovereignty and turns answerability into a bewildering transnational maze” and

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thereby defers “environmental injury, remediation, and redress.”10 Animal’s People will always be remembered for its advocacy of environmental justice. In his essay “Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change,” Nick Admussen drives home a categorical point: “Literature can no longer hang outside the world.”11 To develop this point Admussen observes, “A typical quality of modern thinking is careful attention to questions of what we can know and how we can know it—ontology and epistemology, two pursuits native to research and theory.”12 When one discusses the issue of climate change, we often fail to move beyond “the ontological (Is it real? What is real?) to the ethical (What should we do?).” The argument of Admussen is that “fewer people believe the truth of climate change than they did ten years ago”13 but he is convinced, “Practical ethics must come from the stories we tell.”14 Ruskin Bond’s story “Dust on the Mountain” is a wonderful example in this context. In the opening section of the story the readers get a presage of the climate change: “Clouds gathered on the horizon but they were white and puffy and soon disappeared. True monsoon clouds would have been dark and heavy with moisture. There were other signs—or lack of them—that warned of a long dry summer” (Bond 2016, 490). The story signals that this “long dry summer” is unusual in the hills and this is largely due to the mindless felling of trees like deodars and oaks for furniture and houses. But what further contributes to environmental hazard is the blast in the mountains. The story unfolds how humans for their selfish interests pollute the air and thereby invite their own crisis: “Dust was everywhere. . . . The leaves of the shrubs and the few trees were thick with it. Bishnu could feel the dust under his eyelids and in his mouth” (499). Bishnu is the chief character of the story who finally leaves the job of blasting and comes back home to work on his own land. Through him the author gives a message: “It’s better to grow things on the land, than to blast things out of it” (502). This kind of frank didacticism might not be liked by everyone but this is meant for those “who feel an intense responsibility for our shared future on earth,”15 to echo Admussen. Akkineni Kutumbarao’s Softly Dies a Lake (2020), translated by Vasanth Kannabiran from the original Telugu Kolleti Jadalu (2014), also speaks of a profound ecological concern and “responsibility for our shared future on earth.” The author in his own account of the novel writes that the novel is about his childhood and adds, “All the people in it are real. That village is real. Kolleru is real.”16 Kolleru is the name of the lake. It was “once dense with plants and creepers and flowers,” but when the novel opens up, we find it in “shards of shattered glass” (Kutumbarao 2020, 1). The image of broken mirror (“shards of shattered glass”) is fascinating because it at once brings home the horror of human-induced disaster. But it suggests the “shards”

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of memory too. The story is told through the eyes of a child whose name is Seenu. As Seenu becomes old, he can’t recognize the lake and its shore. Because the living lake with which the lives of the people of Palaparru were inextricably woven has turned today “a filthy pond, a breeding ground for germs, a danger to the environment, a toxic net of birds.” Who are responsible for it? The answer is, “hands greedy for wealth” (2). The phrase is perfectly loaded as it directs our attention to the agents of capitalism whose activities always pose a threat to the order of environment. In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna Haraway raises a question: “is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the ‘game’ of life on earth for everybody and everything” (Haraway 2015, 159). Her answer is categorical: “It’s more than climate change; it’s also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification . . . etc., etc., in systematically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse” (159). Akkineni Kutumbarao’s novel vividly portrays the tragic “depletion” and death of a lake that leads to the “collapse” of the entire ecosystem. In the concluding paragraph of the novel we read: “for the generations to come the destruction of Kolleru will be one of the catastrophes of history” (197). The comic strips and the comic series, it is important to note, also represent ecological catastrophes and spread the message of environmental consciousness among readers of all age groups through powerful illustrations. Without using any jargon or rhetoric, the cartoons straightaway appeal to sensitive minds and ignite their environmental imagination. Orijit Sen’s graphic novel The River of Stories (1994) is a classic example here. It addresses various environmental concerns and socio-political debates centering around the construction of the Narmada Dam, which is fictionalized as “Rewasagar Dam” in the text. The novel gives messages of the symbiotic relationships between humans and their environments. The section titled “The Mountains Were Changing,” for example, at the beginning illustrates how the developmental projects disturb mountain ecology. Thus, when Ratu Kamai who belongs to the Adivasi community of the locality cries out, “Our mountain is changing. . . . Tigers and bears are roaring” (30), we tend to identify with the agony of the person. Rohan Chakravarty’s Green Humour for a Greying Planet (2021) is another dazzling example at this point. The contents of this comic series are deeply engaging as they address burning environmental issues like “Climate Change and Ecological Imbalance,” “Man-Animal Conflict,” “Wildlife Science and Conservation,” and so on. The representation of anthropocenic awareness in the opening section of the book will at once arrest our attention where a tiger speaks to a man. The tiger admiringly addresses the man as “the big foot” but the man corrects the tiger and retorts, “Nah! That’s just my carbon footprint” (Chakravarty 2021, #2). This “carbon footprint” writes

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the destiny of the planet—the “greying planet.” With the help of “Green Humour,” the author here cautions us against the impending ecological crisis. Let us now turn to the representation of environmental/ecological disaster on screen. We may speak here about some of the representative movies. Indian cinema in contemporary times has often engaged with the portrayal of ecodisaster. One may recall the Bollywood movies like Mohan Sharma’s 26th July at Barista (2008) and Kunal Deshmukh’s Tum Mile (2009) that bring home the havoc caused by storm and rain in the city of Mumbai in 2005. But the calamity here serves only as a backdrop to human drama and environmental concern becomes peripheral. So is largely true of Kedarnath (2018), a Hindi movie directed by Abhishek Kapoor, where an inter-faith love story becomes dominant against the chilling scenes of flood and landslide that disfigured Kedarnath, a holy site of Uttarakhand, and killed thousands in 2013. These films were box office hits. This is largely because they showed human resilience in the face of crisis and the triumph of love over natural disaster. But they disappointed those who wanted environmental issues at the centre of the filmic representation. It is in 2015 that Indian cinema started seriously addressing (although in a humorous fashion) ecological issues with Kaun Kitne Pani Mein produced by Nila Madhab Panda. Water crisis gives a dynamic edge to the caste and class questions raised in the conflict between two villages in the film. In other words, environmental issues are deeply interwoven with burning social issues here. The film attracted positive reviews and was appreciated by critics. But Nila Madhab Panda’s next film Kadvi Hawa (“Bitter Wind”) created a history in 2017. Because it shows that “climate change is here and it is affecting all of us and not just the elite,” to echo the producer’s own words (Fernandes 2017). The film projects the horrid impact of drought on the lives of poor farmers of Mahua, an arid village (fictionalized), where events of farmer suicides are part of everyday reality. The film at the same time represents the impact of flood on the coastal people of a certain part of Odisha. Thus, in a subtle way it addresses the issue of climate justice. The poem of Gulzar recited by the famous Hindi actor Amitabh Bachchan captures the spirit of the movie. Kadvi Hawa largely fits in the discourse of “ecocinema” because it strives to “play an active role in fostering environmental awareness . . . and political action.”17 Apart from environmental concerns, Indian disaster film also deals with the toxicity discourse. Bhopal Express (1999) and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014)—the two cultural texts based on the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 may at once come to one’s mind. Pramod K. Nayar in Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017) argues that in “the Bhopal texts the terrible inheritance is of greed, neglect and incompetence, and the claustrophobia is the effect of a sense of entrapment around the UCIL plant, where the plant expands to enclose the world” (Nayar 2017, 2).

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The argument sounds compelling because while we watch the movies, we feel a terrible “sense of entrapment,” as if all on a sudden our escape routes are closed, and we are caught in a world of gothic horror. Irada (2017) is a sensitive film based on a real story of ecological disaster owing to chemical poisoning and reverse boring. The film warns us against the anthropogenic activities without being preachy. A recent Malayalam film titled Puzhayamma (2021)—meaning “Mother River”—is also worth mentioning at this point. The film brings alive the horror of river pollution and enhances our respect for the planetary ecosystem. The present volume contains fifteen well-researched essays on ecodisaster imaginary in India cutting across literary/cultural media. Essays on the fictional representations of ecological/environmental disaster obviously dominate here. It is because novels and stories effortlessly reach the consciousness of readers and make them alert when disaster has become a part of our day-to-day existence. When we are writing this introduction to the volume, reports of landslide in Kashmir burst upon us. But the role of poetry in this context is never less than that of fiction. The titles of poems in anthologies of poetry of contemporary times like “Rising Sea Levels,” “Global Warming,” “Ode to Planet Earth,” “Earth Overshoot Day,” and “Tipping Point” are deeply suggestive of the fact that we can no longer ignore climate crisis and anthropogenic disaster. Whether poetry or any form of literature can save us from the brink of disaster is no longer a question that we ask. Because we acknowledge that literature can open our eyes to environmental degradation and exhort us to put a check on the so-called human progress and development when it is hazardous to the eco-sphere and threatening to the existence of the non-human other. Amitav Ghosh’s verse narrative Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021), illuminated by Salman Toor, “holds up the principles of equitable sharing, respect for all living creatures, and interaction between human and non-human that are our only hope of survival on this damaged planet,” to echo the words of Supriya Chaudhuri (Chaudhuri 2021, 7). Films here also often take a responsible role in the age of planetary crisis. They address issues of ecological import, caution us to environmental hazards, and explore the problematics of environmental justice. Current Indian films address the issues of industrial/toxic disaster, too. Thus, the present volume, we believe, has a tremendous relevance in today’s context when we are supposed to mend our ways before it is too late. Let us now briefly summarise the contents of the chapters. We start with the essays on the novels addressing the natural disaster. Sk Tarik Ali’s essay “Imagining Tropical Cyclones in Fiction: Representation of Cyclone Disaster in Selected Indian Novels in English” addresses the question of literary representation of climate change-induced cyclone disaster in the contemporary Indian English fiction. By making a quick survey, Ali

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demonstrates that cyclone storms have figured prominently not only in several canonical British and American literary works, but also in regional literatures of the different Indian states, popularly known as Bhasha literatures, especially in Oriya and Bengali literatures. But, notwithstanding the increasing frequency, greater intensity, and longer duration of the tropical cyclones in India in recent years, he argues, cyclone disasters figure rarely in imaginative literature in India, particularly in the contemporary Anglophone fictions. Glaring exceptions are, however, Manoj Das’s Cyclones (1987), where cyclone acts both as a background and a metaphor, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), which incorporate both real and fictional representations of cyclones along with their disastrous aftereffects. If in The Hungry Tide Ghosh describes the immediate catastrophic effects of cyclone, in Gun Island he focuses on the indirect and incremental violence, or “slow violence” (Nixon) of cyclone that intersects with the issues of climate injustice, climate change-induced migration, vulnerabilities of the “ecosystem people” (Gadgil and Guha). With the exception of these three novels, the contemporary Indian English fiction shows an apathy towards representation of cyclone disaster, thus indicating “a crisis of imagination” (Ghosh) in the Indian literary context. Green criminology, which involves thinking about environmental offences, offenders, and victims of environmental damage, is the focus of Shruti Das’s essay “Green Criminology and the Himalayas: Revisiting the Ecodisaster in Kedarnath Valley.” Based on Hridayesh Joshi’s account of the Kedarnath disaster in Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster (2016), the essay examines how and to what extent “green crime” is responsible for the ecodisasters in the Himalayas since the British colonial times and makes a critical enquiry into the commercialization of sensitive ecospaces. Das’s study is basically motivated by an inquisitiveness to explore the diverse aspects of the exploitation and neglect of nature, and find alternatives for sustainable future. “Mythical Imagination and the Young Minds: A Reading of Geeta Dharmarajan’s Ma Ganga and the Razai Box as a Metaphor of Hope in Disaster” by Dona Soman and Renu Bhadola Dangwal critically explores the age-old tradition of storytelling in indigenous myths, which offer deep insights into the affective dimension of human learning and carry great possibilities for promoting ecological and cultural knowledge and values. The authors make a clinical analysis of Geeta Dharmarajan’s Ma Ganga and the Razai Box and demonstrate that the mythological imagination and wisdom can effectively be used to comment not only on the urgent environmental concerns of pollution, flooding, and soil erosion but also on the posthumanist thought of interconnections between the human and the non-human world for the recuperation of the present planetary crisis.

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Sharada Allamneni’s “The Trope of the Imperilled Earth in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland” makes a nuanced reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s two works, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013), to examine how she responds to the ecological issue and the notion of the “Anthropocene.” Allamneni reads Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth as a crucial text for an understanding of the intersections of contemporary discourses on geopolitics, global capitalism, and liberal capitalism, all of which are vitally responsible for environmental degradation. Allamneni engages with Lahiri’s other work, The Lowland, to explore the issues of social and environmental change under capitalism like rampant consumerism, unplanned industrial growth, the resultant urban squalor, contrasting demographic histories, human infringement of Nature’s delicate balance and the global warming. With the intersection of ecocriticism with other approaches like postcolonialism, geocriticism, and Anthropocene studies, “land,” which has been conceived as a natural, cultural, and political construction in the neo-colonial period has often been seen as an imperialist tool of territorial annexation and spatial transformation aided by agencies like globalisation, capitalism, development, technology, and modernism. Risha Baruah’s “Land, Trauma, and Family: An Ecocritical Reading of Perumal Murugan’s Rising Heat in the Anthropocene” investigates the dynamics of how land has become a site for contestation of biopower in the Global South, while also being the fundamental source of indigenous identity, communal harmony, and the ancestral past and how it generates environmental, emotional, social, and filial trauma in the Anthropocene. “A Vulnerable City, Environmental Apocalypse, and the ‘Politics’ of Climate Disaster: A Comparative Study of The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay and A Cloud Called Bhura” by Samrat Laskar is a comparative study of two recent Indian texts—the first is Varun Thomas Mathew’s speculative fiction The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) and the second is Bijal Vachharajani’s cli-fi A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue (2019). While attempting to strike a balance between the extremities of despair and hope with speculations about environmental apocalypse as well as imagining a hopeful future induced by motivated human interventions, Laskar’s essay examines the way the local converges with the global as Mumbai, the fictional locale of both the texts, becomes the synecdoche of all places vulnerable to anthropogenic climate crisis. Richa Joshi Pandey and Dheeraj Pandey’s essay “Negotiating Mourning and Trauma: Imagining the Repertoire in Kamala Markandaya’s The Coffer Dams” is concerned with the issues of trauma and mourning in the context of anthropogenic ecological disaster as narrated in Kamala Markandaya’s novel The Coffer Dams. The authors re-read the novel with an objective to explore the inter-relationship of marginalized peoples and places, hitherto ignored by

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the modernity, and to make a critical re-assessment of the postcolonial repertoire and archive of “nation-building,” because the archive and the repertoire together constitute cultural memory in postcolonial India. Using the theoretical conceptualizations of Diana Taylor and Jacques Derrida, the authors turn our attention towards a postcolonial Indian imaginary in order to envision a new “community of purpose” that gestures towards the incorporation of trauma suffered by those who are/may be dis-narrated in the face of ecodisaster. Such a reading of the text opens up the gaps in the national archive and identifies the possibilities within the repertoire, “so as to recuperate the inter-relationship of space and emergent, evolving, hybrid and marginalized entities within a globalized and racialized world.” Sonalika Chaturvedi and Renu Bhadola Dangwal’s essay “Writing the Grotesque: Poisoned Bodies and Toxic Environment in Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale” draws our attention to the pervasive malignant effects of the toxic environment on human body and the literary representation of the physical deformities, poisoned bodies, and the depiction of “grotesque” and the “distorted” in Ambikasutan Mangad’s widely influential novel Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017). Intersecting the discipline of disability studies with the environmental humanities, the essay gives an informative account of the disastrous effects of Organochlorine pesticide on the people of Kasaragod, and the eventual slow and steady contamination and distortion of human bodies caused by the lethal bio-chemical pollution and toxic environment. The authors use Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality” and, more extensively, Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” as theoretical tools for understanding the event of ecodisaster, and link the Endosulfan tragedy in Kerala to two other instances of ecological disaster in India: the Bhopal Gas Disaster in Madhya Pradesh and the Green Revolution in Punjab, which made certain regions in the two states ecologically vulnerable and jeopardised the lives of local people. While the essay critically negotiates with the issues of environmental injustice and vulnerability of the marginalised sections, it advocates for a more inclusive society where “disabled-marginalized bodies can position and voice themselves.” In an attempt to trace the historical roots of the origin of modern anthropogenic climate change, Joydip Ghosh and Tajuddin Ahmed focus in their essay “The Culture of Modernity and Ecological Change: A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” on close interconnections among nature, culture, science, politics, and industrial development, all of which, in some way or the other, they argue, are associated with climate change. As the history of environmental degradation in India is closely linked with the history of colonial modernity, the authors show how vulnerabilities of the megacities like Mumbai and Chennai are immensely increased because of the erroneous foundation planning of the

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colonizers along the coastline, and for Western modernity’s grand sweep of capital-dense economies that continually undermine ecological concerns. “Romanticizing Greenness: A Reading of Rabindranath Tagore from an Eco-theological Perspective” by Goutam Buddha Sural is a critical exploration of the select genres of literary works, particularly poems, prose writings, and plays, by Rabindranath Tagore, one of the earliest environmental thinkers in India. In his attempt to foreground the element of “greenness” in Tagore’s writings, Sural focuses on the seminal environmental writings of Tagore and reveals his concerns for environmental hazards, urgency for conservation of nature, and, most importantly, for a crucial need for the recognition of the interrelationships between humans, animals and the environment. All these issues make Tagore’s writings extremely relevant in the context of contemporary anthropogenic ecological crises and environmental predicament. Moreover, the eco-theological aspect of Tagore’s writings becomes evident in Sural’s perceptive analysis of Tagore’s philosophical belief, which holds that there is “a kinship between the divine and the earthly and a divine spirit inheres multiple species, beings and substances of the created universe.” Shreya Bhattacharji and Roshan Raj Singh focus in their essay “Ecological Violence, Peripheral Voices, and the Need for Climate Justice: Reading Jacinta Kerketta, the Voice of Contemporary Jharkhand” on the adverse impacts of ecological degradation and anthropogenic climate change on the indigenous communities in India, particularly the tribals of Jharkhand state. For this purpose, the authors have selected the poems of Jacinta Kerketta, a young poet belonging to the Oraon tribe of Jharkhand, and examine her poems which address the issues of environmental degradation, ecological violence and the demand for climate justice. Jacinta Kerketta, the authors argue, is “the voice of those living at the periphery of social, economic and political structures,” those pushed to the margin of the national imaginary, and those tribal people who are highly vulnerable in the face of anthropogenic environmental crises and ecodisasters. In his essay, Joyjit Ghosh first of all attempts to define ecopoetry in the context of existing definitions of this form of poetry. He then concentrates on the representation of climate change, environmental disaster, and species extinction among other burning issues in contemporary Indian ecopoetry. The essay has four core sections including “Climate Change and ‘Ecoprecarity,’” “Anthropogenic Ecodisaster and Global Warming,” “Deforestation and the Defamiliarization of the Earth,” and “Species Extinction and Ethical Entanglement with the Other.” In order to substantiate his argument, the author offers illustrative references from the poems included in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (2020), edited by Vinita Agrawal, and Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems (2020), edited by Shruti Das, although there are references to poems in other anthologies as

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well. The last section problematizes the issue of didacticism in the body of Indian ecopoetry of the present day. Ashwarya Samkaria and Debajyoti Biswas engage with an exploration of human-nonhuman vulnerabilities as represented in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) in their essay “The Mangroves are home to predators of every kind”: Performing Ecoprecarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban.” By employing Pramod K. Nayar’s idea of “ecoprecarity” and Scott Slovic’s concept of “literary precarity,” Samkaria and Biswas show how Ghosh creates an environmental literary text through a child-like imaginative storytelling which interweaves text, image, and rhythm, and advocates for the need of a posthumanist “multispecies thinking” by replacing the acquired behaviours of the anthropocentric thinking for communicating the life-threatening reality of climate change crisis. Debabrata Modak and Tarakeshwar Senapati’s co-authored essay “The Bollywood Representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis” is a nuanced study of the cinematic representation of environmental disasters, particularly Bhopal Gas Tragedy, in the Indian Hindi cinema, popularly known as “Bollywood movie.” The authors argue that while Bollywood cinema remains an immensely popular form of mass entertainment for the Indians, the representation of natural or man-made disasters in the mainstream commercial movies is significantly rare. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of “Discourse,” Modak and Senapati critically analyze how mainstream Bollywood films such as Bhopal Express and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain represent the perilous event through cinematic mediums and how, in order to fit into the construction of a commercial movie, many other important concerns pertaining to the environmental disaster were compromised. Devapriya Sanyal proposes to look at the issue of filmic representation of natural calamities and human rights violations in the face of anthropogenic climate change in her essay “Radical Landscapes: Analysing Ecodisaster and Human Rights Violations in Irada and Kadvi Hawa.” Irada is a horrific filmic representation of bio-chemical pollution, caused by uranium poisoning, reverse boring, fertilizer poisoning, and so on, and toxic environmental effects on the people of Malwa region of Punjab, which witnessed the unprecedented benefits of the Green Revolution in the 1960s. Kadvi Hawa is a picturization of terrible effects of drought and an unforgiving landscape in the fictional Bundelkhand region. Through an analysis of the films and a documentary, “Invisible Demons: A Documentary,” Sanyal addresses the question of human rights violations caused by the anthropogenic ecodisasters and examines the role of films in developing a mass awareness for the immediate mitigation of the environmental problems.

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We hope that the present volume on ecodisaster imaginaries in India will significantly contribute to the study of ecodisaster in the postcolonial context and at the same time open up new avenues in the field of disaster studies as a whole. NOTES 1. G. S. Mudur, “Geologist’s Joshimath warning: Cracks foretold 12 years ago,” The Telegraph, January 9, 2023. https:​//​epaper​.telegraphindia​.com​/index​.php​ ?pagedate​=2023​-1​-9​&edcode​=71​&subcode​=71​&mod​=1​&pgnum​=1​&type​=a. 2. “Psychiatrists treat insomnia, anxiety: Joshimath grapples with trauma,” The Telegraph, February 12, 2023. Print. 3. See “Cli-fi: A Short Essay on Its Worlds and Its Importance,” 23 May 2014. https:​//​dragonfly​.eco​/cli​-fi​-short​-essay​-worlds​-importance​/ 4. Elizabeth Temin in a chapter titled “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction” in Disaster Medicine observes, “It is useful to apply a framework in thinking about the differences and similarities in disaster.” Disaster Medicine, ed. Gregory R. Ciottone (Philadelphia: Mosby Elsevier, 2008), 317. 5. The line is quoted from “Disembodied,” a poem by Sudeep Sen. It is included in Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (London: Pippa Rann Books & Media, 2021), 28–29. 6. The line is quoted from Alvina Pang’s poem “Limit.” See the poem in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020), 35–36. 7. These words of Quarantelli are quoted in Anthony Carrigan’s “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies.” See Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al. (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2015), 121. 8. In “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” Anthony Carrigan discusses the different ramifications of what UN calls “complex emergencies (or sometimes compound disasters), 121. 9. See the poem in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020), 31–34. 10. Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque,” vol. 55, no. 3, Modern Fiction and the Ecological: The Futures of Ecocriticism (Fall 2009), 444, Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: https:​//​www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/26287366. 11. Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform,” n.p. 12. Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform,” n.p. 13. Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform,” n.p. 14. Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform,” n.p. 15. Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform,” n.p.

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16. The words of the author are quoted from “This is the Truth” in Softly Dies a Lake translated by Vasanth Kannabiran from the original Telugu Kolleti Jadalu, with a foreword by Kalpana Kannabiran (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020), xxi–xxii. 17. Paula Willoquet-Maicondi, “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism,” in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 10.

REFERENCES Admuseen, Nick. “Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.” https:​//​criticalflame​.org​/six​-proposals​-for​-the​-reform​-of​-literature​-in​-the​ -age​-of​-climate​-change​/. Agrawal, Vinita, ed. Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose. New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020. Andersen, Gregers. “Cli-fi: A Short Essay on Its Worlds and Its Importance,” May 23, 2014. https:​//​dragonfly​.eco​/cli​-fi​-short​-essay​-worlds​-importance​/. Bond, Ruskin. “Dust on the Mountain.” In Collected Short Stories. Gurgaon: Penguin Books, 2016. Carrigan, Anthony. “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies.” In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al. 117–139. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2015. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Foreword. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. Ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al. New York and London: Routledge, 2015.  ———. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2021. Chakravarty, Rohan. Green Humour for a Greying Planet. Gurgaon: Penguin Books, 2021. Chaudhuri, Supriya. “A Parable of our Times.” Biblio (April-June 2021): 7–8. Clark, Timothy. “Nature, Post Nature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling, 75–89. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. DeLuca, Michael J. Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Lake Orion, MI: Reckoning Press, December 22, 2016. https:​//​reckoning​.press. Devi, Mahasweta. Imaginary Maps. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Thema, 2001. Fernandes, Stephen. “KADVI HAWA: This Land Fears Humans.” IndianShowBiz.com. November 30, 2017. http:​//​www​.indianshowbiz​.com​/​?p​=156054. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. Noida: HarperCollins, 2009. ———. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Gurgaon: Penguin Books, 2016. ———. Gun Island. Gurgaon: Hamish Hamilton. 2019. Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6 (2015): 159–165. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/26287366.

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Kutumbarao, Akkineni. Softly Dies a Lake. Translated by Vasanth Kannabiran from the original Telugu Kolleti Jadalu, with a Foreword by Kalpana Kannabiran. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020. Mangad, Ambikasutan. Swarga: A Posthuman Tale. Translated by J. Devika. New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017. Nayar, Pramod K. Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Nixon, Rob. “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque.” Modern Fiction and the Ecological: The Futures of Ecocriticism, vol. 55, No. 3 (Fall 2009): 443–467. ———. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Poray-Wybranowska, Justyna. Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel. New York and London: Routledge, 2021. Rastogi, Pallavi. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Sekhsaria, Pankaj. The Last Wave: An Island Novel. Noida: HarperCollins, 2014. Sen, Orijit. River of Stories. Pune: Kalpavriksha, 1994. Sen, Sudeep. Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation. London: Pippa Rann Books & Media, 2021. Singh, Julietta. “Post-humanitarian Fictions,” symplokē, vol. 23, No. 1–2, Posthumanisms (2015): 137–152. University of Nebraska Press, Stable URL: https:​ //​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.5250​/symploke​.23​.1​-2​.0137. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. London: Pocket Books, 2007. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Appendix. Mahasweta Devi: Imaginary Maps. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Thema, 2001. Temin, Elizabeth. “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction.” In Disaster Medicine, edited by Gregory R. Ciottone. Philadelphia: Mosby Elsevier, 2008: 317–321. Wallace, Molly. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Willoquet-Maicondi, Paula. “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism.” In Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 1–22. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Chapter 1

Imagining Tropical Cyclones in Fiction Representation of Cyclone Disaster in Selected Indian Novels in English Sk Tarik Ali

In this age of climate crisis and the growing popularity of the discipline of literary environmentalism, one intriguing question that involves the essence and purpose of the rapidly growing field of environmental literary criticism is: what role does imaginative literature play in dealing with environmental problems and climate-related risks which can, as it is sometimes believed, only be solved by scientific and technological means? Although the cornucopians1 and purist scientists do not take humanities and literature into consideration while addressing the issue of the climate solution, the humanists believe that together with science, literature and the humanities play an important role in spurring climate action. As regards the role of literary responses to the eco-environmental crisis, environmental writers emphasise the ethical and symbolic side of storytelling in communicating environmental concerns to readers. The ecocritics likewise agree that symbols, images, tropes, forms, and other aesthetic dimensions in an environmentally inflected literary text help in laying out the environmental problems in the form of stories. Lawrence Buell has observed that imaginative engagement with the climate crisis is an important prerequisite for understanding and addressing the problem: For technological breakthroughs, legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will. To 19

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that end, the power of story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory are crucial. (2005: vi)

There is no denying that the representation of individual experiences of unlikely ecological changes in imaginative literature renders the impersonal and empirical data on environmental crisis perceptible to the human mind. By “dramatiz(ing) the occurrence of large events in individual lives” imaginative renditions of eco-catastrophe bring attention to the “slow violence”2 of climate change that otherwise evades our imaginative capacities (Kerridge 1998: 6). The incremental environmental changes which are apparently latent and invisible are communicated by the imaginative elements in literature. These ecocultural functions of imaginative literature substantiate the argument that the problems of climatic rupture cannot be engaged with through the lens of science and technology alone and that a productive dialogue between imaginative literature and climate change problems provides the insights and “imaginative space” necessary for imagining and perceiving the planetary emergencies facing humanity today (Bracke 2019: 8). It is important to quote here what Dipesh Chakrabarty observes in his foreword to Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015): [A]n essential ingredient of the process by which humans make sense of crises in public life—or feel inspired to work towards solutions—is stories: narratives we tell ourselves to find our bearings in a new situation. . . . Our success in developing a globally concerted response to the climate crisis, for instance, will depend on the degree to which we can tell stories that we can all agree on. (2015: xiii–xiv)

It has generally been assumed that among all the literary forms, the novel is particularly well-suited for exploring and engaging with the climate crisis because of its formal conventions. The novel as a counterfactual narrative is an important site for capturing and portraying the climate disasters that have become routine events on the “thoroughly humanized earth” today (Vermeulen 2020: 10). The use of psychological realism in novels helps in conveying the traumatic impacts of environmental changes, particularly of the slow and accretive kind. Considering the suitability of novel form in imagi(ni)ng the climate catastrophe, Astrid Bracke observes, In novels, past and present can be revisited, different futures can be imagined, and responses and experiences tried out. Hence, in a time of global climate crisis novels function as experimental spaces in which actual and imagined circumstances are played out, in which ethical and moral dilemmas are considered and in which the world can be understood. (2019: 7)

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According to Adam Trexler (2015), in the Anthropocene, the novel has become an important art form for addressing the planetary crisis, particularly because of its imaginative capacity of transforming abstract and complex predictions into tangible human experiences. He has observed that “novels are artifacts that produce meaning in their own, unique ways. The imaginative capacities of the novel have made it a vital site for the articulation of the Anthropocene” (Trexler 2015: 23). Fiction, therefore, plays a vital role in forming popular perceptions of the climate crisis. It “shape(s),” as Kate Rigby has observed, “how we prepare for, respond to, and recover from increasingly frequent and . . . unfamiliar forms of eco-catastrophe” (2015: 2). However, despite the growing number of climate change induced-tropical cyclones with increasing intensity and longer duration in recent years in India, the issue has hardly been represented in Indian literary fiction. Except for some contemporary novels like Manoj Das’s Cyclones (1987), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), and Gun Island (2019), the extreme weather event of cyclone storm has not found much expression in Indian English novels in particular. This chapter looks into the representation of cyclone disasters in select Indian Anglophone novels with Amitav Ghosh’s charges of the “crisis of imagination” forming the critical framework of the argument. CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE “CRISIS OF IMAGINATION” Despite the crucial role narrative fiction plays in helping us cognise the climate crisis and in shaping the climate change imagination, it is really surprising, as Amitav Ghosh has observed, that climate problems figure so seldom in literary fiction. In his 2016 polemic The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh observes that despite the overbearing presence of climate crisis in our time, serious fiction has failed to come to terms with climate breakdown. Ghosh finds that although represented in genre fiction, climate change has hardly featured in serious fiction, and “fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals” (2016: 7). Pointing to the modern novel’s obsession with individual moral adventure and the relegation of the nonhuman to the role of inert backdrop in them, Ghosh deduces that literary writers have failed to find the form and language to address the climate crisis in a plausible manner in literary imagination and that climate change has been represented in such ways in serious fiction that it appears unbelievable, extraordinary, and implausible. Environmental catastrophes have, in fact, been cast in such a way in serious, realist fiction that they have been discounted as something uncanny, unreal, and extraterrestrial. Ghosh states,

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Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel. (2016: 7)

In fact, the manifestation of climate change in the form of extreme weather events makes it practically difficult to represent climate catastrophe in literary fiction. Ghosh shares his own experience to substantiate his argument about the fiction writer’s challenges in imagining and representing the climate crisis in their works of fictional imaginings: I have been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it is true of my own work as well, that this subject figures only obliquely in my fiction. . . . I have come to be convinced that this discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction. (2016: 11)

Actually, the ineffability of climate change due to its immateriality and invisibility makes it particularly challenging to represent it in the literary imagination. This failure in imagining and representing the hyperobject of climate change in fiction is considered a “crisis of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016: 9) and “a crisis of culture” (Hartman 2017: 73). This “imaginative and cultural failure,” in fact, poses a “challenge to our ability to make sense of the world around us” (Marshall 2014: 2). According to Ghosh, the inability to imagine the menace of climate change affects the popular perceptions of climate change and impedes our response to the climate crisis as a whole. The climate crisis is, therefore, “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” (2016: 12). As regards fictional engagement with the climate crisis, there is an entire genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) that uses the template of “disaster stories set in the future” to warn us of the impending catastrophe (Ghosh 2016: 72). But the fact is that climate change is not a problem of imagined futures. It is happening now and here. The human appropriation of the natural environment has so far crossed the critical threshold that ecological catastrophe has become a routine event in the contemporary world. The climate fiction’s representation of climate emergency as a distant threat happening in some “imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one” sabotages the popular perceptions of climate change and the responses to it (Ghosh 2016: 72). Moreover, the existing canon of climate fiction represents only the physical dimensions of climate change, and the philosophical, political, social, and cultural implications of anthropogenic climate change have been overlooked in them.

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TROPICAL CYCLONES IN LITERARY IMAGINATION In the time we are living in, the collapsing ecosystems and extreme weather events have been so profoundly impacting human lives in so many multiple ways that it is not virtually possible to deny the reality of climate change anymore. Among all the freakish weather phenomena, something that is most frequent these days and that has perhaps been affecting human lives to the profoundest extent is tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclone is, in fact, a generic term that refers to the combination of a number of natural hazards such as storm surges, squalls, lightning, torrential rain, and inland flooding originating over the tropical and subtropical regions of the world’s oceans. Meteorologists and climatologists have found a close connection between climate change–related impacts on one hand and the increasing frequency, greater intensity, and longer duration of tropical cyclones in recent times on the other. The long-term heating of the planet’s climate increases the sea surface temperature resulting in the formation of a low-pressure zone and consequently, prepares the breeding ground for severe cyclone storms. A scientific study based on the analysis of satellite records over the period from 1979 to 2017 notes a 15% increase in cyclones with a wind speed of about 185 km/h. The region which is the most vulnerable to cyclone storms today is the North Atlantic, which has witnessed an alarming 49% rise in cyclonic activities per decade. The Southern Indian Ocean and eastern North Pacific Ocean have also witnessed an exponential increase in cyclonic activities in the last four decades. Although there is no scientific consensus on it, this upward trend in the number and intensity of cyclonic activities is believed to be induced by the thorough resetting of the planetary constellations by the oversized impacts of human activities. In earlier times cyclone events were seen in terms of divine retribution. It was believed that just like other natural disasters, storms were sent by the divine power to purify the world and free it of sins and sinners. It was a widely held view that cyclonic storms were apocalyptic chaos that provided an opportunity for revelation, redemption, and renewal, and people who survived the catastrophe of cyclones were believed to be righteous, devout, and elect people deserving to live on the planet earth. However, this myth of divine intervention has become irrelevant in today’s world where human beings have transformed themselves from a member of the larger ecological community to the planet’s most powerful geological force. In the Anthropocene, Bill McKibben observes, “hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man” (2006: xviii). India, with a coastline of around 7,516 kilometers, is highly vulnerable to being hit by tropical cyclones. For ages, the coastal areas of the country have been hit by a number of tropical cyclones originating over the Arabian

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Sea and the Bay of Bengal. In an article written by scientists associated with the Ministry of Earth Sciences and Indian Meteorological Department, it has been shown that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019 India faced as many as 117 cyclones ranging from the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 to Cyclone Fani of 2019.3 In the recent past, India faced intense tropical cyclones like Yaas, Phani, Nisarga, Tauktae, Jawad, and Amphan that took a heavy toll on human lives, property, and coastal ecology. The growing number of cyclones and the intensification of cyclone-related multi-hazards pose a serious threat to India’s vast coastline, and the situation has become worse particularly because of the poor socio-economic condition of people exposed to cyclone risks in the country. However, despite the growing frequency, increasing intensity, and prolonged duration of tropical cyclones in recent years in India, cyclone disaster has not found much expression in fictional imaginings in the country. As regards the representation of tropical storms in imaginative literature, cyclone storms have appeared in different forms and roles in many canonical texts in British and American literature. The dramatic and powerful nature of tropical cyclones makes them significant plot elements and dramatic background to human drama in fictional narratives. One of the earliest representations of tropical cyclones in English literature is found in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest where Prospero, the magician, whipped up a dramatic sea storm with the help of Ariel, and the action of the play results from the fictional storm. It is important to note here that whereas in texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Douglas Reemans’s Path of the Storm (1966), and John Gordon Davis’s Typhoon (1979), we see representations of fictional tropical storms, in novels like Carl Hiaasen’s Stormy Weather (1995) and Denis Lehane’s Shutter Island (2003), real tropical cyclones like Hurricane Carol and Hurricane Andrew have been fictionally represented. In narratives like Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon” (1902), George R. Stewart’s “Storm” (1941), J. G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1961), T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), and Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (2014), we see tropical storms having a significant place in the plot of the narratives. In most of these narratives, cyclone storms have been represented either as symbolic background or as a kind of MacGuffin contributing to the development of the plot. In many of these texts, thunderstorms have been knit into the plot to highlight the mood and attitude of the characters. In some cases, cyclones have also been used as symbols suggesting chaos or transition or uncertainty or eruption of emotions. Considering the diversity of approaches to cyclone disaster in the literary imagination, Chrystopher J. Spicer, who has written a thesis on the representation of cyclones in Queensland literature, writes,

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Some writers, such as Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, have seen within cyclones the Burkean sublime, the beauty within the terror. For other writers, such as Thea Astley, Vance Palmer, and Patrick White, the cyclone brings spiritual epiphany and personal revelation, while also motivating community strength and compassion as people ignore differences and work together to survive and rebuild. Some writers see the cyclone within themselves as a personal trope, as Susan Hawthorne observes in her poetry. Other writers such as Alexis Wright see a deep and abiding spiritual bond between weather and country, between people and place, which speaks of our future as well as our past. (2018: iii)

However, except for some recent novels like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2012), which is set in the context of Hurricane Katrina of 2005, and Beth Kephart’s novel This Is the Story of You (2016), which represents the horror of Superstorm Sandy of 2012, the issue of cyclone disaster has not been addressed in relation to climate change–related impacts. In contemporary cyclone fiction, climate phenomena are not passive presence; they are rather active agents influencing, altering, and propelling the plot. In these novels, the authors use the “judgment imaginary”4 to show how nature’s violent forms are the expressions of their response to human appropriation of the other-than-human and how climate disasters are “the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms” (Ghosh 2016: 43). CYCLONE DISASTER IN INDIAN NOVELS IN ENGLISH It is really surprising that despite India’s vulnerability to getting hit by tropical cyclones and despite the increasing frequency and intensity of tropical storms over the past few years in the country, literary imagination in India has hardly been engaged with cyclone disaster and the violence it unleashes in catastrophic and gradual ways. In the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s list of fictional books and plays featuring real or imagined tropical cyclones, there is no Indian text.5 Cyclone hazards have indeed found scattered expression in Bhasha literature of the states that form a significant part of the Indian coastline. If we take Odia literature, for instance, in Pratibha Ray’s novel Magnamati (2004), which retells the horror of the Odisha super cyclone of 1999, the cyclone is the most powerful actant that propels the entire narrative. The aesthetics of tropical cyclones permeate Bengali literature too, and there are a good number of Bengali novels featuring cyclone storms. In such popular Bangla novels as Manik Bandopadhay’s Padma Nodir Majhi (Boatman of the River Padma), Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titas

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Ekti Nodir Naam (A River Called Titash), Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), storms and associated hazards have been represented as crucial plot elements. As recently as in Kunal Ghosh’s novel Baghbidhoba (2020), which is set in the cyclone-prone region of the Sundarbans, cyclone and cyclone experiences appear to form a substantial part of the narrative. However, except for some limited imaginative engagement with tropical storms in the Bhasha literature of coastline states like Odisha and West Bengal, cyclone storms do not feature prominently in Indian literary imagination as a whole. This absence of imaginative renditions of cyclone disaster is particularly conspicuous in Indian novels in English. The Indian novelists writing in English have hardly shown any genuine interest in representing tropical storms in the form of the story. This lack of fictional engagement with cyclone hazards is, in fact, a part of larger imaginative struggles that make climate change resist assimilation in fictional imaginings. Ghosh writes, I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer . . . derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was writing the destiny of the earth. (2016: 7)

One probable reason for this lack of imaginative response to cyclone storms in Indian Anglophone fiction may be the positionality of the Indian novelists writing in English. The Indian Anglophone novelists live mostly in the shelter of the cities not directly exposed to the vagaries of weather the coastal regions are subject to. Some of them even live outside the country. Therefore, most of the time when a severe weather phenomenon like a cyclone hits, they remain relatively sheltered and unaffected. The lack of personal and direct experience of cyclone disaster prevents these authors from imagining the actual or potential impacts of cyclone storms in their works of creative imagination. Moreover, most Indian English novels have been terrestrial in nature, and very little is set on the coastlines. If we try to make a list of the Indian Anglophone novels featuring cyclone storms the first name that comes to our mind is Manoj Das’s novel Cyclones. As early as in 1987, Das, a prolific writer from Odisha, wrote a story where a cyclone acts both as a background and a metaphor. The story is set in a small coastal village named Kusumpur, which is devastated by a cyclone storm, and what follows is a conflict between the colonial government and local people over the issue of filling up a river named Kheya and the local people’s resistance to it. In the novel the cyclone also acts as a metaphor suggesting the tension that gripped the nation during the turbulent time of the

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Indian independence movement. It also signifies the turmoil that Sandip has to go through in his fight against the gigantic colonial administration. The cyclone is also suggestive of the tension and turbulence Sandip undergoes in his personal relationship with women like Geeta, Reena, and Lalita. Initially, the approach of the storms appeared to be “awesome and exotic” (Das 2010: 169) to Sandip, a scion of the zamindari family, but as the cyclone stroke he realized that “he had never known such ferocity of nature” (Das 2010: 170): He [Sandip] could faintly see a row of palm trees mowed down by the wind, almost simultaneously. Huts raised by boatmen camping there for collecting wood collapsed like houses of cards, their thatches blown away and scattered in the air. . . . [S]oon he heard others observing that even the oldest grandfather in the village had no memory of anything similar. . . . The cyclone had spared no tree tall enough to respond to the wind in the village. The devastation had been stunning. (2010: 169–172)

The devastation caused by the cyclone shocked Sandip and brought a significant transformation in his approach to life. He was reluctant to come back to the village initially. In the village, he “was growing restless, whipped up by the memory of his recent exciting days in the town” (Das 2010: 168). It is the experience of the disaster that brought significant changes in his attitude to the village and the villagers. He gave shelter to the batches of refugees in his mansion and helped restore the village devastated by the cyclone storm. It is only after the storm that he felt attached to the village and stood for the villagers’ causes in leading the movement against the filling up of river Kheya, the lifeline of the village. It is the chaos of the cyclone that seems to have affected this change in his inner state and his outlook. That the cyclone has some divine associations or some weird implications has been suggested by the uncanny experience of Nishamoni during and after the storm: One of the oldest woman, Nishamoni, who was alone in her farmhouse, a hut outside the locality, miraculously survived the cyclone, though the hut had been flattened, but she never spoke for the remaining few months of her life. It was rumoured that something uncanny and unheard of had taken place during the last phase of the cyclone. Luminous as a meteor, a deity sped through space riding a white flying horse, crying out, “Calm! Calm!” Only then did the cyclone begin to subside. The consensus was that the darting being was the spirit of cyclones in the process of withdrawing the weird elements let loose by her. (2010: 177)

The poor villagers of the Kusumpur village became victims of both the sudden-onset and slow-onset impacts of the cyclone. The destruction of the bazaar by the cyclone resulted in a price hike first, and ultimately famine

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loomed large in the area. However, “the experience [of the cyclone] must have been necessary” for the villagers, particularly for Sandip because it taught them the value of resilience in life (2010: 260). Thus, in Das’s text, the cyclone disaster acts in more than one way. It serves as a symbolic background. It highlights the mood and attitude of the central character. And it also signifies chaos for change. In Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, which is set in the vulnerable ecosystem of the Sundarbans delta, we find reference to one real cyclone and representation of two fictional ones. In the novel, Ghosh narrates the story of how a colonial officer named Henry Piddington (who coined the term “cyclone”) highlighted the tide country’s exposure to “the turbulent energies of the Bay” (2004: 286). When Piddington-shaheb came to know about the Viceroy’s plan of establishing a new port in Canning at “an unfortunate conjunction of winds and tides,” he warned that the port would be drowned by cyclonic storms in just fifteen years (2004: 286). True to his prediction, the new port was completely destroyed “not by some great tufaan but by a relatively minor storm” (2004: 287) in just five years. Ghosh’s reference to Piddington-shaheb, his prediction about the Canning Port, and the ultimate destruction of the port by a storm surge highlight the Sundarbans’ susceptibility to cyclones, storm surges, and coastal floods. It is important to note here that in the last three years, the Sundarbans delta has been hit by as many as four cyclones—Bulbul in 2019, Amphan in 2020, Yaas and Jawad in 2021. Again, Ghosh’s depiction of Horen’s experience of the 1970 Bhola cyclone shows the severity and deadliness of it that struck the Ganges delta of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and India’s West Bengal, claiming almost three lakhs human lives: It was well after the end of the monsoons, and Horen had gone out to sea in his uncle Bolai’s boat. . . . There was no formal warning system in those days and the storm had taken them completely by surprise. One minute there was sunshine and a stiff breeze; half an hour later a gale had hit them from the southwest. . . . The wind was so fierce that there was no resisting its thrust. It had swept them before it in a northeasterly direction. For a couple of hours they could do nothing other than cling to the timbers of their boat. Then, all of a sudden, they had found themselves heading toward a stretch of flooded land: they could see the crowns of some trees and the roofs of a few dwellings, huts and shacks for the most part. The storm’s surge had drowned most of the shoreline; the flood was so deep that they didn’t know they had made landfall until their boat slammed into a tree trunk. The boat’s planks came apart instantly, but Horen and his uncle managed to save themselves by clinging to the tree. The third member of their crew also took hold of a branch, but it broke under his weight. He was never seen again. (2004: 348–349)

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Ghosh continues to describe the after-effects of the Agunmukha cyclone in graphic details to foreground the horror of the disaster: They spent two days in the tree, without food or any additional water. . . . [I]t was as if they were in the vicinity of some terrible battlefield massacre. There were corpses everywhere, and the land was carpeted with dead fish and livestock. They found out that three hundred thousand people had died. “Like Hiroshima!” said Kanai under his breath.‌‌‌‌ ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌. . . That was Horen’s experience of a cyclone, and the memory of it would last him through a second lifetime—he never wanted to have it repeated. (2004: 349–350).

Nirmal was also caught in a cyclonic storm that led him to meet Kusum in her dwelling in the tide country. In this case, the cyclone acts as an important plot element because the storm-induced meeting between Nirmal and Kusum turns out to be a very important one in Ghosh’s exploration of the environmental realities of the Global South through the representation of the Marichjhapi massacre in the novel. Nirmal’s knowledge of the Sundarbans’ vulnerability to cyclone storms makes him particularly careful about taking anti-cyclone measures in the construction of the hospital building of the Badabon Trust: Although he had rarely interfered in anything to do with the Trust, when the hospital was under construction Nirmal had taken the trouble to find out if any anti-cyclone measures had been provided for. He was horrified to learn that they hadn’t: did nobody know about the tide country’s history of catastrophic cyclones? (2004: 133)

Finally, the tidal storm scene in which Fokir saves Piya’s life in a sacrificial embrace foregrounds the extensive damage to the coastal ecology of the Sundarbans by cyclonic disturbances. The cyclone disaster, although apparently represented as an occasion for the expression of sacrificial love, indicates the dreadful impacts of human-induced disaster on a fragile ecosystem and a group of disenfranchised people on the fringe. The scene of Fokir’s sacrificial embrace in saving the life of Piya when confronted with a cyclone storm has been recreated in Pankaj Sekhsaria’s novel The Last Wave (2014) where Seema, a local-born anthropologist, sacrifices her life in saving the life of her love Harish when confronted with the giant tidal waves of Tsunami. In both novels, the climactic scenes of wild winds contribute substantially to human drama as the incidents of the storm, chaos and loss bring significant changes in the inner states and opinions of the living partners. In the fashion of Ghosh’s text, Sekhsaria’s narrative highlights the threat to the immense

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ecological richness and cultural diversity of “islands in flux” caused by developmental intervention; and as in Ghosh’s novel, there is also an extreme weather event towards the end, a tsunami-induced storm surge in this case that acts as little more than a plot advancer. Unlike Salman Rushdie’s portrayal of the Sundarbans as a sublime and mystical space in Midnights’ Children (1982), Ghosh represents the badabon as geography with an extraordinary agency. The idea that human actants control a narrative is debunked in the novel where the nonhuman actants like windstorms and tidal surges are as active and alive as human characters. Justyna Poray-Wybranowska has rightly observed that the novel The Hungry Tide insists that the nonhuman too can be an actant—that the status of “actant” is not bestowed onto the nonhuman by the human, but is an inherent property of the nonhuman itself. This is an important distinction, one which goes against Enlightenment ways of thinking, wherein actancy is ordained by active human subjects and then projected onto a passive world of objects. The text thus frames human beings as actants embedded in a network of other-than-human actants. (2021: 165)

Again, in Gun Island (2019), which seems to have been written to answer the questions posed by Ghosh about climate change denial and the crisis of imagination in The Great Derangement (2016), Ghosh’s fictional engagement with cyclone disaster leads him to represent the “slow violence” of Cyclone Aila that hit the coastal region of Bangladesh and West Bengal of India in 2009. In this climate novel, Ghosh interweaves myth, legend, magic, and memoir to show how the migration problem and refugee crisis in the present world are integrally connected to the climate change problem. In his representation of Cyclone Aila in Gun Island, Ghosh does not describe the immediate catastrophic effects of the cyclonic storm as he does in The Hungry Tide. Rather, he focuses on the indirect and incremental violence of the disaster and narrates how the cyclone disaster resulted in a massive exodus from the Sundarbans to Kolkata: The way this disaster had unfolded, Moyna told me, was quite different from the cyclones of the past. . . . Yet Aila’s long-term consequences were even more devastating than those of earlier cyclones. Hundreds of miles of embankment had been swept away and the sea had invaded places where it had never entered before; vast tracts of once fertile land had been swamped by salt water rendering them uncultivable for a generation, if not forever. The evacuations too had produced effects that no one could have foretold. Having once been uprooted from their villages many evacuees had decided not to return, knowing that their lives, always hard, would be even more precarious now.

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Communities had been destroyed and families dispersed; the young had drifted to cities, swelling already-swollen slums; among the elderly many had given up trying to eke out a living and had taken to begging on the streets. The Sunderbans had always attracted traffickers, because of its poverty, but never in such numbers as after Aila; they had descended in swarms, spiriting women off to distant brothels and transporting able-bodied men to work sites in faraway cities or even abroad. Many of those who left were never heard again. (2019: 48–49)

Ghosh shows how climate change–induced extreme weather events have become routine phenomena in the lives of the Sundarbans islanders and how the lives of these “ecosystem people”6 are critically affected by freakish weather phenomena. He foregrounds how in the Sunderbans, communities shrink and become climate refugees when their islands sink due to the upsetting of weather patterns across the world. In an interview Ghosh points out the predicament the Sundarbans people went through after Cyclone Aila hit the archipelago: After Cyclone Aila particularly, the Sunderbans were really heavily impacted. Even though not as many people died because of evacuations, after that you really see a mass migration out of there on an almost unimaginable scale. Life in the Sunderbans was always hard but now it’s become almost impossible.7

Ghosh’s engagement with cyclonic storms also finds riveting expression in The Great Derangement where he tells the story of his personal experience of a freak tornado in 1978 in Delhi. I had just passed a busy intersection called Maurice Nagar when I heard a rumbling sound somewhere above. Glancing over my shoulder I saw a grey, tube-like extrusion forming on the underside of a dark cloud: it grew rapidly as I watched, and then all of a sudden it turned and came whiplashing down to earth, heading in my direction. (2016: 16)

Ghosh’s incorporation of personal stories in an otherwise critical discourse on the history and politics of climate change renders the statistical data and scientific reports on climate change clearly visible. In this context, it is important to note what the environmental humanist, Karen L. Thornber observes about “the power of story” in forming people’s perceptions of their surroundings: “The power of story is particularly significant. Our sense of reality, our understandings of who we are and of our relationships with our surroundings, generally are constructed around stories, not around quantitative data” (2012: 5). Thus, among the Indian novelists writing in English, it is Amitav Ghosh who tells the stories of cyclones, both real and fictional. In his narration of

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cyclone stories, Ghosh has particularly been careful to highlight climate injustice and people’s unequal exposure to climate variability. By telling the cyclone stories of the Sundarbans islands, Ghosh seems to foreground the problem of “unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities” that characterizes the present Oliganthropocene8 (Nixon 2011: 8). It is really interesting and apparently paradoxical that Ghosh who has spoken about the crisis of imagination in integrating ecological concerns into literary imagination incorporates freakish weather events like cyclone disaster into his narratives. Ghosh’s representation of cyclone events in his narratives well contradicts his argument about the failure in imagining climate change in literary fiction. This can be interpreted as a classic example of the Lawrentian maxim of “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” (Lawrence 1977: 8). In the three Indian Anglophone novels discussed here, cyclonic storms feature in different forms and features with unpredictable consequences. Importantly enough, these three novels are set on the coastlines of Odisha and West Bengal respectively. Hardly is found any novel other than these three in Indian Anglophone literature where cyclone activities feature prominently either as a symbolic background or for signifying the menace of the climate crisis. CONCLUSION Towards the end of the 20th century when novels started representing climate concerns in the form of stories, formulaic sets of words and images were used for representing the potential threats of climate change. Popular climate change fiction mostly consists of apocalyptic, abstract, sensationalist, and futuristic action-hero narratives that tell climate stories in exciting and melodramatic plotlines. In these narratives where plots of fatalism and survival dominate, climate change is usually represented as a far-off threat happening in some distant future. Although they produce shocks and sensations, they fail in bringing climate change into popular imagination and in engaging readers with the seriousness of the issue. Given this science fiction account of climate change in the majority of climate novels, what we need is climate fiction that makes climate change relevant to people by telling personal stories of climate change in a plausible manner. The discussed novels of Das and Ghosh tell personal stories of cyclone disaster allowing us to imagine the climatic rupture and inspiring us towards ecological thinking. However, apart from the novels discussed here, Indian Anglophone fiction has failed in bringing the climate change–induced cyclone disaster into imagination, and this failure in incorporating the cyclone storms into literary fiction marks the “crisis of imagination” and the “crisis of culture” as a whole. As weather-related

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disasters continue to increase, so will the challenges of living with them. In the face of this awful predicament, it is the stories of shared suffering, resilience, and collective adaptation that can unify communities and prepare them for future climate impacts. And that is perhaps the significance of cyclone fiction amidst the apparent meaninglessness of the chaos and catastrophe of cyclone storm. NOTES 1. Cornucopians are people who deny the reality of ecological crisis on the ground that there is still abundance of resources on earth to provide for the exponentiallyincreasing human population. They believe that whatever environmental problems we are seeing can easily be solved or overcome by technological means. See Greg Garrard’s book Ecocriticism (Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2012), 19. 2. In his book Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon defines “Slow Violence” as a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is not seen as violence at all (2). The invisible and accretive nature of slow violence makes the effects pervasive and elusive. According to Nixon, “slow violence” affects the poor people the most and “their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of slow violence” (2011: 40). See Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). 3. See https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/india​/india​-faced​-117​-cyclones​-from​ -1970​-2019​-over​-40000​-lives​-lost​-study​/articleshow​/83007370​.cms. 4. In his essay “Cli-fi: A Short Essay on Its Worlds and Its Importance,” Gregers Andersen has divided novels on climate change into five “imaginaries.” These are Social Breakdown, Judgment, Conspiracy, Loss of Wilderness, and Sphere. The Judgment imaginary include stories where nature strikes back and gains a monstrous agency to take revenge on humans for their unprecedented exploitation of the other-than-human world. Andersen observes that the cultural history of this imaginary dates back to The Epic of Gilgamesh and to the legend of Atlantis, among others. According to Andersen, the judgment imaginary can be found in Kevin Ready’s Gaia Weeps (1998), Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2004), and the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004). See https:​//​dragonfly​.eco​/cli​-fi​-short​-essay​-worlds​ -importance​/. 5. See https:​//​www​.aoml​.noaa​.gov​/hrd​/tcfaq​/J4​.html. 6. In their book Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India (1995), Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha call the people dependent upon their immediate environment for sustenance the “ecosystem people.” According to Guha and Gadgil, these people are the victims of resource-intensive and socially unjust development in the country.

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7. Ghosh makes this observation in an interview with Harsimran Gill. See https:​//​scroll​.in​/article​/927202​/my​-book​-is​-not​-an​-apocalyptic​-book​-at​-all​-i​-guess​-im​ -leaving​-hope​-as​-a​-possibility​-amitav​-ghosh. 8. The current environmental predicament is certainly related to the politics of inequality that allows life of overconsumption and affluence to one group at the cost of the deprivation and dispossession of certain other sections. This link between environmental crisis and socio-economic inequalities has led Erik Swyngedouw to propose the name Oliganthropocene that refers to the fact that different constituencies are differently implicated in the processes of climate emergencies. The idea of Oliganthropocene foregrounds that ecological vulnerability is disproportionately experienced across the globe and that different factors such as race, ethnicity, economic status and class affect the ways the catastrophic environmental disaster and incremental environmental changes are experienced by individuals living in different parts of the world.

REFERENCES Bracke, Astrid. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2005. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Foreword.” In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al., xii– xiv. Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2015. Das, Manoj. Cyclones. Haryana: Penguin Books India, 2010. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HaperCollins, 2004. ———. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Haryana: Penguin India, 2016. ———. Gun Island. Haryana: Penguin Random House India, 2019. Hartman, Steven. “Climate Change, Public Engagement, and Integrated Environmental Humanities.” In Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, edited by Stephen Siperstein, et al., 67–75. Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2017. Kerridge, Richard. “Introduction.” In Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, 1–10. London: Zed Books, 1998. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Marshall, George. Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 2006. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2011.

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Poray-Wybranowska, Justyna. Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel. Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2021. Rigby, Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Sekhsaria, Pankaj. The Last Wave. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014. Spicer, Chrystopher J. “The Cyclone Written into Our Place: The Cyclone as Trope of Apocalypse and Place in Queensland literature.” Ph.D. dissertation, James Cook University, 2018. Thornber, Karen L. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Vermeulen, Pieter. Literature and the Anthropocene. Abingdon-on-Thames and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Chapter 2

Green Criminology and the Himalayas Revisiting the Ecodisaster in Kedarnath Valley Shruti Das

The natural environment that sustains human populations appears to rebel against us, wreaking havoc on our lives and throwing into question our very identities. —Mark Anderson, Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (2011, 1)

What Mark Anderson wrote in the context of Latin America, rings true in the context of ecological disaster in the Himalayas discussed in this chapter. The Himalayas, which is home to a range of medicinal plants, precious trees, perennial rivers, and fauna that covertly support the ecosystem, have been sustaining human population for centuries. The recent ecological disasters are indicative that it is indeed rebelling against human invasion and exploitation throwing human identity into a problematic. The old adage “Man uses his old disasters as a mirror” couldn’t be more apt as regards the recurrent disasters in the Himalayas. The landslide and the recent environmental disaster faced by the people of the pilgrim town of Joshimath is reminiscent of the Kedarnath disaster that happened in 2013 precisely ten years ago. In January 2023 the Indian media was loudly criticizing the ecological disaster in the Himalayas, particularly Joshimath, a small religious town in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand in India, which was sinking. Joshimath, situated at an altitude 37

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of 6,000 feet above sea level, sank almost two inches causing houses to collapse and creating huge cracks in the roads and buildings. Environmentalists, activists, scientists, and the people of Joshimath blamed the unchecked developmental agendas of the government, which disturbed and displaced the underground earth layers, for the disaster and their tragic plight. The Times of India, a leading daily of India, reports that for decades environmentalists have been warning about the fragile ecology of the region, which has become more vulnerable by the construction of “dams, roads, military sites” and by the increasingly enormous footfall of adventure tourists, hikers and religious tourists to the sensitive region, at seismic risk, over years (Joshimath 2023). The Joshimath disaster is a reiteration of the Kedarnath disaster, another religious site of the Hindus located close to Joshimath, in June 2013. The Kedarnath temple is one of the major shrines of Hinduism located in the Kedar Valley, in the Lesser Himalayas in the State of Uttarakhand in India, about 12,000 feet above sea level. The area is prone to landslides and flooding from rivers Mandakini and Bhagirathi, which run very close to it. Heavy rains, cloudbursts, unusually heavy flooding of Mandakini and breaching of the banks of a lake just above the Kedarnath temple in June 2013 led to the loss of thousands of human lives and about 10,000 mules and also led to the collapse of mountains. The study of the disaster in Kedarnath valley in June 2013 caused by cloudbursts and the flooding of river Mandakini and its impact on people who were visiting the shrine during the time and also on the local people of that area, as depicted by Hridayesh Joshi in his book Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster (2016), will enable us to look closely at the exploitation and neglect of nature which led to devastation of such magnitude. This paper is concerned with the ecological and human disaster that happened in the Kedarnath Valley in Uttarakhand in June 2013 wherein towns and villages were completely destroyed as also the lives of thousands of humans and animals. Concern about environmental offences, offenders and victims who suffer as a result of environmental damage comes under the purview of green criminology. Here “green” means the wild areas of the world which humans harness and which mandates a duty towards its protection and green crime refers to the exploitation and neglect of the vulnerable green areas of the world. The critical interest in this paper has much to do with the narrative of the Kedarnath disaster depicted as first-hand narration by Hridayesh Joshi and also with the governmental apathy in protecting the Himalayas which amounts to grievous green crime. Within the limited scope of this paper, I shall analyze how and to what extent green crime is responsible for the major ecological disaster in the Himalayas since the British colonial times and suggests a deep introspection into the commercialization of sensitive ecospaces. The analysis is based on Hridayesh Joshi’s account of the Kedarnath

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disaster, which happened in June 2013 killing thousands of people and erasing multiple towns, in his book Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster. KEDARNATH VALLEY: ITS MYTHICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND ECOLOGICAL SENSITIVITY To understand the environmental disaster and the massive human tragedy that happened in June 2013 in the Kedarnath valley it is important to understand the religious history of the place, one of the root causes of such disaster. Kedarnath is one of the most important shrines of the four shrines or Char Dhams in Uttarakhand, namely, “Yamunotri (of the goddess/river Yamuna), Gangotri (of the goddess/river Ganga), Kedarnath (of the god Shiva), and Badrinath (of the god Vishnu)” (Whitmore 2018, 2), which the Hindus believe they should visit in order to attain salvation. Hindus believe that Lord Shiva, the nurturer of the universe and the destroyer of evil forces, is self-manifested in Kedarnath. Whitmore clarifies the complex Hindu belief and notes that “Shiva’s presence in Kedarnath specifically is ‘self-manifest’ (Sanskrit: svayambhu). He dwells, not in a form created by human hands, but rather in a form that was always already there” (4). It is here that the communion of earth and water is authenticated in the Hindu religious myth of the holy Ganga. The flowing of the River Mandakini, a tributary of river Bhagirathi, from the white glaciers into the lower Himalayas localizes and validates the famous Hindu myth of Goddess Ganga descending in her aquatic form to salvage the cursed ancestors of King Bhagiratha in response to his ardent prayers. Whitmore explains the story of Ganga’s relationship with Shiva, here Lord Kedarnath. The story reveals the deep ecological philosophy behind the myth of the flowing of “the goddess Ganga in her river form into the world . . . [which] underscores Shiva’s relationship to the Goddess in her aquatic manifestations. Ganga descends at the request of King Bhagiratha, who has performed thousands of years of ascetic practice so that the souls of his ancestors may be purified through the presence of Ganga on earth. Ganga finally assents but says that her unfiltered power would be too much for the earth to bear. Thus a mere trickle of the full power of the Ganga exits the protective filter of Shiva’s matted hair and enters our world” (4) [brackets mine]. In many mythological stories Kedarnath is associated with the pious point of transition where the human in bodily form left the world to enter Heaven to attain communion with the Gods. One such story is narrated in the famous epic The Mahabharata. After the great war of Mahabharata, the five Pandava Princes, Yudhistira, Bheem, Arjun, Nakul, and Sahadeva, with their common

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consort Draupadi, decide to renounce their political duties along with all worldly pleasures and embark on a journey climbing the Himalayas in order to cleanse themselves of their karma and attain Heaven: They walk up into the Himalaya and thence to heaven on what is known as the Mahapath/Mahapanth, the Great Path. The oldest brother, Yudhishthira, does so without leaving behind his physical body. This feat aligns itself with one of the central themes of tantric practice—liberation through the body as opposed to liberation as exit from the material world. The Kedarakalpa (Sanskrit: meaning “account of Kedara”), a late tantric text of uncertain date, tells the story of five spiritual adepts who walk a version of the Great Path into the mountains that passes through the Kedarnath locale and beyond into the abode of Shiva (Goswamy 2013; Viśālman. i Śarmā Upādhyāy 1952; Padumā and Hajārībāg 1907). In the narrative worlds that touch on Kedarnath one finds a sense of the place as a limit point, a door to zones beyond. (Whitmore 2018, 7–8)

The cultural and religious myths and the lure of cleansing karma establish a deep philosophical relationship between the human and the divine and attracts thousands of pilgrims to Kedarnath each year. Apart from the lure of religion the pristine austere beauty of the Kedarnath valley attracts hundreds of tourists all year round. The Kedarnath valley, which hosts the Kedarnath temple, is flanked on three sides by the Himalayan Mountains with river Mandakini flowing through it. Therefore it is important to discuss the topography and geographical sensitivity of the region. The Himalayas, spreading over five countries and lying to the North of India, are the youngest mountain ranges of the world and a sensitive ecospace. It was created by the collision of the Indian plate with the Eurasian plate some 40 million years ago. The collision threw up sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, limestone, and sandstone from under the ocean and formed the Himalayan mountain ranges. Because of these sedimentary and metamorphic rocks the topography of the Himalayas is ever fragile, constantly subject to soil erosion and frequent landslides. The mountain suffers frequent earthquakes since the tectonic plates are still unstable as the Indian plate, which during the collision had slid above the Eurasian plate is still pushing it northwards. According to the article titled “Himalayas: History, Geology and High Peaks,” “The net effect of plate-tectonics forces acting on this geologically complicated region is to squeeze parts of Asia eastward toward the Pacific Ocean. One serious consequence of these processes is a deadly ‘domino’ effect: tremendous stresses build up within the Earth’s crust, which are relieved periodically by earthquakes along the numerous faults that scar the landscape” (“Himalayas: History, Geology and High Peaks,” n.p.). While geological explanations of landslides are acceptable both scientifically and politically, the victims, journalists and geo-scientists were

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perplexed by the incessant heavy rains that continued for over forty-eight hours in the Kedarnath valley resulting in the massive flooding of Mandakini and the breach in the bank of the Chaurabaari Lake situated a little above the Kedarnath temple. Responding to the Kedarnath disaster, the Delhibased National Institute of Disaster Management investigated the matter and submitted a placid report that heavy precipitation along with the melting of glaciers due to the rise in temperature during the months of May and June had caused the rivers to flood and the lake to breach its banks. They further reported that “[t]he drainage studies indicate a migratory/shifting nature of the river systems that cause aggradations on the concave end of the river and degradation/toe erosion on the convex part of the river. Due to the morphological setting of the area, the river has high sinuosity and hence, a high level of erosive capacity, especially when it is loaded with sediments” (Joshi 2016, 61–62). The ecological disaster that happened in the Kedarnath valley was not a limited localized event in that particular Himalayan range, rather in the same year, that is, 2013, “floods and landslides caused havoc right from the Kali Ganga valley at the border of Nepal to the Sutlej valley in Himachal Pradesh. Many geologists categorized this as ‘one single event with composite factors’” (Joshi 2016, 62). Even the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) released satellite pictures of the scenarios (before and after the disaster) “to explain the possible causes of the tragedy” (2016, 64). In this context it is relevant to understand the importance of satellite pictures. Ramachandra Guha, a noted social scientist, contends, Satellite pictures, real and imagined, help us understand the radical changes in the Indian landscape. . . . It is a landscape in which the natural world is continually being replaced by a world of artefacts: where tree, shrubs and grasses are giving way to plantations and crop fields, roads and buildings; where rivers are being increasingly impounded with waters diverted through underground tunnels to turn giant turbines or merely being disciplined to flow along paths straight and narrow; where old wetlands are being drained and new ones created in the form of waterlogged fields. (Gadgil and Guha 1995, 1)

The seismically active Himalayan landscape has been similarly victimized and exploited by people and the state. Mridula Ramesh, in her article “Joshimath’s Salvation Lies on a New Path but Will We Walk It?” published in the Sunday Times of India on 15 January 2023, expresses her concern regarding the Himalayas: “the rocks are so young, rain and snow melt percolate within, creating aquifiers beneath the surface” (Ramesh 2023, 10). She explains: Then there are the dams. The Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric project lies a few kilometres from the town. In 2009 a tunnel boring machine employed in

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this project punctured an underground aquifier and released about 60–70 million litres of water daily for nearly a month! That’s an astounding volume of water— about 5,000 Airbus A-320s worth—that used to sit below the ground. When that water was released, the land over it could potentially sink—almost like a slowly deflating balloon. Next, when we build roads or houses, we blast the hills to flatten out the land and clear trees. Blasting destabilizes land. Tree roots act like scaffolding holding onto the land on steep slopes. When we remove them and intense rain falls on a bald slope, it can pull it downward. (10)

Mridula Ramesh’s arguments and explanation of the causes of ecodisaster that happened exactly 10 years after the Kedarnath disaster is a serious pointer to the sensitivity of the Himalayas and to the profit motive of the state agencies at the cost of all else. Ramachandra Guha goes beyond the geo-scientific reason of terrain destruction and blames individuals, organizations, and the government for environmental destruction. He rightly argues that “peasants saw their forests being diverted by the state for commercial exploitation; pastoralists saw their grazing grounds taken over by factories and engineering colleges; tribals lost their lands and homes to hydro-electric projects; artisanal fisherfolk were squeezed out by large trawlers” (Guha 2010, xii). Guha is concerned about nature being ravaged and in the context cites E. F. Schumacher, a German economist, who in 1954 wrote pointing at the delicate nature-human relationship that “‘Mankind has existed for many thousands of years and has always lived off income. Only in the last hundred years has man forcibly broken into nature’s larder and is now emptying it out at a breathtaking speed which increases from year to year’” (Guha 2010, 90–91). He also cites Lewis Mumford, who in 1955 had “warned that the ‘awful omniscience and the omnipotence of our science and technology’ might ‘turn out to be more self-destructive than ignorance and impotence.’ He deplored the rule of ‘power, prestige and profit’” (2010, 91). The Kedarnath ecological disaster in June 2013 and the sinking of Joshimath in January 2023 are points in cases of the rule of power, prestige, and profit where sensitive ecospaces like the Himalayas become victims of commercialization and profit mongering. ECOLOGICAL DISASTER AND GREEN CRIMINOLOGY Hridayesh Joshi notes that Uttarakhand, in the Himalayas, is host to mountains, forests, and nearly “fifteen mighty watercourses. . . . Streams that emerge from the Himalayas form the upper Gangetic plain. . . . These rivers and streams form an integral part of one of the most important and ecologically fragile biospheres in the world” (Joshi 2016, xviii). One of the first

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journalists to reach Kedarnath after the disaster that happened on the 16 and 17 June of 2013, due to the flooding of river Mandakini and the Chaurabaari lake breaching its banks as a result of cloudburst, Joshi describes in graphic detail how the Kedarnath valley, a place that attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, comprising the towns of Gaurikund, Rambara, Jangalchatti, and Bheembali, and the Kedarnath shrine were affected geographically, emotionally, and psychologically as a result of the deluge. He shockingly notes that there “was nothing left of Rambara after the disaster except a vertical cliff” (Joshi 2016, 81) and that all that was left of the town was “about 250 survivors sitting amidst corpses” (81). Rambara was a town only seven kilometres short of Kedarnath, in fact at the bottom of the incline to the Kedarnath temple. Joshi’s detailed account of the site brings home the severity of the disaster. He says, When we reached there we were struck dumb. We couldn’t see Rambara at all! Usually, on our way to Kedarnath we would often spot the green tin roof of the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam’s guesthouse. It was nowhere to be seen. Where there used to be the Rambara market, always full of people and bustling with activity, was today replaced by the angry, surging Mandakini. The river, which looked like a benign stream on other days, had multiplied a hundred times over in volume today. Huge boulders were strewn all over the place. The whole scene was extremely horrifying. . . . [M]ost of the mountain had been washed away. (70–71)

The human tragedy unfolds as Joshi describes the horrendous plight of the thousands of survivors trapped in the debris, amidst corpses and in various other places in the Kedarnath valley in the aftermath of the floods. Those who had escaped the floods were dying of cold, high altitude, hunger, and hypothermia. One such survivor was a person called Atul, who had come to Kedarnath from Delhi with eight members of his family comprising his wife and his three-year-old daughter, father, brother Sanket, Sanket’s wife, and two children. “When the river breached the banks and the mountains began to crumble, Atul and his family were in between Rambara and Kedarnath” (84). A chaotic situation ensued, and Atul lost all his family members. The next day, that is, on 17 June Atul found his brother Sanket, who by that time was seriously ill and eventually succumbed to death. A rescue team on 20 June found Atul sitting holding the dead body of his brother and refusing to let go of it. He was ultimately convinced that his brother was dead and that he could not stay with the dead body of his brother. He was brought to Delhi, but the tragedy had left an indelible scar on his psyche. Atul’s story is only one example of many such cases amongst the survivors of the Kedarnath tragedy.

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Mark Anderson in his book Disaster Writing describes how human identity, power and dominance is put to question in a natural disaster. He notes, Nothing shakes one’s worldview more than the experience of a natural disaster. Disaster by definition is conceived of as a rupture or inversion of the normal order of things; natural disaster denotes that moment of disjuncture when nature topples what we see as the natural order of human dominance. The natural environment that sustains human populations appears to rebel against us, wreaking havoc on our lives and throwing into question our very identities, as disaster reconfigures suddenly and brutally the lifelong relationships that we have fostered with other people and the places we inhabit. Replenishing rains that nourish lives and livelihoods suddenly transform into raging torrents of destruction that erase the signs of human dominance from the landscape. (Anderson 2011, 1)

This is exactly what happened in the Kedarnath Valley in June 2013. Their faith in themselves brutally shaken, the survivors of the disaster questioned their identities as superior creations of God. These people who thought that dominating nature was their prerogative found themselves suddenly at the mercy of nature. Brian Deyo in his article “Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene” (2018) argues that in the anthropocentric urge to establish mastery over nature humans expose their ecological blindness (195). He posits that “tragedy, like the Anthropocene, engenders an array of affects that in turn unsettle what Val Plumwood refers to as the master model of human identity.” As Plumwood states, it is “a model of domination and transcendence of nature, in which freedom and virtue are construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the sphere of nature, necessity, and the feminine” (Deyo 2018, 196). This brings us to the question of the role of the state as regards protection of environment and people and leads to the domain of green criminology. Green criminology is a recent study that has developed to address the growing discontent over the state’s exploitation of nature for profit. It addresses the anxiety and concerns of environmental victims and involves critique of actions of nation-states and transnational capitalism for fostering harm on the environment and for failing to adequately address and regulate harmful environmental activity (White and Heckenberg 2014, 1). Harm is a normative concept predicated upon cultural values of good and bad which in turn formulate the yardsticks of harm. The yardstick of environmental harm is sustainability, referring to ecological and environmental balance. “The deliberate destruction or depletion of resources that significantly impact a region’s economic or ecological stability would therefore be considered an environmental crime . . . as would those harms associated with the concept of ecocide” (12). White and Heckenberg point out a dichotomy inside green

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criminology that “[h]arm, as conceived by critical green criminologists, for example, demands more encompassing definitions than that offered by mainstream law and criminology. This is because some of the most ecologically destructive activities, such as clear felling of old growth forests, is quite legal; while more benign practices, such as growing hemp for productive purposes, is criminalized” (2014, 13). The Himalayas in Uttarakhand have been victim to policies and political ideology of exploitation of nature for capitalistic gains. The British established Forest Departments in 1864 with the help of German experts to carry out large-scale destruction of accessible forests in India, more so, in the Himalayas, which was rich in sal, teak, and deodar trees considered ideal timber necessary for the expansion of the railways. Ramchandra Guha explains the furtive nature of the forest acts of 1865 and 1878, where the British “reserved” and “protected” the forests and had exclusive claim over them and the local people were prohibited from using forest produce. As Ramachandra Guha remarks, “While the burden of proof to establish ‘legally established rights’ was on the people, the state could grant both ‘non-established rights’ and ‘terminable concessions’ at its discretion” (Guha 2010, 38–39). Thus, the benign practice of sustainable use of the forest was illegal and the ecologically destructive activities like felling sal, teak, and deodar to build seats and rail tracks were considered legal. The political ideology of exploiting forests for capitalist gains, at the cost of human and nonhuman inhabitants, has continued even after the independence of India. The actions of the government and industries have been condoned by people and societies because of lack of empathy and the lure of developmental propaganda otherwise known as “soft power” (Nye 2004). In my paper titled “Soft Power, Crisis of Existence and the Tribal People of Kerala: A Study of Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C K Janu,” published in 2022, I have discussed how governments use soft power to coerce people to accede to their decision. “Vandana Shiva in her book Staying Alive discusses the centrality of forests to Indian civilisation especially the Adivasi, she argues, “As a source of life nature was venerated as sacred and human evolution was measured in terms of man’s capacity to merge with her rhythms and patterns intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. The forest thus nurtured an ecological civilization in the most fundamental sense of harmony with nature“ (qtd. in Das 2022, 113). Shiva’s opinion is corroborated in Hridayesh Joshi’s depiction of the numerous protests against forest acts, which had started as struggles against the British government’s “efforts at alienating the local population from its natural resources” (Joshi 2016, 152) and are continuing till date. While in the 1930s and 1940s people in the Uttarakhand hilly regions fought for their rights to forest resources, 1960s brought about a new turn in attitude when people developed an awareness for the conservation of rivers, forests, and hills and for saving the Himalayas. People realized

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that “[t]he development model pushed by the government actually threatened the people” (156). As early as 1962, leaders “spoke of containing the human exodus from the hills to save the Himalayas” and claimed “that the Himalayas will have to be saved by its own people” (157). Indigenous people who actually understood the forests, the rivers, and the hills were needed to advise against irrational exploitation of the sensitive ecospace. Unfortunately, as the discriminatory “forest laws” were enforced on these people, they lost avenues of age old livelihood and became forced migrants into cities implicitly giving free hand to the government and other capitalist agencies to clear forests, build dams, roads, and hotels at a heavy cost to the environment of the place. In his book Joshi provides examples and factual data and laments that “[p]rivate companies bagged these forest clearing contracts and a full-fledged war was declared on the Himalayan forests” (159) disregarding the protests of the people. The government’s greed for foreign exchange translated into auctioning of the precious ash trees in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand region to companies like Symonds Company to make sports equipment for export and to Star Paper Mills to make paper and other goods. On the other hand, a ban was imposed on the local people which prohibited them from using ash wood to make ploughs for their life sustaining agriculture. This is a glaring example of the green crime perpetrated by the state on people and the ecosystem of the Himalayas. The people of the Himalayas of Uttarakhand, especially women, took it on themselves to protect the trees and thereby the environment by adopting unique means of protest such as tree hugging, which came to be known as the famous Chipko Movement. This brings to mind the struggle between “the Canadian First Nation people and the government that wanted the Makenzie Gas Project, which would run a 1,300 km pipeline from Beaufort Sea through indigenous lands to the Makenzie River Valley, which would, in turn, be highly destructive to the environment” (Das 2022, 113). The government of India, much like the government of Canada, superficially engaged in dialogue with the indigenous people of the area but did not take conservation seriously. CONCLUSION Kedarnath is a reference point of religious faith for Hindus who associate the place with the power of the divine, affect, and the gift of a lifetime’s karma. The power of Kedarnath is produced by the concatenation of several factors and is manifest in the ‘embodied experience of people’ (Whitmore 2018, 22) who visit the shrine. North Indian tourism industry thrives on the devotion of the tourists and the sensationalism of high altitude travel. Whitmore rightly comments,

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It allows us to see how the political economies of mountain pilgrimage tourism in North India and the broader regional, national, and global forces that infuse the worlds of North Indian mountain pilgrimage tourism combine and fuse in the felt experience of those standing in Kedarnath, with the sensuous experiences of high-altitude travel, Himalayan weather, and divine shakti. (2018, 22)

Banking on the frenzy of the tourists, the tourism industry, sponsored by both state and non-state players, lure them into hastily developed dangerous terrains without adequately warning them of environmental hazards. It is this untethered mountain pilgrimage tourism, greed to bleed and harness nature, the selfish political agendas and the unchecked unsustainable developmental goals that led to the severe floods and ecological disaster in June 2013 wherein thousands of human and nonhuman lives were lost and complete human habitations swept off the face of earth. The ecological disaster at Kedarnath that claimed thousands of lives and left hundreds of people physically and psychologically maimed was due to unsustainable capitalistic development in the ecosensitive Himalayas and also due to the lack of empathy of the people for such ecospaces and for the victims of environmental degradation. The lack of empathy of people watching the news of the disaster on TV and the apathy of the politicians described by Joshi in Rage of the River is not only appalling but also a reminder of the fact that the ecological disaster in Kedarnath in 2013 is a direct impact of the green crime committed by government and private agencies who have been denying that ecological hazards in sensitive ecospaces like the Himalayas are a result of unsustainable development and profit mongering. REFERENCES Anderson, Mark. Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Das, Shruti. “Soft Power, Crisis of Existence and the Tribal People of Kerala: A Study of Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C K Janu.” In Literary Studies, Vol. 35 (March 2022): 109–117. DOI: https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3126​/litstud​.v35i01​.43680. Deyo, Brian. “Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment,” edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 195–212. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1995. Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. Haryana: Penguin, 2014. ———. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. Haryana: Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University, 2010.

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“Himalayas: History, Geology and High Peaks.” https:​//​factsanddetails​.com​/china​/ cat6​/sub38​/entry​-6674​.html. “Joshimath: Sinking Town in Indian Himalayas Spotlights Risks of Development.” https: ​ / / ​ t imesofindia​ . indiatimes​ . com​ / india​ / joshimath ​ - sinking ​ - town ​ - in ​ - indian​ -himalayas ​-spotlights​-risks​-of​-development​/articleshow​ /97018583​ . cms 16 January 2023. Joshi, Hridayesh. The Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster. Haryana: Penguin Random House, 2016. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Ramesh, Mridula. “Joshimath’s Salvation Lies on a New Path but Will We Walk It?” Sunday Times of India, Bhubaneswar. 15 January 2023: 10, Col 1. White, Rob, and Diane Heckenberg. Green Criminology: An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2014. Whitmore, Luke. Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

Chapter 3

Mythical Imagination and the Young Minds A Reading of Geeta Dharmarajan’s Ma Ganga and the Razai Box as a Metaphor of Hope in Disaster Dona Soman and Renu Bhadola Dangwal

Human beings, through the process of evolution, have been threatened and tested over time with natural calamities and man-induced disasters often wiping out traces of other life forms. All the species surviving today have lived, perished, and outlived droughts, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, tornadoes, and even nuclear attacks. India is one of the most disaster-prone areas in the world due to its location and geographical peculiarities. The nation’s administrative setups have given immense importance to disaster management at National, State, and District levels. Disaster mitigation in India aspires at planning, preparing, and developing a system of coping techniques bringing together scientific knowledge and indigenous beliefs. The local communities have figured out their own coping mechanisms, which forms the rich storehouse of inherited knowledge. This knowledge, often in form of tales, proverbs, beliefs, and practices forge a link between disaster reduction measures and sustainable development. Mythological stories from our ancient scriptures and legends address themes of creation, life, natural world and ask poignant questions about the being and functioning of the world in which all the living and non-living beings reside. While forming and interpreting living religions and cultures, the mythical stories create a community of believers often cushioning them in an envelope of compassion, harmony, and comfort. Imbibed with depths of 49

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meanings, myths generally do not follow fixed patterns in narration, plot, or imagery but gain strength by being suggestive. These mythical suggestions, in contemporary stories, act as the basis of reality and meaning and help to perceive the world differently by fusing the human minds to depths of life meanings and relationships among the inhabitants of the world. They are “the secret opening,” says eminent mythologist Joseph Campbell, “through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human” (1968: xxiii). Sharing its close affinity with myths, literature stages, explores, and re-explores the relationships of these predominant religio-cultural knowledge and systems and dominant ecological concerns exemplified in human and non-human literary representations. This is how it forges a cultural communication in ever-changing scenario. The early and the contemporary indigenous cultures, emphasizing a holistic approach, have always refrained from subscribing to the dichotomy between the human and the non-human, the idea which was looked upon by the western culture as unscientific. There are stories from pre-modern cultures where human beings experience a close proximity with alternative environments and living worlds, positioning them in a complex web of interdependencies. The indigenous literature with its ecological undertones not only recognizes the repressed and the silenced voices of nature—the nonhumans—but also foregrounds them by providing them with a voice—a force to be acknowledged. Indigenous storytelling thus presents them as significant metaphors, symbols, images, and linguistic coinages engaging the affective dimensions of thoughts and touching upon every aspect of sense of self and ways of being in the world. The literature of a community is founded on myth and as Jean Luc Nancy writes, all myth is “the myth of community” (1991: 51). Hence myths serve an alternative form of investigation that derives from intensive observation of underlying relationships existing among the human and nonhuman units of a specific community. Robert Bringhurst, in this regard, argues that myths are “like science, at perceiving and expressing ultimate truths, but the hypotheses of myth are framed as stories . . . a story so perceptive of reality that it might be rediscovered, like any law of nature, in almost any culture at any time” (2008: 64). Mythical imagination entails using the pristine images and relations presented in mythical stories connecting our past to the present and forming predictions about the future. Through stories human beings process, imagine, and relate to human experiences. The stories which form a part of our culture and tradition relate to life led through generations in time, place, and spirit. The mythical stories, legends, and folktales engage all levels of creative thinking and imaginations. Story worlds, which often are imaginary representations, serve as an important feature of children’s fiction because the world of text the readers inhabit serves as a point of comparison between the textual world and the everyday

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world. Within the difference between these two worlds emerges the narrative’s power to reshape readers’ cognitive powers and imagination. It is in this context that Erin James describes narratives as possessing “world creating powers” (2015: 11). In indigenous cultures, individual experiences, visions and prophecies, and accumulated wisdom from birds, animals, and trees are evaluated and preserved as a unified body of knowledge where no data is considered “unimportant or irrelevant” (Deloria et al. 1999: 66). Local stories with culture specific myths, embraced with local dialects, draw children’s minds to local manifestations of being and knowing catapulting them to metaphysical levels of meaning making. Rosa Braidotti comments through the notion of deep history that this may involve an “interdisciplinary combination of geological and socio-economic history that focuses both on the planetary or earth factors and on the cultural changes that have jointly created humanity” (2013: 160). These factors of history and culture-specific beliefs that bind humanity with the nonhuman community is an indispensable part of dealing with environmental issues which according to Carl Mika give way to “wellspring of infinite connections and co-constitutive realities that are beyond our perception but that we are nevertheless indebted to” (2017: 7). As the global community is grappling with the horrors of Anthropocene and environmental disasters, a new level of human consciousness is being unfolded within children’s stories with earth-centered mythologies reflecting the urgency of human survival, mutualism, and interconnection of all for awakening the younger generation to act towards creating a habitable ecology. Within the daily struggles of existing on this planet where the human and the nonhuman world are both engaged, children seem to be the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. This gravitating towards the trials of child and childhood is in response to anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and biotechnological developments and interventions. Scholars reveal how children’s lives are consciously interconnected with one other, family, the society of humans and the collective of the nonhuman world—all knotted in an intricate bond. Childhood and sustainability researcher Karen Malone in her famous work Children in the Anthropocene writes, “We are not all in the Anthropocene together—the poor and the dispossessed, and the children, are far more in it than others” (2018: ix). Subsequently, the past decades witnessed a fair share of attention being devoted to posthumanist concerns towards conceptions of “child” and the nature of childhood. Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (2007) is a breakthrough while discussing child-nature interactivities. She opines that agency in a thing or person doesn’t preexist before acting on others. It is an interactive phenomenon which coemerges as a result of encounters with others. Hence, agency is “a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (Barad 2007: 141). Nonhumans here don’t simply exist as

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objects being acted upon by humans (children), but become subjects in their own rights—shaped, shaping, and co-emerging with the children. The key idea here is to view children not as the sole agents or autonomous learners but allowing possibilities to think and learn with the more than human world. Pauliina Rautio, a researcher who imagines the co-shaping and interaction between human(child) and nonhuman, writes, “In interaction independent entities are viewed as taking turns in affecting each other, these entities are taken to have an independent existence. In intra-action, interdependent entities are taken to co-emerge through simultaneous activity to come into being as certain kind of entity because of their encounter” (2013: 2). Early childhood researchers have experimented and discovered that children’s place encounters and assimilation of information are not from the landscape or the immediate climatic factors of a specific place, but they gain insights from meanings and opportunities the stories and narratives which they encounter in those places. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi invite our perception to the ways in which the child is emergent in a relational field: “a space in which nonhuman forces are equally at play and work as constitutive factors in children’s learning and becomings” (2010: 257). The children, while reading the stories specific to a geographical location, realize that the nonhuman inhabitants are as much a significant factor as themselves. Margret Meek has rightly pointed out that the stories we write for the young has a socializing function and constitute a “symbolic outlining of sets of possibilities for defining how things are in the world and how they might be” (1987: 110). Mythical references in contemporary children’s literature mobilize an infinite array of vehicles to convey a message and engender a response highlighting the contemporary educational concern to engage the mind, body, and spirit of all the participants. There is an increasing need to live with and survive beyond the self who demands cultivating values of relationship, responsibility, and respect with every other form of life on the earth. In the words of Karen Barad, cultivating such ecological frame of thought is called “intra-action” (2007: 141) and is a pivotal concern in the present state of environmental deterioration. These messages today are most effectively communicated in the stories for children where we find a fantastical merging of nature and supernatural. The fantastical merging of perceiving powers of morally relevant children’s stories and the ethical values propagated through them when dealing with planetary health is manifested in stories through the trope of destruction of nature which leads to catastrophe. Martha Nussbaum, in her work Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), gives a detailed account of how stories of fantasy and imagination possess resources that call us to lead an upright life. She talks of how a child exposed to imaginative (mythical) stories forms an opinion that not everything that exists in the universe apart from humans need to be

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of some utility or purpose. The nonhuman characters in the children’s stories are more often not placed in the plot with agenda of fulfilling some goal or acting as a prop. All the animals, plants, river, and mountains just exist as a mutual companion paying keen attention to the development of the plot. The young readers delight in the possibility of cherishing nature and its elements for their own sake: “the ability to endow a form with life that makes the metaphorical imagination morally valuable; it is the ability to view what one has constructed in fancy as serving no end beyond itself, as good and delightful for itself alone” (Nussbaum 1995: 42). The tendency among the children’s authors, operating on myths, entails a return to the past, rediscovering and often retelling them to suit the contemporary scene. There is a shift in purpose with which the mythical stories were conceived in the past. From being explanations on the creation of world and natural disasters, they are now reflections of hope. Re-telling or allowing stories to be remade across time and place is a common practice within a range of indigenous storytelling traditions which does not yield to the notion that stories have a fixed or static pattern. Present-day authors in India have risen up to unearth the immense possibilities of Indian legends. A Palace of Illusion by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s, Pashu: Animal Tales from Hindu Mythology by Devadutt Pattnaik, and The Upside-Down King: Unusual Tales about Rama and Krishna by Sudha Murthy are some popular examples. Exemplifying the need to preserve nature and its resources, Geeta Dharmarajan’s Ma Ganga and the Razai Box (2006) comments on the most engaging and exhaustive environmental threats of flood and soil erosion and their impact on the people and place. This work sheds light on the preservation of sustainability values and informs how planetary resources like rivers should be conserved as it impacts the health and stability of all ecological constituents including human beings. Daniel Christian Wahl writes in this regard, “[W]hat we are actually trying to sustain is the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain the planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish. Design for sustainability is, ultimately, design for human and planetary health” (2016: 43). Ma Ganga and the Razai Box begins with a young tribal girl Yasho, also known as “Yasho of the Hill People,” scolding river Ganga for flooding their village. Apart from floods it also results in soil erosion, and Yasho is furious at the complete neglect on the river’s part at the agony of the villagers. In the story, the river Ganga is personified as “Ma Ganga” and is given a voice when she decides to scold back the angry Yasho. Referring to the ages of ruthless torments meted upon her by the human companions, she says, “I am tired of always taking the blame” (Dharamarajan 2006). In contrast to the representation of the divine Ganga in the old mythical tales as symbol of vitality and bountifulness, the story paints an image of Ganga depleted

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of her exuberance. Years of human brutality have drained out her, and now she fumes and demands vengeance threatening to wipe out the earth and its occupants with a flood. The raging river is given an agentic stance where it floods the river bank accompanied by soil erosion destabilizing the idea of human as the sole agency on the surface of the earth. Dharmarajan presents the scene of action as an open area, where the performance is a shared spatial act within a participative existing system of interconnections. Here the scene of disaster is a geographical site where the impact of the disaster suffered is in an expanded ecological paradigm. Here the nonhuman river Ganga and all the other living beings housed in and around the river bank are considered as constitutive elements of equal value in matters of sustainability of the village as much as the human. Such disaster ignites an awakening in the minds of the human beings as worded by Immanuel Kant, resulting in “momentary checking of vital powers” (2000: 102). Every myth is renewed with the time and place in which it is told or narrated according to the contemporary challenges the world is facing. The story gains momentum and relevance through the audience’s ability to relate with its brutal description of the disaster the flood causes by imagining the trials and tribulations which the river has undergone for quite some time. Christopher Vecsey’s comment is apt in this regard in which he says that myths “inform us, as well as form us” (1988: 13). Flood myths are one of the most widely propagated narratives known in the history of many civilizations and ancient belief systems like the biblical version of Noah’s ark and the Hindu story of pralaya. A defining character of the flood myth is the humanity’s “capacity to begin anew with a wiser understanding of correct living” (Salvador and Norton 2011: 14). In Ma Ganga and the Razai Box, the flood is created as a result of ignoring warnings of potential catastrophe which later on leads to complete wiping away of all forms of life from the village. The people realizing their ignorance decide to mend their ways and restructure the social order by greening the valley. The idea of time resonated in the concept of “Kalachakra” or the wheel of time underlying the Indian ethnography is its periodic cycle from evolution to dissolution. This is the beauty of mythical thinking—“to play the part of conceptual thinking” (Strauss 2001: 8). The story amends the ancient flood myth with contemporary imagery of soil erosion leading to anger of the villagers in their failure to cultivate crops. Echoing this concern Rajani Kannepalli Kanth comments upon man’s inability to comprehend the humanity’s mishandling of natural resources and the present state of disaster as a failure to “put pieces of planet and its people together” (2017: 267). Yasho and her people respond to the new-found knowledge about the cause of the man-made catastrophe as well as about the necessity to live in balance with nature’s laws, while offering a vision of a brighter future possible ironically only through human intervention.

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Dharmarajan’s story takes inspiration from the religious scriptures on river Ganga’s birth and her movement towards the earth’s surface. The allusion is to the tale of penance by Bhagiratha, belonging to the Ikshavaku dynasty who seeks the assistance of river Ganga or Ganga Devi to flow through the earth’s surface and carry the holy ashes of his ancestors back to heaven. This will lead to salvation of the souls of the dead. Lord Brahma accepts the penance and instructs river Ganga to pass through the earth but only after seeking the grace of Lord Shiva. For, if the mighty river of heaven with her gigantic weight falls directly onto the ground, the tremendous torrent might cleave the earth and shatter it. Someone would have to break the fall by receiving the full weight of the water with Shiva being the sole contender. As a result, Lord Shiva spreads his matted locks in Ganga’s path and delays her cascading current, which gets lost in the labyrinth of his hair. Ganga ultimately is able to carry the holy ashes back to heaven without causing any harm to earth or its creatures. As a commentary on repetitions and cyclical patterns of evolution in natural world, Dharmarajan’s story cements the position of mythical metaphors as “bedrock of our civilization” (Murphy 2013: 121). In the story, the contextual undertones of Ma Ganga’s demands of “matted hair” (Dharmarajan 2006) is a metaphor taken from the ancient story such that wise Yasho indicates to the ignorant villagers “Let’s plant trees everywhere. The roots and branches of trees are like Shiva’s hair. They will hold the soil” (Dharamarajan 2006). Here Yasho’s enlightenment is significant as it inculcates and blends together mythological, aesthetic, and intuitive perspectives of nature with the scientific and rational culminating in learning nature in a holistic manner. Resonating on yoking together of the scientific and the indigenous thoughts to decode the predicament of disaster Feinstein and Krippner commented, “A new vision of democracy is urgently needed that can support the individual and at the same time promote a greater sense of community and more harmonious international relationship” (1988: 219). Subsequently the villagers spring into action, toil day and night to plant new trees with the hope of transforming “the barren hills and muddy streams” (Dharmarajan 2006) to a wealth of flora and fauna “springing all over the hills and valleys” (Dharmarajan 2006). The villagers in Ma Ganga and the Razai Box live in a world fraught with environmental disaster in the form of flood and soil erosion. The most viable solution to the disaster is possible only by exposure, recognition, and engagement with that environment underscoring the need of cautious intervention by humans. Water in the story like the mythical goddess Ganga operates as the ultimate unbiased agent who unites and binds all organic forms of life also acting as a “proto” being giving a ray of hope in retrieving back the lost Eden. In the words of Mercia Eliade, water “precedes all forms and upholds all creation” (1958: 188). Ma Ganga and the Razai Box is a prayer of communion

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not addressed to any distant divine entity but a sermon embedded in the mesh of diversity in a whole repository of life. In the words of Gregory Cajete, our present crises come from a “narrow view of who we are, what the earth is, and what it is to educate our children so that they may live and think as human beings” (2015: 20). The present story by Dharamarajan may be seen as enlarging the worldview towards nature especially rivers and interpreting the realities of life through mythical intervention. Ganga and other riverine banks house an incredible number of trees and grasslands and are home to different species of animals, birds, reptiles, fish, and other aquatic animals. Even though it is considered the most sacred of rivers by a sect of Indian population, river Ganga is also a victim of weary loads of sewage, chemicals, and rubbish dumped mercilessly into it each day generating various diseases and environmental imbalances. Further worsening the ecological balance is the soil erosion rampant on the banks of the river mainly caused by floods and accelerated by the cutting down of trees. This leads to carrying off the rich layer of topsoil pushing scores of rural folks to hunger, poverty, and suicide. A report in Reuters Graphics by Simon Scarr et al. titled, “The Race to Save river Ganges” lays bare the depleting state of Ganga as it pronounces—“If one day’s waste water that is pumped into the river is formed into a cube, it would be twice the height of the Statue of Liberty” (Scarr et al. 2019). For the young generation of readers and writers, it is quite regretful that there is still a dearth of such children’s literature, which can generate awareness of the nature, magnitude and the consequences of disasters and awaken consciousness of planetary sustainability goals. Geeta Dharmarajan, as she makes the best use of mythical narratives for resolving the present-day environmental anxieties, has shown its tremendous scope to others. She most creatively uses imagery of Shiva’s matted hair as a metaphor for trees aiming for a “much higher” purpose of life (Jacobs 2016: 19). Her conferring of material agency on the river as “a process rather than a thing” (Linton 2009: 24) transforms its status from just being treated as a resource for one’s own advantage to a precious environmental asset which may be lost if not preserved carefully. The story ends on a hopeful note where human intervention has fostered an end to the dark futures of Ma Ganga and all the inhabitants on the earth. In her coming out of the razai box, and taking its course, is manifested the story’s actual message. Ma Ganga, proclaims after relieving, “the people are seeing sense once more” (Dharmarajan 2006). Contemporary societies suffer much of the consequences of environmental disaster as they lack enough interaction with mythical thoughts and practices. By intensive observation of relationships among all the living and non-living entities, metaphorical stories underscore the belief that “all things are connected and related” (Pierotti 2000: 1337). As reinforced by Donald Fixico, “[S]tories touch every aspect of itself and its way of being in the world”

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(2003: 52). The metaphoric thinking and mythic sensitivity foster not only self-knowledge but also the social and communal knowledge in children. These myths promulgate such a discourse which has the prowess to illuminate, transform, heal, and bring resolutions to conflicts. Sean Kane argues that myth challenges the authority of man and “articulates a reality that exists outside” (1998: 34); mythical delineations are enormously instrumental in cognizance of realities which are not visible in the tangible world. This propensity of myths enables them to attend to the unforeseen and unimaginable and thus provide wide commentary on various acts and relationships. Engaging with the mythical representations, the children’s literature animates and gives voice to “a host of imaginary, impossible and real beings so that drawing boundaries between truth and fiction becomes sufficiently challenging” (Jaques 2015: 6). Children, being fascinated with boundaries of human and nonhuman, often transcend these divisions in their minds just to examine “the pleasures of the as if” (Boyd 2007: 225) or for “the sheer pleasure of the surprise, of seeing that there could be other ways to be” (Boyd 2007: 225). These stories situate human beings in the realm of many actants where they are equally participating in the exchanges and relationalities happening in the biosphere. By drawing upon the ways in which the nonhumans are made to appear like them, the human–animal dichotomy becomes much more permeable with the ethics of equality being easier to obtain. Aiming towards a posthuman thinking, children’s fiction questions the rigid hierarchical ontology of humanism and unites the possibilities of a mythical world of fantasy with real world changes. Ma Ganga and the Razai Box approaches the issue of disaster and disaster management by critiquing human exceptionalism and stating that human beings are a species living in total conjunction with other co-species. These humans and nonhumans not just impact or control each other but also interact in reciprocity of energy and matter. The issue of ecoculture and biodiversity is receiving much attention today in the wake of degradation of environment under the pretext of development and modernization. Ongoing discussions and negotiations have also opened up a need to look back into the past and examine the ways different cultures have addressed biodiversity and sustainable living. These repositories of traditional totemic beliefs, myths, and practices, down the years, have undergone several layers of social filters. The initial versions have often been modified by the subsequent generations owing to contextual settings, yet they remain the most authentic source of cultural knowledge- “basically and universally human” (Leeming 1998: 6). If Gay A. Bradshaw is to be believed, “the present planetary state that we wish to heal has been achieved by denying connections” (Bradshaw 2013: 134), triggering an awareness of biological sentience. Many cultures and communities don’t differentiate between human and nonhuman nature, and believe that nonhuman entities feel, think, respond,

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and learn from their external environments, making them sentient beings. It requires children’s authors to use narrative skills to produce engrossing and imaginatively inviting stories where they can hope to be talked about over and over again. It requires narratives which can inspire children to interact with their surroundings, embracing and embodying what has already happened, is happening, as well as hoping for what is about to come. It is as if the natural disasters smash open our minds, manners, and stoic thinking, as if “the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being?” (Ghosh 2016: 33). REFERENCES Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Boyd, Brian. “Tails within Tales.” In Knowing Animals, edited by Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong, 217–243. Amsterdam: Brill Illustrated Edition, 2007. https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.1163​/ej​.9789004157736​.i​-296​.82. Bradshaw, Gay A. “Living Out of Our Minds.” In The Rediscovery of the Wild, edited by Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Patricia H. Hasbach, 119–139. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Bringhurst, Robert. Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2008. Cajete, Gregory. Indigenous Community: Rekindling the Teachings of the Seventh Fire: Toward an Evolving Epistemology of Contemporary Indigenous Education. St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2015. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Deloria, Vine, et al. Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Books, 1999. Dharmarajan, Geeta. Ma Ganga and the Razai Box. New Delhi: Katha, 2006. Eliade, Mercia. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. London: Sheed and Ward Inc., 1958. Feinstein, David, and Stanley Krippner. Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self. San Rafael, CA: Mandala Publishing, 1988. Fixico, Donald. American Indian Mind in a Linear World. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2003. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Haryana, India: Penguin Group, 2016. Hultman, Karin, and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi. “Challenging Anthropocentric Analysis of Visual Data: A Relational Materialist Methodological Approach to Educational

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Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, no. 5 (2010): 525–542. Jacobs, Donald Trent. Point of Departure: Returning to a More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2016. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Jaques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2015. Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers, 2nd ed. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. New York: Prometheus Books, 2000. Kanth, Rajani Kannepalli. Farewell to Modernism: On Human Devolution in the Twenty-First Century. Pieterlen, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2017. Leeming, David Adams. Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Linton, Jamie. What Is Water?: The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009. Malone, Karen. Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking Sustainability and Child Friendliness in Cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Meek, Margaret. “Symbolic Outlining: The Academic Study of Children’s Literature.” Signal, no. 53 (1987): 97–113. Mika, Carl. Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2017. Murphy, Susan. “The Koan of the Earth.” Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, 109–125. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Myth Interrupted.” The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor, 43–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Pierotti, Raymond, and Daniel Wildcat. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Third Alternative (Commentary).” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5. (2000): 1333–1340. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2641289. Rautio, Pauliina. “Mingling and Imitating in Producing Spaces for Knowing and Being: Insights from a Finnish Study of Child–Matter Intra-Action.” Childhood 21, no. 4. (2013): 461–474. https:​//​doi​.org​/http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /0907568213496653. Salvador, Michael, and Todd Norton. “The Flood Myth in the Age of Global Climate Change,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 1 (2011): 45–61. Scarr, Simon, et al. “The Race to Save river Ganges.” Reuters Graphics, January 18, 2019. https:​//​graphics​.reuters​.com​/INDIA​-RIVER​/010081TW39P​/index​.html. Strauss, Claude Levi. Myth and Meaning. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge Classic, 2001.

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Vecsey, Christopher. Imagine Ourselves Richly. Chestnut Ridge, PA: Crossroad Publishing, 1988. Wahl, Daniel Christian. Designing Regenerative Cultures. Dorset, UK: Triarchy Press, 2016.

Chapter 4

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌The Trope of the Imperilled Earth in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland Sharada Allamneni

INTRODUCTION Meditating on the notion of human progress, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant expressed indignation that barring some instances of “wisdom here and there . . . men’s actions on the great world-stage . . . speak mostly of folly, childish vanity, and destructiveness.”1 In the end, Kant says, “[O]ne does not know what to think of the human race, so conceited in its gifts. Since the philosopher cannot presuppose any . . . except to try to see if he can discover a natural purpose in this idiotic course of things human.”2 Pondering on the limits of human vision on a pressing global issue like climate change, Amitav Ghosh, in his 2017 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and The Unthinkable and a more recent book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), attributes the current climate crisis to the aggressive expansion of Western colonialism and the subsequent onslaught of global capitalism on the world. It has brought things to this paradoxical state of modernity, such that geopolitical strife and climate change have emerged as two of the most pressing problems of the world today. Engaging with the twin issues of ecological devastation and geopolitical strife, Jhumpa Lahiri’s two works, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013), prefigure the question raised by John Carey, “Are we in the Anthropocene?”3 To which Lahiri would say “yes”; the signs of planetary crisis are everywhere. The two texts, when read as a continuum compel the readers to raise and confront some of the most pertinent questions of our day: 61

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1.  What is it that constitutes progress in an age when the so-called human achievements are threatening to imperil life on this planet? 2.  How can we comprehend and meaningfully respond to the problem of looming environmental crisis? 3.  Can past wisdom help in bailing us out of this crisis and reconnect us with the Earth? 4.  How can we restore our age-old values of respecting and perpetuating life while preserving the conditions which sustain it? By examining the subtext running through the narratives of the two works, the paper will dwell on how Lahiri uses the earth as a trope to explore the problem of impending planetary crisis. The first part of the paper will dwell on how Lahiri, in her 2008 work Unaccustomed Earth, joins the contemporary discourse on geopolitics and global capitalism, an outcome of the spread of liberal capitalism. The second part will examine Lahiri’s later work, The Lowland, to understand her “ethic of nature” where she presents a new social imaginary in which the novel’s characters like Bela and Richard, bound by new ecological values, are found to be leading socially connected lives. THE ANTHROPOCENE IN CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE Reflecting on the existential predicament of the human species in the twenty-first century, the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty engages with the environmental discourse initiated by the Nobel laureates Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000), who caution humanity that the earth is no more in the age of the Holocene but has entered the new era of the “Anthropocene.”4 Since then, as Chakrabarty argues, the “Anthropocene” has not only entered but also begun to dominate the humanities.5 In his 2013 book Anthropocene Fictions, Adam Trexler speaks of the growing popularity of the new genre of climate fiction, while the environmental historian, Lawrence Culver, in his critical essay “From the English Garden to LA” (2013), states that the debate of climate change no longer remains the sole concern of science.6 Amitav Ghosh, however, expresses concern on the inadequacy of response from the literary humanities and exhorts citizens, intellectuals and politicians to assume a more proactive role in saving our imperiled earth.7 Martin Puchner, in his 2022 book Literature for a Changing Planet, makes a similar observation. He opines that the stories we tell ourselves, as humans have a cultural function; they have an immense potential to shape or alter our attitude towards the environment.8 The “Anthropocene,” says Chakrabarty, has come to figure as a tool to probe “into the totality of Human-Earth



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relations and reflect upon ourselves as individuals as well as a collective on this planet.”9 Coming into literary prominence in the late 1990s, the second-generation Indian diaspora writer Jhumpa Lahiri engages with the contemporary discourse on this big picture problem of planetary crisis. THE GEOLOGICAL TROPE IN UNACCUSTOMED EARTH “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House”).10 These Hawthornian lines celebrating human proliferation and transplantation, quoted at the beginning of Lahiri’s book, invoke the geological trope and serve as a frame to examine the eight short stories of the Unaccustomed Earth. The broad trope of the earth thus becomes an overarching framework for the collection, in which Lahiri seemingly questions the modern notion of progress at all three levels, the “personal” and the “local,” as well as the “global.” Incidentally, the picture illustration on the cover of the first edition of Unaccustomed Earth depicts the gold bangle of Hema (the protagonist of the concluding trilogy), drifting off into a swirling eddy of the tsunami affected green sea. The image not only signifies that Hema’s boyfriend, Kaushik, is lost to the sea, but it also compels the reader to carry out an extended meditation on the narrative’s apocalyptic ending. Kaushik’s death signified by images of flood and heaving waves on the television screen, along with the report of devastation that Hema learns, evokes a sense of the impending catastrophe of planetary magnitude that runs like a thread through the different stories of the book. It makes us acutely aware of human vulnerability when pitted against the inexplicable forces of nature. Starting with the symbolically resonant title story of the collection, “Unaccustomed Earth,” the characters in the eight stories evince a penetrating awareness of life’s dreadful possibilities—a quietly fatalistic understanding that at any moment, something could go terribly wrong. The protagonist Ruma is afflicted by a sense of melancholia. It is evident that she experiences “the fatal emptiness” of modern urban life,11 what Max Horkheimer had diagnosed as the “rationalized irrationality” of civilization.12 She passes her days in secret gloom, devoid of any vitality. Living in a palatial house against the picturesque backdrop of Mt. Olympus in Seattle, she is well provided by her doting husband. Yet she wonders why she cannot be content. The mention of Mt. Olympus and Seattle in the story is also historically evocative.

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It inadvertently recalls to mind the famous plea of the native Seattle chief makes to the white colonizer. In his 1854 letter to the American government, the chief writes, “This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he’s merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”13 These lines, read in juxtaposition with the Hawthornian lines cited earlier, bring home to us the native wisdom of the indigenous Americans and their fundamentally different conception of the land, its flora and fauna, which for millennia had been sacred both to the living and dead of their tribe. Contrary to her, Ruma’s aged father, who holds the values of an earlier generation, appears to be in complete harmony with his environment. Wearing a baseball cap labeled Pompeii, he strides into his daughter’s Seattle house pulling his suitcase along the driveway. The name “Pompeii” here resonates with the readers. Interestingly, it conjures up the image of a once flourishing historical city in southern Italy that was buried in ash from a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D 79. As Ruma watches her father working in the backyard, she marvels at the immense care with which he waters and tends to the plants. Silhouetted against the solidity of Mount Olympus, turning and heaping the primordial earth, he seems to experience a fresh lease of energy. While performing household chores, he is extremely sparing in the use of water: “Unlike anyone Ruma had ever known, her father never ran the water while he soaped everything. He waited until the plates and pans were ready to be rinsed, and until then it was only the quiet, persistent sound of the sponge that could be heard.”14 This mundane scene evokes in the readers’ minds the daily anxieties about their own complicity in the ecological harm. We are reminded of the lifestyle choices that each one us has an opportunity to make when it comes to conservation of scarce and precious resources of our earth. In the story “A Choice of Accommodation,” there is an allusion to the trouble-ridden parts of the world; children of refugee parents from Iran migrated to America are mentioned studying with Amit at a private boarding school. The underlying connection between technology proliferation as well as the contemporary global strife emerging from the cold war and post–cold war geo-politics, including the neo-imperialistic struggle of the developed West for conquest over the oil economies of the Middle-East and the ecological crisis are all hinted at. In the last trilogy of the collection, Kaushik, Hema’s boyfriend, is commissioned as a photojournalist to cover the conflict-ridden zones of Latin America, Africa, the West Bank, and Iraq. The references in the stories highlight the immanent crisis of fossil capitalism, of the kind that the developed West promotes: “When he was thirty he was hired by The New York Times,



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and they sent him to Africa and then to the Middle East. He could no longer remember all the corpses he’d photographed, their faces bloated, their mouths stuffed with dirt, their vacant eyes reflecting passing clouds over their heads.”15 The narrative relates to a deeper structure of planetary consciousness and highlights the role that transnational capitalism is playing in sparking off “ecological distribution conflicts” across the world.16 It is clear that capitalism to keep its production mills running forages for new resources, like land and oil for energy, the competition for which keeps key global players ever competitive, and the world in a state of disequilibrium. Lahiri thus alludes to the toxic outcomes of the present military-industrial society. In yet another story, “Only Goodness,” the role of transnational organizations is passingly alluded to, how agencies like the IMF, World Bank or MNCs (what the Dutch American sociologist Saskia Sassen refers to as the global assemblages) serve as “instruments” to steer socio-ecological changes17 and restructure the world. The narrator, Sudha, married to an English man, Roger, is “a project manager for an NGO in London that promotes micro loans in poor countries.”18 Earlier in the story, the readers are informed that Roger’s “father had previously worked overseas for the Singer sewing machines,”19 the very same organization that was once responsible for introducing the exploitative, sweat shop culture in third world countries like India. It is hinted that the same principles that govern the balance of elements in the global environment also govern the material realities of the people living in the developing parts of the world. The numerous references to ecological calamities and man-made disasters, like earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, territorial conflicts, and wars that are dotted across the narratives of the last trilogy of Unaccustomed Earth, suggest not only of geologic turbulence; that earth’s ambient energy is at work, but also speak of the ramifications of complex human activities occurring on a planetary scale. QUESTIONING THE MODERN NOTION OF PROGRESS In the penultimate story of the collection, Hema, a scholar of history, visits the site of the ancient Etruscan civilization accompanied by Kaushik: “They decided to go north, to Volterra, a town founded by Etruscans, and it was in that austere, forbidding, solitary place that they spent their remaining days together. . . . They went into the workshops where alabaster was cut and polished, the translucent material quarried in Volterra for thousands of years.”20 The site of the ancient Etruscans Hema is researching drives home the point of how human enterprise, like quarrying and mining for millennia,

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has been a major force of environmental change on this planet. Such violent anthropogenic activities, extensive and ubiquitous as the ecocritic Melina Savi points out, are as impactful as the cataclysmic events like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes21 in altering the geo-physical. It is this human struggle of conquest and material, this extractive culture that has led modern civilization into a cul de sac of deadness and emptiness, which Ruma of the title story is afflicted by. The Etruscan example also serves as an oblique reference to the neo-imperialistic ambitions of the developed nations of the West, which in their struggle for dominance, have been meddling on a global scale. Kaushik, as a war photographer, undertakes solitary expeditions shooting pictures of the incessant struggle and implacable violence going on in the conflict ridden zones of Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza, and West Bank: “He took pictures of the volcano that loomed west of the capital, buildings pocked by bullets and cracked in half by the earthquake earlier that year. He’d never been in a place so obviously at war with itself. He’d understood, in Guatemala, that . . . were parts of the country to avoid.”22 Finally, the apocalyptic ending of the collection, resulting in Kaushik’s loss to the tsunami, fills the readers with dread of the uncertain future heralded by frequent wars and catastrophes. Even though the novel does not explicitly attribute climate change as the cause of the tsunami, it still invites us, as readers, to think about the fate of this planet. Humans, Lahiri warns us, are altering not only the terrestrial ecosystems, but as her next novel, The Lowland, points out are also meddling with the marine ecosystems. Subash, the protagonist of the novel, is an oceanographer employed in Rhode Island on an offshore project to assess the impact of oil spills in the Atlantic Ocean. During one of his walks at the seashore, Subash experiences a moment of vital interaction with a majestic heron, where he oscillates between ambivalent feelings of radical otherness and oneness with the bird: Blending into the grass was a heron, close enough for Subash to see the amber bead of its eye, its slate-colored body tinted with the late afternoon light. . . . The body of the bird was still, but then the curved neck extended and contracted, as if aware of Subash’s gaze. . . . Never as shapely, as regal as this . . . , its great wings beating slowly and deliberately, looking at once encumbered and free. Its long neck was tucked in, dark legs dangling behind. Against the lowering sky the silhouette was black, the tips of its primary feathers distinct, the forked division of its toes.23 (Lahiri 2013: 40)

The narrative here elaborates Subash’s close encounter with the solitary heron, not to underscore the heron’s possible “meaning” for Subash, but presumably to highlight the interrelatedness of all life forms and the objective fact of the heron’s existence within its specific environment. It leads the



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readers to ponder over the anthropocentric assertion of human “rights” on this world. The heron, like the egrets that no longer came to nest in Tollygunge (Subash’s hometown), reminds him of human culpability in pushing their nonhuman fellow beings to a precarious existence, as their natural habitats get rapidly encroached upon. Lahiri’s design in developing her narrative against the backdrop of Tollygunge and Rhode Island, two places reputed for their lowlands, is quite evident. Environmentally speaking, the lowlands are considered to act as natural sponges for cleansing water and arresting soil erosion. As the environmental writer Barbara Hurd puts it, these marshy lands or bogs make for the most vibrant and diverse ecosystems on earth, known to host majority of the world’s species.24 The novel begins with a mention of the natural rhythm of life at Tollygunge. The two Mitra brothers, Subash and Udayan, living with their parents in the southern suburbs of Calcutta enjoy the harmony of simple community life. Revelling in their closeness to nature they witness the varying landscape of Tollygunge from the time when the first rains came to swell the twin ponds and the land became one big marshy stretch, attracting numerous migrant birds for nesting, to the advent of summer, when the ponds would slowly shrivel up, serving as an open ground for kids to play and hang out in the evenings. “So many times Subash and Udayan had walked across the lowland. . . . Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air.”25 The Mitra family, in a true Wordsworthian sense, experience their lives in intimate connection with the land, its flora and fauna. The Mitra boys’ affinity to nature is closely tied to the stages of their development. At different stages of their life, they are seen relating to nature differently: “Once he (Subash) found an egg that had dropped, intact, from a warbler’s nest. Carefully he carried it home with him, placing it in a terra-cotta container from a sweet shop, covering it with twigs. Digging a hole for it in the garden behind their house, at the base of the mango tree,  when the egg did not hatch.”26 At school, Subash and Udayan learn about the ecological antecedents of their place: they “learned that Tollygunge had been built on reclaimed land. Centuries ago, when the Bay of Bengal’s current was stronger, it had been a swamp dense with mangroves. The ponds and the paddy fields, the lowland, were remnants of this. As part of their life-science lesson they drew pictures of mangrove trees. Their tangled roots above the waterline, their special pores for obtaining air.” But at high water they drifted from their source of origin, for up to a year, before maturing in a suitable environment.27

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LAHIRI’S CRITIQUE OF COLONIALISM IN THE LOWLAND The Mitra boys also learn of the history of Tollygunge, how after the advent of the white colonizer, the natural spaces begin to get transformed into what Lawrence Buell refers to as “engineered environments.”28 In the late eighteenth century, Calcutta’s landscape began to be dramatically reorganized and re-imagined: “The English started clearing the waterlogged jungle, laying down streets. In 1770, beyond the southern limits of Calcutta, they established a suburb whose first population was more European than Indian. A place where spotted deer roamed, and kingfishers darted across the horizon.”29 The narrative here refers to what the ecofeminist Val Plumwood dubiously refers to as the “Master consciousness”30 of the white rulers, who considered power not as a potential to transform but as a power to dominate, that is, the belief that they could lord over nature, to tame and control it: “Major William Tolly, for whom the area was named, excavated and desilted a portion of the Adi Ganga, which came also to be known as Tolly’s Nullah. He’d made shipping trade possible between Calcutta and East Bengal.”31 The narrative dwells in substantial detail, on the bio-regional aspects and the environmental history of Calcutta to suggest how two hundred years of colonization and exploitation transformed the land and its people. Lahiri describes how the English adeptly engineered the physical landscape they invaded to make it hospitable for white settlements and conquests. The people of Tollygunge, living in harmony with Nature were impacted, first by the disruptive forces of colonialism and later by modern capitalism. The narrative plots the trajectory of ecological change caused by individual actors at the local level as they engage with resources on a daily basis. It offers us a glimpse into how these small-scale communities of West Bengal, considered to exist in much bounded ways were actually tied up to the world’s larger systems. Udayan, the younger of the Mitra brothers reflects on how postcolonial governance structures in independent India only tended to reinforce preexisting social and economic inequalities. He informs Subash that it was now the ruling bourgeois class that perpetuated the power structures: “He said, the Tolly Club was proof that India was still a semicolonial country, behaving as if the British had never left.”32 Besides, mindless and insufficiently considered projects of modernization, as Udayan’s naxal comrades point out, only exacerbate the problems further. Elaborate sections in the novel ponder over how subsistence agricultural societies in rural North Bengal were rendered powerless, first by their colonial masters and later by poorly implemented developmental plans of industrialization by the State. Projects of urbanization



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driven by vested interests in Calcutta not only degraded the landscape but also gradually destroyed the spontaneous, organic values that bound the social fabric. Udayan’s mother, Bijoli, is bewildered by the feverish activity of material progress in her locality. She is appalled at the profound indifference the new inhabitants of Tollygunge manifest to their physical environment and fellow residents in the neighborhood. The narrative undertone in the novel implies that local communities need to challenge the hegemony of the “development paradigm” and the covetous culture of capitalism that is sweeping across the world. The struggle of Bijoli, to sanitize and save the open green marshy grounds in Tollygunge, is a case in point. Having married early and spent a good part of her life in the rural environs of Tollygunge, she feels nostalgic for the society she had once known. She is conscious of how the mass influx of refugees from Bangladesh into Calcutta puts pressure on the land. As the twin lakes that had once dominated the landscape slowly begin to dry up, the marshy lowland of Tollygunge, eventually falls into the hands of land sharks and small, unattractive, irregular buildings begin to crop up everywhere. Ecological degradation becomes a perennial reality in the lives of the denizens of Tollygunge, as air pollution and water contamination compromise what had been a pristine, natural landscape. During one of their trips from the United States, Subash and Bela get caught in a traffic jam in Calcutta and choke over the exhaust fumes released by surrounding vehicles. It is evident that the hazards of being exposed to poor-quality air are greatest for people like Bijoli who are compelled to live in high-density, urban localities like Tollygunge. Though she has lived there her whole life and never stepped out of her locality, her life like those of most others in her neighborhood is determined by the nexus of power existing between the State and the unscrupulous local contractors who encroach on scarce land resources in several parts of Calcutta. With the burgeoning population, there is a collapse of civic facilities. Bijoli looks on sadly, as the colony is soon reduced to a hot, dusty urban sprawl comprised of dirt roads with no proper facilities for garbage disposal or sewer services. The narrative thus presents us with a picture of an inhumanly industrialized society that is indifferent to its most vulnerable members and crushes them on its onward march of progress. Later in the novel, we have Subash brooding over the aspect of global warming. Taking a walk along a swampy stretch in Rhode Island, he experiences discomfort at the rising temperatures in the state: “He’d been born and bred in Calcutta, and yet the sun in Rhode Island, bearing down through the depleted ozone, now felt stronger than the sun of his upbringing. Merciless against his skin, striking him, especially in summer, in a way he could no longer endure.”33

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As the narrative progresses, there are references to the unbridled consumption and patterns of excesses of the developed world. After his brother, Udayan’s death Subash travels to India, carrying a copy of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man that he gifts to his sister-in-law, Gauri. The reference to the Frankfurt philosopher in the novel is not lost on the readers. In fact, it was Marcuse who had critiqued capitalism for “creating false needs and false consciousness,” for locking “one-dimensional man into a one-dimensional society.”34 Looking back at his childhood in India, Subash feels nostalgic about the simple, non-acquisitive way of life that he and his family had once led: “Until he left Calcutta, Subash’s life was hardly capable of leaving a trace. He could have put everything belonging to him into a single grocery bag.”35 This is in marked contrast to the life he leads now in the United States: “He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body.”36 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSE TO THE UNFOLDING CRISIS Lahiri, however, is not pessimistic. She provides a glimmer of hope. At several places in the narrative, there are references to community responses that are by no means monolithic. Individuals like Bijoli, Richard, Elise, and Bela in The Lowland, driven by their own personal convictions, approach the environmental problem in a variety of ways. Bijoli, in the true eastern way, is an enlightened being. She is astute enough to sense how environmental hazards can inhibit social progress. She mourns over the growing fragmentation of the neighborhood and the fast-disappearing kinship values. She recalls her early married life during the days of the great Bengal famine. As a pregnant wife, when her own family had been at subsistence levels, she had shared her meagre resources with refugees who came begging at her door. She believes that it is this gift of exchange that keeps her community nourished. Subash’s friend, Richard, believes that ultimately it is the poor who are the worst affected by capitalism. In his rather discursive talks with Subash, he expresses his angst on the deeply unequal distribution of the world’s resources, and the widespread injustice of its effects. He condemns the practices of the richer nations of the world, whose rapacious greed for surplus energy and raw materials keeps the world ever simmering. As a transnational activist, he believes that communication between isolated members



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and groups are essential to make impactful interventions. Engaged in a coalition-building of interest groups, Richard travels widely, spearheading grassroots social movements in developing countries like Bangladesh. He expresses his concern over the political prescriptions and the top-down solutions imposed by first world economies like the United States and Northern Europe on developing countries of the world. He uses new-age communication channels like the internet to build support communities of enlightened people to push for change, that is, for sustainable development in the third world. Like Udayan, Richard refuses to accept the status quo and chooses to participate in the ongoing confrontation between the capitalistic West and the rest of the developing world. Another close friend of Subash, Elise Silva (whom Subash eventually marries) is engaged in reclaiming abandoned buildings in Rhode Island. At weekends, she organizes field trips to visit local sites of indigenous tribes in her endeavour to spread awareness on how the native people in America were dispossessed of their land and simple way of life. During one such expeditions Subash learns about a missing tribe: “On a small island in the middle of the swamp the local Narragansett tribe had built a fort. In a camp of wigwams, behind a palisade of sticks, they had housed themselves, believing their refuge was impregnable. But in the winter of 1675, when the marsh ground was frozen, and the trees were bare, the fort was attacked by colonial militia. Three hundred people were burned alive. Many who’d escaped died of disease and starvation.”37 On the ecological question, it is Bela compared to all other of Lahiri’s characters who offers a special perspective. Graduating with a major in environmental science, Bela right from an early age finds solace in working on community green projects. As an environmental activist, she chooses to live economically, sharing a house with ten other inmates, paring down her life to the most basic utilities: “There is one set of bills, one kitchen, one television, rotating chores. In the mornings they sign up for slots to use the bathrooms. Once a week, Sundays, those who can make it, sit down to a collective meal.”38 Working closely with small farmers, Bela strives for a direct and unselfconscious contact with others around her, experiencing spontaneous joy in the basic processes of life that involves physical work on land: “It became her life: a series of jobs on farms across the country, some close by, others far. Washington State, Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri . . . to plant peach trees or maintain beehives, to raise chickens or goats.”39 Bela thus, presents a new social imaginary for community rejuvenation. Her passionate involvement with the land, conveys her conviction that human beings can live in harmony with nature, drawing sustenance from it, whilst continuing to be its caretakers, preserving the precarious “human-earth” balance: “Over the years her work starting to merge with a certain ideology.

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. . . She was spending time in cities, in blighted sections of Baltimore and Detroit. She helped to convert abandoned properties into community gardens.”40 Bela’s activism in the novel is redolent of both radicalism and reform. As her lifestyle exemplifies, the concept of human prosperity needs to change. On one of her visits, she reproves her father, Subash, for throwing out his vegetable scraps instead of composting them in the backyard. She chides him on the apples he continued to purchase from supermarkets: “She was opposed to eating food that had to be transported long distances. To the patenting of seeds. She talked to him about why people still died from famines, why farmers still went hungry. She blamed the unequal distribution of wealth. What we consume is what we support, she said, telling him he needed to do his part. She could be self-righteous. . . . Her dedication to bettering the world was something that would fulfil her, he imagined, for the rest of her life.”41 Thanks to his daughter, Subash “grew conscious of eating according to what was in season, according to what was available. . . . He made it a practice to drive down to a farm stand on Saturday mornings, to buy his fruits and vegetables as well his eggs for the week.”42 Interestingly, Bela’s boyfriend, Drew, has also renounced the materialistic way of life in favor of a more sustainable retreat of farm life, preferring to earn his livelihood from farm produce. Both Bela and Drew’s lifestyles are built around the principle of respect and reciprocity to the Earth. By taking up farming and animal husbandry, they take up socially required labor. In a true Thoreaunian sense, they seem to cherish the vibrant tradition of ancient societies which guide humans to honor their obligations to mother Earth, which feeds and serves them. CONCLUSION The two texts, Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland, thus dramatize the disturbing effects of global capitalism, geopolitics, and environmental change on human lives. The message from the texts is quite clear. Since the advent of industrial revolution and advancement of global capitalism, humans have begun to drastically alter the earth’s surface, its oceans and atmosphere. To be able to survive as a race in this new geological epoch of the “Anthropocene,” Lahiri conveys, our societal responses become critical. Unless we become responsible and assume a creative stewardship of the earth, we may get wiped out like Kaushik in the tsunami of the concluding story of Unaccustomed Earth. However, Lahiri does not make a gloomy prognosis. Despite the apocalyptic ending of the story, there is a ray of hope evident. In fact, the tsunami in her 2008 book is evoked not to create emotion of fear over the



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impending gloom but to harness it as a motivation for future action. Lahiri presents Bela in The Lowland as a shining example of the possibilities inherent. As an environmental crusader, Bela’s thought and action to create social change are rooted in the real, calling for action which is rational. Her transcendent vision, anchored in a new ethical framework provides a solution that can address this planetary exigency. Bela’s message is not to compete and use up resources but to perpetuate the aesthetics of conservation and generation. After all, any concerted action on the environment front has to start at the level of the individual. NOTES 1. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784, trans. Lewis White Beck. From Immanuel Kant, On History (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963), https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/subject​/ethics​/kant​/universal​-history​ .htm. 2. Kant, Idea for a Universal History. 3. John Carey, “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene’?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113, no. 15 (2016): 3908. 4. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter, no. 41 (2000):17. http:​//​www​.igbp​.net​/download​/18​ .316f18321323470177580001401​/1376383088452​/NL41​.pdf. 5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/596640. 6. Lawrence Culver, “From the English Garden to LA.” RCC Perspectives, no. 5, (2013): 63. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/26240531. 7. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press. 2016), 11. 8. Martin Puchner, “Chapter One. Reading in a Warming World,” in Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 13. https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1515​/9780691230429​-002. 9. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” 217. 10.  Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 3.  11. John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2002), 120. 12. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 86. 13. William Arrowsmith, “Speech of Chief Seattle.” The American Poetry Review, 1975: 23. 14. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 12. 15. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 89. 16. Arturo Escobar, “Difference and Conflict in the Struggle over Natural Resources: A Political Ecology Framework,” Development 9, no. 3 (2006): 6–13.

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https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​/28876363​/Difference​_and​_Conflict​_in​_the​_Struggle​ _Over​_Natural​_Resources​_A​_political​_ecology​_framework. 17. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights from Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2008), Chapter 1. 18. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 136. 19. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 135. 20. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 92. 21. Savi, Melina Pereira Savi, “The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies,” Estudos Feministas 25 (2017): 945. 22. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 89. 23. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 40. 24. Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 23. 25. Lahiri, The Lowland, 11. 26. Lahiri, The Lowland, 14. 27. Lahiri, The Lowland, 17. 28. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24. 29. Lahiri, The Lowland, 18. 30. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1993). https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203006757. 31. Lahiri, The Lowland, 18. 32. Lahiri, The Lowland, 26. 33. Lahiri, The Lowland, 171. 34. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 8. 35. Lahiri, The Lowland, 176. 36. Lahiri, The Lowland, 177. 37. Lahiri, The Lowland, 171. 38. Lahiri, The Lowland, 179. 39. Lahiri, The Lowland, 157. 40. Lahiri, The Lowland, 158. 41. Lahiri, The Lowland, 158–159. 42. Lahiri, The Lowland, 159.  

REFERENCES Arrowsmith, William. “Speech of Chief Seattle.” The American Poetry Review (1975): 23–26. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.



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Carey, John. “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene’?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 113, no. 15 (2016): 3908–3909. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/596640. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. http:​//​www​.igbp​.net​/download​/18​ .316f18321323470177580001401​/1376383088452​/NL41​.pdf. Culver, Lawrence. “From the English Garden to LA.” RCC Perspectives, no. 5 (2013): 59–64. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/26240531. Escobar, A. “Difference and Conflict in the Struggle over Natural Resources: A Political Ecology Framework.” Development 9, no. 3 (2006): 6–13. https:​ //​www​.academia​.edu​/28876363​/Difference​_and​_Conflict​_in​_the​_Struggle​_Over​ _Natural​_Resources​_A​_political​_ecology​_framework. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2017. ———. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hurd, Barbara. Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” translated by Lewis White Beck. From Immanuel Kant, “On History.” Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/ subject​/ethics​/kant​/universal​-history​.htm. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. ———. The Lowland. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2002. Puchner, Martin. “Chapter One. Reading in a Warming World.” In Literature for a Changing Planet, 13–37. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. https:​//​ doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9780691230429–002. Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights from Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Savi, Melina Pereira. “The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies.” Estudos Feministas 25 (2017): 945–959. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. University of Virginia Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1r99. Zerzan, J. Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2002.

Chapter 5

Land, Trauma, and Family An Ecocritical Reading of Perumal Murugan’s Rising Heat in the Anthropocene Risha Baruah

With the increased inclusion of ecological concerns and considerations in theoretical and literary efforts in the Anthropocene, we are made to realise several underlying problems associated in the human-nature relationship. To this end, the notion of ‘land’ as a natural, cultural, and political construction has gained visibility in ecological discourses. This was because of an increased engagement of ecocriticism with postcolonialism, geocriticism, and Anthropocene studies. In fact, through their collaborative approach, land has often been marked as a convenient tool for ecological imperialism through the hegemonic system of territorial annexation and spatial transformation via social, political, and climatic factors. Such a complex response for land emerged as a result of foreign and state-sponsored agencies like globalization, capitalism, development, technology, and modernism, which alienated humans from nature. Keeping these ideas in consideration, this chapter shall attempt to investigate the dynamics of how land had become a site for contestation of bio-power. Towards this end, Axel Goodbody’s understanding of land as rhetoric for community, identity, and ancestral history with “special symbols of events” that “reinforced individual and collective memories” shall be applied in the fictional narrative of Perumal Murugan’s Rising Heat (2020: 60). The chapter shall also attempt to explore several ecological and spatial concerns through the novel, Rising Heat (2020) with the intention to understand the complex relationship between environmental, emotional, social, and filial trauma experienced by the Selvan’s family as they were forced to sell 77

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their land, migrate, and then relocate their existence. In this sense, the family could be seen as a representative of marginalized communities in the Global South as they were largely deprived of their ancestral, social, and legal rights to life, livelihood, dignity, and ownership. In addition to this, the chapter shall also explore how ecological imbalance played a direct role in disturbing the socio-cultural dimensions between the urban elites and the rural marginalized. This idea was addressed by Murugan in the novel as he emphasized the social and political mechanisms that reduced the ancestral lands of the villagers as “earthen hearth” which became a site of “dishonest actions” that were “uncovered” through structural violence against nature and the indigenous villagers (10). Such bio-power contestation unraveled land politics to be mechanized by imperialism and anthropocentrism in the neocolonial period. In light of this, the chapter shall also attempt to provide an indigenous perspective of ecological concerns as expressed by the adolescent Selvan who considered the ancestral land as an integral component of the villagers’ lives. In this regard, the land had become a social and ecological space that generated a sense of identification, ancestral heritage, and social belongingness among the indigenous villagers. Acknowledging this, Appa considered their land as a “treasure” and anything “spent on a land will never go to waste . . . as [o]ur god is but this land” (Murugan 2020: 41, 47). However, with the increased domestication of the environment in the Anthropocene through deforestation, urbanization, development, and modernism, there has been an unprecedented acceleration of the geological epoch to its sixth mass extinction. Understanding the drastic influence of these factors that has resulted in the contemporary postnatural period, Murugan explicitly dealt with the idea of deforestation. He highlighted how the disappearing of “razed forests . . . with sprouts of grass” had made the “large green blanket” of the region; bare and ruinous as it was “ripped off and discarded . . . [of its] last bit of goodness.” Following this, the landscape became “lifeless” as it withered from its “stately elegance [through] the deathly blows of the bulldozer that was used by people of “unrecognizable faces” from faraway places. The act of state-sponsored deforestation for Murugan was like a “scene of a massacre” that left everything empty without any trace of history, memory, and ownership. Murugan described the workers with “bloody hands and demonic fangs,” who “walked with their axes and saws balanced on their shoulders . . . gruesomely chopped to pieces the tall standing palm trees that were until then full of life and health.” Their act was considered as “a juggernaut that swallowed anything and everything in its way.” The bulldozer was described as a “ruthless assault” to the green vegetation and the powerful officers of the government as “stoic like Death” who “sucked” out the “last bit of life . . . [from] the land” as they supervised and hovered the region with the intention of excavating “the entire earth” and driving the indigenous people

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out of the homelands. As the officers played the role of “the God of Death” while “reclaiming their ancestral properties,” their inhumane demands congested the chest of the underpaid workers as “[t]hey kept axing down the trees and sending them to the brick kilns” without a halt. Such a dire situation for Murugan was as similar to “an unfortunate calamity” as wells were covered that subsequently disturbed the irrigation system and farming in the region (2020: 1, 5, 11–14, 24, 193). Following this, there was a drastic decline in the agricultural produce that not only caused financial tension among the villagers who indulged in the (mis)use of chemicals in their cultivation but also resulted in the unplanned migration of the locals to unfamiliar towns for jobs, better opportunities, lifestyle, and survival. This eventually led to a change in the agrarian and farming lifestyle among the villagers, as they began to indulge in various jobs like those of land brokers, shopkeepers, weavers, lorry drivers, construction workers, mending fences, trimming lawns, workshop station, prostitution, and work at financing companies, which caused the “farm owners [to move] to the town,” thereby causing a deep sense of sadness, anxiety, longing and displacement among the indigenous locals. Witnessing this new development in the village, Selvan was left teary as “he caught sight of the denuded land” that was previously abundant with resources, fertility and its indigenous communities (Murugan 2020: 7, 22–23). While these mechanical jobs led to mass migration to the towns, it also made the simple life of the village folks “perpetually [rush] in a hurry” as their life and lands were auctioned and occupied by state-sponsored agencies that monitored the village’s sudden and unaccounted deforestation (Murugan 2020: 45). In this regard, “land” in the postcolonial period has become a site of bio-power contestation as managed by imperialistic forces through socio-political-economic agencies like globalization, international trade, transnational debt burdens, military assistance, multinational corporations, conservation, and foreign funding. Such a realization marked land in the Global South with “legacies [with] continuing presences of colonialism and imperialism” as state governments and their sponsored agencies manage to control and transform nature for their political and economical interests (Mukherjee 2010: 42). Such a framework further resulted in a deepened sense of ecophobia that stemmed from social dispossession, deterritoriality, and ecological trauma. Following the act of organized deforestation in the village mentioned in Rising Heat, there was a startling decline in farming with increased migration. In fact, it also led to a sudden and unplanned splurge in urbanism and development in the region as builders forcefully took cultivable lands and turned them into concrete colonies for housing. This radical transformation of the natural environment into “second nature” highlighted the hegemonic interplay of imperialism and anthropocentrism in the Global South. Such a

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structural alteration of the indigenous ecology seemed to have been tainted by the materialist appraisal of socio-environmental relations that further alienated humans from their traditional eco-centric equation with nature. To this end, there seemed to have also been an ecological and ethical shift in our engagement with nature as Man had increasingly been involved in the complex contestation of bio-power that had intensified his ecological blindness, arrogance, and desire for mastery over nature “for a more sophisticated, accomplished dominance of it” (Pepper 1995: 117; Maldonado 2015: 24; and Purdy 2015: 6). Everything in the fertile village of Rising Heat appeared “lifeless [as] Boulder-like buildings” spread across hundred acres of lands that not only concealed the “fragrance of the soil” and but also choked each individual and their houses and streets “[u]nder the pretext of renovation” (Murugan 2020: 7, 11). In addition to these changes, the region was further appropriated by the government to the Office of Animal Husbandry and the housing colony to build “some paltry colonies on it,” which was considered as “[w]orthless ticks” by the indigenous villagers as it forced them to leave their homeland while also resulting in a sudden flow of new settlers in the village who had migrated for employment and residence to the construction site of the housing board. The indigenous villagers suffered several social deprivations that led to their structural marginalization for “they had no claims left on the property [in fact] not even a clump of soil belonged to them any more” (Murugan 2020: 2, 32). These tensions not only reiterated the idea of territorial appropriation and resource extraction as addressed by ecological imperialism but also attempted to highlight the creation of tension in the regional naturescape as indigenous communities engaged in conflicts among each other, which further marginalised and made them victims of the capitalist tendencies of the West. This practice, according to Dreese led to “spatial colonization” of the Global South by the West and the “Anthropos” (humans in general); with the land becoming an agency for biopower (2002: 7). Such an understanding placed colonialism and anthropocentrism as twin concepts that aimed to legitimize Man’s superiority over all creation. Keeping these ideas in consideration, Perumal Murugan through Rising Heat attempted to address the idea of ecological catastrophes that had largely been human engineered. This was done through artificial hybridization of the environment, which caused anxiety and helplessness among the marginalized communities of the Global South. In addition to this, it also caused an ecological imbalance among the nonhumans’ survival and sustenance as they are getting increasingly endangered in the Anthropocene. This complex equation was explicitly addressed by Murugan in Rising Heat, which made the narrative more elusive in understanding and redirecting our engagement towards the impending Apocalypse. For this purpose, Murugan investigated the socio-political dimensions of climate change that made daily life and

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survival difficult for the indigenous villagers. In the novel, the transformation of nature through deforestation and urbanization was traced and how it directly affected the natural water table, the irrigation pattern, and the mode of cultivation. While this caused extreme climatic conditions of severe hot days in the region, it also darkened the soil, skin, and hopes of the villagers who had become ecological victims of the “stinging heat” of the scorching sun (2020: 127, 134, 146, 214). The unnatural rising heat in the climate seems to have been a result of unplanned and unaccounted deforestation, urbanization, development, and modernization that not only disputed the daily routine of the villagers but also the ecological imprint of the planet that had been denied “even drops of rain.” Such a condition “completely destroy[ed] these lands” while also resulting in prolonged periods of droughts that had reduced the villagers into ecological refugees who were forced to sell their ancestral lands as there was “barely . . . two or three showers of rain” and migrate from their homelands to unknown cities (Murugan 2020: 14, 17, 178). In a similar way, the village also encountered frequent episodes of storm and dense downpour which resulted in massive flooding with its “crashing and piercing roars” that frightened the villagers “to the core.” Caught in dire situation, the villagers experienced spatial and social displacement which robbed them of their livelihood and sustenance, thereby resulting in cultural uncertainties, ecophobia and unplanned migration which consequently led to “the gradual erosion of a way of life [along with] the whittling away of traditional means of subsistence” of the indigenous people (Damodaran 2015: 91; DeLoughrey et al. 2015: 5; Rangarajan 2018: 56; and White 2011: 11). While the new lifestyle brought modernization to the village, it also alienated the indigenous villagers from their ancestral homelands as even “with land [they] could barely feed [themselves]”; their increased demands and desire for materialist culture incited them to sell their land, which appeared to make “better sense” for it fetched “a good price” (Murugan 2020: 178). These extremities in the climatic conditions experienced by the region made the place look “like the ruins of cities of the past,” which forced the indigenous people to isolate their ancestral homes while “endur[ing] the torment of complete separation” from one’s family (Murugan 2020: 50–52). The social, ecological, and filial trauma narrated by Murugan highlighted that natural accidents “are not without a man-made cause.” In fact, they have increased multifold in the Anthropocenean as humans continue to domesticate the “wild” nature with the help of modern technology and sophisticated innovations (McKibben 2003: xx). Such a trend among humans to “forever [keep] remolding” the environment and constructing a “second nature” amplified through the Enlightenment not only aided in improving nature for human benefits but also enhanced man’s powers, and capacities “to achieve new kinds and degrees and fulfillment.” While this exercise of humans made

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them appear as a ready site of study in Posthumanism, it also made the contemporary postnatural period of the Anthropocene appear as “an era of both spectacular catastrophes and mundane, ongoing ecological damage that culminate[d] over time in extreme change, or ‘slow violence’” (Maldonado 2015: 34; Soper 2000: 124; Josephson 2012: 341; Sullivan 2013: 7, 16). In fact, the “slow, invisible, and gradual” alteration of the planet by humans was largely commissioned by the structural violence of imperialistic agencies that have been “dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” but whose effects are “extend[ed] over time leaving its imprint over generation” who are often deprived of their social, natural and ancestral rights alongside the irreversible decline of environmental health and regeneration (Nixon 2011: 2). The description of the flood in the novel seems crucial as it highlighted not only Man’s ecophobia but also the “lamenting” of nature whose sounds, movement, and sight of the flood generated a deep sense of anxiety, fear, and hopelessness among the villagers whose lives were reduced to ecological refugees living in sheer destitution. Such a condition favored the housing company to forcefully buy the lands of the villagers in exchange of a menial compensation which the villagers subsequently invested in finance companies as they believed that it would eventually have “relieved [them] of land labour.” Understanding the challenges attached to land and agriculture, the villagers soon “gave away [much of their] fields that were like gold to the colony,” which was later transformed “to plots for homes” as designed by the housing board (Murugan 2020: 129, 178, 194). Following this, the valuation of land grew exponentially with the entry of modernism and capitalism in the cultural fabric of the indigenous community. To this end, the village was filled with lorries, rickshaws, and power looms that transformed the region “into blocks of houses [while] the area lost its original identity. [In fact, new] faces from unknown places began to settle there [while the] finance companies were ready to give any amount of money for anything” (Murugan 2020: 205). While these corrupt systems of financing showed loopholes in the functioning of capitalism, internationalism, and globalization, it also highlighted as to how the villagers got scammed by the finance companies while the state authorities failed to hold the foreign MNCs accountable for their actions and policies. This contestation of bio-power through land politics reflected the conditioning of political conflicts, delegated legal authority, imperial subjecthood, and communities in the global south through the praxis of internationalism, globalization, and colonialism in the Anthropocenean. In fact, these factors subsequently led to structural poverty among the villagers, which according to Mukherjee was “a special kind—one that has its roots in the modern history of colonialism

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and imperialism” (2010: 31). Such state enforced deprivations reduced the narratives of the marginalized villagers into “blabbers,” while making their cultural presence become “invisible,” as there was “no one to check on us, even to see if we are dead or alive.” As they struggled for their daily survival, the villagers often remembered their past filled with glory. The indigenous people were mainly a small community of respectful merchants, landlords and cultivators who have now been reduced to “labourer[s].” Such a reduction of the villagers seems to have been an immediate outcome of their ancestral lands been forcefully “taken away for the colonies . . . [which] completely diminished” the spirits and hopes of the villagers. In fact, many villagers “like Mohan Master, consumed poison and killed themselves. Suicides became commonplace. And there were more who saw that and tucked a smile in the corners of their lips as they walked on” (Murugan 2020: 26–27, 205). As these factors triggered a systematic change in the social fabric of the village, modernism became a common desire among the younger generations who “began to want all sort of things [while the] young women from the colony had no work to do. They had all the time to watch movies and dramas. Amma too would tie up the buffalo and go away with them to gossip, [play thaayam] or watch movies” for there was no work to be done. Caught in the materialistic aspect of modernism and urbanism, Amma felt superficially happy and satisfied while also fearing that a return to her previous simple agrarian lifestyle would instill a sense of loneliness within her. Such a response highlights the increased detachment between humans and nature with the advent of imperialism, modernism, capitalism, urbanization, and globalization in indigenous lifestyle of the marginalized communities of the Global South. While these materialistic aspirations alienated the villagers from their land, nobody wanted to do “work related to the land” and therefore “nobody came to work in the farms.” In consequence to this, the villagers indulged in a lifestyle that was “way beyond their means,” which eventually resulted in their debt traps from money-lenders (Murugan 2020: 105–107). These social, economic, and ecological problems attached to the changing landscape left the agrarian villagers as “mere bodies” who were forced to do hard jobs like chopping firewood, building fences, sizing logs, or weaving. In this regard, Selvan’s proud Thatha was presented as “a meek dog” as he hardly “engage[d] in a conversation with anyone [but] only yell[ed] irritably at Patti.” Caught in the sudden socio-ecological shift of the landscape brought about by capitalism, imperialism, modernism, and anthropocentrism. The hardworking villagers failed to make ends meet, which consequently forced everyone to work, for “there was never enough to fill a stomach” (Murugan 2020: 23, 113). This situation, for Jagodzinski (citing McBrien), was an outcome of the regressive influence of capitalism whose “end goal leads directly to a ‘New Death,’” environmental degradation and the ultimate extinction

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of the ecosystem (2018: 6). In this sense, landed property became a site of control and wealth in the neocolonial period as “many democracies are now dominated, captured and corrupted by self-serving, cronyistic elites who structure the political system to reflect and further their own interests.” Such a lopsided framework led to several social and “environmental inequalities result[ing] from land use, housing and development practices that disproportionately and adversely affect[ed] the poor and people of colour” who became “invisible and vulnerable to environmental exploitation” (Beeson 2019: 114; and Bullard 2003: 44). While these ecological traumas had drastically transformed the regional landscape, it also forced the indigenous villagers towards unplanned, fast, and constant accommodation and adaptation of their lives to the fast-changing socio-ecological occurrences in the village. This idea was explored by Sevathaan in his interaction with Selvan’s father who didn’t want to sell his ancestral land as he “had no desire to part with the soil,” for it continued to reflect his identity, heritage, and ancestral culture. He also emphasized the importance of “farming and fields,” which grew from his love and reverence for his ancestral land (Murugan 2020: 131–132). In a similar fashion, Periamma lamented on the reduced condition of Thatha, which she considered was an outcome of his lost land that “he craved . . . [and] lamented . . . [as it] was being taken away for the colony.” The deep love and desire for his land didn’t emerge from its materialistic and capitalistic valuation but from the fact that he “sprouted from [the] soil.” This naturalized love and reverence for the ancestral lands was subtly acknowledged by many villagers in the novel as they were unable “to adapt from an accustomed life to one completely alien and unknown” (Murugan 2020: 157, 213). The villagers became agitated towards the unknown workers who felled trees without their permission. In fact, the failure to attain answers as to whose orders had been followed for the act of massive deforestation resulted in an organized resistance by the villagers against the workers. Following the verbal battle between the hired workers and the villagers, both the groups engaged in a rebellion for the workers demeaned the villagers into insignificant and powerless presences that “treated the villagers like dust” (Murugan 2020: 193). To this end, the villagers were filled with anger, fear, and anxiety, which was further mobilized by collective ecophobia that resulted in an organized mob attack by the villagers on the workers, for they felt alienated from their ancestral land due to the policies on deforestation, urbanization, and  development, administered by the state, which drastically altered their life, identity, culture, and environment. This was done to generate a sense of belonging to their own “place,” for the villagers feared that they would have no “connection left with the land.” In fact, the peasant rebellion towards the authoritarian system was also essentially aimed to generate and reinforce a sense of communal and

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filial bonds within the indigenous communities and also in their relationship with nature. This idea was addressed by Heise in her work Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), where she developed the concept of “sense of place, or local vision” as a necessary requirement for ecological awareness, environmentalism, sustainability, solidarity, and activism, which could help in reconnecting individuals with their regional place through new forms of belonging and stewardship. Adding to this, Dreese considered Heise’s concept as a prerequisite to literary regionalism that was advocated by geocriticism, wherein “sense of place” became a cultural and ecological tool of the disempowered indigenous communities “to protect ecological concerns from foreign exploitation of globalization launched by the big powers” (Dreese 2002: 3; Heise 2008: 33, 48). In this regard, the agitations of the villagers seem to be an act of developing a “sense of place” as it grew out of social and ecological uncertainties following the inaccessibility to humanitarian rights, and responsibilities, by the traumatized victims who had no resources to “[file] a lawsuit against the government for taking [their] land” and turning them into vulnerable refugees (Murugan 2020: 6). Caught in these deprivations, the villagers engaged in resistance against the centre: “each person held an axe, a short-handled hoe, a staff or some sort of a weapon” against the hired men chopping the trees and intimidating them with slogans and warnings like “One more cut and the next will be one of your heads” (Murugan 2020: 195, 211). Despite this, the state-sponsored act of deforestation continued under police protection as the forced infiltration of state not only transformed the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of the indigenous lives but also resulted in “special” poverty as “the smell of money” disappeared, while “the stench of corpses” from the suicide victims pervaded  (Murugan 2020: 206). In addition to the social, ecological, and climatic changes, the novel also dealt with filial trauma following the alteration of land ownership and landscape. The interconnectedness of social, ecological, climatic, and filial trauma was highlighted by Selvan as he lamented the increased disorderliness in his family. For him, “the loss of the land they had owned” was to be blamed for his family’s constant bickering, fights, sadness, helplessness, frustrations, sudden emotional outburst of tears, anger, and irritation with each other (Murugan 2020: 99). This consequently intensified verbal spat, domestic violence, and alcoholism within the family, which eventually left the house “haunted most of the time. There was no cheer on anyone’s face. No one talked to another with any mirth. Everyone carried on with their work as if they had no option. The boy’s mind was always in turmoil. He kept on worrying about something or the other. He imagined he would run away from all these troubles. But where? What would he do?” Caught in this emotional dilemma, Selvan yearned for his ancestral land, which was a symbol of love,

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harmony, and hope for him. In the end, “he felt like being outside was a lot more peaceful. He remained functional by staying away from home as much as possible” (Murugan 2020: 73, 207). In addition to this, a deep sense of resentment grew within Selvan as he saw his family, especially his grandparents, become ecological victims and refugees due to devastating flood and cyclone. Selvan’s grandparents were neglected and reduced to a “burden” by their three sons who were “brusquely scattered and thrown into different corners.” Acknowledging the destitution of the aging couple that continued to live under the constant state of ecophobia of experiencing another potential flood in the future, Selvan considered that “[e]ven a dog had a better life than his grandparents (Murugan 2020: 18, 52, 59). Towards the end, the aging couple was not only emotionally disheartened but also experienced a lot of hostility from their own family members such as Appa who kicked and crumbled the walls of their flooded house, Amma’s constant nagging and impatience towards the old couple, and Annan’s blinded anger that forced him to burn Paati’s house under intoxication. In fact, such hostility spread across other family members like Amma and Appa, who were constantly engaged in verbal and physical assaults, the infamous fist fight between Appa and his son Annan, all of which started to annoy the young Selvan who often felt isolated not only from their ancestral land and culture but also from his own family, which had begun drifting following the social, ecological, and climatic catastrophes. This interconnection of “social and natural, political and scientific dimensions” within ecological calamities was explored by Trexler as he investigated the contemporary postnatural world of the Anthropocene (2015: 22). In fact, this intersection highlights the merger of culture and nature which had been interrogated by ecological studies under the recent conceptualization of “new” anthropocentrism that aimed to provide ecological awareness and timely warnings of the impending Apocalypse, which has now become “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.” Such a response appears relevant for Beier as “the planet is undergoing uncertain, and potentially catastrophic transformations” which has placed us “at the brink of ecocide and calamity where the life support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our very own survival” (Bartosch in citing Buell 2019: 29; Beier 2018: 360). The novel thus appears to be a social and ecological document on how to (re)imagine catastrophes in the postnatural period of the Anthropocene.

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REFERENCES Bartosch, Roman. Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Beeson, Mark. Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival in the Anthropocene. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Beier, Jessie. “Dispatch from the Future: Science Fictioning (in) the Anthropocene.” In Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, edited by Jan Jagodzinski, 359–400. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Bullard, Robert. “Environmental Justice Challenges at Home and Abroad.” In Global Ethics and Environment, edited by Nicholas Low, 33–46. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2003. Damodaran, Vinita. “The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal.” In The East India Company and the Natural World, edited by Vinita Damodaran et al., 80–101. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth et al. “Introduction: A Postcolonial Environmental Humanities.” In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, 1–32. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2015. Dreese, Donelle N. Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literatures. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Goodbody, Axel. “Sense of Place and Lieu de Mémoire: A Cultural Memory Approach to Environmental Texts.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, 55–67. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jagodzinski, Jan. “Introduction: Interrogating the Anthropocene.” In Interrogating the Anthropocene Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, edited by Jan Jagodzinski, 1–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Josephson, Paul. “Technology and Environment.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History, edited by J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 340– 359. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Maldonado, Manuel Arias. Environment and Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene. New York: Springer, 2015. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Mukherjee, Upamanyu P. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Murugan, Perumal. Rising Heat, translated by Janani Kannan. Gurgaon, India: Penguin Random House, 2020. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice. Abingdon-onThames, UK: Routledge, 1995. Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

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Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. Ecocriticism: Bid Ideas and Practical Strategies. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2018. Soper, Kate. “The Idea of Nature.” In The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, edited by Lawrence Coupe, 123–126. Abindon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2000. Sullivan, Hearther I. “The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene.” In German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Hearther I. Sullivan, 25–44. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Chapter 6

A Vulnerable City, Environmental Apocalypse, and the “Politics” of Climate Disaster A Comparative Study of The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay and A Cloud Called Bhura Samrat Laskar

INTRODUCTION: THE ANTHROPOCENE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND POLITICS Are we in the middle of a human-induced climate crisis which is leading us towards an unavoidable environmental catastrophe? This question, when asked, elicits different and even contradictory responses. While the academicians mostly agree upon that we are indeed tumbling headlong towards an anthropogenic environmental crisis, the majority of others refuse to believe in this. It is not that there is an outright denial of the environmental issues; the seriousness of environmental pollution is noted and discussed, but though the problems are recognized those are rarely considered as crises. Instead, those who foreground the idea of a planetary crisis are often branded as alarmists and even derided as “pathological crisis-mongers, chicken littles . . . joyless, puritanical doomsters”1 by the climate crisis sceptics and deniers. Of course, these sceptics/deniers are not only led by the lack of awareness to the reality but in certain cases they are also guided by self-serving political and economic motives. In spite of these naysayers, in the last two decades or so there has been a definite escalation of interest in the emergent global problem 89

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of human-induced climate crisis and the term which is most discussed and debated in this context is certainly that of the Anthropocene. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen and marine-scientist Eugene Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” (which can be roughly translated as “Age of Humans”) to designate a new geological epoch in which human activities have altered the earth’s environment in such unprecedented ways that it becomes necessary to proclaim a new geological epoch superseding the current Holocene. However, designating the present geological epoch as Anthropocene has not yet met with universal concurrence. Another point of contention is the starting point of this epoch. The extreme views of scientists like W. F. Ruddiman, who goes as far back to the extinction of mammoths due to human predation (around 13,800 years ago) and beginning of agricultural activities by clearing forest land (8,000 to 5,000 years ago) as the starting point of Anthropocene, have got little support. Crutzen and others rather prefer the view that the starting point coincides with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Europe around the late eighteenth century. Simon Lewis, Mark Maslin, Amitav Ghosh, and others rather prefer the beginning of European colonial enterprises worldwide as the possible starting point. However, in recent times the general consensus for the starting point is the period of Great Acceleration from 1945 onwards. It is a temporal zone when “global figures for population, real GDPs, foreign direct investment, damning of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, urban population, paper consumption, transport motor vehicles, telephones, international tourism . . . all began to increase dramatically in an exponential fashion.”2 The Great Acceleration coincided with decolonization of several Third World countries across the world and interestingly the newly independent countries were quick to adopt the notion of “progress” of their colonizing countries and began to contribute significantly to increasing the global carbon footprint. In his seminal essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty underscored one of the major features of Anthropocene with relation to the role of humans in this planetary crisis. Humans have always been biological agents in this planet. But during the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty observed, humans took the role of active geological agents by affecting the basic physical processes of the planet. Chakrabarty quotes Naomi Oreskes in some detail to advance his point: There are now so many of us cutting down so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.3

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There was once a time, Oreskes observes, not long before when “human activities were insignificant compared with the force of geological processes.”4 But that time has passed. With the exponential rise of human population, the ubiquity of capitalist and consumerist discourses, and the increase in energy consumption through fossil-fuel burning, the global carbon footprint has increased to such an alarming level that there are bound to be, and indeed there are, unprecedented human-induced environmental changes which include “anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems.”5 The Anthropocene is deeply embedded within the dynamics of global as well as local environmental politics. There is a justified debate regarding the universality tagged with the word “anthropogenic.” It must be remembered that all humans don’t share an equal role in violating the environment. In most cases the Western, industrialized countries have played and continue to play the dominant role as the major perpetrators. As that is the case, it would be wrong to represent the narrative of the Anthropocene as a manifestation of collective human agency. In order to ensure proper environmental justice, responsibilities must therefore be stratified. However, due to its internal dynamics, global politics often refuse to fix responsibilities, and even if it does so in rare instances, necessary curbing measures are seldom implemented. Localized politics, on the other hand, offer no greater hope as they are often trapped in the dynamics of populist electoral politics. Dipesh Chakrabarty makes an apt distinction between environmental policy specialists and politicians when he states that “[p]olicy specialists think in terms of years, decades, at most centuries while politicians in democracies think in terms of their electoral cycles.”6 As politicians refuse to consider a larger timescale while framing environmental policies, they indirectly resist the measures needed to fight anthropogenic climate change on a long-term basis. As is often the case, both global and local politics strive to maintain the status quo in respect to environmental matters and prefer inaction rather than unpopular but potentially beneficial actions. This willful inaction helps to maintain the existing power-balance and the anthropogenic violation of environment and consequent climate change continue accordingly. THE MOTIFS OF ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE AND DYSTOPIA Anthropocene and anthropogenic climate crisis have expectedly made their inroads in literature, but in the majority of instances these issues are taken up in nonfiction rather than in fiction. Amitav Ghosh, in his lecture-series turned

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book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, criticizes contemporary fiction writers for being complicit in the “great derangement” of willfully neglecting the issue of climate crisis. Ghosh is critical of the way “the literary mainstream, even as it was becoming more engagé on many fronts, remained just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large.”7 However, his casual mention of the engagement of these issues in science-fiction and “cli-fi” is rather reductive. For decades, the subgenre of climate-fiction (cli-fi) has been foregrounding environmental issues including anthropogenic climate change. While tacitly accepting the generic hierarchy between “serious literature” and “popular literature,” Ghosh somewhat reduces the importance of the engagement of environmental issues in cli-fi. It must not be disregarded that these cli-fi works often are haunted by “intuitions of apocalypse,”8 which is a potent rhetoric in this time of crisis. In environmental literature the motif of apocalypse is used with a certain degree of urgency.9 According to Lawrence Buell, apocalypse “is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”10 In order to create environmental awareness among the unconcerned and uninitiated, the motif of apocalypse is used by the environmentalists. In most cases, the vision of environmental apocalypse leads towards environmental dystopianism. Buell has identified three major features of this environmental dystopianism. These are as follows: 1.  the vision of exploitation leading to “overshoot” (excessive demands of the land) or interference producing irreversible degradation, 2.  the vision of a tampered-with nature recoiling against humankind in a kind of return of the repressed, and 3.  the loss of all escape routes.11 Buell finds all these fears being projected in Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring (1962), one of the earliest to invoke the metaphor of apocalypse in environmental literature. The idea of environmental apocalypticism is also disseminated through books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance (1992), and others. The literature of Anthropocene, as expected, also uses this motif in a recurrent basis. While identifying five major narrative patterns of the Anthropocene, Gabriele Dürbeck places the disaster and apocalypse narrative in the first place.12 This is the kind of narrative which portrays a vision of dark and gloomy future as natural resources shrink and exhaust, several species become extinct and there is rarely any vision of hope. In the majority of the apocalyptic narratives the “traditional optimistic

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conclusion and intent to inspire faith disappear . . . [and get] replaced by imaginative but definitive End scenarios.”13 Apocalyptic narratives are often dismissed for their proclivity for generating sensationalism. As the nature of such rhetoric is often hyperbolic, in many cases, it creates the exact opposite reaction intended, as people tend to disregard it as merely fictitious. It must though not be forgotten that the Greek word apokalypsis is not limited to an idea of catastrophe only but also means “a disruptive event that provokes revelation.” Junot Diaz goes on to explain that an “apocalyptic event . . . in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate ‘the true nature of what has been brought to an end.’”14 It is then to be expected that the narratives of Anthropocene, which uses the register of environmental apocalypse, would also expose the true nature of the human-induced climate crisis. When Greg Garrard points out that apocalyptic rhetoric “is capable of galvanizing activists, converting the undecided, and . . . influencing government and commercial policy. . . . [as well as] provid[ing] an emotionally charged frame of reference within which complex, long-term issues are reduced to monoclausal crises involving conflicts between recognizable opposed groups,”15 he offers a positive valence to the use of this rhetoric. For this paper, I have zeroed in on two Indian narratives of the Anthropocene, both of which can be placed under the rubrics of apocalyptic literature. Varun Thomas Mathew’s speculative fiction The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay and Bijal Vachharajani’s A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue are both imagined to be set in a dystopic future where the interaction between anthropogenic climate crisis and politics take interesting turn. Published in the same year, 2019, these two novels are also set in the same sea-side city of Mumbai. Before attempting a comparative ecocritical study of these two narratives of Anthropocene and trying to show how the politics of climate crisis shape the meanings of these two texts, it would be ideal to probe deep into the nature of environmental vulnerabilities of the city of Mumbai. MUMBAI: THE VULNERABLE CITY It is no coincidence that both Mathew and Vachharajani have zeroed in on Mumbai as the setting of their novels. Mathew’s patently political novel imagines a dystopic Mumbai in the near future and traces back the origin of the crisis to the vicious political mechanisms of present times. When asked in an interview why did he choose Mumbai as the backdrop of his debut novel, Mathew replied that “[o]ne of the biggest differences [he] wanted to portray between . . . our present and the approaching future—was the loss of a certain

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magic that has always inhabited India. . . . And nowhere else in India is that magic as strong as it is in Mumbai.”16 Interestingly, for him, climate crisis is not a major focus of his dystopian novel. He declares in no uncertain terms that “the focus on climate change in the book is actually quite minimal.”17 Of course, in the next part of this article, I shall contest this declaration of his and try to show how climate disaster is intricately embedded in the deep structure of Mathew’s novel. If that is the case, Mathew’s choice of Mumbai as the setting must have been guided, even if unconsciously, by the ecological vulnerabilities of the city. Unlike Mathew, Bijal Vachharajani consciously forged a work of “climate fiction,” or “cli-fi,” and thus her choice of Mumbai is obviously conditioned by the environmental vulnerabilities of this sea-side megalopolis. Mumbai, formerly Bombay, grew out from the reclaimed lands of seven islets—Colaba, Old Woman’s Island, Bombay, Mazgaon, Parel, Mahim, and Worli.18 The official process of reclamation continued till the 1970s; the unofficial reclamation process continues to date. Facing the Arabian seas, the megacity of Mumbai with a population of about 13.6 million (around 19.2 million if the entire metropolitan area is considered) has emerged as the economic hub of the country. However, Mumbai is also one of the most ecologically vulnerable places in the world. The combination of its vulnerable location by the sea, continuous anthropogenic environmental violation primarily through development activities, ever-increasing population, lack of political goodwill, and consequent inaction has rendered this megalopolis extremely susceptible to the whims of climate change. The following data may give us some idea how climate change is affecting Mumbai in profound ways. Sea-level rise is one of the most notable threats to Mumbai and is estimated to lie between 2.5 and 3 mm annually at present with projections of a further average rise of 30–80 cm by 2100. Sea surface temperatures of the Arabian coast have already increased with the rate of 0.32°C per decade from 1985 to 1998. In addition to that, mean atmospheric temperature in Mumbai has risen by 2.4°C from 1881 to 2015 and is projected to increase further 1.5–1.8°C by 2050. Heavy rainfall has become a regular occurrence in this region. The downpour of 26 July 2005, in which the city received 37.2 inches rainfall over a single day, led to a flooding of unprecedented scale. It resulted in the death of over 1,000 people and there was a significant damage to property and displacement of thousands of poor people who were living in the low areas of the city. Another severe downpour on 10 June 2015 created a sense of déjà vu, though the amount of rainfall was almost one-third of the fateful day of 2005. Cyclones, which hadn’t troubled Mumbai much in recent recorded history, have also started to emerge from the Arabian Sea. Amitav Ghosh connects the recent recurrence of cyclonic storms in Mumbai with the anthropogenic climate change in the subcontinent. Referring to the findings

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of a recent study, Ghosh mentions that “cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is . . . likely to intensify because of the cloud of dust and pollution that now hangs over the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding waters.”19 Some of the other predictions also look grim. Among the twenty cities projected to be the most vulnerable to coastal flooding by 2050, Mumbai is second only to Guangzhou, China. It has the sixth largest “at-risk” assets among all major port cities and by 2070, an estimated 11.4 million people and assets worth $1.3 trillion would be at peril in Mumbai due to climatic extremes, as predicted in a study carried out by the University of Southampton. A climate crisis of such magnitude, which connects the temporal zones of both the present and the future, needs to be addressed through proper planning in a long-term basis. This can only be done through political goodwill and positive collective action. It is not that actions are not being taken at all but often the actions are taken after the crisis; preemptive measures are rarely considered and implemented. As is seen after the flood of July 2005, there were ample “anecdotal evidence that local humanitarian organisations, families, and individual slum dwellers largely acted collectively in response to the crisis, while the official response was far less effective despite the existence of city disaster risk management plans.”20 Environmental issues including climate crisis have seldom been included in the agenda of any political parties of India. Environmental policies in the country are framed often with half-knowledge, reluctance, and visible lack of earnestness. The same pattern is observed in the case of Mumbai too. If the key decisions taken by the state government in the last decade or so are perused, it would be seen that there is almost no attempt to take any committed long-term steps. If this situation continues, would it be improbable for us to imagine Mumbai turning into an ecological dystopia? If not, then the novels of Mathew and Vachharajani are closer to actual possibilities than fanciful imaginings. DYSTOPIC MUMBAI: READING TOGETHER THE BLACK DWARVES OF THE GOOD LITTLE BAY AND A CLOUD CALLED BHURA At the outset, it must be clarified that in spite of a common setting and certain thematic similarities, the approaches of Mathew and Vachharajani are markedly different. Mathew attempts a satirical political commentary of the present times by taking recourse to a magic-realistic narrative technique and links the political sins of the present with the bleak dystopic future. Vachharajani, on the other hand, writes a “cli-fi” story for children and young adults and with a consummate mixture of realistic narrative technique and environmental

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fantasy foregrounds the issues of climate crisis. However, she also offers a definite note of optimism, which is less pronounced in Mathew’s work. Set in the two temporal zones of the present and the near future, The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay opens in a dystopic Mumbai of 2040–2041. In the opening pages, Mumbai is described through the rhetoric of apocalypse. Avoided by rains, invaded by seas, inundated by water, the city once reclaimed from the sea is now almost lost to it. The “trees died out and plants withered and . . . all vegetation disappeared. . . . The soil grew soft and debauched.”21 The rhetoric is exactly similar to that of Carson’s, as she too opens her Silent Spring with a description of a land blighted by an environmental curse. There is now a self-sustaining towering structure, named Bombadrome, in which thousands of people stay and live a technologically monitored and controlled life. Devoid of disturbing memories and desires, they continue to exist in a state of simulated happiness. Only one character, Convent Godse, a cynical IAS officer, refuses to be complicit in this project of forgetfulness. Living outside Bombadrome, Godse ultimately decides to give voice to the memories and expose the evil political mechanisms of the present Chief Minister to the inhabitants of Bombadrome and beyond. He bestows upon himself the role of reminding the people “of what this city was once like, and how our people used to be, and what we have lost, and how low we have fallen.”22 Even if his primary aim to thwart the further political ambition of the antagonist doesn’t become successful, Godse hopes that his story will remain with the people “serving as a reminder of what this nation once was and what it could be”23 in the future. The issue of environmental crisis has not been dealt in a conventional manner in this novel. In fact, the rational explanations of climate crisis have rather been disregarded and even contested. Chief Minister Ankur Lal Shinde, or Alas as he is popularly known, uses the rhetoric of anthropogenic climate crisis to take the public under his confidence. He appears to project himself as a “woke” politician who is aware of the realities of climate crisis. When rain suddenly stopped appearing in Mumbai, Alas was quick to come out with logical explanations: He explained away the invasion of the sea, blaming it on the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of ocean levels across the globe. He attributed the city’s atmospheric changes to decades of environmental degradation and the chemical reconfiguration of our surroundings. . . . To explain away the ruin of our city, he popularized wild theories about the environmental havoc caused by global warming, solar winds and even the gravitational influence of a white dwarf star in the vicinity of our solar system.24

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Alas identified that the anthropogenic “sins” of “unchecked pollution and environmental abuse”25 were to be blamed for this climate change in the city. In a way, Alas foregrounds the concerns of Anthropocene; he identifies the ways in which human activities have affected the environment adversely. Yet, his rational discourse is contested and eventually discarded in the novel. Godse, the narrator, dismisses the rational explanations as he considers the climate crisis as a manifestation of earth’s rebellion against the sinful activities of some humans, especially politicians. He believes that “the earth beneath our feet has rebelled against us”26 and connects this not with any acts of anthropogenic environmental violation but rather with the domination of the powerful over the powerless. In his interview with Chirdeep Malhotra, Mathew talks about this in some detail: I tried to use environmental changes as a device to portray the consequences of great sins that we commit as a people. So while traditional sins like polluting a river or levelling a forest are . . . alluded to as the direct causes of environmental issues, I also looked at other sins—like riots and rapes and the enslaving of communities, each of which I connected with specific environmental disasters that followed the commission of these sins. And if you study Indian history with that objective, you’ll find. . . . [that] [q]uite a few of the atrocities we’ve committed in various parts of the country have often been followed by natural disasters—like great droughts and famines or earthquakes. It was almost as if the earth itself was rebelling against the sins being committed on her surface; as if this sub-continent of our has a conscience.27

Both the character (Godse) and his creator (Mathew) imagine earth as a living being capable of rebelling against her perpetrator. This idea not only connects with that of James Lovelock’s famous “Gaia” hypothesis in which earth is imagined as a living organism but also with several precolonial cultural beliefs in which nature is endowed with its own vitalism. It is rather the Enlightenment in the West which had forced a visible disjuncture between nature and the humans. Amitav Ghosh, in recent times, has repeatedly spoken against the imposed binaries between the humans and the non-humans.28 He contests the Enlightenment and colonial discourse that “the planet is an inert body that exists merely in order to provide humans with resources.”29 Instead, looking at the unexpected natural calamities that afflict the world, Ghosh opines that “when provoked by humans [the earth] begins to strike back in utterly unexpected and uncanny ways.”30 There is a mystic connection between the planet and the living beings inhabiting it. When the poor, gullible, powerless human beings are exploited by the manipulations of the powerful, the terrain often decides to strike back. This is what happened in the Mumbai of Mathew’s novel. The evil mechanisms engineered by Alas in order to gain complete political power are acts of violation against environment too.

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After infiltrating the radical anti-incumbency “Black Dwarves Movement,” Alas and his party came to power in the fateful election of 2008 but in the process the city is lost to a curse—the curse of the earth. The shelter provided by the Bombadrome is apparently perfect from the ecological point of view. Not only is it resistant to the perils of rising sea levels, eroding shorelines, and violent tempests, but it has also negative carbon footprint. But not until the political sins done in the past are atoned for and the moral balance is restored, the city will continue to remain the waste land as it is. Ankit Prasad aptly observes that the novel talks “about the interconnectedness of human actions, a historical awareness that the climate crisis is one (though the most staggering) manifestation of the dominant economic/political direction of the world.”31 The novel connects the issues of ethicality, politics and environment having its focus “on the way anthropogenic climate catastrophes signal the broader ideologies that inform how we behave with each other too.”32 While retelling the misdeeds of the past, in which he too was also partly complicit, Godse still keeps open the possibility of some hope. Not only does he wish that his words will be remembered by all, but he also looks forward to a day in which “the rains [will] finally return to these shores.”33 Hope is the keyword of Bijal Vachharajani’s A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue. The novel opens with an “unnatural” event of the sudden emergence of a brown cloud on the sky of Mumbai. This Bhura Cloud, as the media given name gets stuck to it immediately, is described again in the register of apocalypse. The gigantic brown cloud appeared like a “turbulent, toxic ocean”34 and was described as “a swirling mass of sooty greys, muddy browns, burnt yellows, gases that collided violently and restlessly into each other.”35 The emergence of this cloud is initially presented as a fantastic event but as the narrative unfolds it was linked directly to anthropogenic environmental violation. The cloud becomes the concrete representation of all the environmental threats combined. In a country where discussions on climate crisis are generally shoved to the margins, with the threat of Bhura looming large above, those warnings now gain an immediacy of effect. Unlike The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay, A Cloud Called Bhura foregrounds the rational explanations of the present climate crisis which is largely anthropogenic in nature. After the appearance of Bhura, the climate of Mumbai went through discernible changes. There is a significant increase in the mean temperature of the city, the readings of Air Quality Index (AQI) increased to an alarming degree, people started to suffer from serious respiratory problems, toxic rains led to a flooding reminiscent of the July 2005 Mumbai flooding. As this “cli-fi” work is primarily meant for children and young adults, many of the explanations behind these changes may appear too obvious to the mature readers. When Dr. Vidisha Mehta, the climatologist,

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goes on explaining about the reasons of climate crisis, which manifests in the form of unpredictable weather, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and, of course, the appearance of Bhura cloud, some of us may not help equating her discourse with the lecture of a school teacher directed to her uninitiated students. Dr. Vidisha directly blames the humans for this crisis and spells out the concept of the Anthropocene to the teenage climate champions of the novel: [W]e are responsible. This is human-accelerated climate change. Oh, it’s a climate breakdown, a crisis. It’s called the age of Anthropocene, that’s what we are living in. . . . We’re at a time when our activity has increased the probability of extreme weather conditions like these.36

The rational explanations behind climate change are highlighted; problems are identified so that the solutions can be worked out by the people concerned. However, solutions are not easily worked out in a politically charged country like India. Vachharajani exposes the reluctance of the political leaders who refuse to identify the seriousness of the situation. Initially, there are instant denials to the crisis, then attempts to present the crisis by means of absurd political rhetoric (Bhura cloud is even declared as anti-national), followed by unplanned “corrective” actions, which often take the form of farcical public performance. The Head Minister of the state, Mota Bhai, is quite unlike Alas, the antagonist of Mathew’s novel. Alas was aware of the perils of anthropogenic climate crisis. Mota Bhai, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge the problem even when it is staring menacingly from above. In addition to the politicians, there are hyperactive media personalities, wily godmen, and the climate change deniers. Dr. Vidisha’s twin sister, Dr. Bidisha, secretly aligned herself with the last group. Impersonating her sister in a public lecture, Dr. Bidisha dismissed the environmental threat associated with the Bhura cloud as she says that she is there “to lay to rest rumours about Bhura being a manifestation of climate change. The cloud is nothing but a weather anomaly. It is characteristic of disruptive weather patterns.”37 She also refuses to give importance to the degree of human responsibility in engineering the climate crisis. She states categorically that “[w]e cannot even begin to think that human beings could cause such extreme planetary changes. That . . . would be akin to God. And we are after all only humans.”38 The nexus between politicians, corporate houses, and manipulative climate change deniers are indicated in the novel. It is because of the unwillingness as well as inability of the politicians and other “groan-ups” to address the problems that led the children and teenagers to come into the forefront. The four principal climate champions, Amni, Mithil, Tammy, and Andrew, are all school-going teenagers. They are intelligent, curious, conscientious, empathetic, and fearless—all these qualities

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combine to goad them to take some positive actions, instead of useless whining and complaining. These children are not only capable of asking the right questions but also are spirited enough to come forward to do the right thing. It is due to the combined efforts of these little climate champions that a public interest litigation was filed at the court. In their opening statement, the judges acknowledge that humans are “faced with a harsh future, one that is eclipsed by noxious gases and toxins, and things are only going to get worse.”39 Castigating the state for doing too little and the industries for ignoring the repeated warnings, the judges opine that because of this collective inaction, the children of now will be left only with the “legacy [of] a ravaged Earth.”40 They, however, end their statement with the positive note that the courts will take necessary steps to “ensure [that] justice is done.”41 It is not made clear what steps exactly will be taken as the Bhura Cloud continues to sit above the city, but still the cli-fi ends with a distinct note of optimism. The climate champions are active now, public awareness is generated, and better days are surely round the corner. CONCLUSION Anthropogenic environmental violation and consequent climate crisis is a reality which not only demands our recognition but also calls for urgent collective action against it. The literature of Anthropocene attempts to edify the uninitiated, sceptics, and deniers regarding the extent of seriousness of this issue. In course of doing so, these writers often use the motifs of apocalypse and dystopia to introduce a certain urgency of effect. In the last two decades though a majority of the Anthropocene literature has emerged from the West, this subgenre of literature has also started to make its presence felt in the Indian context. If Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh have emerged as major figures to address these issues in their nonfiction works, then the fiction of Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide and Gun Island), Indra Sinha (Animal’s People), Amulya Malladi (A Breath of Fresh Air), Nayantara Sahgal (When the Moon Shines by Day), Rajat Chaudhuri (The Butterfly Effect), Vandana Singh (Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories), and others are following the same practice. However, mere literary representation is not enough. Admitting that there is indeed a “problem of the imagination” in respect to the climate crisis, Vandana Singh states that one must not disregard the fact that “imaginative literature—no literature—can ever be enough. We are called to do much more than write or run workshops—to face the possibility of hell itself, and then get to work.”42 There must be a concentrated effort to connect these stories with radical environmental movements

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and environmental policy framings, which again bring us back to the domain of politics. The politics of the sub-continent rarely, if at all, considers the issues of environment fit for any serious consideration. The interface of politics and environmental issues is thereby a tricky terrain to discuss in the Indian context. In this present chapter, I have deliberately chosen two texts which have tried to address this issue. If in Mathew’s novel, the political sins lead towards a dystopic Mumbai, in Vachharajani’s climate fiction, the inadequacy of the politicians are exposed when an environmental disaster strikes the same city. In spite of the immorality and inadequacy of contemporary politics, it must not give us the impression that politics should be completely dispensed away with. Human-induced environmental violation has become so serious that now individual action or actions by a chosen few would not be enough. It is a global crisis which demands collective human action. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for this universal approach to be adopted both in the academia and beyond. He states categorically that “climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe.”43 Chakrabarty reminds us that it will require “a global approach to politics without the myth of global identity.”44 Both these novels underscore the value of this collective effort. If The Black Dwarves pins a glimmer of hope on the gaining of awareness of the inhabitants of Bombadrome, then A Cloud Called Bhura ends with an unequivocal note of optimism that climate crisis can be defeated by collective effort and goodwill. In fact, A Cloud Called Bhura, in particular, uses another distinct kind of Anthropocene narrative pattern mentioned by Gabriele Dürbeck—the narrative of the great transformation which presumes that the global environmental problems are still manageable and that its effects can be minimized by local and bottom-up action that complements centralized measures. Nevertheless, the optimism, muted or pronounced doesn’t negate the gravity of the situation in any way. Both of the novels connect the local with the global as Mumbai becomes the synecdoche of all ecologically vulnerable places of the world, and even of the planet itself. The novels warn us against the possibilities of unregulated anthropogenic action transforming our known world to a bleak dystopia. How far we, the collective human “we,” are willing to take the message with seriousness may determine ours as well as the planet’s future in the long run.

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NOTES 1. Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 30. 2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 15. 3. Quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 206. 4. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206. 5. Liana Chua and Hannah Fair, “Anthropocene,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. doi.org/10.29164/19anthro. Accessed December 14, 2022. 6. Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 3. 7. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Gurgaon: Allen Lane, 2016), 167. 8. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 167. 9. I have earlier engaged with the use of this rhetoric of apocalypse in environmental literature in two of my published articles. For details, see Laskar in the bibliography section. Not only the texts discussed were different in those papers, but the conclusions drawn were also quite dissimilar to the present one. 10. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285. 11. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 308. 12. See the article of Dürbeck to know in details about these five narrative patterns of the Anthropocene. 13. Elizabeth K Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), xv. 14. Quoted in Kate Rigby, “Confronting Catastrophe: Ecocriticism in a Warming World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Westling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 218. 15. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2007), 104–105. 16. Varun Thomas Mathew, “On The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay: ‘Fiction is easier to get through to people,’” interview by Chirdeep Malhotra, The Dispatch, September 3, 2019, accessed December 18, 2022, https:​//​www​.thedispatch​ .in​/on​-the​-black​-dwarves​-of​-the​-good​-little​-bay​-fiction​-is​-easier​-to​-get​-through​-to​ -people​/. 17. Mathew, interview. 18. I am indebted to Hans Nikolai Adam et al. and Emily Boyd et al. for most of the statistical data regarding Mumbai and its extreme vulnerabilities to climate crisis. 19. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 55. 20. Emily Boyd et al., “Climate change adaptation in Mumbai, India,” accessed December 16, 2022. https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​/280092424​_Climate​ _change​_adaptation​_in​_Mumbai​_India.

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21. Varun Thomas Mathew, The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2019), 13. 22. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 8. 23. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 293. 24. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 14. 25. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 15. 26. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 11. 27. Mathew, Interview. 28. To read more about Amitav Ghosh’s engagement with the essential vitalism of earth, see chapter 6 (“Bonds of Earth”) and chapter 7 (“Monstrous Gaia”) from The Nutmeg’s Curse. 29. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Gurgaon: Allen Lane, 2021), 83. 30. Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, 83. 31. Ankit Prasad, “Cli-fi: A Polemic.” Third Lane, Special Issue 2 (Sept. 2021), accessed December 18, 2022. https:​//​thirdlanemag​.com​/en​/cli​-fi​-a​-polemic​-ankit​-prasad​-oddborg reinton/ nonfiction/special-series-prodigal-earth/. 32. Prasad, “Cli-fi: A Polemic.” 33. Mathew, The Black Dwarves, 293. 34. Bijal Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue (New Delhi: Talking Cub, 2019), 7. 35. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 8. 36. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 96. 37. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 148. 38. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 149. 39. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 240. 40. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 241. 41. Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura, 242. 42. Qtd. in Prasad, “Cli-fi: A Polemic.” 43. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206. 44. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206.

REFERENCES Adam, Hans Nikolai, et al. “Climate Change and Uncertainty in India’s Maximum City, Mumbai.” In The Politics of Uncertainty and Climate Change in India, edited by Lyla Mehta, et al., 134–160. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2022. Boyd, Emily, et al. “Climate Change Adaptation in Mumbai, India.” ResearchGate. https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​/280092424​_Climate​_change​_adaptation​ _in​_Mumbai​_India. Accessed December 16, 2022. Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2003.

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Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 1–23. ———. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Chua, Liana, and Hannah Fair. “Anthropocene.” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. doi.org/10.29164/19anthro. Accessed December 14, 2022. Dürbeck, Gabriele. “Narratives of the Anthropocene in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” In Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, edited by Gina Komos and Caroline Rosenthal, 23–47, New Castle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2007. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Gurgaon: Allen Lane, 2016. ———. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Gurgaon: Allen Lane, 2021. Laskar, Samrat. “Environmental Apocalypticism and Representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster in Contemporary Indian-English Fiction.” Muse India 67 (May-June 2016). https:​//​museindia​.com​/Home​/ViewContentData​?arttype​=articles​&issid​=67​ &menuid​=6539. ———. “The Overpopulation Apocalypse and Anthropocentric Bioterrorism in Dan Brown’s Inferno.” postScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies III, no. ii (July 2018): 1–10. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1318969. Mathew, Varun Thomas. The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay. Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2019. ———. “On The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay: ‘Fiction is easier to get through to people.’” Interview by Chirdeep Malhotra. The Dispatch, September 3, 2019. https:​//​www​.thedispatch​.in​/on​-the​-black​-dwarves​-of​-the​-good​-little​-bay​ -fiction​-is​-easier​-to​-get​-through​-to​-people​/. Accessed December 18, 2022. Prasad, Ankit. “Cli-fi: A Polemic.” Third Lane, Special Issue 2 (Sept. 2021). https:​//​thirdlanemag​.com​/en​/cli​-fi​-a​-polemic​-ankit​-prasad​-oddborg reinton/nonfiction/specialseries-prodigal-earth/. Accessed December 18, 2022. Rigby, Kate. “Confronting Catastrophe: Ecocriticism in a Warming World.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling, 212–225. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Rosen, Elizabeth K. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Vachharajani, Bijal. A Cloud Called Bhura: Climate Champions to the Rescue. New Delhi: Talking Cub, 2019.

Chapter 7

Negotiating Mourning and Trauma Imagining the Repertoire in Kamala Markandaya’s The Coffer Dams Richa Joshi Pandey and Dheeraj Pandey

In the Indian sub-continent, nature-based conflicts, particularly those involving forests as resource, have had a long lineage since before the colonial inception of the Indian Forest Department in 1864. State intervention, as a “political watershed”1 in the management of forest areas since 1864, is largely a result of the colonial state’s takeover of these areas, primarily for the sake of commercial forestry. Prior to 1864, local communities, by far, controlled and managed forest areas. In fact, traditionally, communities of forest-dwellers and tribes in India have practiced Swidden agriculture, which has involved a sustainable and reciprocal relationship with the land. In addition, the British colonizers categorized and criminalized various tribes in the Indian sub-continent. The imposition and inscription of these categories continued to have imaginative and material valence in the postcolonial Indian imagination. Thus, the natural cultural identity of the tribes was (re)imagined and distorted under the “white gaze” of (post)colonial encounters. The Coffer Dams was published in 1969. The 1960s was the post-independence period marked by a newly independent India’s imperative to “Grow More Food” and advance both technologically and economically. Arguably, the 1960s was an important period in the history of Indian forestry and agriculture. According to Ashis Nandy, The Indian state, representing the wishes of a powerful section of the nationalist movement and being led in the early years of independence by Jawaharlal 105

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Nehru . . . decided to keep the practice of science outside politics but ensured that the scientific estate had a direct, privileged access to the state. It was as a part of this “double vision” that Nehru, the modern élites which gathered around him, and the Indian state began to build science as a major source of justification for the Indian state as well as for their political dominance.2

It has been argued that from the late forties to the seventies, the building of major dams in independent India, led to the forced uprooting of people from their traditional homes.3 In a broad-based survey and analysis of natural resource conflicts in contemporary India, Gadgil and Guha in a subsection titled “Forests: For Whom and for What?”4 assert that, in the forestry sector, this tendency has ultimately implied more intensive resource use; massive monocultural plantations were undertaken from the 1960s onwards and dams and mines were constructed from the 1950s onwards, resulting in widespread marginalization of forest-dwellers and forest-dependent poor peasants. At large, in India, in the initial years following independence, the “ecological dimension”5 of social conflicts over forests and wildlife, entailed the defense of forest-dependent groups against the control exerted by the nation-state as well as against a rapidly dwindling forest resource base. It is argued, that the late seventies and early eighties witnessed ecologists concerned largely with forestry related issues, while the late eighties and the nineties have found them preoccupied with large dams.6 Thus, in the 1960s in India, aspects related to both the killing and conservation of wildlife as well as the rights of local forest dwellers were yet to be viewed through a legally binding and publicly accountable rights-based lens. In India, the First Soil Conservation Plan, with a multi-stakeholder approach, involving multiple departments and local village councils, was already part of India’s First Five Year Plan (1951).7 Thus, land and its floral and faunal produce had already begun to be viewed instrumentally as a seminal resource that now belonged to those who entrusted their sacred trust in a government of, for, and by the people. However, with the rapid momentum built around environmental consciousness at home and around the world, India adopted a number of constitutional provisions, policies, and legal framework policies, since the 1970s onwards, to promote conservation, equity, and biodiversity and the sustainable use of biodiversity and national resources. These include, among other legal instruments and acts, the enactment of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006. The Schedule Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006, in particular, “builds a rights-based conservation framework around the recognition of forest rights,

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the process of determination of such rights, and the empowerment of local community institutions.”8 Furthermore, the 1960s was a period that saw the postcolonial project of reconstructing community identity against the demands set up by complex, contending, and overlapping forms of marginalization. A crisis of identity was experienced by a newly independent nation. The textual encounter within The Coffer Dams renders an effective appraisal of shared histories, epistemologies, and memory, in the face of impending ecological disaster. At the same time, by re-presenting the discontinuities and incompleteness of cultural archives as cultural memory, the novel orients us towards embracing the gaps in history and identity that may be envisioned through what has been called the repertoire. The repertoire of cultural memory is (re)produced and enacted within the gaps between these archives. These gaps address the theoretical space between deprivation and radical possibility. The current paper examines issues of trauma and mourning in the context of human-led ecological disaster with reference to Kamala Markandaya’s novel The Coffer Dams. Markandaya’s novel, as a postcolonial Indian novel written in English, belongs to a genre that is itself a product of colonial modernity. However, by disrupting and interrogating the (post)colonial archive, the novel at once turns into a critique of colonial modernity. The current paper re-reads The Coffer Dams in order to explore the subjecthood and agency of marginalized peoples and places, that otherwise, fail to be recognized by modernity’s center. The novel situates the postcolonial globalized and cosmopolitan world order, operative through the politics of nation-building by eliding Empire building as world-building in the 1960s in India. In doing so, the novel reassesses the archive of “nation-building” in terms of the archive and the repertoire that together constitute cultural memory in postcolonial India. The current study borrows performance and postcolonial critic Diana Taylor’s theoretical framework of the archive and the repertoire, where she refers to the “archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, and bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”9 According to Taylor, Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it. But that does not mean that performance—as ritualized, formalized, or reiterative behavior—disappears. Performances also replicate themselves through their own structures and codes. This means that the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated. The process of selection, memorization or internalization, and transmission takes place within (and in turn helps constitute) specific systems of re-presentation. Multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting

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communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next. Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.10

A brief summary of the novel is as follows: Clinton and Mackendrick got the contract to build the Great Dam. This includes two Coffer dams, which must be built before the monsoon sets in. Clinton Mackendrick Inc. employs a technical team, manned both by Indians and Westerners as well as a labour team, which only comprises poor locals, which involves “replacing one dark wave of humanity by another.”11 Clinton’s wife Helen is increasingly drawn to the Indian way of life and their “affinities”12 with their cultural roots. During the building of the dam, it is evident that the local forest dwellers have not been part of the policy and decision-making process. A retrospective reading of the novel, reveals that the spirit of equity or access-benefit sharing are conspicuous in their absence, within the diegetic universe of the novel. The local forest dwellers have been ousted out of their homes without any recompense and are forced to occupy a make-shift settlement on the most vulnerable site on the mountainside. Clearly, as a political statement, the novel highlights the skewed and lopsided nature of the particular developmental enterprise of dam-building, which is seen as aspirational for a newly independent India. Two accidents happen at the dam site. In the first one, two Westerners are killed accidentally by a machine. The company team ensures that the dead are given a “decent Christian”13 burial. Next, an error in judgement by the foreign handlers of the dynamite, causes forty deaths; thirty-eight of them, buried under a heavy boulder. In a bid towards equality, the Indian team comes together, showing solidarity with the local forest-dwellers, to fight for the retrieval of the corpses. This is a hard-won struggle. Left to the callous company bosses, the corpses would rather be incorporated into the dam, in order to stick to their time-line. Apparently, the boulder is impossible to lift off, unless the Avery-Kent crane is deployed. Bashiam is a local Indian master crane technician, who undertakes the risky operation. That the Avery-Kent is faulty, is, in fact, hidden from Bashiam. Against all odds, Bashiam deploys the Avery-Kent to lift the boulder off and helps retrieve the trapped dead bodies, but he suffers a near-fatal injury and severe permanent disability. At the end of the novel, the monsoons have begun and unless the village headman oracularly announces whether the rains would stop or not, the entire basin, and its people’s culture, is likely to be drowned in the ensuing ecological disaster. In a signature cryptic message, the dying village headman, leaves a clue regarding the receding of the rains: “When the ridges rise clear.”14 His accumulated and embodied cultural knowledge about the landscape enable him to sense the landscape and make the prediction accurately. The impending ecological disaster is averted, as if prophesied, even ordained, by the village headman.

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At the start of the novel, the narrator describes its setting, in a tone that allegorizes the Empire in independent India. The landscape is represented through interrelated and value-laden binaries of light/dark, culture/nature, human/feral, and order/disorder. The landscape, “a man’s town . . . like old time barracks,”15 is cross-hatched with Conradian references of light and darkness. The unnamed fictional industrial town has been “gouged and blasted out of a hillside.”16 Evidently, Clinton and his ilk, display the overtones of an environmental racism that is imbued ideologically with colonial racism. The landscape is, for them, a fiscal resource. The narrator, under Clinton’s eyes, describes the river in Eurocentric terms: The river as a mechanical-fiscal resource, is potentially wasted by the local riverside/forest dwellers, who too are described in static terms, lacking intentionality and agency: The people who lived by its waters were grateful, but wary. They propitiated it with sacrifice and ceremony. . . . Sometimes when the rains failed there was no river at all . . . (leading to) parched fields. . . . At other times, the land was inundated[;] . . . they saw the crops drowned beneath spreading lakes, their mud huts dissolved to a lumpy brown soup and carried away on a flood tide. At both times they prayed to God, they never blamed him. It was their fate.17

For their foreign recruiters, the Indian labour constitute a “blank wall of masks”18 with “black, depthless eyes.”19 The recruiters find themselves confronted with the “dark, questioning eyes”20 of Krishnan, one among the other up-and-coming Indian engineers in their team. Clinton treats the labour class as “verboten”21 and precludes their linguistic-political-cultural presence: “[W]hat weight if any, he thought with contempt, could one attach to the words of a people who worshipped birds and bees and possibly snakes, decking the forest with scruffy hutches which they knocked up out of driftwood and crammed with leaves and flowers for their deities?”22 Under this “white gaze,” the “turbulent river . . . rose in the lakes and valleys of the south Indian highlands and thundered through inaccessible gorges of its hills and jungles down to the plains with prodigal waste.”23 Thus, the “prodigal waste” within the “turbulent river,” spatially and materially recapture and restore the essentialized image, of what is archived by the white gaze, as wasteful and wasted Indianness. Waste “thunders” in the river’s urban/ rural vicinity. Likewise, during their first site inspection, both Mackendrick and Clinton, paradoxically display an imperialist, even dystopian, “site blindness”: Clinton, “hazed over,”24 sees “not the welter of men and machines but only his vision (of) . . . The Great Dam”25 and Mackendrick’s helicopter view renders “a uniform, impenetrable green.”26 This is a universalist and masculinist gaze that seeks to measure, record, and control the landscape. The river and its landscape, present as encroachers,

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as feral interlopers that tediously cohabit a disembodied space are presently imagined through the transformative potential and progress offered through global technology and neoliberal capitalism. Global capitalism undergirds the positive organizing potential for spatial reproduction at the local level in imperialist terms, which, in turn, enables, a national imaginary of progress through spatial transformation at the local level. At the heart of the universalist enterprise of Empire building as world building is a reciprocity between man and the machine. This interrelationship between the body as machine and the machine as body is entirely profit-driven. Clinton argues that the making of the two—man and machine—is not dissimilar: “One builds . . . [a] ship, a bridge, a dam. What is it built of [?] . . . Iron, steel, glass, concrete, would one not say? But not at all. It is built out of oneself, one’s blood, brain, nerve, guts, spleen and marrow. And spirit. What goes into us, goes into it.”27 As the novel progresses, there is a transubstantiation from the colonial master-myth to the postcolonial mastermind myth. Clinton and the “planners of the new India . . . (are) speaking the same language.”28 In so doing, the latter display a “percepticide”29 towards their own collusion in the violence meted out towards the tribal communities at the dam site. In Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor, uses the word “percepticide” to indicate “the most dehumanizing of acts. To see, without being able to do, disempowers absolutely. But seeing, without even admitting that one is seeing, further turns the violence of oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, and kills through the senses.”30 The fact that Clinton and the “planners of the new India . . . were speaking the same language”31 alludes to a form of percepticide that is informed by colonial/modern ideologies of race and nation. Arguably, the novel, at the present moment, retrospectively draws attention to the headway made by the Indian state, in displaying a critical “ecological turn” in the 1970s, that has fostered and hence strengthened, the discursive and cultural impetus towards a rights-based “ecology of the poor,”32 resulting in the enactment of a range of legal and policy frameworks that uphold India’s democratic ethic. Clinton and his ilk’s postcolonial knowledge of the forest landscape and the forest dwellers is indicative of their cultural blindness and apathy towards the unique thriving and immersive lived experience of the local people. Within the postcolonial archive of geological surveys and technological plans, the land and its people are encoded in metrics. These metrics are objectively grasped and made available for easy consumption within “resourceignorant”33 market-oriented economic and technological development, based on models of economic growth underpinned by “disenfranchisement and disposability of people.”34 However, for the local forest-dwellers, the forest is a web of life. Nature is their dominant resource too. The capital available to them includes a repertoire of what Bourdieu refers to as the embodied35 and accumulated capital of

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its human inhabitants. However, their interrelationship with nature is exemplified in sustainable and non-commodified forms of living available in the form of an untranslatable and performative cultural repertoire. The novel deconstructs colonial modernity by reinscribing within the novel as a structural model for modernity, gaps within the cognitive mapping of environmental and cultural risks. This involves the creative retelling of marginalized narratives by adopting the neutrality and cosmopolitanism offered by English as a link language in India. The novel, written in English, offers a position of ambivalence in its simultaneous recognition and rejection of modernity’s universalism. There are no local translated and untranslatable words from indigenous languages (regional/tribal) inserted within the narrative. The linguistic diversity that is commonly found in a local region, possibly cohabited by a single tribe or tribes or due to the presence of extra-mural members of the tribe like the novel’s wildfowl-catcher, is absent within the narrative. Alternatively, Markandaya’s use of English without translated or untranslated tribal/regional languages, precludes any posturing that would gesture towards a proxy and/or superfluous witnessing of the vernacular frame(s) of reference. The discourse that privileges the use of English, does not diminish or blot out the experience of the violent event, nor does it lessen the blow experienced by the victims. In fact, the use of the Indian English novel format amplifies, through paradox and irony, the brutally unreal and situated reality of the traumatic encounter. Here, the event itself becomes the discourse. Therefore, the witnessing is done extra-verbally in the performative gestures as repertoire, located within indigenous and embodied knowledge, transmitted as cultural memory. The novel also uses narrative metalepsis that gestures, like nested Matryoshkas, towards a repertoire that testifies to transcultural forms of silenced marginalities and traumatic experiences. The repertoire addresses, reveals, and recovers the gaps within (post)colonial archive. The repertoire as embodied knowledge is that “which disappears because it cannot be contained or recuperated through the archive . . . multiple forms of embodied acts are always present . . . reconstitute themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.”36 Helen’s initial curiosity soon culminates as an open-hearted response to “an outflowing warmth,”37 that she experiences during her excursions to the upriver village. She is “no longer satisfied with watching, but wanting to know: entry achieved, now seeking performance.”38 Taylor argues that performance “functions as epistemology.”39 Performance and the aesthetics of everyday life, function in the “live”40 mode, “reflecting cultural and historical specificity as much in the enactment as in the viewing/reception . . . intelligible in the framework of the immediate environment and the issues

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surrounding them.”41 What Helen is seeking, is the performance as “practices that bring together what have historically been kept separate as discrete, supposedly free-standing, ontological and epistemological discourses.”42 Helen and Bashiam witness the wildfowler’s performance of the bird-catching act in the jungle. The performance, we are told, requires a carefully guarded skill, which is deployed only “when the young birds rise.”43 With “simple ordinary instruments of disaster and death” and what seems a well-timed and time-tested technique, the wildfowler performs the act that attests to “expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements, made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words . . . and imaginary movements . . . not prior to language but constitutive of it.”44 The act is embodied and embedded in the performance itself. It shall not repeat itself. Performatively too, the limed net is buried, never to ensnare again. Yet, the performance is reiterative in its coterminous relation with cultural memory and history. Moreover, it challenges traditionally held notions of time and embodied bodily experience, to render alternative ways of experiencing the contours of the body and that of time. The performance enjoins upon Helen, Bashiam, the wildfowler, and the rapidly ensnared birds to experience time and the body differentially. For Helen, “time had detached itself from existence”45; that Bashiam’s eyes “were brilliant . . . like an animal close on quarry . . . that was how she looked [too] and it was not a judging but a recording”46; though “she [Helen] could not have said which was birdsong and which the [wildfowler’s] luring reed”47 and “she [Helen] did not know why the birds should come. . . . The sack bulged but still they [the birds] came as if they could not see what went on in front of their eyes.”48 Likewise, during this bird-catching act, Helen comes across “minute pagodas”49 and “votive altars,”50 both symbols of worship of the forest gods. Helen’s grasp of the forest dwellers’ symbols of worship is a new and differential form of learning about time and space, learning, both necessary and accidental. She notices that these symbols of worship are present at some and absent at other places in the forest. Though the “unexpected and decorative quality [of these symbols] invariably filled her with pleasure; perhaps even jungle dwellers set a limit to how far they penetrated the jungle.”51 Thus, her first experience of forest culture, however peripheral, is enough to link her, through an embodied experience of the forest via performance, with the cultural practices and memory of the forest dwellers. In many ways, Helen’s position of marginality, both within her family/ public circle, as well as within the tribal settlement, is empowering. While it allows her to view the dominant capitalist culture from the outside, it also gives her the ethical and empathetic positioning to enter into a transactional relationship with the forest dwellers, while “discovering natural springs of

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intercourse.”52 In Clinton and company’s imperialist view, the business of dam building is a “gift” of the West to the “underdeveloped” erstwhile colony, amply evident in their racist and condescending treatment of Indians across the spectrum. Helen, on the other hand, is strategically poised to question imperial acts. By excavating the ruins of broken pots, she performs the discovery53 that the upriver tribesmen had been ousted from their land to build the Mackendrick bunglows. Though she cannot hear their “moaning”54 for what has been called “cargo,”55 she is acutely conscious of the cultural risks and trauma that forgetting can entail. The buried remains of cooking vessels, an “episode”56 that Clinton has “quite forgotten,”57 spontaneously resurrects memories of her father’s stroke: “Someone else had said episode once . . . the physician, urbane, aloof, speaking of an episode . . . [s]omeone more human translating what he said”58 (emphasis added). The narrative metalepsis that nests Helen’s traumatic registers, alerts her to the violence inherent in the cultural forgetting of trauma. Thus, the forest dwellers’ loss and trauma are internalized by Helen, when she confronts Bashiam: “It wasn’t a dam they were building. It was bungalows with a view.”59 Later, during an exchange with the village headman, she learns to listen, rather than speak: Helen, distressed, saw with the headman’s eyes the visible deterioration: the uprooted palings lying where they had fallen in muddy troughs of their own creation, the unfilled subsidence craters left by intensified blasting, the ragged come-apart thatching. . . . But now she was quiet, her mind slowly filling with glimpsed truths, nebulous understanding no less valid for its lack of form.60

Pramod K. Nayar uses the term “ecoprecarity,” which he argues is “at once about the precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster . . . and also about the environment itself which is rendered precarious due to human intervention in the Anthropocene.”61 The lives of the ousted forest dwellers, the curtailment of their human rights, including the right to “environmental human rights”62 invoke cultural anxieties, embedded in power relations that draw attention to fragile, vulnerable, and disposable people and cultural practices. The bird-catching episode also points towards the “wasting of other life forms at the altar of human development and modernity.” Thus, the net(work) of interspecies relationship between birds and humans, acquired by the wildfowler through the cultural memory of living in the forest, is recast precariously as “species death,” where birds are rendered disposable and are trapped and sold/killed for economic profit. Likewise, animals and animalized humans are subject to ecoprecarity and are viewed as disposable products of colonial utility. Bailey, for example, is “very proud of the spotted [deer] skin, which he used as a bedside rug.”63 Mackendrick observes “the six ants that were men scurrying up the

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escarpment.”64 Jackson “shows[ing] off”65 his black mynah, kept in solitary confinement for her song, till she dies. Then, in what appears as a grotesquely exaggerated ritual, he buries her in Clinton’s compound. Likewise, at the time of the accident, the company heads offer no remorse, compensation, sympathy, or empathy with the tribal community. The company’s foreign heads demonstrate no fear of Indian law, while their carelessness has led to the loss of Indian lives. On the other hand, an accident occurs. Two foreigners die. Their trauma is witnessed: “How maudlin one became about dying in a foreign land! . . . Clods of earth, held together by severed threads and rootlets of the distant trees, clumped heavily down on the coffins. No one had brought flowers. The simple graves, in the shadow of the towering jungle, were suddenly forlorn and pathetic.”66 The bodies “crushed and suffocated, but not savaged”67 have been recovered against the grain, thereby articulating their “victory over the river.”68 The fulfilling of death in a painstakingly undertaken detailed mourning ritual, has been articulated by Rawlings: “We like to give our dead a decent Christian burial.”69 Here, the fear of death in a foreign land is imbricated with the need to overcome it; as if fulfilling the prophecies of the Empire. The pathetic fallacy of nature around the grave, foregrounds the context of dying, while eulogizing the dead who can never be fully mourned. The novel begins from Clinton’s Lines, which are, for Clinton, “shabby little outposts of empire,”70 and it ends with Clinton’s success in the building of the coffers; his refrain is “We’ve got to finish on time.”71 A second accident occurs at the dam site, this time due to a technical error-in-judgement of the fuses and of their own timing, while setting off the dynamite blast. Forty local Indian people die, ten out of whom are labourers, and the rest are onlookers, who have gathered to watch the spectacle of the Great Dam in the making. Thirty-eight corpses are trapped under a boulder. All the Westerners are safe. For Clinton, this is “bad business . . . the poison tooth of disaster [is its] delaying potential.”72 For Henderson, “the dam takes overriding priority.”73 The “danger of forgetting”74 was, for him, the danger of forgetting the task at hand, which is building the dam before the monsoon sets in, as per the preset timeline. Together, the company’s core team decrees that all the corpses that are buried under the rock shall be incorporated into the structure. At this point, a shift in power occurs. Until this juncture, the technicians and the labourers, both Indian, have constituted a social/professional hierarchy, where the first group has been privileged over the second. The disposability and replaceability of labourers is echoed by Rawlings, who argues that the matter of the buried corpses is “simple”75 and “merely a question of disposal.”76 At this juncture, by liaising with the spokesmen for the tribe, Krishnan articulates the equality question. Together, “mixed and formed from the same

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soil,”77 they enunciate their decree: “No work, until the bodies of our dead are returned to us. So that the rites may be correctly performed, and their souls depart in peace.”78 Thus, however inconvenient to the company heads, they will need to have the corpses retrieved. It is not the death of these forty Indians that enables the recognition of Indian lives, per se. It is in the agentic performance-in-minutiae of the death ritual, that the traumatic encounter is mitigated through mourning. Death is fungible. It makes the Westerners uneasy. Their discussions around the idea “to concrete them [the thirty-eight corpses of Indians] in”79 are pared down conversations, interspersed with silence. Soon, a metaleptic “cage” to the “door” of a [his]story of human disposability opens into “some experimental laboratory, kept out of sight in the basements of humane hospitals, where the smooth men in white coats worked. . . . [They] saw the twisted thing, that made their bowels jump and kick, in a silence that squirmed like a wormy cocoon.”80 In literature, Gerald Prince uses the term “disnarrated”81 to refer to “all the events that do not happen though they could have and are nonetheless referred to [in a negative or hypothetical mode] by the narrative text.” Rawlings remembers the mythically recounted shooting of a crocodile, spontaneously conscious of “this same river, which had ceased to be full of crocodiles.”82 Displaying coalitional consciousness around disposability, Mackendrick too, recounts the horrific disnarrated story of the unmourned individual who once melted into bell-metal, leaving forever within it, the trauma of “flesh colours in the dull bell metal.”83 Another “miracle”84 is performed. While others refrain from the risky venture, Bashiam operates the dysfunctional Avery Kent “Devi”85 (translated as goddess), to retrieve the corpses. Against the grain “looking at his young man’s limbs which were smooth and strong, but would twist so easily, frail under metal, breaking him with them,”86 Bashiam’s motivation to undertake the risky operation is a combination of the awareness of his “rights and responsibilities”87 towards his people, his guilt at cuckolding Clinton and his passion for machines, which have given him “another way of life.”88 His “race knowledge and instincts,”89 and his own skill at machines, aid him in successfully lifting the boulder off. The corpses are liberated, the trauma of the dead mitigated, if not averted. However, as expected, having performed the act, the crane falls, taking Bashiam, with it, “imprisoning in its crushed cage the man who could still be seen at the controls.”90 After a long period of episodic sedation, extreme pain and consciousness, Bashiam, we are told, manages to speak again, though he cannot walk. In him, hope, however bleak, remains intact. Tragically, Bashiam’s heroic act and trauma remains unrecorded and unregistered in the official “archival” report composed by Clinton.

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All through the novel, Bashiam is called “jungly-wallah”91 by many of his peers and superiors. He has been marginalized both by the Westerners as well as by the Indian elite, who have turned their back on the man who had learned on the job, painstakingly “welding his new learning on to an older, part-inherited knowledge.”92 At the same time, he has also felt that his “roots were attenuated: his homecomings were uneasy surface affairs.”93 Arguably, Bashiam’s act of retrieval and martyrdom, reactivates the scenario of colonial-inspired percepticide to produce a highly codified postcolonial environment involving a “continuum of ways of storing and transmitting memory that spans from the archival to the embodied.”94 In addition, Bashiam’s reenactment of the archive and the repertoire as a continuum, relocates his subject positionality in-between/beyond deprivation and radical possibility. The coffers, as is decreed by Clinton, are to stay intact. They are not to be breached even in the face of heavy rain and an alarming rise in the river’s water level, which may result in “an extinction of the entire land basin.”95 Clearly, this risk is perceived by his builder kin, Mackendrick, who tells Clinton, “It is not . . . we who take the risk. We make the calculations, it is they who run the risk.”96 The Dam has been proposed to be built with blueprint precision, according to an elaborate and time-bound technical and management plan. Risks and safeguards have been assessed and managed from a “London penthouse padded to keep out the noise of the traffic.”97 Risks are not extraneous to modernity but are built into the system as part of a disembodied “risk society”98 which frames risks in one society, which are then applied to another through a “one-size-fits-all” homogenizing and essentializing approach. However, as the story unfolds, Clinton’s moment of triumph as the master-builder and the beholder of cutting-edge technology is paradoxically the moment of his failure. For it is because of native knowledge gleaned from the dying tribal chief that they are all saved. At the end of the novel, Mackendrick and Helen are certain that the intact coffers shall ultimately result in a water memorial for those who live in its closest proximity. They pledge their presence in and as a new “community of purpose”99 that seeks to preserve/conserve the local space, its people, and their culture. This is a departure, however partial, for Helen and Mackendrick, from an earlier eclectic “community of purpose (with) . . . savage breakaway strands of internecine struggle”100 that involved, an awful intimacy between Indians and their [erstwhile] master[mind]s. At the time of the impending ecological disaster, Helen and Mackendrick present themselves on the most vulnerable site at the tribal settlement. Their passage is a conscious breach from the space offered by the control room of the master-makers. Thus, two separate but inter-linked islands have emerged. One, where death occurs—people and their cultural symbols, practices, and

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knowledge, die; the other—which calculates and controls death. These are disconnected spaces where experiences of centre-margin relations within historical colonialism are reconfigured with Helen and Mackendrick’s rite of passage. If Clinton represents a heterosexual and heteronormative Europe, wherein conformity is sustained by a homo-erotic brotherhood, Helen and Mackendrick deviate and resist the center of colonial modernity, moving instead, towards an ethics of witnessing. Helen and Mackendrick’s deliberate presence at the tribal settlement is critical. At the moment when the rains and coffers are likely to drown the entire landmass, theirs is not just an expression of solidarity with the tribal people. It is an act/gesture of responsibility towards the deaths of other people by attempting to witness, and partake of, the trauma that they can claim to perceive as inevitable and one that they are complicit in, insofar as they are unable to preempt, if not prevent it. It is an act, both transforming and transformative. The space of the impending ecological disaster, earlier imagined as disposable, is now imaginatively transformed as it draws attention with the emergence of Clinton’s wife and business partner. If the death memorial as archive, as has been evidenced in the case of Bailey and Wilkins’s death, is what shall be certainly afforded to the Westerner; by ensuring their presence in the potentially traumatic coordinates of space and time that mark the death of a plausibly unsung, unmourned community, Helen and Mackendrick negotiate through a cross cultural and intersubjective exchange, from their hybrid and ambivalent positionality, the (post)colonial repertoire of the hill people. In trying to testify to the trauma of a dying people and culture, they are not yet one with the hill people and yet not completely outside the latter’s traumatic experience. At the brink of death, together with the tribespeople, they constitute a new community of purpose, also a community of mourning. In doing so, they remodel and renew the archive and the repertoire in hybrid terms. Thus, disaster averted, Mackendrick and Helen have made the effort to enter into an intersubjective exchange, not with Clinton but with those whose suffering they are motivated to avow. In other words, their subjectivity is constituted through the witnessing of the dehumanization of the tribespeople on the one hand and the “percepticide” displayed by Clinton and his ilk on the other. For Kelly Oliver, “Avowing the suffering of others caused by my own privilege, however, requires more than cognition or even imagination. It requires pathos beyond recognition. It requires a commitment to what Jacques Derrida calls ‘hyperbolic ethics,’ an ethics of impossible responsibilities for what we do not and cannot recognize.”101 Death embodies a unique potential for staying alive in the novel, both performatively as well as narratively. Under Western eyes, while Bailey and Wilkins had been given an elaborate Christian burial, the unnamed local tribals were not considered fit subjects for a death ritual. Nor are those

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individuals whose lives have been put to risk but whose spectral presence remains present and disnarrated metaleptically from Rawlings’s story about crocodiles and Mackendrick’s memory narrative about the casting of the bell. Speaking of trauma and mourning, Derrida argues, “I would say there is no politics without an organization of the time and space of mourning, without a topolitology of the sepulcher, without an anamnesic and thematic relation to the spirit as ghost, without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost, whom one holds, just as he holds us, hostage.”102 Mbembe theorizes necropolitics in the ability to kill as the absolute articulation of sovereignty. Necropolitics engenders “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”103 Thus, an imagined impunity by the West over the killing of others manifests in the latter’s ability to continuously assert sovereignty through necropower over racialized, colonized other(s) within everyday practices. However, the dead have the potential to spring back to life within living memory in the present and future. Thus, the ability to kill/disnarrate, however dominant, can be displaced, and thereby reversed and resisted, by those relegated to utmost silence and trauma. This reversal is evident in the case of the resurrected corpses, through collective action, based on a relationship on mutual constructedness and reciprocity; by Bashiam, on pain of grave personal trauma; and the locals, who retrieve the corpses once the boulder has been lifted off by Bashiam. This reversal is also evident in the nested stories of silenced others within the narrative metalepsis that emplaces the resurgence of silenced others. Likewise, this resistance is also evident in the witnessing ensured by them as they “saw that the banks held firm and the water levels were falling, which was of moment to them. While others who looked, their concerns being different, saw only the coffers”104 (emphasis added). Arguably, as in the case of Yuyachkani, “trauma, by its very nature precludes its registration,”105 leaving no trace because “a record has yet to be made.”106 Thus, it is crucial to ask questions pertaining to “Whose memories, whose trauma, ‘disappear’107 if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?”108 The ritual of mourning can not only mitigate trauma, but by raising questions of whose trauma is witnessed by whom, such a ritual recreates the political topos for the reversal of privilege, that has had the propensity to anchor itself around an intersectionality that interlinks Western supremacism with class, ethnic, and educational supremacism. In Markandaya’s novel, the depopulation narrative is realigned with a (de)colonization narrative to produce a continuing fear of history and a rediscovery of insecurity and trauma in order to confront it differently. This marks the waning of colonial knowledge and influence. Thus, in the face of ecological disaster, the symbolism in the “coffer” is transformed and

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dispersed from an imperial imaginary to a democratizing imaginary, where the interests, drives, needs, and challenges of tribal people remain marginalized and intact; from a public/corporate treasury owned and archived by few, the coffer materializes into a radically unifying, concretizing, interlinking, culturally treasured support structure that retains the aspirations of a new nation and the vulnerabilities of specific and situated traumatic encounters. At the brink of a human-generated ecological disaster that coincides with a development model based on the West, the coffer dam presents a spatial imaginary, where land and water are architectonically reconfigured towards cultural self-definition, where authority is contested and forged. As archive, the coffer dam records the archive of nation-building as Empire-building. On a different level, as emblematic of a resurrection praxis and (hi)story enabled through Bashiam and the local villagers and of the promise towards and despite nation-building, made by a dying headman, his people as well the novel’s European cast, including Sister Theresa, Helen, and Bashiam, the coffer dam constitutes the repertoire of embodied cultural practice. Thus, The Coffer Dams exemplifies the political dimension of mourning and its associated rites and rituals that constitute the repertoire. The novel lends itself to a postcolonial Indian imaginary in order to envision a new “community of purpose” that may gesture towards an incorporation of the trauma of those who are/may be disnarrated in the face of ecological disaster. Alternatively, the novel locates the gaps in the national archive and recuperates the possibilities within the repertoire, so as to reexamine the inter-relationship of space and emergent, evolving, hybrid, and marginalized entities within a globalized and racialized world. NOTES 1. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1995), 85. 2. Ashis Nandy, Science Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5. 3. Walter Fernandes and Enakshi Ganguly Thukral. Development, Displacement, and Rehabilitation: Issues for a National Debate (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1989). 4. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, “Ecological Conflicts and the Environmental Movements in India,” Development and Change 25, no. 1 (1994): 103. 5. Gadgil and Guha, “Ecological Conflicts,” 105.

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6. Satyajit Singh, “Review of The Resettlement Issue in Ecological Politics by Enakshi Ganguly Thukral,” Social Scientist 20, no. 9/10 (1992): 87, https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.2307​/3517721. 7. Planning Commission. “First Five Year Plan” (1953). 8. Tushar Dash, “The Forest Rights Act: Redefining Biodiversity Conservation in India,” Policy Matters (2010): 33. 9. Diana Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” in The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 10. Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” 20–21. 11. Kamala Markandaya, The Coffer Dams (London: Hamilton, 1969), 6. 12. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 144. 13. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 117. 14. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 234. 15. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 1. 16. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 2. 17. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 3. 18. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 16. 19. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 16. 20. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 16. 21. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 129. 22. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 76. 23. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 3. 24. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 1. 25. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 2. 26. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 2. 27. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 190. 28. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 3. 29. Diana Taylor. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 119. 30. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 123–124. 31. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 3. 32. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997). 33. Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice Sustainability and Peace (London: Zed Books, 2016), 16. 34. Shiva, Earth Democracy, 15. 35. Pierre Bourdieu and John G. Richardson, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–258. 36. Diana Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” in The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 21. 37. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 39. 38. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 41. 39. Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” 3. 40. Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” 3.

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41. Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” 3. 42. Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire,” 3. 43. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 82. 44. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26. 45. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 85. 46. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 87. 47. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 86. 48. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 86–87. 49. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 84. 50. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 84. 51. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 84. 52. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 39. 53. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 45. 54. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 71. 55. Garry W. Trompf, ed., Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements, Vol. 29 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 10. 56. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 25. 57. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 25. 58. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 25, emphasis added. 59. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 46. 60. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 151. 61. Pramod K. Nayar, Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019), 7. 62. Linda Hajjar Leib, “Human Rights and the Environment: Philosophical, Theoretical and Legal Perspectives,” Brill (2011). 63. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 101. 64. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 49. 65. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 102. 66. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 122–124 67. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 119. 68. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 120. 69. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 117. 70. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 1. 71. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 150. 72. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 172. 73. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 176 74. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 175. 75. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 188. 76. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 188. 77. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 182. 78. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 182. 79. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 176. 80. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 176.

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81. Prince, Gerald. Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 30. 82. Prince. Narrative as Theme, 177. 83. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 178. 84. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 191. 85. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 98. 86. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 192. 87. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 192. 88. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 42. 89. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 80. 90. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 199. 91. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 19. 92. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 8. 93. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 44. 94. Yuyachkani, “Staging Traumatic Memory” in The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 192. 95. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 229. 96. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 230. 97. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 230. 98. Ulrich Beck, A Critical Introduction to Risk Society (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2004). 99. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 232. 100. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 120. 101. Kelly Oliver, “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics” in Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 475. 102. Jacques Derrida, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michel Naas, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19. 103. J-A., Mbembé, and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 40. 104. Markandaya, The Coffer Dams, 235. 105. Yuyachkani, “Staging Traumatic Memory,” in The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 193. 106. Yuyachkani, “Staging Traumatic Memory,” 193. 107. Yuyachkani, “Staging Traumatic Memory,” 193. 108. Yuyachkani, “Staging Traumatic Memory,” 193.

REFERENCES Beck, Ulrich. A Critical Introduction to Risk Society. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre, and John G. Richardson. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Dash, Tushar. “The Forest Rights Act: Redefining Biodiversity Conservation in India.” In Policy Matters 17 (2010): 33–40.

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Derrida, Jacques, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michel Naas. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Fernandes, Walter, and Enakshi Ganguly Thukral. Development, Displacement, and Rehabilitation: Issues for a National Debate. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1989. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. “Ecological Conflicts and the Environmental Movements in India.” In Development and Change 25, no.1 (January 1994): 101–136. _______. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1995. Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism Essays North and South. London: Earthscan, 1997. Leib, Linda Hajjar. Human Rights and the Environment: Philosophical, Theoretical and Legal Perspectives. Netherlands: Brill, 2011. Markandaya, Kamala. The Coffer Dams. London: Hamilton, 1969. Mbembé, J-A., and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics.” In Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Nandy, Ashis, ed. Science Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2019. Oliver, Kelly. “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics.” In Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 473–493. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.5325​/philrhet​.48​.4​.0473. Planning Commission. “First Five Year Plan” (1953). Prince, Gerald. Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice Sustainability and Peace. London: Zed Books, 2016. Singh, Satyajit. “Review of The Resettlement Issue in Ecological Politics by Enakshi Ganguly Thukral.” In Social Scientist 20, no. 9/10 (1992): 87–91. https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.2307​/3517721. Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. ______. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Trompf, Garry W., ed. Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements, Vol. 29. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Yuyachkani. “Staging Traumatic Memory.” In The Archive and the Repertoire, edited by Diana Taylor, 190–211. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Chapter 8

Writing the Grotesque Poisoned Bodies and Toxic Environment in Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale Sonalika Chaturvedi and Renu Bhadola Dangwal

We live in a ubiquitously toxic world which is heavily infected by incessant ecological violence and pseudo-development politics. This has led to a collective obliteration of harmony between body and environment in an age wherein chemicals present in trace amounts in the environment are seeping into our bodies. These toxic chemicals are slowly but steadily altering the fundamental molecular structure of human and nonhuman bodies. This leads us to contemplate that any discussion around body-environment relationships needs regulation on toxic chemicals as the basic proposition of the debate. Ambikasutan Mangad’s novel Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017) is originally written in Malayalam and translated by J. Devika. The novel constructs this connection between body and its environment, representing the struggle of the people of Kasaragod district in Kerala and their seemingly unending battle against the Indian State.1 The people of Kasaragod are victims of the endosulfan tragedy; they were exposed to the Organochlorine pesticide during the years 1975 to 2000 (Amrudheen 2019). This toxin, which was used to control pests like whiteflies, aphids, beetles, and worms, became a large part of the food chain over time and turned into an “ecocide.” Rob Nixon (2011) refers to this as “slow violence” and defines it as a viciousness “that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2). The people living and working in and near crop fields are severely affected by the spraying of chemicals. Since the effects do not show immediately, the harmfulness of pesticides typically goes 125

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undermined. As a result, the aforesaid toxic violence continues over time while, estranged from its original causes, the other issues are held accountable. Such a situation urges us to look beyond the obvious and the immediate in order to stand up to confront the eco-social injustices occurring in an era of “slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” (Nixon 2011: 2) of lethal chemical abuses. Adithya Pradyumna has described the delayed and irreversible effect of endosulfan in his review titled India’s Endosulfan Disaster: A Review of the Health Impacts and Status of Remediation (2009). As per the preface of the review, the tragedy of Kasaragod has been considered by experts in the field of pesticide toxicity as “one of the worst pesticide disasters to happen to a region and its people” (Pradyumna 2009: 2). The report mentions regional health practitioners according to whom the cases of congenital anomalies, delayed puberty, mental retardation, abortions, and cancer had prominently increased during the time of spraying endosulfan. The review thus draws attention to the challenges which biological and chemical pollution raise to the corporeal existence and identity. In regard to the lethal consequences of toxic environment on human body, Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “trans-corporeality” is significant; according to Alaimo, all the bodies “are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” (Alaimo 2018). Due to this interaction among different bodies, environmental entities are bound to affect each other. Commenting upon the relationship of disabled bodies to their environment, Alaimo remarks, “environmental illness offers a particularly potent example of trans-corporeal space, in which the body can never be disentangled from the material world, a world composed of emergent, entangled biological creatures as well as a multitude of xenobiotic, humanly made substances” (2010: 24). Alaimo’s remark emphasises the extent to which the human body is vulnerable as an integral part of the precarious ecology. Environmental illness thus eradicates the perceived boundary between human and ecosystem. Prior to humans, the animals of Kasaragod were witnessed to be suffering the brunt of endosulfan as if to warn the people of the upcoming danger. Romeo Quijano (2006), an expert of pharmacology and toxicology, mentions in his report its drastic impact on animals in the form of mass “death of fishes, honeybees, frogs, birds, chicken and even cows” (2006: 1). The report also mentions domestic animals that suffered “miscarriages, bleeding, infertility, stunting of growth and deformities” (2006: 3). Both the humans and the nonhumans were victims of the endosulfan-poisoning equally. But the real question remains who is to be blamed? The human rapacity that makes us “think that everything on Earth belongs to us” (Atwood 2009: 63) can no longer be overlooked in this regard. The avidity with which humans have worn out and consumed the natural wealth of the earth has become a major concern when

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it comes to sustenance of life on earth. Vandana Shiva and Kartikey Shiva (2020), expressing their concern on industrial agriculture where toxins and fossil fuels are used profusely, write that it “is the main driver of both the sixth mass extinction and climate change” (2020: 49). They describe these as “crimes against nature” (2020: 49). According to them the central industrial and mechanized model, that is overriding our traditional agricultural system, has ruined our food and agriculture. This “Law of Exploitation” sees “the world as machine and nature as dead matter” (Shiva 2016: x). This separatism of human, nature, and all other constituent bodies that make up the entirety of the biodiversity reflects the arrogance of the capitalist society we inhabit, which only accommodates economic gain over ecology. As per the article on environment in National Geographic, approximately “1.7 billion people belong to the global ‘consumer class’” (Mayell 2004). Andre Krebber, an environmental studies scholar, in his article “Anthropocentrism and Reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Environmental Crisis and Animal Subject” (Krebber 2011: 321–340), reveals that man has tried to subjugate nature in order to better and secure human society as is evident from the anthropocentric struggle in human history. He adds that as a result of consumerist desires of humans, nature has been reduced to an object of resource fulfillment only. The close examination of the exhaustive research and creative literature available on the endosulfan tragedy opens a window through which the disruption of corporeality can be observed. This also brings forth the inconsiderate choices for monetary gains over ecological well-being. Developing nations like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and many others have become sites of anthropogenic perturbations caused by excessive industrial demands that have most often led to serious damage to the humans and nonhumans present in the vicinity of the disaster. Looking back at the historical past of India, similar accidents can be found to have cast, time and again, the dangerous impact of pesticides. The Bhopal Gas Disaster in 1984, which had killed thousands of people in a night and produced a “crippled generation,” was caused due to methyl isocyanate gas leak from a pesticide factory situated in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. In Punjab, massive cancer prone deaths are accounted to Green Revolution that promoted heavy use of toxic chemicals. In her book Who Really Feeds the World? (2016), Vandana Shiva notes, “We are all exposed to pesticides and carry measurable amounts of these harmful chemicals in our bodies” (2016: 41). These ecological disasters leave an inerasable mark in the form of mental and physical deformities that continue to haunt people for generations, even those born ages after the calamity. Commenting on the horrific and the most enduring effects of pesticides, Jayarajan, in the novel, expresses his concern to Neelakantan: “Endosulfan apparently causes rapid genetic change in creatures. In chromosomes, genes, why, even in DNA. . . . I think that’s why we are seeing strange-looking

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infants and calves in Enmakaje” (Mangad 146). Mangad’s perturbations reverberate in local discussions on the toxins: “Remember the US bombing in Vietnam. . . . There were reports of grotesque looking children born in Vietnam too” (Mangad 2017: 176). Expressing his sense of shock, Mangad writes, “Many agricultural scientists are brokers of the pesticide lobby! This poison network is so huge—with money it swallows them all—politicians grown fat on public funds” (2017: 180). The novel highlights the root cause of the issue and finds that the people who are responsible for safeguarding the large populace are causing the biggest threat to them. Mangad dismantles the overall idea of pseudo-development, which conjures up the fear and sense of imminent disaster. He decries the fact that the monetary and material gains are valued more than human life, and this enforces the perpetrators to continue doing so. The capitalist attitude adopted by the authorities has led to endangering the lives of the people, particularly those who rely on agriculture and natural resources. The consumer culture has furthered the commodifying of natural resources, promoting market-based agriculture. This capitalist urge to make profit has increased the rate of disruption of body-space interdependence. Condemning the environmental degradation that human beings have caused, Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (2002) writes, The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. (Carson 2002: 6)

Therefore, it becomes pertinent for the imaginative writers to think beyond the usual and represent what is “grotesque” and “distorted,” not only to explain the ecological disaster but also provide its dark and distorted images. In this connection, Nixon appeals “to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (2011: 3). He demands such texts that can represent the struggle of marginalized people against the injustices inflicted on their geographical spaces and consequently on their physical bodies. Richard Kerridge (1991) emphasizes this need to directly represent the “environmental damage or political struggle” along with the “whole array of cultural and daily life, for what it reveals about implicit attitudes that have environmental consequences” (Kerridge 1991: 530). It is only through such writings that people become aware and realize the unprecedented atrocities which they are being subjected to. There is considerable research stating that these events of “slow violence,” which go unnoticed under the usual norms of supervision, must be brought to center by recognizing them as occurrence of significance (DeLuca 2012; Peeples

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2011). As described by S. Mohammed Irshad and Jacquleen Joseph, such is the case of endosulfan tragedy, where it took Sreepadre, an environmental journalist, to uncover the hazards of the chemical only after which the people noticed what was actually happening to their bodies and the environment. He first reported “various disabilities among domestic animals” (Irshad and Joseph 2015: 61–65) and later informed “of many instances where the pesticide also seemed to have had a negative effect on the people in Padre Village in Enmakaje panchayat of Kasaragod District” (Irshad and Joseph 2015: 61– 65). The case recalls disability theorist Stacy Alaimo, who suggests that the body cannot be situated distinctly from its environment, society, culture, and history. It becomes imperative that disability studies and ecological disaster discourse come together to confront such issues. As stated by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (2017), disability studies question the conventional opinions on the body as distinct from the environments in which bodies subsist. Explaining further they write, “[T]hese fields in dialogue means identifying what we learn by recasting these concerns of the environmental humanities in terms that disability studies scholars enlist, such as ableism, access, and the medical model” (Ray and Sibara 2017: 1–2). There is a need to discard conventional scholarly practices which ignore the “abnormal,” “disable,” and “diseased” others and privilege only the normative and the homogeneous groups. An increased attention is required to position “disability” in the mainstream environmental discourse and learn about the failing ecology in its gruesome forms and shapes. In the novel, Neelakantan is shown to be anxious and concerned when he notices the absence of fishes, crabs, crows, butterflies, or worms in the hills. His anxiety is further aggravated observing that the water which used to be a nourisher has now become lethal to its people. “This was no Swarga—heaven—but hell—Naraka. The land must have yielded gold before endosulfan’s entry. The soil was so rich, so well endowed with water sources maybe that is why it was named heaven” (Mangad 2017: 112). Neelakantan’s distress, which is caused due to environmental damage, brings to mind Lawerence Buell’s deliberation on “anxiety arising from the perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency” (2001: 31). The concern over chemical poisoning in Swarga and in the broader context of countries like India, produces an atmosphere of apprehension and vulnerability for those facing the realities of toxic exposure. The novel begins with Devayani bringing home an orphaned creature who is hard to be distinguished from an infant animal, all over covered in abysmal abscesses. For a very long time Devayani and Neelakantan have been living in solitude bereft of society. It is Pareekshit who introduces them to the toxic bodies, the victims of the endosulfan poisoning, around them. The hint of this impending struggle is given to Neelkantan when the Cave asks him to return to Devayani saying that “[it]

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is not just she who seeks you, but many others” (Mangad 2017: 59). Mangad weaves the story with elements of mythology, blurring the difference between human and nonhuman. Here the reference “many others” is suggestive of the disabled-toxic bodies that Neelakantan later meets. Neelakantan is a person who had never adhered to the normative boundaries. This is manifested in his monologue as he says, “I have cared for many sick people. Mostly lepers. Also prostitutes with venereal disease, sore-ridden beggars. . . . ” (Mangad 2017: 60). In Neelakantan, Mangad offers a character who stands as a role model for the society suffering from “ableism” (Dan 2014). To Neelakantan, this experience of disability becomes more intimate when the sage/local healer Panji brings him face to face with all the cases of disability prevailing in Swarga. He takes him to Bhagyalakshi who “stood with a big tongue jutting out through her mouth” (Mangad 2017: 69). It is a shock to him to witness “a rosy red tongue” that “lay well below her chin” (69). Neelkantan observes that she does not close her mouth and her tongue lies hanging. In the next house, he meets a girl whose “body was grotesque . . . her head was bigger than her body, her limbs were tiny” (71). Later he saw “two children, both mentally ill, in chains” (71). These two children who were “old enough to be married” lived in a “house that stank badly” (72). Upon going up close, he observes “that the boy was rubbing his own shit and piss into the floor” (72). Their poor living condition and bodily ailments leave him stunned. He tells Devayani, “Devi, we have arrived at the right place indeed. Didn’t we seek a land without human beings? In the houses on the other side of the canal there are strange children, neither animal nor human. Like this mysterious child of ours! This is not Swarga—heaven—Devi, this is Naraka- hell” . . . “I saw a child today covered with sores, like ours. His name is Anvar . . . not a child . . . his mother said he was twenty-six. But he looks twelve. His fingers are strangely long and thin . . . like octopus arms, all curled up. His eyes are all white . . . with no pupils.” (73–74)

Neelakantan’s experiences of disaster are corporeal in nature, which bring to mind the observations of  Stacy Alaimo that the “bodies interface with other bodies” (Larval Subjects). It is based on the idea that “the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment” (2010: 2). Just as human beings are engaged in perpetual relation with their environment, so are the toxic bodies with their poisoned environment. A healthy body, after degenerating into toxic and disabled condition, loses the capability to fight against all sorts of injustices inflicted on to it. Such bodies are doubly victimized and suffer stigmatization of being termed as “ecological others” (Ray 2013). It is an ironical situation where the powerful

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(here the corporate giants) benefit from the miseries of the marginalized section of the society. As Anthony Nocella (2017), an award-winning writer of critical animal studies, says that the social order is maintained by denigrating those people who are disabled and thereby validating the hegemonic authority enjoyed by the able ones (2017: 3–21). These kids with disabilities are hence deprived of so-called normal life. The parents of children depicted in the novel do not know the real cause behind their kids’ ailments. They believe that the Jadadhari Hills have cursed them. They are ignorant of the fact that the devastation is actually caused by toxic poisoning. Toxic chemicals, like endosulfan, when used for a long time alter human and nonhuman bodies at the very fundamental level. These changes that take place at a very molecular level accumulate over the time to result in large observable changes. Mangad epitomizes this through the slowly degrading situation of children in Enmakaje. The kids who once had healthy and functioning bodies slowly go into serious health challenges. Anwar’s mother describes the sad condition of her child who had been a healthy boy till the age of ten suddenly fell ill one day “on his way to school, he felt his feet slip; his eyeballs started disappearing. . . . He could not walk or see anymore” (Mangad 2017: 74). Shedding light on Anwar’s continuous ordeal, she says, “Sixteen whole years, he’d been in this state. Because his fingers had curled up he could not eat on his own” (74). Such severe and sudden onset of physical deformities is a consequence of toxic chemicals coming in contact with bodies. Explaining this low-level accretion of toxins in human and nonhumans, Michelle Murphy (2013) speaks of “chemical regime of living,” a process where “molecular relations extend outside of the organic realm and create interconnections with landscapes, production, and consumption, requiring us to tie the history of techno science with political economy” (Murphy 2013: 697). It is this connection between the corporate and the state that Mangad establishes in the novel by portraying a community that has over the years been subjected to the toxin endosulfan. The vulnerable bodies that are deformed and contract various illnesses in the novel represent the violent realities of Kasaragod district. While speaking to the minister who had arrived at Kasaragod for the inauguration of a jewelry shop, Neelkantan says, pointing towards the victims of endosulfan tragedy, “These ugly-looking creatures are the children of our land. They are the living martyrs of endosulfan spraying” (Mangad 2017: 158). To this, the minister utters with an indifferent sneer, “Endosulfan is no posion, it is medicine! If you are ill, go to the doctor . . . take them all away . . . all of these corpses!” (158). It is an unfortunate reality that there was no escape for these people who had to live and work in the area which was affected by endosulfan. Moreover, the precautionary measures were written down only in theory and had no practical implications. Comparing the cautionary procedures followed by the

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developed nations and that of India, Jayarajan says, “But here? There are no precautions at all! The fellow who mixes the poison wouldn’t even be wearing a shirt!” (Mangad 2017: 145). The comment sheds light on the present state of agricultural and industrial factories in India which are manufacturing and using pesticides indiscriminately. In order to increase their productivity, toxins are being introduced in the market every day without giving any heed to the risk factors involved and the ecological well-being. It is the greed of obtaining more than what is naturally produced that incites industries resort to harmful methods of agriculture. Vandana Shiva notes that this increased use is “especially seen in the Global South, where the use of pesticides is growing at the rate of 5–7 percent per year” (Shiva 2016: 41). Even today, the current trends of chemical usage in our farms are petrifying. As per the report prepared by the Government of India during the year 2020–2021, the huge consumption of pesticides can be observed in the figure 8.1: None of the states of India, except for Sikkim which is a 100% organic farming state (Reddy 2019), can claim to be practicing organic and safe farming. The seriousness of this issue can be felt in the light of Shiva’s statement: “Pesticides are now found in our rivers, groundwater, breast milk, soil, food, and air” (Shiva 2016: 41). Mangad testifies the facts stated by Shiva as he mentions the amount of endosulfan found in Lalitamma’s breast milk: “22.4 ppm of endosulfan” and “176.9 ppm” in her blood (Mangad 2017: 174). There is no doubt that the human race as a whole will have to endure

Figure F08-001. State wise pesticide consumption in India (2020–2021). Source: Government of India data, 2021. Graph created by Sonalika Chaturvedi.

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the effects of skyrocketing manufacture of detrimental chemicals worldwide, which is undeniably a gruesome situation. It is irrefutable that some select groups of individuals are actively engaged in producing and spreading the large fraction of toxins. This segment of the population is, more often, not the one experiencing the detrimental ramifications of these chemicals across the planet. Bringing the stories of Puranas to the fore where the “demoness Puthana tried to kill baby Krishana by contaminating her breast milk” (Mangad 2017: 174), Mangad creates a comparison between the puranic story and the toxic situation at hand. Here the profit makers are demons who poison the masses with endosulfan. The terrified people can’t believe that the purest “food on earth . . . mother’s milk” (174–175) is contaminated now. Food, the very fundamental constituent necessary for our survival, has become the most polluted resource and “a key route of human exposure to pesticides and industrial pollutants” (Shiva 2016: 41). Food is the primary agent that makes human and nonhuman animals carriers of “measurable amounts of these harmful chemicals in our bodies” (2016: 41). In the novel, the doctor tells Neelakantan and Devayani that “This lan’is ful’ of disease. . . . My med’cine isn’ workin’. . . . Ther’ ‘re fifty mental patients . . . Lots o’ abortion, cancer. My personal opinion is tha’ some terrible poison ha’ sprea’ all o’er the soil and wate’ ‘ere” (Mangad 2017: 83). Ecological catastrophes like endosulfan tragedy lead to chemicals being “driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation that—particularly in the bodies of the poor—remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated” (Nixon 2011: 6). This situation arises more so because discussing human vulnerability is often looked upon as belittling human agency contrary to which it is pertinent to emphasize and reconsider the matter of toxic bodies in the Anthropocene. Writing on disability experiences carves a new path towards confronting such ecological disasters by appealing to the senses and emotions towards these bodies. The novel Swarga by Ambikasutan Mangad takes up the entanglement of disabled bodies and toxic environmental conditions and scrutinizes this in the imagined locale Swarga-Enmakaje, a village inhabited by disabled and diseased bodies. Here the toxin endosulfan becomes the agent that blurs the boundary between the body and the ecological space. Neelakantan, the protagonist in the novel, traverses through several complications emerging due to the occurrence of the endosulfan tragedy. His confrontation with the disabled and diseased bodies unearths the dangers that remain hidden behind the façade of industrial growth and thus invites discussion on the matter of “disability”/“corporeality.” The novel documents the encounters of Neelaknatan and Devayani and explains “disability” as “delayed destruction.” It brings forth the urgency to take these experiences in the center of the

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discourse on ecological disaster since they are easily forgotten and ignored. In this context, it is worth to refer to Rob Nixon, who contemplates the time gap that occurs amid the “emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects” (Nixon 2011: 8–9). In many such instances of disability, people’s memory “readily fade as the casualties incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered” (9). Therefore, creative writers need to engage with such experiences and adequately represent the “pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (3). Writing the grotesque in this way enhances the possibilities to examine these situations through the trajectory of eco-crip, ecojustice and eco-ability theories. As these perspectives assist in examining the complicacies associated with the notion of “corporeality,” they also forge interconnectedness among all beings, ignoring all kinds of hierarchies. The novel envisions a more inclusive society where disabled-marginalized bodies can position and voice themselves. Ambikasutan Mangad gives an impressive blend of mythology and real-life tragedy as he deliberates upon one of the prominent issues of our times-chemical poisoning and disability and further expands our understanding by drawing on the convergence between disability and ecological disaster narratives. NOTE 1. T. A. Ameerudheen in her article published in Scroll, “‘We Want Justice’: Victims of Endosulfan Poisoning in Kerala Set to Start Hunger Strike,” reports that “[t] he victims had held several rounds of agitations such as rallies, sit-ins and hunger strikes in the state capital in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2018, seeking the attention of the governments in power.” These continued agitations are the result of the inefficient action on the part of the government that repeatedly fails to fulfill its promises.

REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ———. “Introduction.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquett Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. ———. “Trans-corporeality.” Posthuman Glossary, 2018, 435–438. https:​//​www​ .academia​ . edu​ / 32205792​ / Alaimo​ _ Trans​ _ corporeality​ _ for​ _ The​ _ Posthuman​ _Glossary. Ameerudheen, T. A. “‘We Want Justice’: Victims of Endosulfan Poisoning in Kerala Set to Start Hunger Strike.” Scroll.in, 30 January 2019, http:​//​www​.scroll​.in​/article​

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/911273​/we​-want​-justice​-victims​-of​-endosulfan​-poisoning​-in​-kerala​-set​-to​-start​ -hunger​-strike. Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. Boston, MA: Little, Brown Book Group, 2009. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. DeLuca, Kevin Michael. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012. Dolmage, Jay. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Government of India. “Statistical Database: Statistics of State-Wise Consumption of Chemical Pesticides.” Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine and Storage, 2021. http:​//​ppqs​.gov​.in​/statistical​-database. Goodley, Dan. Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. Abingdon-onThames, UK: Routledge, 2014. Irshad, S. Mohammed, and Jacquleen Joseph. “An Invisible Disaster: Endosulfan Tragedy of Kerala.” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 11 (2015): 61–65. http:​ //​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24481498. Kerridge, Richards. “Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism.” In Literary Theory and Criticism- An Oxford Guide, edited by Patricia Waugh, 530–543. Abindon-onThames, UK: Routledge, 1991. Krebber, Andre. “Anthropocentrism and Reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Environmental Crisis and Animal Subject.” In Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice, 321–340. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Brill, 2011. Mangad, Ambikasutan. Swarga: A Posthuman Tale. Translated by J Devika. New Dehlhi, India: Juggernaut, 2017. Mayell, Hillary. “Environment.” National Geographic, 12 January 2004. http:​//​www​ .nationalgeographic​.com​/environment​/article​/consumerism​-earth​-suffers. Murphy, Michelle. “Chemical Infrastructures of the St Clair River.” In Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, edited by Nathalie Jas and Soraya Boudia, 103–115. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2013. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nocella, Anthony J. “Chapter One: Defining Eco-Ability Social Justice and the Intersection of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” In Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-Ability Movement, edited by A. J. Nocella, J. K. C. Bentley, and J. M. Duncan, 3–21. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Peeples, Jennifer. “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5, no. 4 (2011): 373–392. Pradyumna, Adithya. India’s Endosulfan Disaster: A Review of the Health Impacts and Status of Remediation. THANAL (Thanal Conservation Action and Information Network), 2009. http:​//​www​.environmentportal​.in​/files​/IndiaEndosulfan​.pdf.

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Quijano, Romeo. “Position Paper on Endosulfan.” Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PANAP), 2006. https:​//​ntn​.org​.au​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2010​/02​/ panendo06​.pdf. Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Reddy, Shyam Sunder. “Sikkim’s Journey on Becoming the First 100% Organic Farming State.” Medium, August 27, 2019. https:​//​medium​.com​/@shyam052090​/ sikkims​-journey​-on​-becoming​-the​-first​-100​-organic​-farming​-state​-7904b222770a. Shiva, Vandana. Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016. Shiva, Vandana, and Kartikey Shiva. Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom. United Kingdom: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020. Sreekumar, K. M., and K. D. Prathapan. “An Evidence-based Inquiry into the Endosulfan Tragedy in Kasaragod, Kerala.” Economic & Political Weekly 56, no. 41 (2021): 45.

Chapter 9

The Culture of Modernity and Ecological Change A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Joydip Ghosh and Tajuddin Ahmed

Keeping the Anthropocene in mind, with the rapidly changing global environment causing disasters in different parts of the world, it is essential to have an understanding into the relationship of nature, culture, science, politics, and industrial development, all of which, in some way or the other, are associated with climate change. As Jessica Barnes and Michael Dove suggest, “it is not just about hotter temperatures and melting ice. It is also about stories and images, myth and reality, knowledge and ignorance, humor and tragedy—questions that are, at root, cultural in nature.”1 Climate change studies also invite an inspection to the impacts of changing climatic patterns on national economy or policy making for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or overall carbon health of a country. With his academic background rooted in anthropology and as a novelist dedicated to always upholding the humanistic concerns, it was quite natural for Amitav Ghosh to look at ecological change from a different perspective that is not solely confined to scientific discourses, but rather integral to how it is politically, culturally, and literally mediated. As Ghosh puts it, “[W]e are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normality, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and yes, freakish tornadoes.”2 Bill McKibben, in his book The 137

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End of Nature, also makes our reckless attempts to alter the patterns of nature responsible for the sudden behavioral change of climate: [W]e’re used to thinking of the Earth as changing with infinite slowness, but that in fact it is now speeding up, changing in rapid, dangerous and profound ways as a result of our alterations. . . . [W]e live in the oddest moment since our species first stood upright, the moment when we are finally grown so big in numbers and in appetites that we alter everything around us.3

In the face of this challenging situation of today’s world the author traces the history of the origin of three Indian megacities—Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata, founded by the British Empire, all near or by the side of the sea. Mumbai, where it now stands, was first ceded to the Portuguese in 1535 by the ruler of Gujarat. It was an estuarine archipelago with some hilly islands in the north and some low-lying islands in the south. Although there were considerable number of villages, shrines, bazaars, and even harbours on the southern islands, they never developed into urban centres in the early decades of the European occupation. Several churches and forts were made by the Portuguese in the southern part, but the main residential complexes always remained close to the mainland, away from the sea where tidal waves would least likely to hit. With the political marriage of Catherine of Braganza to King Charles II, these islands passed into English hands as dowry in the year 1661. From then onwards the southern islands started to convert into the hub of urban trading conglomeration. The southern part was also linked with the northern part at an accelerated pace by constructing bridges, causeways, and embankments. However, this part of the city houses many industries and financial centres, and almost half of the country’s containerized cargo are transported through the adjoining port. Along the western edge of the peninsula innumerable housing complexes have risen up with the objective of having the finest view of the sea. Such is the topography of Mumbai, a great centre of commercial, cultural, and economic activities, that it is largely exposed to the perils brought about any time by the vagaries of the ocean, considering the present state of global warming and our continuous input that is making the earth warmer. But, unlike the Bay of Bengal, Mumbai is situated by the Arabian Sea, which is less portentous for it has not generated a great deal of cyclonic activity in the past. Moreover, it had not witnessed any Tsunami like the east coast of India had to endure in 2004. However, the region’s seismic and cyclonic profiles point to the fact that the sea is not seismically inactive. A few years back a previously unknown fault system was detected in the Arabian Sea, near the coast of Oman, which stretches over 800 kilometres and touches the west coast of India, placing Mumbai on a point of vulnerability. This discovery

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invites a fresh appraisal of the possibility of seismic and tsunami hazard off the coast of North-West Indian Ocean. Keeping in mind the freakish nature the weather is adopting in some parts of the world, it can be presumed that climate change possesses the capability to significantly transform the patterns of cyclonic activity around the world. The symptoms were also visible in and around the Arabian Sea as there was an increase of cyclonic activity during the last two decades. The author cites three incidents of cyclonic storms that lashed onto the regions to the north of Mumbai between 1998 and 2001 claiming over 17,000 lives. Then in 2007, cyclone Gonu, a category 5 hurricane, generated in the Arabian Sea, crashed into Oman, Iran, and Pakistan, causing widespread damage and innumerable casualties. The author also cites one more Japanese study that suggests 46 percent increase of cyclonic frequency over the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century. Indeed, the patterns of cyclone formation are changing in such a way over the region that it is not unexpected of a cyclone to hit the coasts of Mumbai even in the months of monsoon, which was least likely to occur before. Another research by an American team suggests that cyclonic activity over the Arabian Sea will witness an increase because of rampant pollution and clouds of dust that now spread over the Indian subcontinent and its adjoining waters. This, too, is contributing to the change of wind patterns in the region. The earliest record of Mumbai encountering a powerful storm could be traced in the year 1618 when on May 15 a mighty storm lashed its shores with unprecedented vehemence and destructive power. The author quotes an anonymous Portuguese historian describing the event: “The sea was brought into the city by the wind; the waves roared fearfully; the tops of the churches were blown off and immense stones were driven to vast distances; two thousand persons were killed.”4 In the eighteenth century, a cyclone of considerable force caused immense damage to the city in the year 1740 and another, in 1783 caused great havoc as it killed 400 people in Bombay harbour and damaged ships that came in its path. The city was also hit by several cyclones in the nineteenth century. After a lapse of several decades, the Arabian Sea generated a greater number of storms in the year 2015 in comparison to the Bay of Bengal. This trend brings in the premonition that the city may be subjected to the terrible fury of a mighty storm at any point in time. As per a report published in Hindustan Times on July 18, 2021, based on a study conducted by the scientists of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, 52 percent increase was noticed in the frequency of cyclones over the Arabian Sea between 2001 and 2019.5 Along with the frequency, the intensity and duration of the cyclones over the Arabian Sea are also changing. The research finds out that the duration for which a cyclonic storm lasts over the Arabian Sea is on a rise alarmingly. Between 2001 and 2019, the total time span of

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cyclonic storms over the Arabian Sea rose by 80 percent when compared to the 1982 to 2002 time period. Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist from IITM and one of the researchers, said, [T]he number of very severe cyclones in the Arabian Sea has gone up by 150% during the last two decades. This means that we need to be prepared, not only in terms of forecasts but also have a risk assessment. This risk assessment should be based on the overlapping impacts of storm surges, heavy rains and a rising sea level that can act together, resulting in prolonged floods in the west coast. More cyclones in the Arabian Sea means the chances of some (storms) getting closer to the west coast are more, like we saw in the last four years.6

With this threatening condition in the backdrop, the author is astonished to think of the severity of loss if a category 4 or 5 storm, with a wind speed of 240 kmph or higher, catches Mumbai all of a sudden in its whirl. The gargantuan impact of its might and the suddenness with which it will arrive upon a population of over 20 million is horribly spine-chilling. This is the “uncanny” aspect of the events set forth by climate change. What is responsible for this freakish and abrupt turn of weather is the result of “cumulative human actions,” which are utterly thoughtless. As the writer comments, “In that sense, the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past—this is because we have all contributed to in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable forms and shapes.”7 The author is also critical of the mode of relief measures that are undertaken by the government bodies or organizations when a catastrophic event occurs. The disaster management is largely focused on post-disaster operation. It is not applicable to Mumbai alone; rather it applies to all the megacities throughout the world. At the same time what is needed is the prior education of the people about the possible dangers that might unexpectedly come upon the at-risk areas particularly exposed to the vagaries of the weather. However, as per the fashion of these days, expensive residential complexes are constructed in the coastal areas with a fine view of the expanding oceans. The risk factor hardly comes to the mind of the residents or the constructing agencies or the approving authorities. To add to the woe, the construction lobbies, not only in Mumbai but throughout the world, are very active to prevent any kind of dissemination of fear factor or risk that might be associated with residing by the side of the seas for it will greatly decrease the sea-side property values. The question that often arises is that civilization in the past flourished by the riverside and throughout the ages people always loved to reside by the side of great or small bodies of water. Then why should one raise objection

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when people live by the waters? The author negates the point and is of the opinion that people regarded the ocean with much wariness throughout human history. As he points out, Even when they made their living from the sea, through fishing or trade, they generally did not build large settlements on the water’s edge: the great old cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon and Hamburg, all are protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems. The same is true of old Asian ports: Cochin, Surat, Tamluk, Dhaka, Mrauk-U, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Malacca are all cases in point. It is as if, before the early modern era, there had existed a general acceptance that provisions had to be made for the unpredictable furies of the ocean—tsunamis, storm surges and the like.8

This note of caution was always there in the mind of the people even when the European global expansion started in the sixteenth century. It was in the seventeenth century that colonial cities like Mumbai, Chennai, New York, and Charleston started to be built on seafronts. The nineteenth century witnessed an even greater wave of city building—Singapore and Hong Kong came up in this period. All these colonial cities are now under direct threat of the menace of climate change. In view of the above, it is high time to change our attitude towards the environment. In our culture lies an awareness of the “precariousness of human existence”; it also finds place in the Biblical and Quranic images and references as in Norse mythology and the Sanskrit tales of pralaya. As Ghosh says, the literary imagination in all the ages was informed everywhere by this awareness except in the case of modernity. But how did it come about that practical people like the founders of colonies and cities showed such an indifference to the destructive power of the mother earth? The obvious reason for this, as the author traces it, must have been “the European Enlightenment’s predatory hubris [italics mine] in relation to the earth and its resources. . . . This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand.”9 It was the avowed philosophy of the colonization brought about by the West that the resources of the earth were there to be exploited by mankind, specially by those who were advanced scientifically and technologically. Sure enough, Ghosh critiques the European practice of negating certain forms of knowledge from its epistemological boundary and traces the genealogy of climate change, imperialism, and capitalism taking shape from European Enlightenment.10 Once the author was on a visit to the Nicobar Islands immediately after the tsunami of 2004. The sight of damage in the town of Malacca was horrific mainly around half a mile area from the shore. The houses were literally

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reduced to their foundations; only the floors were left. Here and there one could find the stumps of walls jutting out incongruously from the base. It was as if, the place was hit by a bomb of great magnitude that destroyed everything in its path. But at the same time the writer was greatly astonished to see the island’s interior, which remained largely unaffected. Everything was tranquil, peaceful, and serenely beautiful. One of the ironies of the situation, that struck the author most was that the most upwardly mobile educated people on the island, mainly from the mainland, preferred to live by the seafront while the indigenous islanders chose to live in the interior. Even at the air force base where his plane had landed the living areas were located much closer to the sea whereas the functional parts of the base, where the planes and machineries were kept, were at the rear side, away from the water. The risk factor hardly appeared in the mind of the dwellers. It will not be inappropriate to quote here a few lines from the author’s essay “The Town by the Sea.” It was a view of tsunami hit Car Nicobar as the plane was making its descent to the base: “It was evident from above that the tsunami had been peculiarly selective in the manner of its destruction. . . . The villages along the shore [italics mine] were not merely damaged; they were erased. It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property while leaving nature largely unharmed.”11 The lack of awareness on the part of the islanders who dwelt by the seaside about the possible dangers that might come from the sea clearly points to a complacency that is directed towards nothing but a kind of madness, considering the climate crisis of these days. Yet, considering the number of human settlements that made their way by the waterfronts and the orderliness with which these were built clearly suggest that sanction of the state must have been instrumental behind their making. The ordered geometry of the streets clearly indicates that the builders and engineers only followed the accepted and prevailing global norms in this respect. They took the footprints of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay, Madras, New York, and Hong Kong, all of which are directly sited on the ocean. This pattern of settlement is the dominant trend of the modern world. The author is highly critical of this kind of global view that has taken hold of the intellectual brotherhood of the world: “[P]roximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a seafront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of the real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe.”12 Though Mumbai might face considerably small chance of being hit by a cyclone in any given year, there are threats from other climate change impacts such as increased precipitation and rising sea levels. Damaging floods might become

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more frequent. A similar situation might occur in cases of Chennai, founded in the same century as Mumbai and Kolkata, a megacity within the reach of the fury of the Bay of Bengal. The city experiences regular flooding and much of its surface area is below sea level. A significant change in the climate situation might result in a great deluge or invite a cyclone from the Bay of Bengal, causing heavy damage to the city. Let us come back to the question of modernity and its differentiation between nature and culture. Ghosh is an author who has always raised objection to this kind of separation. He has always opposed boundaries between the canons, “even those that divide fiction from non-fiction, so that he incorporates fictional techniques in his non-fiction and histories in his fiction.”13 So far, matter of climate change was thought to be limited within the purview of science alone, to be written about in scientific journals and treatises. He is critical of such an outlook. Even earlier he has broken such epistemological boundaries particularly imposed by the western knowledge system. In writing the book In an Antique Land, he has made use of his research experience in Egypt, mixed the generic qualities of a travelogue. The narrative style resembles the double helix structure that we find in his novels; it can be taken as a sociological commentary on different cultural and religious groups and so on. The book Calcutta Chromosome is also a genre splitting text combining the elements of science fiction, ghost story, suspense narrative, adventure stories, a story of malarial research by Dr. Ronald Ross, a commentary on subaltern agency, and so on. Here, in dealing with such a matter like climate change and its terrible consequences upon our lives within the covers of a literary prose fiction, he has posed a challenge to the fictitious boundary between science and literature. This is his endeavor to oppose modernity’s project of separation. What is it that led to the separation of science fiction from the literary mainstream? The possible answer to this may be traced in Bruno Latour who, in his views about modernity, says, The adjective “modern” designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. . . . [I]t designates a break in the regular passage of time and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished. . . . [T]he word “modern” designates two sets on entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by purification, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of non-humans on the other.14

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Thus, the imaginary gulf between nature and culture has been widened by modernity. The former is placed entirely under the domain of science and is regarded as something that doesn’t have anything to do with culture. The author makes an attempt to subvert this dominant move of modernity brought about by the West by bringing together science and culture of our everyday mode of living under the same umbrella of human existence on this earth. A peep into the history of modernity reveals that “nature” has not been accorded a higher place in the discourses of modernity. The instrumentalrational approach meted out to it has led human beings away from conceptualizing nature in its intimate relation with the human world. The root of this perhaps harps back to the days of European Enlightenment when the exponent of individualism and liberalism, John Locke, floated his ideas of “life, liberty and estate” and argued that the proper purpose of the state should be directed in protecting these three things. This may not appear unfamiliar to those acquainted with the ideas of modern liberalism that pushes nature into marginality in consideration of its relation to humanity. An instrumental approach to nature is visibly felt in the writings of Locke as in the following: “God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience. The earth and all that is therein is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.”15 This particularly instrumental approach to nature is what pervades most of the writings of Locke and it makes one believe that nature is something meant to be used by men. His human centric approach has always exerted a powerful effect on our understanding and treatment of nature and the non-human world. According to him, reason is the faculty that clearly distinguishes human beings from beasts. God has given us reason “to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience”16 along with the earth and all other things. God gave the world to people. But this has also created a problem as, Locke says, it cannot be put to productive use without individual appropriation of different parts of it. How much of the earth did he give us? Collectively—all. Individually—enough. As long as a person “tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of” some piece of land, it is his; “he by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.”17 Henrik Skaug Sætra questions, “What then of the wilderness? What of the preservation of ‘untouched’ nature as deep ecologists and other environmentalists go on about?”18 Locke has a very simple answer to offer to such queries. Land left to nature is waste and “the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.”19 For him, human labour accounts for the “ninety-nine hundredths” of the value of land. Locke’s writings adumbrate that men have very little obligations towards nature as also towards animals as we cannot just let them flourish. Callicott and Frodeman claim that this particular view of nature, in combination with Locke’s theology, gave the “theological warrant to colonial

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expropriation of native lands.”20 Settlers followed God’s instructions to till the land, while the natives did not, as they left nature “wild and disordered.” It is clear that Locke advocates in favour of the appropriation of waste land through human labour and the transformation of untouched nature by productive resources. Although nature is given to us by God, Locke says, it should not be left as it is created; it must be transformed for human use. It is only then that one can live in accordance with the will of his creator. This view of Locke exerts enormous influence on our understanding of modernity and how we think of and treat nature in everyday life. In this connection Lynn White Jr., in his oft-quoted article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” claims that many of our environmental problems have their direct links with the views of nature advocated by Locke.21 Likewise, in the political projects offered by Hobbes, Descartes, and some others, the discourses of modernity largely influence the ways in which nature is conceptualized. A dominant issue that engulfs the discussion of modernity is the idea of anthropocentrism. Sarah E. Boslaugh defines it as a “philosophical viewpoint,” which argues that “human beings are the central or most significant entities in the world. . . . Anthropocentrism regards humans as separate from and superior to nature and holds that human life has intrinsic value while other entities (including animals, plants, mineral resources, and so on) are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.”22 In fact, modernity dominates the metaphysics as to how the world operates. An effort to understand nature empirically favouring the technological growth also aided humanity’s mastery of the untamed nature. The science promoted by key intellectuals such as Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon and the scientist Isaac Newton separated nature from society as a mechanistic and divisible space.23 While Bacon acknowledges man as part of nature with the ability to master nature itself, Descartes views man capable of transcending nature. Luke Godfrey says that the commonality between different views of nature put forward by different intellectuals in modernity has at least one thing in common—“placement of nature as a subject of humanity” and the objective of the modernity project has always been to enhance a good amount of human freedom “with human capabilities viewed as unlimited” allowing the manipulation of nature in this direction.24 Gillespie’s observation in this respect is noteworthy as he claims, “The basis of this emancipatory project relies upon making humanity, at least to an extent, the master and possessor of nature, facilitating individual autonomy.”25 Thus, it can be seen that rational and scientific framework of modernity allows nature to be regarded as a means to an end. As animals are attributed value only in terms of instrumentality, it keeps aside other values in the process. As Escobar points out, “Within this framework nature takes on a particular role as the basis on which instrumental rationality can be exercised

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and capitalist production systems operate.26 Rationalism and technological control have become the guiding principles in relation to humanity’s treatment of nature in the modern world. The rise of environmental disasters and natural calamities in today’s world point to the fault-line of the discourses of modernity that always puts nature in a subservient position guided by its capital dense objectives. “The lesson,” opines Godfrey, “which is largely unrecognized, is that society and ecosystems are far from separate spaces as conceived in modernity.”27 As the author notes, “Climate change poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single most important political conception of the modern era: the idea of freedom, which is central not only to contemporary politics but also to the humanities, the arts and literature.”28 The advocates of freedom, notes Dipesh Chakrabarty, were mainly engaged with how humans could be freed from various sorts of “injustices, oppression, inequality or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems.”29 There was no place of non-human forces and systems in this scheme of liberty. Even in the twentieth century there was a radical turn from the non-human to the human suggesting it became highly anthropocentric. The search for human freedom in the direction of an autonomy over nature has its history for nearly three hundred years from now. But, as Chakrabarty categorically says, “In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom.”30 Human beings functioning as geological agency has been a recent phenomenon propelled by modernity. So, while human-centric movements and discourses took the center-stage through the advocacies of modernism, the non-humans (both animals and natural objects) went into the background. Even an issue as sensitive and important as global warming failed to arrest the collective imagination. There was a definite lack of “transitive connection” between political mobilization and global warming. This is especially evident in the countries of particularly Southeast Asia, which are more vulnerable to climate changes. But the main concern is, in today’s world, nothing remains confined to local, it travels fast to other regions as well. And the serious effect of global warming makes it visibly felt in the western and the developed world alike. All of us have seen instances of disaster including the unprecedented burning of the Amazon Forest, the devastating flood in Germany not witnessed in centuries or the sudden rise of the tornadoes in different oceanic regions causing tsunami of catastrophic magnitude. However, climate change has not been a significant political issue in any of the countries already reeling under the disastrous impact of climate change. Political energy is directed round the questions of identity, religion, caste,

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ethnicity, language, gender rights, and so on and so forth. What about climate change when the situation is so grave? What about people’s activism and obviously literary activism? Which direction is it taking in the postmodern geocentric scenario? Is it on the right track or is it a “great derangement”? The novelist strongly raises the issue to ponder over in this non-fiction. Today’s world is witnessing an utterly vehement and unnatural weather phenomenon in different corners of the world. Today’s world, frequently affected by global warming, heavy floods not witnessed in decades, mass displacements induced by disasters of unprecedented scale, and other ecological crises, poses threats to a degree which the globe has not seen in centuries. The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, as I have tried to show in this paper, strongly demonstrates the necessity of reevaluating the tenets of Western modernity that continually undermines ecological concerns. NOTES 1. Franco Moretti, “Serious Century: From Vermeer to Austen,” in The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 23. 2. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Gurgaon, India: Allen Lane, 2016), 32. 3. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Bloomsbury, Revised and updated edition, 2005), ix–x. 4. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 58. 5. Jayashree Nandi, “52% Rise in Frequency of Cyclones in Arabian Sea over Two Decades: Study,” July 18, 2021. https:​//​www​.hindustantimes​.com​/india​ -news​/52​-rise​-in​-frequency​-of​-cyclones​-in​-arabian​-sea​-over​-two​-decades​-study​ -101626550577184​.html. 6. Roxy Mathew Koll, quoted in Jayashree Nandi, “Frequency of Cyclones,” Hindustan Times, July 18, 2021. 7. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 43. 8. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 49. 9. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 75. 10. Alessandro Vescovi, “The Uncanny and the Secular in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and The Hungry Tide,” Le Simplegadi 15, no. 17 (November 2017), 212–222. 11. Amitav Ghosh, “The Town by the Sea,” in Dancing in Cambodia and Other Essays (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher and Penguin Viking, [2002] 2008), 115. 12. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 49. 13. Frederick Luis Aldama, “An Interview with Amitav Ghosh,” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 76, no. 2 (2002), 84؎90. 14. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10–11.

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15. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, [1689] 1969), 134. 16. Locke, Two Treatises, 134. 17. Locke, Two Treatises, 136. 18. Henrik Skaug Sætra, “The Limits of a Lockean Environmentalism: God, Human Beings, and Nature in Locke’s Philosophy,” Barataria Revista Castellano-Manchega de Ciencias Sociales, 27 (June 2020), 1–17. https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​ /342379480. 19. Locke, Two Treatises, 142. 20. J. Baird Callicott and R. Frodeman, Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy (USA: Macmillan Reference, 2009), 151. 21. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967), 1203–1207. https:​//​www​.science​.org​/doi​/10​.1126​/science​ .155​.3767​.1203. 22. Sarah E. Boslaugh, “Anthropocentrism.” November 10, 2022. https:​//​www​ .britannica​.com​/topic​/anthropocentrism. 23. Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2000), 38–39. 24. Luke Godfrey, “How Has Nature Been Conceptualised in Modernity?,” 2. https:​ //​www​.e​-ir​.info​/2012​/12​/04​/how​-has​-nature​-been​-conceptualised​-in​-modernity​/. 25. M. A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 42. Quoted in Luke Godfrey, “How Has Nature Been Conceptualised in Modernity?,” 2. 26. Arturo Escobar, “After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology,40, no.1 (February 1999), 7. 27. Godfrey, “Nature Conceptualised in Modernity,” 3. 28. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 159. 29. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 208. 30. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 208.

REFERENCES Aldama, Frederick Luis. “An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 76, no. 2 (2002): 84–90. Barnes, Jessica, and Michael R. Dove. Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Boslaugh, Sarah E. “Anthropocentrism.” https:​//​www​.britannica​.com​/topic​/ anthropocentrism. Callicott, J. Baird, and R. Frodeman. Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy. London: Macmillan Reference, 2009. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. https:​//​warwick​.ac​.uk​/fac​/arts​/english​/currentstudents​/ undergraduate​/modules​/literaturetheoryandtime​/chakrabarty​.pdf. Dobson, Andrew. Green Political Thought. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2000.

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Escobar, Arturo. “After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology.” Current Anthropology 40, no.1 (Feb, 1999):1–30. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Gurgaon, India: Allen Lane, 2016. ———. Dancing in Cambodia and Other Essays. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher and Penguin Viking, (2002) 2008. Gillespie, M. A. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Godfrey, Luke. “How Has Nature Been Conceptualised in Modernity?” https:​//​www​.e​ -ir​.info​/2012​/12​/04​/how​-has​-nature​-been​-conceptualised​-in​-modernity​/. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, (1689) 1969. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. London: Bloomsbury, Revised and updated edition, 2005. Moretti, Franco, ed. The Novel. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Sætra, Henrik Skaug. “The Limits of a Lockean Environmentalism: God, Human Beings, and Nature in Locke’s Philosophy.” Barataria Revista Castellano-Manchega de Ciencias Sociales, 27 (June 2020): 1–17. Vescovi, Alessandro. “The Uncanny and the Secular in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and The Hungry Tide.” Le Simplegadi, 15, no.17 (Nov. 2017): 212–222. White, Lynn Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science, 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–1207.

Chapter 10

Romanticizing Greenness A Reading of Rabindranath Tagore from an Eco-theological Perspective Goutam Buddha Sural

I Those who have polluted your air, who have quenched your light,  Have you forgiven them? Do you love them still? “Proshno” Rabindranath Tagore (Translation mine, lines 17–18)

The above lines from Tagore’s poem “Proshno” (Question) are often figuratively alluded to by scholars while expressing their concern about the defilement of nature and environment. The poem was anthologized in the collection of poems titled Parishes, which was published in 1932. The poem may be seen as a critique of the British colonial rule, which used its brute power to dominate India. In the final lines of the poem the poet asks his agonized question as to whether God has forgiven the perpetrators of crime against humanity. In the present context, the quoted lines have been used metaphorically. Lawrence Buell, in his essays “Can Environmental Imagination Save the World?,” begins by trying to answer the question: “The short answer is ‘Yes, but.’ Environmental imagination is a crucial but insufficient resource against global warming and other forms of looming planetary degradation. Without it, no way; with it, perhaps” (Buell 2016: 407). In course of the essay, he observes that it is man’s will to act more than theorizing about environment which can save the world from an ecocatastrophe. According 151

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to him, “propagation of stories of anthropogenic degradation of the physical environments” (2016: 414) can only ensure result if man has the will to act. He points out, [I]magination is one thing, enactment another. Humankind’s failure, so far, to address the threat of runaway climate change and the hefty menu of other semi-interrelated environmental crises . . . is less a failure of imagination than of collective and personal will. (Buell 2016: 410)

As to what role literature can play in the case of making people effectively aware about environmental issues has always been a matter of debate. Literary texts, be they poems, novels, non-fiction, or dramas, do play a major role in shaping man’s consciousness. And when it comes to issues related to environment, literature can sensitise people and even has the power to organize resistance against environmental exploitation carried out by vested interest groups. Discussions on environment add to men’s knowledge and sometimes such knowledge motivate people into action. In the words of Himmet Umunc, Indeed, through its varied representations of nature, literature has enabled us to reshape and broaden our sense of a sustainable environment. Moreover, by problematizing and discussing environmental issues, it has urged us to revisit our cultural values and assumptions about nature and its conservation. Therefore, literary studies with relation to environmental representation in texts can be instructive and upgrade our awareness of the natural world. (Umunc 2015: 265)

Jerome Bump, in his article “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment” published in 1974 in Georgia Review, points out that poetry can play a useful role in interdisciplinary environmental science. According to him “poets in many ways have anticipated environmental scientists” and have expressed their ideas in definite, convincing, and forceful language (Bump 1974: 230). Environmental awareness has been a part of Indian society and culture since the ancient times and our Rishis have always tried to draw the attention of the world to the close relationship between nature, human beings, and all other living species and non-living things on earth. They observed that the wellbeing of the world depends on the maintenance of mutuality of this relationship. I would like to begin by quoting a mantra (sacred utterance) from Rigveda, which is oft quoted and points to the close relationship between nature, human beings, birds and animals, and the Divine Spirit: madhu vātā ṛtāyate madhukṣaranti sindhavaḥ| mādhvīrnaḥ santvauṣadhīḥ|| madhu naktamutoṣasi madhumatpārthivamrajaḥ|

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madhudyaurastu na pitā|| madhumānno vanaspatirmadhumān astu sūryaḥ| mādhvīrgāvo bhavantu naḥ|| (Rigveda, 1:90:6–8 677–678)

The quoted slokas are an entreaty to the divine spirit to bless the world with fragrant breeze, sweet river, and beneficial herbs. It further appeals that the eternal father be benevolent to the humans and may the particles of earth, the sun, the fruit bearing tree, and even the cows with their milk make the world of the humans a blessed one. Sitaram Dixit, in his article “Environmental Sustainability Lessons from Ancient India,” observes, Today when we are struggling for a better environment, the Vedas actually teach us to take steps for the protection of clean environment. Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda all clearly recognise the importance of maintaining the seasonal cycles that lead to climatic changes largely due to inappropriate human behaviour and actions. The ancients treated nature holistically giving utmost reverence to preserving its various entities and elements. (Dixit 2018: 10)

In the same vein, Purushottama Bilimoria observes, The oral tradition and the Veda would have to be among the earliest record of ruminations on nature in India. The Vedas (from Sanskrit veda, “what is known”) gradually grew into a huge canonical body of recited and memorized “texts” that both eulogized and appeased the forces of nature and higher planes of beinghood depicted as gods. (Bilimoria 1998: 2)

The Vedas and the Upanishads are the great repositories of India’s religio-cultural tradition, which emphasises an intimate connection between God and the created world—the living and non-living things. The mantra with which the Isa Upanishad begins, “Isā vāsyam idam sarvam yatkinca jagatyām jagat” (verse 1 1), means whatever exists in this material world is impregnated with the spirit of God. The Gayatri mantra is also a prayer to the Divine Mother: “Om bhūr bhuvaḥ suvaḥ tatsaviturvareṇyaṃ bhargo devasyadhīmahi dhiyo yo naḥ prachodayāt” (Sukla Yajur Veda 36:3 394). Rendered into English it means “May your pure celestial radiance illuminate all kingdoms‒physical, mental and spiritual. Please remove all darkness from our hearts and enlighten us with true wisdom.” Referring to the Gayatri mantra, Tagore says, By its help we try to realize the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same

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time irradiates our minds with the light of a consciousness that moves and exists in unbroken continuity with the outer world. (Tagore, “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe” 1996: 283)

According to Tagore, the ancient texts of India, like the dramas of Kalidasa and the great Indian epic, Ramayana speak of the close kinship between human beings, the environment—which includes both the conscious and unconscious elements of nature, and the Spirit that fathers forth all creation. He observes, “[I]n all our dramas which still retain their fame, such as Mrit-Shakatika, Shakuntalā, Uttarā-rāmacharita, Nature stands on her own right, proving that she has her great function, to impart the peace of the eternal to human emotions” (Tagore, “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe,” 1996: 513). II When it comes to Tagore’s writings one notices how in his poetry and other forms of writing he has consistently expressed his concerns about environmental hazards due to destruction of nature. Since the end of the twentieth century, there is a revival of interest in Tagore from the point of view of his ecological concerns. In a book titled Key Thinkers on the Environment, published in 2018, Tagore is incorporated as one of the key thinkers on environment. In the book Kalyan Sengupta writes, Crucially, Tagore’s poems, short stories and novels, as well as books and essays, exhibit his love and concern for nature, for land, sea, air, plants and animals that constitute the “environment” around us. His concern or thinking about the environment is not, however, activated by any pragmatic or utilitarian consideration. Rather it grows on a different—non-utilitarian—ground. (Sengupta 2018: 141)

In that essay the author has “tried to explain and defend Tagore’s thinking about the environment on aesthetic and spiritual grounds” (Sengupta 2018; 145) and says that Tagore was influenced by the teachings of Upanishads (143). Tagore believed that there is a kinship between the divine and the earthly and a divine spirit inheres multiple species, beings, and substances of the created universe. For him the basic theological assumption was that the created world is a manifestation of God’s munificence. Tagore believed that the root of environmental degradation lies in the destruction of the harmony between man, nature, and God. Umasankar Joshi observes, “Tagore was looked up to as an oriental sage, a seer, a prophet” (Joshi 1961: 140). He is also regarded as a devotional poet.

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But whatever may be the levels that scholars and critics want to attach to this great poet he is at bottom an ardent admirer of nature’s beauty and splendour. The poet appreciated with a sense of wonder every object of nature and at the same time saw in them a universal significance. For him nature was his guide and is almost synonymous with God and throughout his writing he acknowledged this in various ways. But man’s attitude to nature, his insane destruction of green for the sake of urbanization and industrialisation saddened the poet. He constantly cautioned the world against destruction of forest, waterbodies, and the world of the animals. The ecological imbalance that we find in our world today was envisaged by Tagore almost a century ago. Tagore writes in his essay “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe” about man’s incapacity to understand the spiritual unity that runs through all living and non-living things on earth and as a result he fails to grasp “the significance of the world into which he is born.” According to Tagore, The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper than science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with the spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena. The water does not merely cleanse his limbs, but it purifies his heart; for it touches his soul. The earth does not merely hold his body, but it gladdens his mind; for its contact is more than a physical contact—it is a living presence. When a man does not realize his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, then is he emancipated for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with the all is established. (Tagore 1996: 283)

Incidentally Tagore makes a distinction between the west and India as to their understanding of what nature is. While the west believed that nature does not include humans and human nature according to them is superior, India has always believed in the unbroken relationship between the two. Tagore writes, In the west the prevalent feeling is that nature belongs exclusively to inanimate things and to beasts, that there is a sudden unaccountable break where human-nature begins. According to it, everything that is low in the scale of beings is merely nature, and whatever has the stamp of perfection on it, intellectual or moral, is human-nature. It is like dividing the bud and the blossom into two separate categories, and putting their grace to the credit of two different and antithetical principles. But the Indian mind never has any hesitation in acknowledging its kinship with nature, its unbroken relation with all. (Tagore 1996: 282)

Tagore’s view is reflected in the perception of the British Romantic poets for whom nature is all inclusive and human beings are very much part of nature.

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But the malady of the world today, including India, which boasts of its spiritual enlightenment, is the belief that in nature’s scheme of things there is a hierarchy and humans are hierarchically at the top. Tagore, like Wordsworth, laments the annihilation of nature’s beauty for the sake of modern civilization. The widespread destruction of forest, the pollution created by the machine age, robbing nature of its pastoral beauty—all these compel the poet to make an impassioned appeal to the all-consuming civilization. In the poem, “To Civilization” (“Sabhyatār Prati”), the poet makes a fervent plea to civilization to return the wilderness and sylvan bliss that the world had been enjoying prior to industrialization. The mad rush for industry, which has resulted in pollution, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity, smothers the spiritual self in man. In the name of progress and civilization the destruction of wilderness pains the poet and he does not hesitate to call it cruelty to nature. The modern civilization is surely marching forward with industrialization but it is simultaneously making the world ecologically deficient. The new civilization, which thrives on the annihilation of the green, has created an environment in which human beings cannot “breathe freely.” In the poem one may also notice the modern man’s concern for deforestation and the consequent lowering of the oxygen level in the atmosphere, thereby causing ozone layer depletion. He wants the natural strength of man to break the barriers that confine him and do not allow them to enjoy the vibrant universe. The defilement of nature by the rapid industrialization became an uppermost concern for Tagore. In his play Red Oleanders (Raktokarobi), Tagore voices his concern about the plundering of natural resources due to the king’s avaricious nature. The play focuses on the excavation of gold from under the earth and the miners engaged in the mining activity present a dehumanised state of their existence. Their identity has been reduced to numbers and they are addressed not by their names but by their respective numbers. They are trapped in a society which is no better than a prison from where, even if they want to, they have no scope to escape. To forget their inhuman toil, they resort to drinking, which for the time being makes them forget their suffering. The loot and exploitation of nature continues and the poet cautions the society that destruction of nature may rebound against them in an unpredictable way. The play foreshadows the natural disasters that different parts of the world, including India, have witnessed with horror due to mindless urbanisation and mining that utterly ignores the ecological balance. In the words of Fakrul Alam, “The play can be related to ideas that Tagore held dear such as his critique of the nexus between imperialism and technology” (Alam and Chakravarty 2011: 375). The play reminds us of the recent subsidence in Joshimath, a hill station in Uttarakhand, India. This disaster was caused mainly due to unplanned development and indiscriminate construction in Joshimath without taking into consideration the topographical peculiarity and the ecosystem of the

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place. Massive deforestation, rampant infrastructure development and the construction of tunnels in connection with a hydropower project by National Thermal Power Corporation, are said to be the major reasons for frequent landslides and the subsidence in the region. In Red Oleanders Nandini, the central character of the play, warns the king of Yaksha Town, who does not appear physically but is represented by his voice, that he will have to face the consequence of digging the earth for excavating gold to satisfy his insatiable greed. She says, The living heart of earth gives itself up in love and life and beauty, but when you rend its bosom and disturb the dead, you bring up with your body the curse of its dark demon, blind and hard, cruel and envious. (215)

The king is aware of the dangers and yet cannot resist his hunger for piling up of wealth. He feels inwardly tired in his march for material prosperity and confesses that wealth can give him power but not the joy of life. He even foresees that one day his world of possession will be reduced to dust. He says: One day, Nandini, in a far off land, I saw a mountain as weary as myself. I could not guess that all its stones were aching inwardly. One night I heard a noise, as if some giant’s evil dream had moaned and moaned and suddenly snapped asunder. Next morning I found the mountain had disappeared in the chasm of a yawning earthquake. That made me understand how overgrown power crushes itself inwardly by its own weight. (Tagore 1996: 217)

These words closely echo the concern of environmental experts who are looking into the causes of the present disaster that Joshimath is facing. The place is now paying the price of human greed, which has caused immense damage to the mountainscape and ecosystem of the area. In another of his plays, The Waterfall (Mukta Dhārā), Tagore is strongly critical of building embankments on rivers as such dams obstruct the free flow of water and deprive a huge section of people living on either side of the river the benefits of drinking water. In the play, the king of Uttarakut, in order to subjugate the subjects of a neighbouring village, the inhabitants of which he considers his enemy, decided to stop the free water supply to that village and ordered his engineer, Bibhuti, to construct a dam on the river. After a strenuous effort of twenty-five years, the engineer has been able to build the same, and he feels proud of his achievement. When the king is reminded by his uncle, Viswajit, that he is perhaps going against the will of God in constructing the dam and by doing so the king would make God himself his enemy, he replies, “Our victory is His. He is the Patron God of Uttarakut. Therefore, He has allowed His own boon to be withdrawn for our sake. He

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will bring Shiu-tarai to the feet of Uttarakut, piercing its heart with the spear of thirst” (Tagore 1996: 172). The citizens of Uttarakut and Shiu-Tarai engage in a wordy duel on this issue and the citizens of Shiu-Tarai express their disbelief at such an effort made by the Royal engineer and a character, named Ganesh, expresses his belief that it would not be possible since the water flows from Bhairava Himself. (Bhairava is an incarnation of Lord Shiva from whose crown flows The Gangā): Second Shiu-Tarai Citizen: Our water in Bibhuti’s hands! Has he suddenly become a God? Second Uttarakut Citizen: He has dismissed God from service. He’ll take up God’s work himself. First Shiu-Tarai Citizen: Is there any specimen of his work? First Uttarakut Citizen: Yes! That embankment across Muktadhārā. [Shiu-Tarai Citizens laugh loudly.] Second Uttarakut Citizen: D’you take this to be a joke? Ganesh: Why! What else can it be? That son of a blacksmith to snatch away from us the gift that comes from Bhairava Himself! (Tagore 1996: 188)

Finally, the water is released by Abhijit, the crown Prince who was against this project since the beginning. He breaks the embankment and sets the water free and meets a sacrificial death as he is washed away by the powerful current of water when the water was released. Many see in the play a reflection of various movements in recent times that are organised by people at different parts of the globe to save environment and especially waterbodies. In India some scholars see this play as foreshadowing the Narmadā Bānchāo Andolon1 in the last two decades of twentieth century. In a poem titled, “Hymn to the Tree” (“Brikshabandanā”), Tagore pays his tribute to the tree for sustaining the civilization on earth. One by one he catalogues the roles played by the tree—bringing feeling to insensible cruel desert, raised life’s triumphal flag in fearless pride before the unknown, declared battle to free earth’s soil from the desert’s dread fortress, giving voice to the speechless water, earth, and sky, transmitting the power of the sun on earth and decking the earth with endless youth. And for all these the poet expresses his sense of indebtedness and gratitude to the tree. The poem ends with an attitude of humble submission acknowledging the contribution of trees in life. The poet feels that trees are the source of strength for the human world, and it draws its sustenance from trees. Galvanised by the power of trees and cooled by their loving shade, the human world stands indebted to the trees.

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The focus on green is fundamental in Tagore’s nature poems. Such poems do not simply reflect his love of nature nor are they merely a romantic portrayal of nature, rather they point to the essential bond between human beings and nature with all her creations. Underneath this glorification of the tree there is a message to save the environment so that man may continue to enjoy the bliss of nature that has helped him progress in the march of civilization. It may be mentioned here that Tagore introduced “Vriksharopan Utsav” (tree planting festival) in Santiniketan way back in 1928 to propagate the idea of afforestation. Since then, it has been observed annually to create awareness about the environment. Tagore discerned the glory of God in the world of created things. Whenever Tagore observes the beauty of the created universe, he recognizes the shaping hand of God behind it. The impassioned feeling roused by minute observation helps Tagore to integrate the physical and the spiritual. Tagore’s view of the immanence of God is very much similar to that of Hopkins, the Victorian poet. In his own words: “If ever I have somehow come to realize God, or if the vision of God has ever been granted to me, I must have received the vision through this world, through men, through trees and birds and beasts, the dust and the soil” (qtd. in Radhakrishnan 1961: xix). Tagore’s poem “Anandaloke Mangalāloke Birāja Satya Sundara” is an impassioned address to God as the spirit of truth and beauty and is an acknowledgment of the presence of that spirit in every object of nature. In the poem, the poet mentions all the elements of nature—the sky, the planets, the stars, the moon, the sun—as manifesting the grandeur of God. The song ends by paying a tribute to God who is the quintessence of all the variety and beauty of the world: The universe is singing of thy great fest in the world The wealth of beauty, the world’s abundance rests safe in thee. (ll 12–13) (Translation mine)

This is very close to what the Chandogya Upanisad says: “Sarvaṃ khalvidaṃ Brahma tajjalāniti śānta upāsīta” (verse 14.1 208), which means “All this is Brahman. Everything comes from Brahman, everything goes back to Brahman, and everything is sustained by Brahman.” According to Tagore, “The attitude of the God-conscious man of the Upanishad towards the universe is one of a deep feeling of adoration. His object of worship is present everywhere. It is the one living truth that makes all realities true. The truth is not only of knowledge but of devotion” (Tagore, “The Relation of the Individual,” 1996: 287). The poem speaks of harmony, peace, and spirituality that are to be found in the world of nature. The whole universe including the world of created beauty is pervaded by the power of God. Tagore practiced a

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theocentric aestheticism and to some extent this is true of Wordsworth. Both of them felt that God is not merely the creator, he is also the force behind each and every object of nature. It is this awareness that endowed Tagore with the responsibility to proclaim that all great art is praise of God, who is the author of all creation. Tagore observes, “India chose her places of pilgrimage wherever there was in nature some special grandeur or beauty, so that her mind could come out of its world of narrow necessities and realize its place in the infinite” (Tagore, “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe,” 1996: 283). Tagore established his Santiniketan school and called it an ashram following the Vedic tradition of the Gurukul system. His chief aim in establishing such a school was to allow the children to grow up in the company of nature so that they can respond to “the constant invitations to establish direct communication which come to their senses from the universe” (Tagore, “My School,” 1996: 391). He says that it is difficult for those who are not Indians to realize the associations that are grouped round the word ashram (the forest sanctuary). According to him in such natural sanctuaries, men live in close communion with the elements of nature and through this mode of living a merger takes place between the individual soul and the Supreme Soul. In case of his own son, he followed the same principle. He writes in his essay “My School,” The first thing that I did was to take him away from the town surroundings into a village and allow him the freedom of primeval nature as far as it is available in modern days. He had a river, noted for its danger, where he swam and rowed without check from the anxiety of his elders. He spent his time in the fields and on the trackless sand-banks, coming late for his meals without being questioned. He had none of those luxuries that are not only customary but as held as proper for boys of his circumstance. (Tagore, “My School,” 1996: 394)

Tagore, like Wordsworth, believed that nature had the power to educate and spiritually enlighten human beings. His contemporary world was witnessing a divorce between the world of humans and the idyllic beauty of nature due to industrial development and consequent damage done to countryside. His school was aimed at providing the students an escape from the claustrophobic environment of city life so that they could feel free and enjoy great psychological comfort while learning their lessons in the company of nature. Recollecting her experience in Santiniketan in her childhood days, Mahasweta Devi, the eminent writer and activist, wrote, “We were taught in our school in Santiniketan that every animal, every cat, every bird, had a right to live. From childhood, we were taught to care for nature, not to break a single leaf or flower from a tree” (qtd. in Alam and Chakravarty 2011: 23).

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The writings of Tagore confirm that he achieved a recognisable Romantic ecology. Many of his poems focus on the interactions between the physical and the biological environment. In his poem “Spring, you enchant earth” (Basanti he bhubanmohini), the poet speaks of the pervading influence of the season on both the physical and the biological world and points to the essential unity that exists between them. The poem is an acknowledgment of this and the poet sings, Tagore’s poems on nature, however romantic they may sound, they speak of the relationship between humans, animals, and the environment, which is necessary in building a sustainable existence on this planet. The poet stands witness to this and feels the hand of God behind such harmony. As Fakrul Alam observes, “Tagore was incorrigibly romantic, and love of god and nature coexisted in him throughout his life” (Alam and Chakravarty 2011: 315). His poems encourage biocentrism in the readers. I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that reading the poems of Tagore can help us gain an understanding of the role ecology plays in conservation, wetland, and natural resource management and forestry. I would like to conclude with an observation made by Jonathan Bate in his book Romantic Ecology: The “Romantic ecology” reverences the green earth because it recognizes that neither physically nor psychologically can we live without green things; it proclaims that there is “one life” within us and abroad, that the earth is a single vast ecosystem which we destabilize at our peril. In sharp contrast to the so-called “Romantic ideology,” the Romantic ecology has nothing to do with flight from the material world, from history and society—it is in fact an attempt to enable mankind the better to live in the material world by entering into harmony with the environment. (Bate 1991: 40)

The anthropogenic degradation of the physical environment is a matter of great concern for us today. Literature plays a major role in enlightening the society about the environmental issues and about the need for human beings to live in sustainable harmony with nature. In Tagore’s writings one finds the poet consistently addressing the green issues and simultaneously trying to make the society aware of the dangers that people may face if the ecological balance is destroyed in the name of progress of human civilization. As Sengupta rightly observes, “[I]t cannot be denied that caring for nature on aesthetic grounds, as Tagore did, has now become one of the major environmental concerns in the developed countries of the world” (Sengupta 2018: 144). Tagore’s environmental consciousness always harped on the close relationship between nature, human beings, and God or a divine spirit. His writings give us the message that both the living and the non-living are part of the world’s ecosystem and it is the responsibility of the humans to protect

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the environment for everyone’s well-being. In today’s world Tagore’s writings are particularly relevant as they constantly point out that survival of the human world depends on the survival of the world of nature. NOTE 1. Narmadā Bānchāo Andolon (NBA) was a social movement in India that started in 1985 to protest against the construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in Gujrat, which threatened to displace huge numbers of people living in the embankments of the river. It turned out to be one of the most powerful mass movements with the participation of human rights activists, environmentalists, along with tribes and farmers. The movement was spearheaded by Medha Patkar and subsequently joined by Baba Amte. It compelled the World Bank, which was the financing agency for the project, to set up a commission to look into the environmental implications of the project. However, the project got finally completed in 2006.

REFERENCES Alam, Fakrul, and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1991. Bilimoria, Purushottama. “Indian religious traditions.” In Spirit of the Environment: Religion, Value and Environmental Concern, edited by David E. Cooper and Joy A. Palmer, 1–13. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1998. Buell, Lawrence. “Can Environmental Imagination Save the World?” In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, edited by J. Parham and L. Westling, 407–422. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Bump, Jerome. “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment.” Georgia Review 28, no. 2 (1974): 227–244. Dixit, Sitaram. “Environmental Sustainability Lessons from Ancient India.” Keemat (Publication of CGSI), September-October, 2018: 9–12. https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​ /37310640​/Environmental​_Sustainability​_Lessons​_from​_Ancient​_India. Gambhirananda, Swami, ed. Chandogya Upanishad. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrsam, 1983. Joshi, Umasankar. “Tagore’s Poetic Vision.” In Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861–1961. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. “Most Dear to All the Muses.” In Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861–1961. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961. Sarvananda, Swami, ed. Isabasyopanishad. Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1964. Sengupta, Kalyan. “Rabindranath Tagore.” In Key Thinkers on the Environment, edited by Joy A. Palmer Cooper and David E. Cooper, 141–145. Abingdon-onThames, UK: Routledge, 2018.

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Sukla Yajur Veda Madhyandiniya Sanhita, Amritalal Sastri, ed. Chaukhamba Sanskrit Bhawan, rpt. New Delhi: Sri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, 2006. Tagore, Rabindranath. “My School.” In The Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume Two, 389–403. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. ———. The Red Oleanders. In The Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume Two, 209–253. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. ———. “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe.” In The Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume Two, 281–289. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. ———. “The Religion of the Forest.” In The Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume Two, 511–519. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. ———. The Waterfall. In The Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume Two, 163– 208. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. Trivedi, Ramgovind, ed. Rig Veda Sanhita, Vol. I, Chaukhamba Sanskrit Bhawan, rpt. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Vidyabhawan Varanasi, 2016. Umunc, Himmet. “The Green Shakespeare: An Ecocritical Reading.” Journal of Faculty of Letters, Vol. 32, No. 2, December 2015: 265–276. https:​//​www​ .researchgate​.net​/publication​/315054804.

Chapter 11

Ecological Violence, Peripheral Voices, and the Need for Climate Justice Reading Jacinta Kerketta, the Voice of Contemporary Jharkhand Shreya Bhattacharji and Roshan Raj Singh

The state of Jharkhand is located in central east India. The word, “Jharkhand,” is made up of two words—“jhar,” meaning bush or tree, and “khand,” which means land. Jharkhand, therefore, is the land of trees. The state is home to thirty-two tribes. The Scheduled Tribe (ST) population of Jharkhand, as per the 2011 census, constitutes 26.21 per cent of the total population of the state.1 Jharkhand was carved out of the erstwhile state of Bihar in the year 2000 to give the tribal population their rightful place. However, twenty-two years down the lane, the tribals remain marginalised in their own state, occupying a meagre portion of the demography. In the country, Jharkhand occupies first position in coal reserves, second position in iron, third position in copper ore reserve, seventh position in bauxite reserve and is the sole producer of prime coking coal. Limestone, dolomite, manganese, mica, china clay, graphite, soapstone, fire clay, coal bed methane, uranium, phosphorite, apatite, quartz, feldspar, gold, and pyroxenite are the other important minerals available in huge quantities in Jharkhand.2 This huge mineral resource seems to have become one of the leading causes of environmental degradation in Jharkhand. Mining of these mineral resources often begins with displacement of tribal populations and ends with the complete destruction of the landscape. Jharkhand is also an ecologically rich state, having approximately 32.74 percent forest and tree cover.3 Almost all the mineral reserves are located in 165

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densely forested lands. The Saranda forest, located in the hilly regions of the Saraikela Kharsawan district of southern Jharkhand and inhabited mostly by the Ho tribe, is a perfect example of this. It forms a part of the “Red Corridor” (Dungdung 2015: xiii), a region rich in minerals, mainly iron, spread mostly across the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha. The heavy mining of iron causes the entire area to be polluted with red iron ore dust. Another reason for this name could be the insurgency movements of Naxals4 and the retaliatory government action, causing bloodshed on a large scale. These forests are home to diverse flora and fauna, and they have also been sustaining the tribal communities for generations. The thirty-two tribes that reside in Jharkhand were classified into four groups by the noted Indian anthropologist Lalita Prasad Vidyarthi (1931– 1985).5 These four groups are “hunter-gatherer” type, consisting of tribes such as Birhor, Korwa, Hill Kharia, and so on; “shifting agriculturists,” consisting of tribes such as Sauria-Pahariya; “simple artisans,” consisting of tribes such as Mahli, Lohra, Karmali, Chik Baraik, and so on; and “settled agriculturists,” consisting of tribes such as Santhal, Munda, Oraon, Ho, Bhumij, and so forth. The Oraon tribe is one of the major tribes that resides in Jharkhand. In addition to Jharkhand, the Oraon population spreads to neighbouring states of Odisha and Chattisgarh. They speak Kurukh as their native language. Jacinta Kerketta, a poet from the Oraon community, was born in the West Singhbhum district of Jharkhand. Her poems highlight such pertinent issues as discrimination, ecological violence, and the many attacks on the adivasi6 way of life. Be it discrimination between men and women, tribal and non-tribal, ancient and modern, or village and city, each finds mention in Kerketta’s poems. She has been fiercely vocal about issues of environmental degradation that have devastated the lush green land and posed a threat to the very existence of tribal populations living in harmony with nature for hundreds of years. Hers is a voice of those living at the periphery of social, economic, and political structures. With scathing honesty, she portrays the injustices that have been meted out onto these people. In the present world rife with ecological violence, this article is an attempt to foreground the peripheral voice of a lone crusader advocating a fairer, just, and sustainable planet that is at peace with itself. Angor (2016) is her first published collection of poems. In the preface, she reflects upon her childhood wherein she had to witness the trauma of her mother being subjected to domestic violence at the hands of her father who was in the police. The mainstream tenets of patriarchy were gradually internalised by this adivasi family after Kerketta’s father began working in the police force. In a 2018 interview she talks about this: My parents didn’t share an amicable relationship. My father often used to drink and he would fight with my mother. But we were living within the mainstream

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society in Bihar, and a lot of new and bad things were coming into our family lives. Slowly, my father, like other men, began to be oppressive towards my mother. Like she should eat only after her husband. She shouldn’t speak to other men. And these were the dicta that the girls in our house were also asked to follow. (“In Conversation with Adivasi Poet Jacinta Kerketta,” GroundXero 2018)

During her childhood, she also witnessed the brutal killing of her close relatives by non-tribals who were driven by greed to occupy tribal lands. Later on, working as a freelance journalist, she developed much sensitivity towards issues concerning ecology and the consequent violence perpetrated upon the tribal population. In the same interview she talks about one such incident: [T]here was an incident in Manoharpur town. An Adivasi man and an elderly Adivasi woman who were working in their fields, were attacked by 10–20 non-Adivasi armed men of the Rajwade clan. The Adivasis were beaten, chased and dragged out of the field to the main road, where the man was killed. It was alleged that the two had sacrificed a girl child for the sake of better crops. The newspapers, too, had published the same story. Later, on my father’s enquiry, the police told him as a confidential matter, that someone had raped and killed the girl and thrown her body onto the fields of that Adivasi person and later came with a group of 10–20 people to kill the latter, thus giving the story a different turn, and getting away with it. I don’t know whether the real culprits were punished ever or not. But the older woman was thrown into prison. When she came out of the prison, she died. Mother told us about this incident, and then I learnt that the victims were no other than my uncle and my grandmother, who had gotten killed. . . . When I got to hear about the news that has been circulated in the newspapers, I began to think, who will write such stories from our perspective. The newspaper is theirs. The power, too, belongs to them. It was then that it struck me that I should study journalism, and that I should work for the newspapers. (“In Conversation,” GroundXero 2018)

Land of the Roots (2018) is her second volume of poetry. It is dedicated to “the Villages and Jungles Vanishing from this Earth.” In the foreword to the volume, she writes how the question of belonging is pervasive in contemporary tribal life. The adivasis are tied to their surrounding that largely consists of forests. They share a symbiotic relationship with nature. Since the spaces inhabited by tribals are being destroyed, they are forced to migrate towards the cities. In these alien cityscapes, they find themselves struggling to earn their livelihoods without the anchor of belongingness holding them together. Jacinta Kerketta, being a member of one of the communities that is at the receiving end of insensitive ecological violence, addresses these issues in her poems. India, being a developing nation, is constantly upgrading and adding to its infrastructure. Construction of many bridges, flyovers, highways, airports,

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and so on are underway.7 These development projects demand extraction of huge quantities of minerals, which comes at the cost of dislocation and the resultant exploitation of tribal communities, who have been the original inhabitants of these lands. In many cases, the mining projects begin with the forceful reclamation of adivasi land and driving the tribal population out of their ancestral home. It bears a close resemblance to the colonial takeover of lands in the context of Africa. In her novel, The Color Purple (1982), Alice Walker describes the aftermath of one such atrocity on the Olinka tribe. “Since the Olinka no longer own their village, they must pay rent for it, and in order to use the water, which also no longer belongs to them, they must pay a water tax” (Walker 2011: 177). Although the tribe in question is fictitious, the barbarities perpetrated upon them have several larger than life parallels across the globe. Usually, after such illegitimate confiscations, the land is stripped of all flora and fauna to set up machinery and equipment required to carry out the mining work. In Jharkhand over time, the open-cast coal mines have completely devastated the ecology of the areas they are located in. Jharia coal field, which provides most of the coal for India, is located in the Dhanbad district of Jharkhand and covers around 280 square kilometres. Since mining began in Jharia in the 1890s, the entire physiography has completely transformed. The previously lush green forested area has now metamorphosed into a battered land covered with coal dust and speckled with ditches abandoned after open-pit mining. These ditches have gradually filled with rainwater creating small ponds. The waters, laced with coal dust and toxic effluents, make these unnatural water bodies unsupportive of life forms. Another issue plaguing the region is the smouldering fires in the underground mines. The first underground fire was recorded in 1916.8 Since then, the fires have continued and caused the land to subside in many places making the entire area dangerous. The residents have been forced to relocate, leaving their ancestral lands behind. These areas have been reduced to rubble and are neither fit for agriculture nor supportive of any architecture. Thus in these unstable lands, one can never be sure which area might get subsided next. This is the story of just one minefield. The numerous others that operate in Jharkhand and surrounding states have each caused massive devastation. In most cases, the worst sufferers have been the tribals who neither have the means to protest nor the ability to reclaim the land that belongs to them. The Saranda forest features prominently in the poems of Jacinta Kerketta. The constant mining of rich iron ore deposits causes the entire forest area to be coated in red dust. Even the two rivers, Karo and Koina, which flow in this area are heavily polluted, the water turning red from the iron ore dust. The mining activities in Saranda have been taking a huge toll both on the ecosystem of the forest, and also on the tribal population who have been residing here. The issues concerning this area are heavily politicised. Since

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long, there has been a war being waged between the pro-mining groups and the anti-mining groups. There are largely four parties involved in the conflict: the government along with the state machinery including the police force, the mining companies, the Naxals, and the tribals. For long, the difficult terrain of Saranda has made it difficult for outsiders to access this forest. Tribals have been living here for a long time. Their way of life is deeply intertwined with the forest. As Gladson Dungdung, a tribal activist from Jhrakhand, puts it in his book Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India (2015), “[t]he cultures of the two ethnic groups ‘Ho’ and ‘Munda’ are similar. Their life cycle moves around nature. The basic characters of their culture are collectivism, community living, equality, autonomy and non-profit ethos” (Dungdung 2015: 40–41). The adivasi economy is largely based on agriculture and most of their sustenance is dependent on forest products. Since there is no tradition of profit making in the adivasi way of life, they do not take more than they need and thereby maintain a symbiotic relationship with the forest. In her poems, Jacinta Kerketta paints a picture of the dense sal forests of Saranda. These forests are sacred to the adivasi communities. The forests are also the means of their sustenance and livelihood and vital to their way of life. The adivasis do not believe in idol worship. Their deities are the gods and goddesses of nature—rivers, trees, and mountains. The tribal way of life is deeply intertwined with the forest and this mutual coexistence has continued for millenia. The tribals always maintain the sanctity of the forests and never exploit the forests even while drawing sustenance from nature. Hence, it comes as no surprise that wherever there is tribal population, the forests have stayed preserved. The adivasis have designated “sacred groves” in the forest which they worship and protect. In Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India, Gladson Dungdung notes how the biggest wars in the twenty-first century, across the world, are being waged for natural resources. He calls this a “silent war,” “[t]he war for minerals, however is usually a silent war, that most people know little about” (Dungdung 2015: 2). He cites the example of Afghanistan, which has become a site for exploitation and unrest after the United States discovered untapped mineral resources estimated to be worth $1 trillion (2015: 2). The war for minerals is being waged in India as well. Whereas in the case of the United States, other countries are at the receiving end of this war, in India, the adivasi population, citizens of the same country, are the ones at the receiving end. Adivasi lands are being taken forcefully. The mineral rich soil of Saranda forest has turned the region into a battlefield. It has claimed the lives of adivasis and destroyed the rich ecosystem of the forest. The two rivers of the region, Karo and Koina, are heavily polluted. Iron ore dust also causes the air in this area to be unbreathable. Added to this is the

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countless felling of trees that has ripped apart the symbiotic relationship that the adivasis share with the forest. Heavy machinery, crucial for iron ore mining, has penetrated deep into the environs of the forests. This invasion, over time, has completely destroyed the biodiversity of this area. When one looks at this land through the poems of Jacinta Kerketta, one realises how deep the problems related to ecology and tribals are. Kerketta, in her poem “The Blossoms of Saranda,” from Angor, shows how the sanctity of the forest is compromised by the invasion of mining activities. The fragrance of flowers is overpowered by the metallic odour of machines. The calm and quiet forest environment is disturbed by the constant explosions. The forest is personified as a sleepy being whose very existence is under attack and yet it tries to gather its fragmented roots ripped apart by the exploding dynamites. Eyes still heavy with sleep, . . . gathering all strength, it begins To pick out the withered remains Of its roots Blown up into fragments By exploding dynamites. (Kerketta 2016: 25)

The violence, however, is not confined to the ground. Above the forest, the “corpse of rain” hangs by the neck, dangling on a tree, signifying the utter destruction of the forest biosphere. In the sky, vultures gather for a feast. The rivers of the forest weep “bloody tears” (Kerketta 2016: 25); the iron ore dust has polluted the rivers and turned the waters red. Further, she writes about the tools, “[t]he spade, the pickaxe,” and “a few hands” (27) that wield those tools, crying silent tears as they begin digging the grave of the forest. They know that in that grave, they will bury not only their world views but also their future. But all is not gone. The poem ends on a hopeful note, however faint. A fragrant hope strikes at the nauseating smell of dynamite and machines, to silently find its place in every blossom of the forest. With dawn, rises the undying hope of a better tomorrow, when another sweet blossom blooms somewhere deep in the forests of Saranda. This undying hope, quintessentially human, also finds mention in noted Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Beatrice, the only surviving narrator of a brutal dictatorial regime change, performs the naming ceremony of Ikem and Elewa’s baby girl. The name that she chooses for her is Amaechina, which is typically a boy’s name. It means “May the path never close”:

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“There was an Old Testament prophet who named his son The-remnant-shallreturn. They must have lived in times like this. We have a different metaphor, though; we have our own version of hope that springs eternal. We shall call this child AMAECHINA: May-the-path-never-close. Ama for short.” “But that’s a boy’s name.” “No matter.” (Achebe 2010: 320)

Although in the novel, the context is that of a dictatorial regime, the human capacity to hope is similar across cultures and history. No matter how hard one tries to vanquish hope, it always finds a way to emerge again. The adivasi plight of being uprooted from their homeland finds voice in the poem “O, City!” In the name of development, the tribals have been evicted from their own land and are being forced into the city where they feel lost and drift without any moorings: Leaving behind their homes, Their soil, their bales of straw, Fleeing the roof over their heads. (Kerketta 2016: 31)

What is happening with adivasi life is oxymoronic; while their homes are being destroyed and they are being forced out of ancestral lands, the reason given for this epistemic destruction is “progress” and “development.” No wonder the adivasis feel compelled to ask what this “development” means and for whom it is being executed. They never asked for it in the first place. The adivasis leaving behind their life in the forest ask the city this pertinent question - whether the city has ever been “wrenched from the very roots” like they have been in the name of “so called progress” (Kerketta 2016: 31). The poem, like the city, has no answer. The poem titled “The River, the Mountain and the Bazaar” focuses on the adivasi way of life, an alternative world view of loving and living that is on the verge of extinction. The poetic persona, presumably a woman belonging to the older generation, shows “little Posterity,” signifying not only the present but also future generations, a rare glimpse of what the past had been and what the future would never more be. On the way to the bazaar, she shows the little girl vestiges of the past, a way of life lost due to rampant human activities like mining and deforestation. First they come upon a narrow path and she shows her little posterity the place “where the village river used to be” (Kerketta 2016: 33). Further, she shows her “[a] deep furrow in the ground ahead,” which has “swallowed all the mountains” of the village. The mining agencies, complete with their stone crushers, have crumbled the many hills of Jharkhand to inconsequential stone chips. And so proliferate concrete jungles,

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the many cities of Jharkhand. In a 2021 article published on Mongabay-India, the plight of Rajmahal hills, one of the oldest hill ranges in India, is highlighted. Rampant mining activities are threatening the disappearance of the entire range: “The biodiversity on the hills, on which livelihoods are dependent, is receding. If the pace of stone quarrying continues, we will not be able to trace any mountain in Sahibganj” (Singh 2021). The woman and the child then come across a graveyard, “vast and sinister,” that has engulfed the barns of their ancestors. Finally, they reach the bazaar. When the shopkeeper asks what they would like to buy, the woman’s reply is steeped in longing for what has been forever lost. She asks for “a little rain, a handful wet earth,/[a] bottle of river, and that mountain preserved.” She also asks for “a piece of nature” hanging from the wall. She asks why the rain is so expensive and the shopkeeper replies that the “wetness is not of here” but “[i]t comes from another sphere” (Kerketta 2016: 33). Fumbling for money, when the woman unties the knot at the corner of her sari,9 she finds only “[t]he crumpled folds of [her] entire being.” The natural entities that the woman wishes to buy are deeply connected with the adivasi way of life. As the adivasis live in a symbiotic relationship with nature, the river, the rain, the mountains, and so on form not only a part of their surroundings, but also an inalienable part of their identity. The rampant destruction of the environment has targeted the fundamentals of their being, essential for their survival and way of life. This ironic bazaar has on sale elements of nature in man-made containers. The mindless destruction of the elements of nature has simultaneously destroyed the very being of the adivasi. The woman knows that neither money, the hallmark of consumerist-capitalist mainstream society, nor her “development” crumpled being can buy her or the unborn generations those rivers, those hills, ever again. Thus, nothing in this bazaar can ever get sold or be bought and the woman ends up buying nothing. Another poem, “Bloodstained Rivers,” talks about the violence being perpetrated in the forests of Saranda. The imageries in the poem are reflective of the current situation of a battered and destroyed forest, while the system seems to benefit only the enemies of nature. The poem begins with an image of bloodstained hands washing themselves clean in the rivers of Saranda: Hands stained with the blood Of a thousand slaughtered trees Quietly wash themselves clean In the rivers of Sârandâ. (Kerketta 2016: 45)

The blood-drenched waters of the river weep on the riverbanks and the entire forest turns red. At this juncture, the poem “यह पलाश के फूलने का समय है” (This is the Time for Palash to Bloom) by Anuj Lugun, another powerful tribal

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voice of contemporary Jharkhand, becomes singularly relevant. In spring, no longer do the crimson palash blooms, very succinctly called “flame-of-theforest,”10 turn the forests aglow. Rampant mining activities ensure that the forests are forever unnaturally aflame in red iron ore dust. यह पलाश के फूलने का समय है और जंगल जल रहा है। This is the time for palash to bloom And the jungles are aflame. (Lugun n.d., our translation)

Jacinta Kerketta laments that on the branches of the sakhua11 tree are nailed “posters of memories/[t]hat once were, but have now gone missing” (Kerketta 2016: 45). These images highlight the issues plaguing the forest and its people. The violence is not only being perpetrated against the trees but also against the people who have been living here since generations. The concept of social justice is a farce here. Adivasi lives are being claimed everyday along with the lives of trees, rivers, and other elements of nature. The poem is a sensitive account of the violence that has become routine in Saranda. The last stanza of the poem shows how deep-rooted the suffering is, both for the forest as well as for its native inhabitants, and the only choice they have left now is to weep silent tears: Eyes seeking the truth cower, Starving voices, raised in protest, Nibble at morsels of hope and solace, While endless streams of desperate tears Weep the bloodstained rivers. (Kerketta 2016: 45)

Kerketta’s poem “The Six-Lane Freeway of Deceit” focuses on the exploitation of the adivasis in the forests of Saranda. The poem dwells on the “Khassi Tournament,” a football tournament very popular in rural Jharkhand where the prize for the winning team is a goat.12 These tournaments have a huge fan following among the youth who spend countless hours practising and preparing for each tournament. This causes a definite setback to their formal education. Blinded in their devotion to these tournaments, they fail to see how their ancestral lands, their forests, and their mountains are being surreptitiously stolen away. These football intoxicated youth do not realise that the organisers of these tournaments are more often than not the mining companies and their associates who are the sole profiteers in the larger game that plays out everyday in the forests of Saranda. The poem opens with a gathering of people who have emerged from the forests of Saranda, not to participate in a protest march but to watch a football tournament where a goat would be the winning team’s trophy. The second

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stanza talks about each child of Saranda being made a member of some youth club team or another as soon as he comes of age. The sinister plot of putting a football in every hand that should be holding a book is deftly played out to ensure that these young boys do not grow up to join any form of protest against the illegal mining of their land. While goats as tournament trophies beckon, books and studies take a backseat for these youngsters. The addiction to football is like opium and the love for the game keeps these boys in a perpetual delirium. They fail to see beyond victory and loss and are completely oblivious to the strife and struggle for survival. As these boys attain adulthood, hunger pushes them into the mining workforce; too late they realise that there is no other way of earning their sustenance other than to pick up spades and shovels and disembowel Mother Earth. Dreams of becoming Pelè, Maradona, Naymar, or Messi13 are dashed to the ground as they become party to the very work responsible for their destitution. The adivasi  miner betrays his own Mother Earth and begins “clawing open her womb without mercy.” Kerketta further shows how the agents of mining corporations are ever ready, in attendance in front of each village door. At the first sigh of hunger, disease, unemployment or helplessness, these agents rush in with grains, medicines, utensils, and clothes. In return, the family members are compelled to become labourers in the mines for “a mere pittance pay.” In the name of progress, “four and six-lane roads” are proposed to be built in Saranda. The people labouring away in the mines and the road construction sites do not know about this “progress.” They remain unaware of the different “lanes of deceit” (Kerketta 2016: 75) that run through the forests of Saranda. Anuj Lugun, in his poem “यह पलाश के फूलने का समय है” (This is the Time for Palash to Bloom), reveals how the once lush green forests are now a labyrinth of gunpowder and explosives ripping open the earth: साखू के सागर सारंडा की लहरों में बिछ गई है बारूदी सुरंगें In Saranda, waves of the sea of Sakhu14 are inlaid with explosive tunnels (Lugun n.d., our translation)

Kerketta’s poem “The River That Was” reads like an elegy. It tells the story of the tragic rape of the river “Pusaro.” Illegal sand mining is rampant in the rivers of Jharkhand causing many a river to drift from its natural course. It has left the rivers stripped of their erstwhile beauty. The sand mining mafia often get into violent clashes with the police and the local administration who attempt to stop such illegal mining activities.15 The poem begins with the poet persona reminiscing about her childhood when the Pusaro flowed in all its beauty, and she played in the ripples. She remembers the gurgling waters of

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the river as her cradle. Today, the unquenchable thirst of the ever-growing population has dried the river up. During her childhood, the poet persona remembers “a length of bright sands” that lined the river’s banks like the golden folds of a sari. The personification of the river as a woman, whose modesty is outraged everyday by insolent hands grabbing her golden robes, makes the poem even more poignant for the reader. The last two stanzas highlight how ravenous the appetite of the perpetrators is. They plough the bosom of the river-woman day and night to mine the sand. Their spades dig mercilessly to rip and gauge out from the body of the river-woman, “chunks of earth, red and meaty.” And then comes “development” in the form of a bridge built across the ravaged river, a flimsy tatter mocking the rape of a beautiful river: And at the end of this savagery A bridge across her parched, hollowed body Is flung like a tatter To clothe her outraged modesty, Making a cruel mockery Of her robbed and ravaged existence. (Kerketta 2016: 81)

The poem “Return” from Land of the Roots talks about the agency of Mother Earth. She can speak for herself against all the injustices that have been wrecked upon her. The poet argues that Mother Earth would need just a little while to set herself free from the rules and regulations of men. She is capable of healing her own wounds and covering her naked lands with greenery. She can reclaim the ancient earth-friendly civilisations, complete with their now extinct languages. Clearly never before has any civilization caused so much destruction to the planet as the current one. Before the discovery of fossil fuels that catapulted human civilisation on the current path of endless growth, the Earth had never suffered such devastation at the hands of just one species. In this poem, Kerketta tries to address the Earth’s ability to regenerate herself, which is only hampered by the constant battles raged upon her by humans. The poem titled “The Grave” is in the form of a conversation between the “[m]ud piled up on the sides” and the “hollow left in the ground behind.” The mud pile asks the hollow in the ground, how is it that with every passing day, the hollow becomes deeper, longer, and wider. The poem ends with the hollow’s reply where it says that inch by inch “they are digging the grave of their entire race.” Although the conversation is very short with just one question addressed, it is loaded with meaning and makes the reader reflect upon what humanity is doing to itself. In its mindless greed for minerals and other riches of the Earth, the human race is digging the grave of its own civilisation.

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Whether it is mining for fossil fuels or any other mineral, the very basics of life supporting components of Earth are being destroyed. The air is polluted from the gases released upon burning fossil fuels, the rivers are heaving under mining effluents and waste from industries and the land is being stripped of all greenery. Such a destructive process has very aptly been portrayed by the poet as digging the grave of the human race. The poem “Care” gives the reader a glimpse into the intricate relationship that the adivasis share with the forest and the extent to which they go to protect their forests. The poem is in the form of a conversation between a mother and her child. The child asks the mother why is it that she scours the jungle, climbing hills all day only to come home late with just one bundle of firewood. The mother responds that indeed she scours the woods, climbs the hills, and wanders the whole day just to collect that one bundle of dry firewood. She does so because she is wary of cutting a living tree, she does so out of her care for the forest. The figure of the adivasi mother stands out sharply against the backdrop of massive destruction that goes on in the forests of Jharkhand where hundreds of trees are butchered every day without much thought. The reasons given may be different; sometimes there’s a road to be built, other times more land needs to be acquired to set up factories. No matter what the reason is, the violence is always inflicted on the forest. As the lives of adivasis are intertwined with the forest, the violence claims them as victims too. This contrast between the adivasi way of life and the people who perpetrate such violence upon nature is also depicted in the poem “Land of the Roots.” It is a two-line poem. The first line states that “they” cannot stand the sight of trees. The next line reasons why the sight of trees is not agreeable. The roots of trees claim land. Land, of course, is a much-contested entity with multiple claimants, each forgetting that the land belongs to the trees, the original inhabitants of earth long before any human came on the scene. Human civilisation has been moving on a path of unprecedented and continuous growth since the industrial revolution. The discovery of fossil fuels and other mineral resources stored in the bowels of the earth has catapulted the human race onto the jet age. Although the “progress” made has been extraordinary, its by-product is rampant destruction of the Earth with large amounts of pollutants being pumped into the hitherto pristine landscape and unsullied air. Within just two centuries, humankind has chalked large scale and potentially irreversible changes on the environment. Its impact has become etched on the geological timeline and the current age has been called the age of the Anthropocene. The reckless excavation and use of minerals has put the future of the whole planet at great risk. Climate change and the resulting calamities such as rise in sea level, heat waves, cyclones, droughts, and so on threatens the existence of all life forms. No other species has ever caused such devastating changes to the Earth’s biosphere. While tussling

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with the larger question of the planet’s survival, one must be vigilant about the battles around the world that have cumulatively become a war against the planet and its inhabitants. Jacinta Kerketta’s poems draw attention to multiple such battles raging in the forests of Jharkhand. Human history, replete with violence and bloodshed, has always made the people at the periphery its worst victims. The adivasis of Jharkhand are fighting a constant battle for their survival. The mass scale exploitation of Jharkhand’s natural resources and its people are very poignantly portrayed in the poems of Jacinta Kerketta. Her poems provide a lens through which to look at the many injustices suffered by the weakest sections of society. Being an advocate of adivasi rights, she does not forget that nature, too, is an entity that suffers greatly. In her poems, the elements of nature find agency; rivers, mountains, trees, and the like find a platform to voice themselves. Theirs is a plaintive cry about a present that is unjust and a future that is bleak and hopeless. Yet, one must hope: for a better future, for a just and clean world, and for a sustainable planet that is at peace with itself. One must hope, for in that hope lies the promise of a better world in the present and for the future. In Stephen King’s short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (1982), the debate about hope’s ability to kill or set one free finds a vessel in Peter Stevens’s letter to his friend Red: “Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies” (King 2016: 114). Therefore, one must hope: to that hope is tethered the existence of the planet. NOTES 1. “Jharkhand Population—Census India 2011.” Census India. Accessed December 22, 2022. https:​//​www​.censusindia2011​.com​/jharkhand​-population​.html. 2. “About Department.” Department of Mines and Geology, Government of Jharkhand. Accessed December 27, 2022. https:​//​minerals​.jharkhand​.gov​.in​/content​ /1​/1. 3. “Basic Recorded Details of Jharkhand.” Forests, Environment and Climate Change Department, Government of Jharkhand. Accessed January 4, 2023. https:​//​ forest​.jharkhand​.gov​.in​/About​_us​/geo​_dis​.aspx. 4. A Naxal is a member of any of the Communist guerrilla groups in India, mostly associated with the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The term “Naxal” derives its name from the village Naxalbari in West Bengal, where the movement had its origin. 5. “Tribals in Jharkhand.” Official Website of Jharkhand Police: A Force to Reckon With. Accessed on January 6, 2023. https:​//​jhpolice​.gov​.in​/about​-jharkhand​/tribals. 6. The term, “adivasi,” derives from the Hindi word “adi,” which means, from the beginning and “vasi” meaning inhabitant or resident. The term was coined in the 1930s, largely a consequence of a political movement to forge a sense of identity among the various indigenous peoples of India.

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7. “10 Mega Projects in India Currently Ongoing 2023 That Are Going to Boost Economy for Sure.” Indian Construction Info. Accessed on January 9, 2023. https:​//​ indianconstructioninfo​.com​/mega​-projects​-in​-india​/. 8. Moushumi Basu, “Living above a Century-Old Coal Fire, Jharia Residents Pay the Price for India’s Mining Ambitions.” Mongabay, March 9, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2023. https:​//​news​.mongabay​.com​/2017​/03​/living​-above​-a​-century​-old​-coal​ -fire​-jharia​-residents​-pay​-the​-price​-for​-indias​-mining​-ambitions​/. 9. A sari is a garment that consists of a long piece of cloth that women, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, wear by draping around their bodies. 10. Palash, commonly known as “flame-of-the-forest” is a tree found in Jharkhand and produces vivid red blooms. 11. Sakhua or Sal (Shorea Robusta) is the most prominent tree species in the Saranda forest, greatly valued for its strength and used in construction. 12. Achintya Ganguly, “A Football Contest That Will Get You a Goat in Jharkhand.” The Telegraph Online, December 2, 2020. Accessed on January 10, 2023. https:​//​www​.telegraphindia​.com​/jharkhand​/a​-football​-contest​-that​-will​-get​-you​ -a​-goat​-in​-jharkhand​/cid​/1799227. 13. Famous football players who have had very successful careers. 14. Sakhu is another name for the Sal tree, commonly found in Jharkhand. 15. “Sand Mafia Tries to Mow Down Female Officer, SDM in Jharkhand.” India Today, November 14, 2022. Accessed on January 11, 2023. https:​//​www​.indiatoday​ .in​/crime​/story​/sand​-mafia​-murder​-attempt​-sdm​-truck​-jharkhand​-garhwa​-2297020​ -2022​-11​-14.

REFERENCES Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2010. Dungdung, Gladson. Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India. Deshaj Prakashan: Bihar-Jharkhand, 2015. “In Conversation with Adivasi Poet Jacinta Kerketta.” GroundXero. August 13, 2018. https:​//​www​.groundxero​.in​/2018​/08​/13​/in​-conversation​-with​-jacinta​-kerketta​/. Kerketta, Jacinta. Angor. Kolkata: Adivaani, 2016. ———. Land of the Roots. New Delhi: Bhartiya Jnanpith, 2018. King, Stephen. “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” In Different Seasons, 6–116. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018. Lugun, Anuj. “यह पलाश के फूलने का समय है” (This is the Time for Palash to Bloom). Hindwi, Accessed on February 8, 2023. https:​//​www​.hindwi​.org​/kavita​/yah​-palaash​ -ke​-phuulane​-ka​-samay​-hai​-anuj​-lugun​-kavita. Singh, Rahul. “A Primitive Tribe and Rare Fossils Threatened by Stone Mining in Jharkhand.” Mongabay, October 21, 2021. Accessed on January 31, 2023. https:​ //​india​.mongabay​.com​/2021​/10​/a​-primitive​-tribe​-and​-rare​-fossils​-threatened​-by​ -stone​-mining​-in​-jharkhand​/. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Open Road Integrated Media: New York, 2011.

Chapter 12

“Cry, children / cry the silence of the earth” Representation of Climate Change, Environmental Disaster, and Species Extinction in Contemporary Indian Ecopoetry Joyjit Ghosh

The nest on the mango tree has turned black. The birds’ cry of hunger is no more heard. Susheel Kumar Sharma, “A Pond Nearby” (2020: 10–14)1

The lines quoted in the title of my essay are from Jayanta Mahapatra’s “I Am Today.”2 They hit hard at the idea of “ecopoetry” as those in the epigraph do. The term “ecopoetry” has entered the discourse of environmental humanities like the term “cli-fi.” But in the first place we ask: What is ecopoetry? How is it different from nature poetry or even environmental poetry? There are debates regarding these issues among environmental thinkers and writers. However, ecopoetry is often viewed as “a subfield of environmental poetry, and thus also of nature poetry” (Dunning 2013: 69). Borrowing certain ideas from both Lawrence Buell and Leonard Scigaj, Kate Dunning argues that “ecological thinking” (Scigaj’s expression)3 is at the heart of ecopoetry and what distinguishes ecopoetry from environmental poetry is “the desire to issue a ‘warning’ of some kind” (Dunning 2013: 69–70). This “warning” is obviously related to the question of ecological vulnerability: we are not 179

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immune to disaster, like all other species and organisms within the ecosystem, we are vulnerable too. According to Ursula K Heise, ecopoetry is “related to the broadest genre of nature poetry but can be distinguished from it by its portrayal of nature as threatened by human activities.”4 In other words, anthropocenic awareness permeates the discourse of ecopoetry. We recognize that our relation with the earth has turned toxic; we have poisoned nature and we have poisoned ourselves. Samantha Walton defines ecopoetry “as poetry that addresses, or can be read in ways that address, the current conditions of our environmental crisis.”5 John Shoptaw also speaks about “environmental damage or risk” while he describes ecopoetry, but he significantly adds that “it is urgent, it aims to unsettle” when we concentrate on its rhetorical aspect (Shoptaw 2016: 400–401). The two lines that serve as the epigraph to the essay “unsettle” us as they poignantly speak of the “damage” caused to environment by humans. The image of the nest that has “turned black” is deeply suggestive of the “environmental crisis” through which we are passing. Helen Moore argues that ecopoetry raises certain “ethical questions” regarding “our planet and other species” and “encompasses both spiritual practice and political activism.”6 While theorizing “ecopoetics,” Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne also speak of “an ethos or ethical relation.”7 This ethical relation works at various planes of understanding. In the first place, it speaks of “a response to the world and a respecting of the earth,” to echo Jonathan Bate.8 We have to acknowledge human limits while we use the resources of the earth for our sustenance. But it also addresses the issue of “ethical entanglement with the other,” borrowing a phrase from Timothy Morton.9 This is enormously significant because ecopoetry like environmental poetry often deals with the experiences and conditions of the nonhuman other—their sufferings at the hands of humans in particular. It is interesting to note that most of the features which characterize American and British ecopoetry are characteristic of contemporary Indian ecopoetry as well, although the latter has its own socio-cultural specificities. The present essay attempts to explore the representation of climate change and allied issues like global warming, eco-catastrophe, toxic disaster, and species extinction in Indian ecopoetry of the present times. For this purpose, I have mainly selected poems included in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (2020), edited by Vinita Agrawal, and Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems (2020), edited by Shruti Das, although there are references to poems in other anthologies too. The essay offers critical approaches to contemporary ecopoetry in the Indian context. The argumentations in this regard often intersect and are organically connected with each other.

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND “ECOPRECARITY” The issue of climate change is at the centre of Indian ecopoetry. Climate change is unpredictable. It may happen anytime. One may remember Longbir Terang’s poem with a telling title: “No One Knows When the Climate will Alter”:10 For years we’ve been confabulating about floods and thunderstorms happening everywhere (1–4) . . . When will the climate alter? Unpredictable; is it the end then? (25–27)

This seems to be a question we are all facing. Do the series of disasters— tsunami, cyclone, cloudburst, among others—signal the “end” of the planet— our only home? The poet blatantly states that with “arrogant self-love” and fearful “possessiveness” human beings are “a bane to the environment.” The poem thus throws light on the complex idea of “ecoprecarity.” The words of Pramod K. Nayar are worth quoting in this context: “‘ecoprecarity’ is at once about the precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster . . . and also about the environment itself which is rendered precarious due to human intervention in the Anthropocene.”11 Indian ecopoetry vividly represents “precarious lives” of mankind when the disaster takes place. The informed reader may remember Sukrita Paul Kumar’s “Tsunami Snapshots”12 in this context: “Who’s shaking the ground?” The schizophrenic’s hand reaching the baby in her belly saw the breaking of dawn sensing the cracking of earth while her fragmenting self came together for the song of creation Hanging like a coconut The head stuck between the Branches of a half broken palm tree The little boy On the lonely planet

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saw water below swelling with corpses (Kumar 2020: 37–53)

The lines send a shiver down our spine as we read them. We realize how helpless and vulnerable humans are in the event of ecocatastrophe. First of all, the lines give a vivid sense of immediacy. They narrate what is happening at the moment of the crisis. There are two snapshots here. The first one is that of a pregnant woman who with her “fragmented self” senses “the cracking of earth.” The “song of creation” she offers at “the breaking of dawn” is therefore fearfully ironic because the creation now faces monstrous devastation. The second snapshot is that of a head resembling a coconut caught between the shattered branches of a tree. The image is indeed breath-taking and reveals the magnitude of ecohorror. The familiar space becomes awfully unfamiliar as the sea water swells with corpses. The “little boy” who watches this horrid spectacle on the “lonely planet” represents mankind at the mercy of nature red in tooth and claw. Indian ecopoetry in contemporary times abounds in horrid imaginary. To borrow a few words from Molly Wallace, it “negotiates an uncertain terrain between the speculative and the real, the risk, the hazard, and the catastrophe” (Wallace 2016: 18–19). Sudeep Sen’s “Disembodied”13 offers an amazing instance in this regard. One may quote a few lines from the concluding section of the poem: Ice-caps are rapidly melting—too fast to arrest glacial slide. In the near future—there will be no water left or too much water that is undrinkable, excess water that will drown us all. Disembodied floats, afloat like Noah’s Ark – no gps, no pole-star navigation, no fossil fuel to burn away – just maps with empty grids and names of places that might exist. (30–36)

The images of catastrophe in the poem speak of the “real” (“Ice-caps are rapidly melting”) and the “speculative” (“In the near future—there will be no water left” or “excess water that will drown us all,” etc.) at the same time and thereby suggest an “uncertain terrain.” While discussing the issue of literary representation in the Anthropocene, Timothy Clark argues that “the main artistic implication of trying to represent the Anthropocene must be a deep suspicion of any traditionally realist aesthetic.” In Clark’s view, the Anthropocene becomes “deeply counterintuitive” with “its bizarre kinds of action-at-a-distance, its imponderable scale, the collapse of distinctions between the trivial and the disastrous, nature and culture, and the proliferation

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of forces that cannot be directly perceived.”14 The images of “maps with empty grids and names of places that might exist” are not merely “bizarre” but profoundly “counterintuitive” because they depict destructive forces of nature on an “imponderable scale” that unsettles human consciousness. But the reference to “fossil fuel” in the line “no fossil fuel to burn away” also deserves our close attention because it speaks of anthropocenic awareness. ANTHROPOGENIC ECODISASTER AND GLOBAL WARMING There is no easy way to define Anthropocene. For it is multifactorial, complex, and evolving (Adamson, Gleason, and Pellow 2016: 16). Ursula K. Heise defines Anthropocene as “the sum of all environmental havocs humans have wreaked on the planet.”15 Heise alludes to Paul J Crutzen’s “Geology of Mankind” (2002) where the Nobel Laureate gives a comprehensive catalogue of the “environmental havocs” caused by humans during the past three centuries. The awful increase in human population obviously tops the list. The other activities of humans to which Crutzen draws our attention include the excessive use of energy causing atmospheric sulphur dioxide emissions, more application of nitrogen fertilizer in agriculture than is fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems, burning of fossil fuel causing substantial increases in the concentrations of “greenhouse” gases, and so forth. When we read contemporary ecopoetry based on urban spaces in India, the representation of pollution assuming a horrid form unnerves us. One may recall Jhilmil Breckenridge’s poem “Photograph”16 in this context: Imagine you are looking at a photograph of a city The city is your beloved Delhi. (1–2)

The “skyline” of the city is “familiar”: India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, among other landmarks in the heart of the capital. However, the smog defamiliarizes the city and offers it a strange look. The sky becomes “murky” and absurdly “dense.” The photograph of the city assumes a dystopic dimension when we discover to our utter horror that “trees can’t breathe” and birds die in the course of their flight. This is largely due to the “noxious fumes” of vehicles and stubble burning by farmers “around Delhi” in the months of October and November. The “Photograph” thus exhorts us to open our eyes to anthropogenic ecodisaster. The poem may remind the informed reader of Shikhandin’s poem “When the Haze Descends”17 that depicts a ghostly city— Singapore—particularly when its air is polluted by the burning of vegetation

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in Indonesia during September. At this point, one may quote a couple of lines from the opening section of the poem that evoke the image of a spectral city: When the haze descends upon this sun-speared land, already wet with sweat and tropical rain, clouds are veiled, and there is smoke in the air. Everything is a dismal grey. (1–5) . . . Ghosts let loose for a day, rise to meet the haze. (8–10)

So “smoke in the air” has “veiled” the clouds. The whole city is wrapped in “dismal grey.” And in this abnormal ambience, only “ghosts” assume an active agency. These “ghosts” are actually eerie forms of slow violence that humans cause to environment and thereby make the earth unhomely for all species including humans. These two poems are contextualised in two different geographical spaces, but they have an organic thematic connection because they foreground “the human’s doubled role in the Anthropocene . . . as both perpetrator of environmental decline, and victim of environmental decline” (Voie 2017: 25). One very significant form of “environmental decline” is global warming that finds its telling treatment in Indian ecopoems that we discuss here. Sumana Roy’s “Global Warming”18 is a classic case in point. The poem gives a narrative of the growing up of a child who happens to be the nephew of the poetic persona. The child one day learns from his teacher about “Global Warming”: “That it’s everywhere.” He learns so many things as he advances in life: “cycling,” “swimming,” “peeling oranges,” and so on. The fact is, “he won’t be able to unlearn these again.” But would he be able to unlearn “Global Warming”? The poem implies the negative. Towards the close of the poem there is a vivid description of “Global Warming” as a lived reality: It is November. You know it from the susurration of light – unclotted light, its guest-like tone. On my nephew’s face the light is like a muscle, quickening as he pedals. The sweat still a secret – armpits, folds of private skin. (67–74)

The reference to the month of November is significant. Because in India winter, roughly speaking, sets in November. The phrase “the susurration of

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light” creates a synaesthetic effect because auditory and visual images go hand in hand here. But there is no touch of softness in the sunlight. It is “like a muscle” and it hardens on the face of the little boy as he “pedals.” The word “quickening” suggests how the environmental decline escalates. In the inner body parts, the boy experiences “sweat” which is a bit unusual in winter season. The poem (without using any strong rhetoric) thus signals that global warming is an inescapable reality. Smita Agarwal’s “Binsar Barahmasa” may also come to our mind at this point. Binsar is a place in Uttarakhand. And “Barahmasa” refers to “songs of the months and the seasons in the Indic poetic tradition.”19 But the poet here bemoans the “unvarying season” and raises a crucial question: Will there be a day we won’t have any seasons? No winter, no snow . . . No high-heat in May . . . No relentless rain in August . . . No leaves turning red-brown in October . . . Just one standard season, Heat sucking out the life of grasses and plants. (28–34)

The life cycle of humans and other species on the face of the earth revolves with the seasonal cycle. Neither the “high-heat in May” nor the “relentless rain in August” depresses us because they are all part of the cycle of seasons. And when the leaves turn “red-brown” in the month of October, we are thrilled with nature’s variegated spectacle.20 But due to climate change and global warming, we are doomed to experience only one “unvarying season” when the exorbitant heat dries up the sap of “grasses and plants.” Only rain could redeem the earth from the heat-ridden state and from the drought. But the skies are “emaciated.” And the “solitary cloud” that wafts “perilously” brings no promise: “it is too far in the distance for any real hope—for rain,” we read in Sudeep Sen’s “Drought, Cloud.”21 The “clouds are deserts in the skies” as Vinita Agrawal’s poem “Arid”22 portrays and hence they fail to shower the “brilliant liquid” that could quench the thirst of the arid earth. The poem gives voice to the agony of the poetic persona as she misses rains: I miss the moistness of rains. Its Sarangi notes, open-fisted generosity the colours locked in its belly the yin to the yang of the throat. (24–27)

The lines are poetically charged. They evoke the music of rain (“Sarangi notes”), its majesty as well as its “generosity” and the conjugation of the

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bright active male principle of the universe (“yang”) with the dark, not active female principle (“yin”). As we move toward the close of the text the representation of global warming will unfailingly arrest our attention: A sheep with slumped shoulders walks through me. I become a burned hoof. A sore mouth. (32–33)

While discoursing on the identity of a poet, Keats writes in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, dated 27 October 1818, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.”23 The poetic persona in “Arid” assumes the “Identity” of a sheep that has become tired and is going to collapse soon. Its mouth is “sore” because it has no access to moist rains and its hoofs burn as it walks through an arid land. Ecopoetry, to echo the words of Jonathan Bate, is “not a description of dwelling with the earth, not a disengaged thinking about it, but an experiencing of it”24 (Bate 2002: 42). Vinita Agrawal’s “Arid” is a wonderful example of it. DEFORESTATION AND THE DEFAMILIARIZATION OF THE EARTH Indian ecopoems written by the contemporary authors often lament for an earth that had a forest “verdant, virgin, vibrant” which even the “mighty sun” could not penetrate. We are echoing words and expressions from Temsula Ao’s “Lament for an Earth”25 that portrays how the lorries loaded with the “treasures” of the forest “rumble” through the body of the earth and leave an “evidence” of “rape” on her “breasts.” The portrayal of the ravage of the earth is thus capable of an eco-feminist reading. It reveals how the destruction of nature runs parallel with the infliction of cruelty on the body of a woman. The whole poem is charged with an anthropocenic awareness as it unfolds how “the two-legged animal” disfigures and defamiliarizes the earth—not only its forest but also its water body. The river becomes “muddy” and “mis-shapen” through the exploitative activities of humans who bleach the river banks and “bomb” its depths in search of “little fishes.” As a consequence, “No life stirs in her belly now.” The end of the poem exhorts us to grieve and mourn for the “old” and “decrepit” earth. In Jayanta Mahapatra’s “I Am Today,” there is also a reflection of tremendous anthropocentric awareness. The poetic persona recounts how he misses all the beauties of nature which had always an attraction for him—the lovesport of frogs in rainy season or the “swinging” of fruit bats “in the deodars.”

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The forest of deodars has been mercilessly killed and replaced by “the silkstockinged sleepless city.” As he passes through it, he is overwhelmed by its smells of blood and paint, petrol and cement, lipstick and factory waste . . . (23–25)

The lines are loaded with a stark recognition of toxicity in the atmosphere. With our deliberate goal of urbanization, we have corrupted nature and we have transformed “the Earth into planetary terra incognita” (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007: 614). In other words, we don’t recognize our earth anymore. The “death murmur of trees” that the poet listens to in the heart of the city causes a note of alarm to all of us as we recognize how deforestation poses a threat to the ecosystem. Kiriti Sengupta’s “Coterie”26 is another poem that may come to a reader’s mind in this context. It poignantly reflects that “wood is abolished to expand highways.” The city is thus sadly estranged from nature: “A flame tree stands alone beside/ the gateway. Old leaves cover the passage.” Perhaps this is the last flame tree that awaits its erasure from the soil of the city, and then it will enter the region of memory. The “Milk”27 by Paresh Tiwari voices the anguish of a man who is haunted by the memory of “the forest that once was.” The memory, however, seems to elude his grasp. It fades at a tremendous pace: It is the silent leopard now forever lost in a shrinking forest. It is the arterial road by an Adivasi home. (29–31)

The lines once again vividly depict the impact of urbanization on environment. The dense forest—the habitat of the wild animals—has yielded place to an “arterial road”—the main road of a town. The reference to the “Adivasi home” is precisely significant because the unplanned urbanization is a curse to the lives of the indigenous people who basically depend on forests for their survival and sustenance. Towards the end of the text the poetic persona mourns the sad disappearance of forests “branch by branch.” He imagines that the forest itself offers “a prayer to the Tiger God to save forests.” The “Tiger God” or the deity of the tigers having different names is worshipped by the forest-dwelling Adivasis like the Gonds, Mundas, and Santals scattered across India. These indigenous communities believe that this deity protects them from the attack of the tigers. The poet here gives an interesting twist to the idea of the indigenous worship of the “Tiger God”: in his environmental imagination, the forest and the deity of tigers depend on each other for their survival. The following line is

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surrealistic in tone and spirit and defies paraphrasing. The poet now leaves it to our imagination that the “collective howl” of the trees, as they are mercilessly felled by the smugglers, “curdled milk over the upturned sky.” The poem at the same time is, therefore, a veritable protest against deforestation and species extinction. SPECIES EXTINCTION AND ETHICAL ENTANGLEMENT WITH THE OTHER Species extinction is an important point at issue in ecopoetry in the global context. And when we read Indian ecopoetry of the present day, we see that the poets address this issue in a way that directly appeals to our finer sensibility. One may recall the opening lines of Jayanta Mahapatra’s “I Am Today”: I am today. I write a poem whose words fall to pieces before the poem is made. The oriole does not call, I know I’ll never hear it again. It’s a name now in a child’s picture book. (1–8)

The first point that may strike a reader is the how the words “fall” and “call” rhyme with each other in the inner structure of the lines and how this poetic device brings home the agony of the poet. The poet is not able to compose his poem because the music of the oriole has become eternally silent. The poet even warns that the children won’t be able to identify this bird in future. In “To Autumn” Keats raises a question, “Where are the songs of spring? Ah, where are they?,”28 and in the same breath provides a soothing answer, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” Apart from the bleat of the lambs and the chirping of the crickets, the “music” of autumn comprises the whistle of the red-breast robin and the twitter of the swallows (who are ready to migrate to warmer regions of the earth). Keats’s poem, therefore, offers a paean to the English autumn and depicts in our mind a serene picture where birds, beasts, and other creatures live within a balanced eco-system. In other words, “To Autumn” is part of an essentially romantic discourse that marvellously represents the purity and sanctity of environment. But in the Anthropocene, the “season of certainties” is gone; the environment that we

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ever knew is gone. This is what is time and again voiced in ecopoetry. Usha Akella’s “Adam Walking Backward”29 is a touching example at this point: The season of certainties is past, the earth slips like an eel (1–2) . . . There was a tiger, a gorilla, a leopard, there was a bird, there was Man, there was a child we will say soon, this mess, this diurnal dirge of Nature, this was a planet once. (5–9)

The lines from Akella’s poem signal the end of nature and the erasure of human and other species from the face of the earth. As we move through the poem the poet gives a catalogue of birds that have become nearly extinct: arabian owl, Seychelle parakeet, new zealand quail, ivory billed woodpecker, skunk duck, passenger pigeon—where are the birds? (24–26)

The lines contain an intertextual reference to Keats’s ode, but the poem, considered as a whole, marks the departure from nature poetry of the Romantic age to ecopoetry of contemporary times that always warns against the endangerment of creatures “species by species.” Pushing the creatures of the earth to the edge of extinction is also a vital concern in K. V. Dominic’s “I Can Hear the Groan of Mother Earth”:30 I can hear the scream of elephants, tigers, Boars, snakes and all wild animals when they drive them from their homes and starve to death by burning forests I can hear the death cry of bird after bird when they cut their feeding trees to make their selfish life more luxurious (11–17)

The lines starkly reveal how “ecospheres are vanishing” and “species are moving toward extinction.”31 The forests, the “ecosphere” of the wild animals, are cleared and even burnt out for human purposes that often involve industrial entanglement and so-called development. The trees that feed and give shelter to birds are felled to make the “selfish life” of humans more cosy and “luxurious.” The issue of species extinction is poignantly represented in Sonali Sarkar’s “Anthropocene Blues.”32 The poet in an elegiac fashion mourns here the

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killing of marine turtles at the pristine beach of Mamallapuram. The “dry sand dunes” of the beach bear witness to the cruel acts of humans. In order to protect their offspring from the predators, the olive ridley sea turtles, we know, lay eggs in huge number at one place. This place is called arribada. But even then, the offspring’s chances of survival are very slim. The poem vividly describes the “death of an injured mother turtle” in her own arribada: and the amniotic eggs, falling out of her body ceased her labour, the pain she had to undergo to lay her eggs! (31–33)

This horrible description shocks us to our marrows and alerts us to the recognition of “ethical entanglement with the other” (Morton 2010: 47). In “In lieu of a Manifesto” to Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (2020), Ranjit Hoskote beautifully writes, “We have imagined ourselves to be the owners of the earth, when we are merely its transient and unruly tenants. We have disregarded the rights and needs of the species that are our fellow tenants of this planet.”33 The observation critiques the limits of the anthropocentric approach and compels us to accept that nonhuman living things with their own habits and habitats have their equal share in the ecosystem and by annihilating the “fellow tenants of this planet” we invite the environmental risk. Rohan Chhetri’s “Fish Cross The Border In Rain”34 is another fine example in this context. The poem portrays how men with “lead batteries” cast “low voltage discs of current” in the depth of water in order to catch fish. Once the fish sense they are ensnared, they “heave their nets,” but it slowly dawns upon them that they have no escape from the cruel clutches of greedy humans. The last lines of the poem represent the utter desperation of “shoal after stunned shoal” as they succumb to ugly human traps: The fish wake older, dreaming brief new lives huddled in a foreign prison gasping at each other’s gills blinded like a sack of mirrors. (11–14)

The poem thus brings home the fearful struggle for survival of the nonhuman other in the human-dominated earth and expresses “ethical concern that extends beyond the human” (Walton 2018). The poem may remind a reader of Lawrence’s “Fish”35 that poignantly depicts the desperate beating of a fish in the hand of the poetic persona before meeting its death: Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth. And seen his horror-tilted eye,

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His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye; And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb. (10–144)

The Lawrentian rhetoric pierces the reader’s heart and stimulates human concern for the fellow-species of the earth and thereby anticipates an ecocritical turn in modern English poetry. DIDACTICISM IN INDIAN ECOPOETRY “The business of literature is to work upon consciousness,” wrote Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth (2002: 23). This insightful statement adds a critical edge to the discourse on ecopoetry. Humans in no way can afford to be oblivious of their ecological entanglement. They must acknowledge that for their own survival in the planet they have to be respectful towards birds, beasts, and flowers. They should not mercilessly kill trees because killing trees will threaten the existence of all species of the planet including humans. They should put a check on unplanned urbanization and mindless industrial progress because otherwise it will pollute the air and water more and more and one day make the earth perfectly inhospitable. Indian ecopoetry powerfully voices that there should always be a limit to the exploitation of natural resources. “Man’s insatiable thirst for/more comforts and luxuries/ignores and disregards/reserve for future generation,” we read in K.V. Dominic’s “Ecological Debt Day.”36 This is a very serious concern indeed. And the poem drives home the significance of the title of Dominic’s anthology, Contemporary Concerns and Beyond. The more we exhaust and exploit nature, the more we rob the future generations of resources that can help them survive and sustain on the planet. The ending of the poem in its own way makes a didactic point that speaks of environmental consciousness: “Renewable resources and/carbon sequestration/the only remedy for/earth’s early overshoot.” Ecopoetry “can help make environmentalism happen,” writes John Shoptaw. But he significantly adds that the “more immediate hazard for ecopoetry is didacticism” (2016: 401). There is always a debate among critics and scholars regarding the fine point of balance between aestheticism and activism in the realm of ecopoetry. Can an ecopoem spread environmental consciousness without being moralistic? Can an ecopoem evoke environmental imagination without teaching a lesson? The answers to these questions are not simple. Because environmental imaginary is often closely integrated with an activist aesthetic. I would like to refer to two ecopoems in this context. The first poem is “Ode to Planet Earth”37 by Bina Sarkar Ellias and the second

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one is Jagriti Upadhyaya’s “Apocalypse Now.”38 The “Ode to Planet Earth” throws a direct question to the readers: do you recall how in your youth the sky was blue and you breathed truth? (29–32)

This “truth” of the azure sky is “buried in lies.” The air of the city is “choked with chemical fume” and “the trees are weighed/with dust and gloom.” And more horrid of it, “plastic bottles dance on the sea.” One may in this context recall those lines in “The Fire Sermon” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,39 which include an ironic allusion to the idyllic world depicted in Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion”: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. (175–178)

The lines evoke a sordid picture of the water of the Thames in the poet’s own day and reflect how humans indiscriminately pollute natural resources in urban spaces. But there is no moralistic tone in Eliot’s poem. The concluding lines of Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poem, however, are frankly didactic: let’s mend our ways. let’s seed more green let’s wash the air let’s heal the world with love and care. (40–44)

The moral implication is, we have to “mend our ways.” We have inflicted wounds on the body of the Mother Earth, and it is high time to “heal” the wounds with “love” and “compassion.” Jagriti Upadhyaya’s “Apocalypse Now” (with a title that creates a sense of urgency) also contains a didactic note although it is far more strong in spirit in comparison with that in Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poem. The poem cautions mankind: Ye foolish Mortals! . . . Take good heed lest your avaricious materialism, your rapacious consumerism . . . gone berserk devour you like the coiled serpent that feeds on its own tail. (7–11)

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The lines thus exhort the “foolish” humans to be careful of their greedy activities lest these activities become suicidal. The last line of the quote containing an awful analogy of self-annihilation: “like the coiled serpent that feeds on its own tail” is profoundly disturbing. The image of a “coiled serpent” is significant for another reason. A coil is a continuous series of loops into which rope or wire has been wound. In the context of the poem, it suggests a nexus of “avaricious materialism” and “rapacious consumerism” in which humans continually engage and thereby disturb the harmony of the ecosystem. CONCLUSION In the introduction to his book Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (2009), John Felstiner states that poetry has an important role to play in today’s world suffering from environmental crisis. “Science, policy, and activism point the way toward solutions,” Felstiner argues, “but something deeper must draw us there.” To echo Felstiner, “It can be found in poetry’s musical lift, attentive imagery, and shaping force” (2009: 13–14). What Felstiner observes of nature poems is fairly true of ecopoems as well. Because we acknowledge that ecopoetry “doesn’t supplant nature poetry but enlarges it” (Shoptaw 2016: 408). Indian ecopoems which I analysed and discussed above draw the attention of readers through their powerful imagery and environment-sensitive rhetoric among other poetic devices and inspire them to take “a stance toward the living planet.”40 This planet is everyone’s. So why should humans view their identity and existence separate from that of flora and fauna? Why should humans dominate over other species and exploit the latter for their own interests? Ecopoetry voices the desire for effecting change—a change in our pedagogy and praxis. It encourages environmental activism and gives a warning, and at the same time it articulates that perhaps this is not too late, perhaps we can still protect the earth from the catastrophe. NOTES 1. The poem is included in Unwinding Self. A Collections of Poems by Susheel Kumar Sharma (Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, 2020), 36. 2. See the poem in Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinita Agrawal (New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020), 24–25. 3. Kate Dunning, “From Environmental Poetry to Ecopoetry: W. S. Merwin’s Poetic Forest” (Audio file of Dunning reading her article), Merwin Studies: Poetry/ Poetics/Ecology, Volume 1, 2013, 69–70. Dunning borrows certain ideas including

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the idea of “ecological thinking” from Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). See “Notes” to the article of Dunning. 4. Ursula K. Heise. “Environment and Poetry,” in The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. R. Greene et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 437. 5. Samantha Walton, “Ecopoetry,” in Companion to Environmental Studies, ed. N Castree et al. (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2018), 393–398. 6. Helen Moore, “What Is Ecopoetry?” https:​ //​ internationaltimes​ .it​ /what​ -is​ -ecopoetry​/. 7. Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, “Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction,” Ecopoetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 9. 8. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 282. 9. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 47. 10. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 111–112. 11. Pramod K. Nayar, Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2019), 7. 12. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 31–34. 13. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 82–83. 14. In the section titled “Nature and the Question of Literary Representation” of his essay “Nature, Post Nature” Timothy Clark observes the following: It [Anthropocene] may find its analogue in modes of the fantastic, new forms of magic realism or science fiction, or texts in which distinctions between “character” and “environment” become fragile or break down, or in which the thoughts and desires of an individual are not intelligible in themselves but only as the epiphenomenal sign of entrapment in some larger and not necessarily benign dynamic. See The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Westling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81. 15. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 206. 16. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 99–100. 17. See Shikhandin’s poem “When the Haze Descends” in Reckoning 4: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, ed. Arkady Martin, July 2020, print edition (Lake Orion, MI: Reckoning Press). 18. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 59–62. 19. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 42–43. This is quoted from the footnote for the illustration of the title of the poem. 20. One may recall a surreal image used in the last stanza of Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” at this point: “the town lay leaved with October blood.” Twentieth Century Verse: An Anglo-American Anthology, ed. C. T. Thomas (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2013), 408–410. 21. See Sudeep Sen, Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (London: Pippa Rann Books & Media, 2021), 35.

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22. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 124–125. 23. John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings, revised with an introduction and notes by Jon Mee (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), 148. 24. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, 42. 25. See Temsula Ao, Book of Songs: Collected Poems 1988–2007 (Dimapur: Heritage Publishing House, 2013), 42–44. 26. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 94. 27. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 50–51. 28. See John Keats, Selected Poems, edited with an introduction by Edmund Blunden (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1970), 267–268. 29. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 37–38. 30. See K. V. Dominic, Contemporary Concerns and Beyond (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2016), 26. 31. While speaking on the mass extinction of animals, Akira Mizuta Lippit observes, “animals recede into the shadows of human consumption and environmental destruction, . . . ecospheres are vanishing, species are moving toward extinction.” See Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1. 32. See Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems, ed. Shruti Das (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2020), 65–66. 33. Ranjit Hoskote, “In lieu of a Manifesto,” Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose (New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020), ii. 34. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 30. 35. D. H. Lawrence, “Fish” in The Complete Poems, collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Vivian De Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 334–340. 36. See K. V. Dominic, Contemporary Concerns and Beyond (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2016), 23. 37. The poem is included in Open Your Eyes, 63–64. 38. See Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems, 65–66. 39. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 51–74. 40. The phrase is borrowed from Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), xi.

REFERENCES Adamson, Joni, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, eds. Keywords for Environmental Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Agrawal, Vinita, ed. Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose. New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020. Ao, Temsula. Book of Songs: Collected Poems 1988–2007. Dimapur: Heritage Publishing House, 2013.

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Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Clark, Timothy. “Nature, Post Nature.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415, no. 23 (2002). https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1038​/415023a. Das, Shruti, ed. Earth Song: An Anthology of Poems. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2020. Dominic, K. V. Contemporary Concerns and Beyond. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2016. Dunning, Kate. “From Environmental Poetry to Ecopoetry: W. S. Merwin’s Poetic Forest” (Audio file of Dunning reading her article). Merwin Studies: Poetry/ Poetics/Ecology, Volume 1, 2013. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, in Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hoskote, Ranjit. “In Lieu of a Manifesto.” Open Your Eyes: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry and Prose. New Delhi: Hawakal, 2020. Hume, Angela, and Gillian Osborne, “Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction.” Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. Keats, John. “To Autumn.” Selected Poems. Edited with an introduction by Edmund Blunden. London: Collins, 1970. ———, ed. Selected Letters. Robert Gittings. Revised with an introduction and notes by Jon Mee. New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009. Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems. Collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Vivian De Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993. Martin, Arkady, ed. Reckoning 4: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Lake Orion: MI: Reckoning Press, 2020. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Moore, Helen. “What Is Ecopoetry?” https:​//​internationaltimes​.it​/what​-is​-ecopoetry​/. Nayar, Promod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2019. Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Scigaj, Leonard. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Sen, Sudeep. Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation. London: Pippa Rann Books & Media, 2021.

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Sharma, Susheel Kumar. Unwinding Self. A Collections of Poems. Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, 2020. Shoptaw, John. “Why Ecopoetry.” Poetry 207, no. 4 (January 2016). https:​//​www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/44015972: 395–408. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 38: 614–621. Voie, Christian Hummelsund. Nature Writing of the Anthropocene. Thesis for Doctoral Degree in English. Printed by Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, 2017. Wallace, Molly. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Walton, Samantha. “Ecopoetry.” In Companion to Environmental Studies, edited by N Castree et al., 393–398. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2018.

Chapter 13

“The Mangroves are home to predators of every kind” Performing Ecoprecarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban Ashwarya Samkaria and Debajyoti Biswas

Amitav Ghosh has emerged as a pertinent voice in narrativizing concerns related to the age that we have come to know as the Anthropocene, wherein human actions are (negatively) and exponentially impacting Earth’s geological processes. In his recent ecological fiction Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021), Ghosh commingles image and metrical text in order to delineate an environmental narrative. The narrative recounts a story from a popular folk narrative centering around the interrelatedness between the human and the nonhuman forces living in and around the world’s largest mangrove forest located between West Bengal (in India) and Bangladesh, the Sundarban. This area is prone to rampant catastrophes due to anthropogenically-induced climate change, which is affecting its biodiversity, human settlement, and geoscape. In Jungle Nama, Ghosh maps out Sundarban’s ecologically precarious condition by adapting in verse form the popular folk legend of the goddess Bon Bibi, who is considered as the guardian spirit of the forest and is revered by the locals as their patron deity guarding the forest against evil spirits. Though Jungle Nama is Ghosh’s first verse narration, he has revisited the popular legend of Bon Bibi in his earlier novel The Hungry Tide (2004) as well while delineating ecological narratives pertaining to the Sundarban. Set within Sundarban’s dense mangrove forest, Jungle Nama jostles between the avarice of the trader merchant (Dhona) and his exploitation of 199

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the socially marginalized (Dukhey and his mother). Ecologically sustainable balance is restored in the Sundarban forest by Bon Bibi who not only holds the usurper Dhona responsible for his reckless greed for possessing natural resources but also emphasizes language, prosody, and the creative meter as vehicles for environmental communication and restoration of ecological harmony. Thus, through the medium of literary representation,1 Ghosh responds to the 21st-century’s environmental crisis caused due to anthropogenically induced ecological imbalances by voicing a perspective which offers the readers a different way of understanding the interconnectedness between the human, nonhuman, and more-than-human. He does so by destabilizing anthropocentric human separatism from the natural world by way of retelling a spatially located ecological story which explores human-nonhuman vulnerabilities in an interconnected manner. Furthermore, he responds to the threat of environmental catastrophes by narrativizing a tale in verse which offers a universal practice of sustainable everyday environmentalism. The notion of ecoprecarity as an “intertwined set of discourses of fragility, vulnerability, power relations across species” (Nayar 2019: 6) as espoused by the ecocritic Pramod K. Nayar identifies “vulnerability of all life forms, their attendant ecosystems and relations between and across lifeforms/ species” (Nayar 2019: 14). Through fictional rendering of an ecological folktale practised by the Sundarban dwellers, Ghosh locates an entanglement between “precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster . . . [and] . . . the environment itself which is rendered precarious due to human intervention in the Anthropocene” (italics in original).2 In order to address human–nonhuman entanglements, our paper explores ecoprecarity in Jungle Nama by studying how a literary representation of a folkloric mythic legend engages human–nonhuman vulnerabilities in an interconnected manner. Postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence identifies “our inattention to calamities that are slow and long-lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans” (2011: 6). What then emerges as a crucial study is an understanding of how literary (eco)precarity can enable a reading that can make perceptible to the reader the slow incremental environmental violence which is present not just in the literary text, but those which pertain to the world-asplanet as well. Though Nayar primarily conceptualizes ecoprecarity’s discursivity in narratives of disaster, dystopia, and apocalypse, he also extends it to include “imagining different and alternative futures” (2019: 10) that contest anthropocentric claims. In the afterword to Jungle Nama, Ghosh directs our attention to the “planetary crisis” (2021: 77) as an extension of ecoprecarity. Differentiating among the keywords “World,” “Earth,” and “Planet,” Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that as we face the planetary crisis, we are plunged into the domain

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of unknown forces which are beyond human comprehensibility, which he terms planetary (2019). Ghosh’s portrayal of the eco-space in Jungle Nama is representative of the earth-as-planetary which is mysterious and unfathomable. Although some scholars contend this to be graspable and controllable (Pugh and Chandler 2021), in reality, the planetary remains uncanny in the popular imagination. The approach to negotiate with the uncanny and precarity among indigenous communities and postcolonial nations in the global south is quite different from that of the colonialist nations and technologically advanced global north. Whereas the western capitalist mode of thinking capitalizes on material gain and dissection of the planet, indigenous communities believe in propitiating the “uncanny” forces of nature. In that sense, the precarious aspect of nature is revered and respected. Bon Bibi’s advice to Dukhey exemplifies this: “All you need to do, is be content with what you have got; / To be always craving more is a demon’s lot” (Ghosh 2021: 70). While narratives of risk and eco-trauma highlight the planet’s vulnerability and “contingent nature” (Nayar 2019: 9), Jungle Nama’s mythic genre draws attention towards an ecological narrative of remedial acts premised upon the emotion of hope that might induce responsibility in human thinking towards the earth and its earthlings in both human and nonhuman form. Our paper studies how Ghosh through the trope of literary storytelling as a mode of representation highlights the agentic capacity of the nonhuman and more-than-human. We also argue that Ghosh’s literary representation of the Sundarban as an ecological site where “[t]he Mangroves are home to predators of every kind / Some you’ll never see, but they will enter your mind” (Ghosh 2021: 18) performs an ecoprecarity visibilizing the predatory instinct not of the nonhuman per se but of human extractionist anthropogenic thinking which routes itself by locating value and aspiration in consumerist tendencies that interfere with the planet’s natural processes. The term “perform” emphasizes the notion that Jungle Nama’s environmental narrative identifies the performativity of actions and thus obliquely critiques learnt behaviours of anthropocentric thinking that are performed as normative actions. Furthermore, our paper also reads Jungle Nama’s ecoprecarity using ecocritic Scott Slovic’s conceptualization of literary precarity “not as a problem or a negative phenomenon but actually as a positive phenomenon, an experience, an awareness that may promote a sense of urgency” (39:34). As a literary studies scholar, Slovic approaches [l]iterature not as a way of describing disasters that have already occurred but rather as a way of priming us or preparing us, making us more sensitive to disasters that we are not yet aware of happening or that somehow have occurred without our perception . . . [since the problem is that] we cannot adequately perceive the actual disasters that are occurring around us. (37:08–37:53)

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Our paper thus studies how Ghosh through the trope of a popular local environmental myth (here, the myth of Bon Bibi) contributes to the literary imagination of the modern environmental crisis by allegorically addressing the ecological imperceptibility of slow acts of violence of anthropogenic thinking. ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER IN JUNGLE NAMA Responding to the need for the field of environmental humanities to focus on a multiplicity of narratives in order to actively engage with an environmental consciousness, Ghosh’s literary endeavour raises a pertinent observation regarding the use of literature for the current century’s environmental concern. While Jungle Nama’s narrative does not have apparent real-world environmental disasters that disturb the planet’s natural ecological processes (such as ocean acidification, increased salinity, deforestation, wildfires, untimely and unprecedented weather changes, and species extinction, to name a few), what does qualify as an intended environmental catastrophe fundamental to the current environmental crisis is human depravity that is jeopardizing human and nonhuman planetary survival. Jungle Nama deploys a myth,3 a literary device that characteristically delineates cosmological stories of creation. By way of the ecological impetus of Bon Bibi’s legend which posits codes of conduct for communitarian and planetary survival, Ghosh demarcates the excess of human interference and its limit for environmental sustenance. Thus, Ghosh’s adaptation focuses on the episode which constitutes the Bon Bibi legend’s dramatic and imaginative core—limiting avaricious appetites for possessions and holding usurpers accountable. Through its archetypal characters, the narrative of Jungle Nama offers a preventive measure to avoid ecological calamities by adhering to ecologically attuned boundaries that not only rejuvenate the earth’s natural geological processes but also restrain colossal human greed. Episodically, this moment of environmental crisis in Jungle Nama results in a climatic alteration wherein “[a]ll at once the leaves began to move and tremble, / as if shaken by a force, potent yet spectral; / they could feel a presence, gathering like a cloud, / unseen yet active, like an invisible cloud” (2021: 41). Through the trope of a non-realist mythic setting, the uncanny environmental unsettling functions as a precursor to the act of extraction of natural resources for self-consumption by the greedy merchant Dhona (whose name signifies wealth). The mythic trope condenses the imperceptible slow acts of violence caused due to environmental exploitation by representing a whirlwind of climatic alteration. Using the elasticity of myth’s spatial and temporal discourse, Ghosh deploys illusory tactics that obliquely point to

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the impending disaster of the exhaustion of resources—“[t]here was nothing in the comb! No honey, no prize”; “Some being is playing tricks, someone unearthly” (32); and “they were all empty within” (32). Dhona not only performs the role of the greedy merchant but also functions as an archetypal character embodying extractionist anthropocentric thinking whose actions necessitate a blinding of the human’s faculties of sight–—“[e]very one of you must carry a blindfold” (41) as well as thought—“but you can’t ask questions, or your fate will be dire” (41). Effacing the abilities to perceive (visually and critically) for a collective fracturing of the senses and putting into play an inarticulate temperament where “none could make sense of the uncanny atmosphere” (44) represents the slow acts of violence of anthropocentric thinking. Taking away the ability to see the negative and detrimental environmental change symbolically refers to the notion of slow violence as espoused by the ecocritic Rob Nixon. He defines slow violence as violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight . . . that is dispersed over time and space . . . an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 2). Slow violence in relation to practising ecologically precarious extractionist tendencies which put into action imperceptible catastrophic environmental changes are difficult to perceive and thus represent. Dhona epitomizes the capitalist class whose objective is to hoard wealth by exploiting natural resources at the expense of the weaker section of people symbolized by the blindfolded lascars and Dukhey. They remain oblivious of the intention of Dhona and his ilk only to discover at the end that they are the ones standing at the frontline of precarity. This reading essentially foregrounds the ramification of slow acts of violence perpetrated by anthropocentric thinking. A practising belief in Bon Bibi’s legend appears to be sacrosanct for the people living in and around the Sundarbans as it regulates their interaction with the world of nature they inhabit. However, a close perusal of Jungle Nama brings to light the fact that Ghosh has reinvested this cultural trope with the signification of a greedy capitalist world which is incessantly and irrevocably interfering with the eco-space of the culturally marginalized. The foundation of this can be located in the extractive capitalist venture deployed since colonial times. Ghosh has revisited this theme in his recent writings such as his nonfiction The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) and his most recent fiction, The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times (2022).4 With the rise of the bourgeoisie class and the proliferation of a capitalist economy, there has been a cultural transformation in many developing nations. This new cultural transformation has constructed a separateness of the human from the nonhuman world resulting in the instrumentalization of nature. Such a cultural consciousness has scant respect for the world of nature because it is principled on acts of domination and exploitation. Environmentalists and ecocritics, therefore, argue that respect for the world of

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nature could reduce the speed of great acceleration in which storytellers and indigenous communities can play a conspicuous role (Biswas 2022). Ghosh iterates the same in Jungle Nama when he writes, “It was the meter itself that came to his rescue, / Like magic it summoned lines of the right hue” (Ghosh 2021: 53). Later, the vicious Dokkhin Rai, an epitome of the dark force and greed, accepts with a calm resignation that “I’ve learned restraint, with the magic of meter. / With word-count and rhyme, I will master my needs, / my desires I shall check, and repent for my misdeeds” (2021: 57). These iterations explain Ghosh’s injunction that folklores, myths, legends, poetry, and stories have redemptive powers as they carry within them forewarnings for mankind to avoid transgressing the sanctity of the world of nature. Therefore, Jungle Nama can be read not only as a literary intervention in the modernday environmental discourse but also as a literary text and narration which presents a sense of urgency by communicating narratives that do not mediate upon the narrative of the human but instead, focalize the “vitality of matter”5 (Bennett 2010: viii) and coexistence of the more-than-human. Ghosh counters the slow violence of anthropocentric thinking by peeling away layers of concealment that are strategically made to present a particular version of reality6 which posits the realm of human cultural existence not only beyond the natural realm but also unaffected by calamitous disasters, and in complete command of driving the humanist narrative forward. He does so by way of delineating human-nonhuman co-existence, “coexistentialism” (Morton 2010: 47) wherein both the human and the nonhuman “[share] precariousness and unchosen proximities” (Cohen 2015: 107) through collective sustenance derived from Sundarbans’ natural resources. Exploring the potential of the literary as a tool to communicate environmental knowledge, Ghosh also destabilizes the notion of language as a marker of human exceptionalism by writing into the literary narrative structure a story of the nonhuman itself (i.e., the Sundarban forest). Interestingly, Ghosh deploys language as another crucial character in the ecological myth of the Bon Bibi legend with the ability to save the distressed in the hour of the crisis caused by Dokkhin Rai’s manipulations. It is not the linguistic discourse per se but the cadence of the verse that Dukhey recites in dwipodi-poyar (two-lined meter), which establishes a channel of communication with the ecologically sound “Lady of the Jungle, Ma Bon-Bibi” (2021: 23). It is the aesthetic device and its communicativeness which establishes the route. If Dukhey’s poetic call to the Goddess of the Forest results in establishing an equilibrium in terms of equitable allocation of resources and practising acts of restraint for ecological dwelling, Ghosh’s retelling of the Bon Bibi myth mirrors the active potential of the literary as a trope to negotiate with the current climate change emergency. Though Jungle Nama does not narrate “storied matter” in terms of material forms as narratorial agents chronicling the story, it nonetheless

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delineates a story of the Sundarban itself with the mythic voice of Bon Bibi who is considered as the spiritual voice and presence of the forest itself. Thus, in emphasizing Sundarban’s narratorial capacity, Ghosh recognizes the nonhuman’s subjectivity and agentic capacity to communicate. Material ecocriticism has emerged as a pertinent theoretical trope which emphasizes the “realisation that all matter has the agentic capacity and produces a wide spectrum of material expressions” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 129). Focalizing “concreteness of matter” (Rangarajan 2018: 128), material ecocriticism proposes the postmodern ecological thought of “the ‘re-enchantment of nature’ as an antidote to an anthropocentric model of disenchantment [denying subjectivity to nature] that has led to the rampant instrumentalisation of nature” (Rangarajan 2018: 128). While Ghosh’s literary endeavour is set within the mythic trope which defies the modern realist setting and accords voice to the nonhuman lifeworld, Jungle Nama also foregrounds the more-than-human coexistence of environmental “background.” It is a literary and artistic endeavour which subverts the predominant understanding of environment as a mere background to a story. Ghosh not only brings the spatial setting of the dense forest of the Sundarban to the foreground but also situates it as one of the protagonists which steers the plot forward. Such an intermeshing not only heightens the inseparability of the human and the nonhuman but also makes evident the centrality of the nonhuman in actively shaping an individual’s lived reality and human history. Ghosh’s literary imagination in this ecofiction does not focalize the centrality of the human but sutures the narrative of practicing sustainable environmentalism through the agentic capacity of the nonhuman. It chronicles a story which problematizes the dynamic power relations between the human and the nonhuman inhabitants (particularly the tiger) wherein it is the survival of both which is smeared with a sense of precarity. Though mainstream anthropocentric discourse maintains its distance from the nonhuman world and invites proximity to it by taking them in as pet animals or through the creation of a spectacle (circus animal shows, zoos) or in terms of market-engineered commodification, Jungle Nama posits proximity of a different kind. Sundarban as a forest is heavily infested with numerous nonhuman creatures (crocodiles, sharks, and snakes, and numerous endangered species such as Gangetic dolphins, Olive Ridley turtles, and water monitors to name a few) and is home to the famous royal Bengal tiger. However, islanders inhabiting the forest have maintained a congenial relationship with the nonhuman, especially the tiger. Environmental anthropologist Annu Jalais7 who has extensively worked in the Sundarban states that the islanders “consider the forest as being only for those who are poor and for those who have no intention of taking more than what they need to survive. This is the ‘agreement’ between non-humans and humans that permits them both to depend on the forest and yet respect the

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others’ needs” (Jalais 2010: 73). She further writes that “[t]igers and forest fishers, linked by the same mother Bonbibi, are thus ‘brothers’ and ‘equal,’ as it is believed that the forest in its ‘purity’ does not distinguish between the different kinds of beings that depend on it” (85). In Jungle Nama, though, the nonhuman evil spirit of Dokkhin Rai inhabits the tiger’s body, it is the practising belief in the nonhuman spirit of the ecologically attuned Mistress of the Forest performed by social participants which establishes a dispensation. In the literary text, it is Dukhey  and in the real world it is the Sundarban islanders who revere the goddess. She not only reprimands the greed of Dokkhin Rai and the trader merchant Dhona but also rewards the poor Dukhey and his mother. On the one hand, the human (Dhona) disregards the realm of the nonhuman tiger through an act of intrusion to exploit the forest’s nonhuman life-world for personal over-consumption. On the other hand, the human’s (Dukhey) close encounter with the evil spirit of Dokkhin Rai inhabiting the tiger’s body necessitates a performative vocalization of reaching out to the Goddess of the Forest to rescue the human from death by the force of the nonhuman. Moreover, it is the human’s life that is rendered precarious by way of an inversion of the anthropocentric notion of the gaze since the tiger’s sight becomes the reining faculty of vision which spatially maps the human’s movement as an intrusion in the forest. The environmental catastrophe thus lies in turning a blind eye to the material physicality of the altering planet as opposed to a poststructuralist linguistic conceptualization of the planet-asworld, in turning a deaf ear to the sounds of the forest and the nonhuman’s agentic capacity at narrativizing, and in turning away from the story of planetary ecological precarity. Addressing the crisis of environmental degradation through a folktale that is a part of the public consciousness of the Sundarban inhabitants evinces the ties between the literary, cultural, and performative expressions pertaining to the region and the material reality of the spatiality of Sundarban (site of ecological enquiry in the face of climate crisis). Ghosh’s narrative differs from the environmental narrative of “ecophobia” (Estok 2013) and ecoprecarity as a disaster narrative (Nayar 2019) since Jungle Nama narrates an environmental imagination that is attuned to a sense of an ecophilia and concludes by imparting a practice of sustainable everyday environmentalism. Slovic’s conceptualization of “literary precarity” as a “tool or a strategy for giving us an appropriate or healthy sense of urgency” (39:54) coupled with the myth of Bon Bibi’s and Jungle Nama’s primary message—performing the fundamental preventive measure of limiting greed and practising sustainable dwelling on an everyday basis—brings into the mainstream ecofictional literary discourse a narrative which due to its folkloric form presents an ahistorical yet ecological articulation of how to maintain sustenance on the planet as a whole. Jungle Nama’s reinsertion of the mythic narrative that heightens the

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nonhuman’s agentic capacity invokes a sense of urgency as it yokes together the current environmental crisis and a different “non-realist” narrative. In Ghosh’s attempt to respond to the current environmental crisis, Jungle Nama’s circulation as a literary text surfaces as a practice of literary precarity which facilitates the creation of (an)other world which can encourage readers to adopt hopeful ways of reading the environment and making choices that proliferate sustainable living on the planet. The ecological state that is imagined is neither dystopian nor utopian. This ecofiction’s imagination is a precarious sway between balance and disruption. It establishes a dispensation which is disregarded and balance is finally restored as a cautionary message. The text’s ecological impetus is in its impulse towards restoration, coexistence between human and nonhuman entities, and adherence to boundaries created to maintain the balance of natural processes of the planet. CONCLUSION Thus, Ghosh has attempted to address the abovementioned concerns (imperceptibility of slow violence, nature–culture separatism, and absence of nonhuman narratives) by creating a literary representation in the form of Jungle Nama, which firstly, uses the trope of myth to puncture the temporality of slow incremental environmental changes and make apparent the underlying impending environmental disaster. Secondly, it counters Cartesian nature– culture dualism by grounding his entire text in a cultural narrative that blurs such distinctions insofar as the myth’s message is practised by the Sundarban dwellers in their everyday environmentalism. Finally, it brings the natural environment-as-background to the foreground by narrativizing “a story of the Sundarban” such that the forested Sundarban itself becomes the titular character of Ghosh’s verse-adaptation. Jungle Nama is altering the approach in addressing the gravity of the issue at hand—urgent, effective, and collective engagements to deal with environmental catastrophes—as Ghosh creates a fictional imagination that plays with tropes of realism and logocentrism that have come about to define “serious” eco-fiction. It steers away from the dominant literary environmental negotiations through its form (folkloric myth), multimodal semiotic language registers (logos, image, rhythmicality), and narration of “storied matter” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014) that is foregrounded by locating nonhuman as its titular character. A child-like imaginative storytelling that interweaves text, image, and rhythmicality to make readers reconceive ways of inhabiting the planet helps create a different pathway for communicating about and dealing with the serious, lifethreatening reality of climate crisis of the 21st century. It also puts into place a different experience of an environmental literary text. In its simplicity and

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unfamiliar addressal lies the complexity of the issue at hand—the absence of literature exploring the reality of our times. Ghosh’s literary intervention thereby addresses ecocritic Scott Slovic’s concern that “[t]he great problem is not the [environmental] catastrophe itself but the lack of a sense of urgency” (40:04–40:10). The predator that emerges in Jungle Nama is the embodiment of human greed for consuming more than one’s needs which causes resource depletion and disrupts earth’s natural processes and regenerative capacities. Furthermore, this also negatively impacts the need for resources for the survival of those whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. Thus, Ghosh’s Jungle Nama articulates a different environmental imaginary by countering the slow violence of anthropocentric thinking by way of functioning as a cautionary yet hopeful message of mending behavioural abuses of violent possession of (natural) resources and advocating for actively pursuing practices of restraint, contentment, and interconnectedness. NOTES 1. He has spoken extensively about the Sundarbans in the public domain. His nonfiction The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) looks at Sundarbans through historical, political, and literary lenses. In his novel The Hungry Tide (2004), Sundarbans is a primary site of action. His latest novel Gun Island (2019) also has Sundarbans and its ecological and mythical aspects play a crucial role in the plot. 2. Nayar extrapolates gender theorist Judith Butler’s idea of “precious lives” as resulting from “dependence of our lives upon precarious environments, people and processes” (2004, 2009, mentioned in Nayar 2019, 7). 3. Etymologically, the term myth (mythos) establishes its proximity to logos/word that was written/spoken and the structure of myth entails a story of creation/ narratives believed in by communities as a whole. For more details, see Laurence Coupe, Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2005). 4. Ghosh narrates in The Nutmeg’s Curse the saga of colonial destruction of indigenous communities, cultures, and their native habitats. In The Living Mountain, he returns to allegorising the theme of the Anthropocene to show how greedy and powerful forces have destroyed the sacred eco-space (represented by Mountain), thereby triggering the onset of geological transformation leading to crisis. 5. Bennett defines vitality of matter as the capacity of things “to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (2010: viii). In Jungle Nama, the concerted emphasis is on how in the advent of manipulating resource extraction, balance is restored by recognizing the affective power of the nonhuman world. Encased within the generic trope of the fable, Ghosh’s verse narration functions as a timely reminder and behavioural corrective.

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6. For more, see Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (India: Penguin Random House, 2016). 7. Annu Jalais is an environment anthropologist whose primary area of specialisation is South Asia. Her areas of interest focus on the human–nonhuman interface, social justice, migration, and climate change. She has worked extensively on the Sundarbans in terms of their ecology, forests, and people. For more, see https:​//​www​ .dakshin​.org​/dt​_team​/annu​-jalais​/.

REFERENCES Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Biswas, Debajyoti. “The Site of Anthropocene and Colonial Entanglement: Reviewing The Nutmeg’s Curse.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 12 (2022): 905–908. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s13412​-022​-00783​-9. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “The Sea Above.” In Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Air, Water, and Fire, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 105–133. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry 46, no.1 (Autumn 2019): 1–31. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/705298. Estok, Simon S. “The Ecophobia Hypothesis.” In International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2013. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. India: Penguin Random House, 2016. ———. Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban. Gurugram, Haryana, India: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021. ———. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Gurgaon: Penguin, 2021. ———. The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times. Gurugram, Haryana, India: HarperCollins, 2022. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Jalais, Annu. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2019. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Oppermann, Serpil, and Serenella Iovino, eds. Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Pugh, Jonathan, and David Chandler. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds. London: University of Westminster Press, 2021.

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Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2018. Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Slovic, Scott. “Literary Precarity as Preparation for Eco-Disaster,” webinar speech, Department of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, October 22, 2022, https:​//​ www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=fuew9Y​-lQLY​&t​=2700s.

Chapter 14

The Bollywood Representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis Debabrata Modak and Tarakeshwar Senapati

Disaster, as one of the major strands of popular literary imagination, is almost inextricably linked to the establishment of human monopoly in the environment. However, in a country like India, where nature is deified in myths and worshipped as mother by 1.3 billion people, a collective indifference to major environmental issues sounds somewhat unacceptable, but it is a harsh reality. Despite the fact that Indian cinema dates back to the 1890s, the number of disaster films produced is not impressive. In a third-world country like India, this remains a problem because mainstream cinema is still primarily a form of entertainment, and the success of a film is determined by how well it is commercialised for the entertainment of the masses. However, a commercial film might not ensure a faithful representation of the reality. As a result, the representation of natural and man-made disasters in a globalised and competitive space is sometimes far or partially removed from reality. In terms of heinousness, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 is considered the world’s worst industrial disaster. Since then, the event has been mentioned in some literary works but has only piqued the interest of a few Indian filmmakers. Indian filmmaker Tapan Bose1 made Bhopal: Beyond Genocide2 in 1986. Subsequently, Bollywood movies like Bhopal Express and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain were released in 1999 and 2014 respectively. Both of these films dealt with the immediate aftermath of the disaster, but they also shared a strangely muted response to the events that led up to the disaster, as well as the sad odyssey of people in the long run after the disaster ravaged thousands of innocent people in the immediate vicinity. However, a stereotypical response to disaster or 211

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the subversion of disaster under the canopy of commercialisation extends as well as limits the boundary of our consciousness, and sometimes denies the possibilities of ethical humane intervention, because cinema, no matter how strange it may sound, has a telling impact on our psyche. However, commercialisation, representation of reality, and the subsequent response to disaster are intricately linked in a complex network that is part of a larger narrative. Using the iconic French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of Discourse, we will attempt to investigate how mainstream Bollywood films such as Bhopal Express and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain represent the perilous event through cinematic mediums and how, in order to fit into the construction of a so-called “Bollywood movie,” many other important aspects pertaining to the disaster are compromised. The enveloping horror of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 probably did not make many of us oblivious to it. On December 2–3, 1984, a highly toxic substance called methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from the Bhopal plant of the American pesticide manufacturer Union Carbide. According to government records, the immediate death toll was around 2,500. However, numerous documents later suggested that the number was higher than 30,000, and the total number of injured people is likely to be higher than 500,000 because the poisonous gas caused many complex and genetic-mutation-related diseases. What happened next combined a farcical process of economic rehabilitation and a history of denial and injustice. However, it took more than a decade and a half before mainstream filmmakers responded to the event after the country had already witnessed several other gas-related disasters. Directed by Mahesh Mathai and set against the gas tragedy of Bhopal, the movie Bhopal Express represents the tragedy through the eyes of a newly wed couple: Verma (Kay Kay Menon) and Tara (Nethra Raghuraman). The movie was released in 1999, almost fifteen years after the gas tragedy had happened. The first scene of the film depicts a man running on the railway tracks, desperately attempting to stop a train. However, it is soon discovered that he has stopped the wrong train, and the train that is supposed to be stopped continues on its way to its destination. The following scenes of the film are shown through flashbacks. There is no sign of impending disaster because it is a simple family story with simple human aspirations. Verma works as a supervisor at the Union Carbide plant, but his official identity belies the poet he is. This poetic side of him adds depth to his character. Verma’s newly wed wife is like any other Indian wife, going through all the rituals for the family’s happiness and prosperity. Tara is observing “Karva-Chauth,”3 a ritual performed by a Hindu wife for the good health of her husband. Meanwhile, Tara leaves for her mother’s home and promises to return soon. Verma is persuaded by Bashir (Naseeruddin Shah), his good old friend, to visit Zohrabai’s (Zeenat Aman) place to have some fun. Bashir is a former Union Carbide employee

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who left the company for safety reasons and now drives an auto rickshaw. Bashir becomes so inebriated at Zohrabai’s place that he exchanges passionate and romantic words with Zohrabai on his way back to his place. The story still appears to be a family drama with occasional forays into the outside world. In fact, the first forty minutes of the film give no indication that a disaster is about to destroy everything in the next few minutes. There is obviously a faint glimmer of the devastating condition of the factory when a factory worker exchanges the following words with Verma in a jovial mood: “It took me all of 50 years to age but the factory of yours . . . and she is already an old hag” (Mathai 1999, 00.14.12 to 00.14.14). Meanwhile Bashir and Verma come out of Zohrabai’s place only to see that people are running for their lives since the poisonous gas has leaked from the factory and started taking people’s lives. Bashir rushes towards the Qazi Camp to save his own people, only to be found dead outside the hospital later owing to his exposure to the poisonous gas and the hospital’s subsequent failure in providing a bed and proper antidote. The company refuses to provide antidote as it claims that MIC is not harmful. Earlier, Verma tries to enter inside the factory with a hope of collecting information about the antidote but he is recognized as a factory worker by the agitated mob outside and beaten mercilessly. The authorities could disperse the agitated mob by spreading news of another leakage and this allows Verma to venture inside the factory, but his hope for collecting information about the antidote is immediately shattered as the officials refrain from passing any comment. Broken from inside, Verma soon discovers that Tara would be returning to Bhopal by train and desperately attempts to save her life. The macabre image of the auto rickshaw being driven by Verma through scattered dead bodies is bound to give a chill down the spine. At this point, the suspense behind the stopping of the train is revealed. Babulal Verma’s attempt to stop the train from entering the poisonous gas infested station proves futile as the Bhopal bound train reaches the station and the lives of ordinary passengers are pushed to the brink of death. However, at the end Verma could rescue terrified Tara and a recently orphaned baby, oblivious of the death of the mother. The movie ends here, giving no clue about the couple’s journey ahead. Possibly, amidst the enveloping chaos of silence, they hope to rebuild everything again. Even though the film is categorized as an Indian disaster movie, it remains for a large part, another love story, a family drama, where the hero and the heroine are finally reunited as they defy the wrath of a catastrophic disaster of unimaginable magnitude. But the cinematic representation of the disaster of such infinite catastrophic potentialities through a love story somehow hides its insane possibilities. The very image of a man’s failure to stop the right train immediately diverts the attention from citizen-state binary to something that “naturalizes” the human suffering by providing an acceptable

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space for common people to comprehend the aftermath of the disaster and thereby restricts the possibilities of further interrogations. But to mould it as a human failure is to hide the state’s failure in keeping its promises to secure its people’s life and safety. This “naturalization” of human suffering is structured in such a way that we, the Indians, are mostly unaware of the state’s violence and more prone to treat our sufferings as inevitable occurrence because we often fail to question the sovereign. Babulal is deemed as a “trouble maker” when he engages in a verbal brawl with the factory officials during his futile attempt of retrieving information about the antidote. Pramod K. Nayar observes, “UCIL evaluates the crisis in terms of its employee’s history of demands for compensation and greater safety, and responds to Verma’s queries for antidotes as though this was one more instance of such ‘unreasonable’ demands from an angry worker” (Nayar 2017: 32). The managerial staff remain indifferent when Babulal is seen screaming against them that people are dying everywhere in the thousands. In response to this social abjection of the Bhopalis, this indifference towards suffering people, Nayar writes, “Social abjection is the loss of all forms of power of the Bhopalis as a result of the MIC” (Nayar 2017: 32). We see the Zohrabai episode as a vantage point to understand the populist politics that different political parties have adopted at different points of time especially when they tried to liberalize the economic systems. Bashir has already quit the Union Carbide factory as he felt that the factory officials had compromised the safety standards. But there is only one sporadic incidence where Bashir is at least found vocal, albeit in a subdued way, about it in the public, when Babulal meets him outside the factory. But it is too hard to create a public consensus against the factory. He is rather found more agitated about the worsening condition of the factory when he is seen highly intoxicated at Zohrabai’s place. Populist politics surfaced in an electoral democracy like India whenever the state had decided to tread the path of neo-liberalization.4 The “garibi hathao, desh bachao”5 (“remove poverty and save the country”) slogan by Indira Gandhi had so fascinating an effect upon the poor people of India that they could never see how in the name of liberalizing the economic system, in the name of providing jobs for the poor people, the state had actually exploited the lives of the downtrodden people. In banking on the cheap labour of the poor people, the state actually perpetrated the capitalist system in the name of benefiting the common masses. Bashir’s concerns at Zohrabai’s place are therefore symbolic because the populist politics is so fascinating, paralyzing, and intoxicating a tactic that an individual resistance to the state’s duality is bound to be ineffectual. The resistance could never culminate as mass protest by overpowering such a complex discourse endorsed by the state. Apart from casting its ominous shadow over the lives of thousands of people, the disaster also killed the poetic self in Verma as we never see him

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reciting poetry anymore. When Bashir was found half-dead outside the hospital, Verma rained slangs against the Union Carbide authority: a reminder that death is not poetic in the face of such disaster. The hazardous event has thus reduced him to a mere living dead, a poet from whom the poetry of life is snatched away. The fatal event has thus not only killed common people but also their aspirations, their dreams, the future prospects and everything that remained unsaid so far, everything that would never be heard anymore, everything beyond our comprehension, everything that would be lost forever under the grand narrative of disaster. The cinematic representation of the Bhopal tragedy through this film obviously raises a few questions. What is the immediate necessity of shaping a disaster film as a love story? Is Bollywood not ready yet to focus on environmental concerns as a subject for a mainstream movie? Is the audience not ready yet to accept purely environmental concerns as a medium of entertainment? We shall get back to these particular issues but before that let us talk about another mainstream Bollywood movie, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, set again against the unfortunate Bhopal gas tragedy and released in 2014. Directed by Ravi Kumar, the movie, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain opens with the breaking of a rickshaw while the rickshaw puller, Dilip (Rajpal Yadav), is transporting a Union Carbide employee to the plant. Dilip subsequently loses his income as his rickshaw breaks down. For Dilip it’s a matter of great concern since he lives with his wife and his unmarried sister in the nearby slum. Meanwhile, Dilip could manage a job in the plant as a labourer and that makes him happy as his daily wage is secured. The initial loss of hope and the subsequent hope for a better future set the tone of the movie. However, the plant fails to generate the target revenue as the sale of the pesticides drops beyond expectations. The officials of the plant pay less heed to the safety and maintenance in order to reduce the maintenance cost of the plant. Officials make fun of tabloid reporter Motwani’s (Kal Penn) report and overlook the safety officer Roy’s (Joy Sengupta) concerns about the poor condition of the plant. Meanwhile, a worker is killed when a drop of methyl isocyanate from a leaking pipe falls on his arm. As it turns out, the plant officials deny any negligence on their part and blame the worker for the mishap. The plant continues to function and, interestingly, Dilip gets a better job in spite of having little technical knowledge about machine operations. Meanwhile, Roy prevents a minor gas leak, and the warning siren of the plant is disabled by the officials to stop people from panicking. The arrival of the CEO, Warren Anderson (Martin Sheen), for an inspection sounds ironic as the officials discuss how two additional tanks of MIC can increase the rate of production despite the deteriorating condition of the plant. Amidst all of this, Dilip manages to get a loan for his sister’s wedding from a local moneylender. The safety officer, Roy submits his resignation to the

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company as he foresees the threat the plant hides. Roy briefs the deteriorating condition of the plant to Dilip and Dilip makes up his mind to quit the job immediately after the sister’s marriage. Meanwhile, while Dilip is attending his sister’s wedding, Roy goes to the control room for a final check, only to discover that the safety measures have failed and the poisonous gas begins to leak from the faulty tank. The wind keeps on spreading the poisonous gas eastward. Meanwhile, Motwani rushes to warn the people in the plant’s immediate vicinity, advising them to evacuate and run towards the west because the warning sirens had previously been sabotaged. However, Dilip ignores the warning, and the guests start having breathing difficulties and irritation in the eyes. Upon insistence of the guests, Dilip visits the plant only to realize soon that the gas has leaked due to compromised safety measures. When he returns, he painfully witnesses the death of his loving wife and other guests. He eventually carries away his son and tries to flee the slum. Due to unavailability of antidote and inadequacy of beds, local hospitals are unable to provide medical services to visiting patients. Meanwhile, Dilip dies after ripping off his Union Carbide badge and lying down beside his dead son. The film concludes with a present-day scene in which a blind boy is seen holding Dilip’s badge and attempting to return home while smiling. Much like Bhopal Express, the movie Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain also uses a guise of a family drama to portray the horridness of the disaster. Even though some of the scenes, such as the death of an employee due to sudden exposure to MIC, are based on true events, the story never allows for a single unified representation of the disaster. The story does try to indicate how neo-liberalization of economy made room for populist politics, particularly when Motwani said to a visiting foreign reporter, Eva Caulfield, “Job means votes. They are all milking the cash cow together” (Kumar 2014: 00.32.57 to 00.32.58). The harsh reality is that a sovereign power never loses relevance, and that relevance is maintained by making many other things in life irrelevant. In one scene, Dilip’s wife sews the tattered uniform of a deceased worker for Dilip to wear. When Dilip’s wife sews the garment, the true cause of the deceased worker’s death becomes irrelevant. In order to survive in poverty, the common worker is forced to make his judgement irrelevant. This helplessness of the poor is heightened in a later scene when Anderson, while resting in his room and ruminating on the company’s profit and loss, engages in a conversation with another factory employee, who responds formally, “Yes Sahib! Yes Sahib!” to all questions posed to him. The employee’s ignorance of the foreign language is the immediate reason for such a response. In retrospect, this may be the most obvious reason, but in our opinion, this also represents the employee’s lack of understanding of the language of repression and how it works, and the irony is that he does not even have the language to express his angst. Populist politics survives by removing any protest language

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of any potential revolution. Unlike the Bhopal Express, the movie Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain uses silence as a more powerful medium than words. The final few minutes of the film truly speak through silence, possibly because existing language parameters would fail to measure the depth and breadth of human suffering. The blind boy’s smile conceals a deep pain revealed through silence. The smile is projected as a conscious tirade against the state’s irresponsibility and all forms of social abjection. The smile represents the acceptance of the disaster. We usually appreciate what we can comprehend and what we comprehend is always subject to our consciousness. The way we comprehend or perceive reality ultimately guides the construction of reality through cinematic mediums. Because mass appreciation of visual representation determines a film’s commercial success, cinematic representation of environmental issues frequently confines itself to the permissible space provided by codes of commercialization. Therefore, we see commercialization as a deliberate political tool used in a postcolonial space to inflict symbolic violence on the audience, with the goal of erasing from public memory a slew of other factors responsible for a catastrophic event such as an ecological or man-made disaster. We would like to argue that the representation of environment in a postcolonial space is a political construction designed to benefit the state machinery in all plausible ways. We also contend that our collective irresponsibility or muted response to environmental issues, as well as our environmental consciousness, are all political constructions designed to serve the purpose of the sovereign state machinery. However, before critiquing these movies, we genuinely feel that it is almost an obligatory task for us to try and understand the moral and social responsibilities of the common Indians in our familiar space towards the environment and how it contributes to the formation of the epistemology of mass environmental consciousness. We have noticed that an inherent duality always persists in our conscious and unconscious response to environmental issues. Moreover, in India, the environment has not been a “political” agenda of any political party, nor has the state actively taken part in educating common people about environmental issues and the laws pertaining to it. This negligence is what projects our tragedies as divine occurrence or at least “naturalizes” our “mundane” sufferings, and we have internalized this in such a way that we hardly talk about it. What we are basically trying to say here is that the root cause lies in the very construction of the knowledge system on environmental issues as an academic as well as public discourse that determines the possibilities of academic as well as mass responses towards environmental concerns. French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his celebrated book The Archaeology of Knowledge, wrote,

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[A]ll manifest discourse is secretly based on an “already-said”; and that this “already-said” is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a “never-said,” an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of its own mark. It is supposed therefore that every-thing that is formulated in discourse was already articulated in that semi-silence that precedes it, which continues to run obstinately beneath it, but which it covers and silences. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this “not-said” is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said. (Foucault 2002: 27–28)

Clearly, what remains a “never said” within the framework of a discursive practice is the state’s conscious desire to hide its violence, to hide from the masses the language of repression we mentioned earlier. This conscious repression remains as an “incorporeal discourse” within the discursive practice itself. What lies in the “semi-silence” is actually what the state doesn’t want us know so that the benevolent image of the state remains unquestionable. So, the main problem pivots around the construction of environment as a discourse and understanding what remains as a “never said” behind the “manifest discourse.” Michel Foucault while speaking about the factors that limit the possibility of discourse mentioned three factors: taboo, distinction between sanity and insanity, and institutional ratification. Theoretically, the infinity of discussable issues pertaining to environment is easily discernible, but practically, the number of things we talk about concerning environment or disaster is very limited since most of us are governed by a false consciousness that we already know everything about it. This all-pervasive sense of knowing everything about it makes it what Foucault would call a taboo subject: most of the times we consciously refrain from talking about environment; even a thought of raising a topic of environment for discussion is consciously suppressed from surfacing, possibly because of our fear of being judged as incompetent. This fear of incompetency that limits the possibility of discourses on environment within the ambit of the circular motion of history is what may be described as the manipulative act of silencing each other. Coupled with our sense of incompetency, the “naturalization” of human suffering has made environment a taboo subject for most of us, at least for the common people. Now the question is whether the Bhopal disaster and its cinematic representation have made the disaster a taboo subject or not. If yes, then for whom? We have already mentioned that the cinematic representation strangely didn’t show what preceded and subsequently followed the catastrophic event. Reports have suggested that the immediate relief efforts were decided two days after the gas tragedy. In her book Bhopal Gas Saga: Causes and Consequences of the World’s Largest Industrial Disaster, Ingrid

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Eckerman mentioned that each claimant potentially harmed by the gas disaster was to be categorized by a doctor. She went on, mentioning that [i]n court, the claimants were expected to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that death or injury in each case was attributable to exposure. Victims, who did not have medical records, or money to pay the doctor, were said to have great difficulties in getting into the right category. It is also documented that the officers made decisions on their own, and that they seemed to keep some money for themselves. Most victims had no bank accounts and were required to open accounts after depositing 20 rupees before the banks would handle their cheques. (Eckerman 2014: 5)

As per the record in Madhya Pradesh Government’s official website titled “Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation,” the total number of awarded cases was 574,304 and the number of rejected cases was 455,213. It can be easily found that nearly half of the people were denied economic rehabilitation on dubious grounds. This sadly happens most of the times in some way or the other whenever the issue of providing economic rehabilitation surfaces after a disaster. Eckerman also noted, “the criteria for the medical categorisation were regarded as inadequate . . . 92 percent of the categorised claimants had been categorised as having suffered only temporary injuries or no injuries at all” (Eckerman 2014: 5). In order to fit into the structure of a so called “Bollywood movie,” both the films didn’t talk about these facts at all. The lack of a monolithic structure within the purview of a commercial movie had made many aspects related to the disaster taboo subjects for those who were denied justice, for the Bhopalis at large. Most of us could anticipate what would happen to those people called for verification. How long can someone wait for justice when this state abjection is already anticipated? But the fallacy is that we chose to remain silent apart from producing a text like this, much like remaining silent to other environmental issues since the possibility of large-scale mass retaliation is already numbed by the several ideological apparatuses. When a subject is deemed taboo or cautiously made taboo it is bound to be erased from public memory at large, forcing human suffering to be understood as more of a natural occurrence. The majority of UCIL was owned by Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) of the United States, but Indian Government controlled banks and Indian Public holding shared a stake of 49.1%. The government policies of 1970s that aimed at encouraging foreign companies to invest in local industries made room for the Union Carbide Commission to build a plant for the manufacturing of Sevin (the industrial name for MIC) at Bhopal. Edward Broughton, in his article “The Bhopal Disaster and Its Aftermath: A Review,” wrote, “The govt. itself had a 22% stake in the company’s subsidiary, UCIL” (Broughton,

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10 May 2005). Clearly, the Indian government’s irresponsibility regarding the disaster cannot be overlooked in any way since it was instrumental behind the establishment of the company in Bhopal. But soon after the disaster, the government was never seen admitting its irresponsibility in public. It kept on presenting itself as a messiah and was more concerned to shift culpability to the American manufacturer who in turn replicated the same. The cinematic representation of the Bhopal gas disaster in both the movies never took this subject into context. Even though the desolate condition of the manufacturing company was highlighted, the state’s irresponsibility was carefully hidden. For Foucault discourse “determines the reality that we perceive” (Mills 2003: 5). Our perception is therefore limited and influenced by dominant discourses. The exclusion of government representatives in both the movies ultimately protects the messiah image of the state. The legitimization of any power solely depends on its creation of binaries. The Union Carbide Corporation–Bhopali binary as represented in the movies clearly casts a shadow on the state neutrality behind the desolate condition of the Sevin factory. Thus, some statements are regulated and circulated widely, and others have restricted circulation or no circulation at all. Sara Mills observes that “the notion of exclusion is very important in Foucault’s thinking about discourse” (Mills 2003: 54). This deliberate exclusion negates the possibilities of mass protest against the government or possibly deems all allegations against the government as insane. In a settlement that was mediated by the Indian Supreme Court, the UCC ultimately accepted moral responsibility and agreed to pay $470 million to the Indian government. Sanjay Kumar in his article “Victims of Bhopal Seek Redress on Compensation” wrote, although $470m was paid by Union Carbide for 102 000 injured people and 3000 deaths as part of the settlement, in fact far more claims have been made than this. Although officially only 5800 compensation claims for death have been paid out, more than 9000 further death claims have been paid out, but under the injuries category. (Kumar, 12 August 2004)

According to Foucault, discourses determine what we see, what we interpret, and how we interpret things. The compromised cinematic representations thus not only hide the state’s irresponsibility but also hide the levels of symbolic violence the state inflicts upon its people. We human beings often find it difficult to translate our emotions and thoughts through the available semantic network of language. The representations not only limit the possible interpretations but also restrict the usage of the available language to express our concern about such violence since the mechanism of such violence is covered under the canopy of commercialisation of the subject. Foucault states in “The Order of Discourse,” “We must conceive of discourse as a violence

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which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them; and it is in the practice that the events of discourse finds the principle of their regularity” (Foucault 2002: 67). No government can allow industrial growth in the immediate vicinity of the human habitation. But in the case of Bhopal it seems that the plant was deliberately set near the slums so that cheap labour could be offered easily without paying too much heed to the safety of the poor people. The state being the sovereign power has over the years been determining how some people may live and how some must die. Achille Mbembe termed this violence as “Necropolitics.” The slum near the UCC factory therefore becomes another “deathworld” where “vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe 2019: 92). However, the cinematic representation does not allow us to comprehend the state’s violence in the manner stated, and imagining the entire situation in this manner may be considered “insane” because the state’s overpowering populist discourse has already cast a shadow over the possibility of such interpretation. Sara Mills, while discussing Foucault’s concept of discourse observes, “To think and express oneself outside these discursive constrainst, meant to be mad and incomprehensible by others” (Mills 2003: 56). The greatest fear that restricts us from being vocal about such issues beyond the “discursive constraints” is the fear of incompetency since very few people talk about it in this manner. Sadly, the reviews of the films published by stalwart reviewers were mostly concerned about the acting skill of the different actors. This has been a crucial issue since more than the subject itself, most of the times it’s the screen presence of the actors combined with their performance that draws the attention of the audience. However, the sanity or insanity of a statement is ratified by different institutions. Cinema as a popular medium no doubt functions as a ratifying agency. The alternative narratives pertaining to Bhopal disaster could never surface in the cinematic representations since both the movies focused on highlighting the devastating safety measures of the factory. The ill maintenance of the factory being ratified as the sole reason behind such disaster, the cinematic representation therefore deemed all other possible interpretations irrelevant and unnecessary. Sara Mills rightly observes, “We categorize and interpret experience and events according to the structures available to us and in the places of interpreting, we lend these structures a solidity and a normality which is often difficult to question” (Mills 2003: 56). Now, before we conclude, let us try to find the answers to the questions we raised earlier: what is the necessity of shaping a disaster film in the form of a love story? As we stated earlier this remains a problem in a third-world country. In India, a proper documentary film narrated in a single unified manner would never find its way into theatres and would scarcely attract the

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attention of producers. Since for producers cinema means business and for a large audience, it remains a popular medium of entertainment, reality must be infused in admissible doses that it doesn’t hamper the purpose of watching a movie. For the commercial success of a movie, the audience needs to identify with a character or a group of characters who may be similar to them. A disaster film, on the other hand, requires a lot of background research. Most disaster filmmakers take a deliberate shortcut and avoid proper research because production design and visual effects for a fruitful rendering of the disaster in movies are extremely expensive. When we checked the official website of CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) we found that though the movie Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain received an “Indian U” certificate, “Bhopal Express” received an “Indian A” certificate from the censor board. Interestingly, a U certificate means unrestricted public exhibition whereas, an A certificate means the film is restricted to adults. Quite interestingly, we found no mention of the documentary film made by the filmmaker Tapan Bose in the CBFC website. Both of the commercial movies were never shown on television, which means a large number of people could never know what was shown in the movie or even what was the subject these movies dealt with. This deliberate intervention on part of the state purposefully restricts the possibility of all counter discourses against its hegemony. The state, therefore, carefully determines the boundary of our consciousness. Sadly, what we are producing here is after all an academic response, which at large has very little to do with public consensus. Therefore, by using the framework of a commercial movie, the state deliberately perpetrates violence on the audience and negates the possibility of ethical humane intervention at large. Certification from the CBFC plays an important role behind the cinematic representation of disaster. A commercial film made solely for public entertainment is bound to omit scenes and issues from films that would limit the number of potential viewers. The guidelines given by the CBFC are written in that “semi-silence” that would potentially deem any alternative narrative as “insane.” When fundamental issues of life such as food, clothing, and shelter persist, Bollywood cinema will rarely be able to embrace a single unified narrative style as followed in documentary films. In order to appeal to the senses of the audience, it is somehow bound to incorporate masala elements. For example, in Bhopal Express sexuality runs as an undercurrent almost throughout the movie. And in Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain there are some frivolous scenes which are not organically connected with the main narrative. In the process what remains unsaid or what was cautiously hidden from the masses will slowly disappear from collective memory and the eternal cycle of violence and mass suffering will continue.

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NOTES 1. Indian film maker Tapan Bose is famous for directing movies like From Behind the Barricade, An Indian story, Jharkhand, and Bhopal: Beyond Genocide. 2. The award-winning documentary film, Bhopal: Beyond Genocide is undoubtedly the most comprehensive film and painstaking documentary made on Bhopal disaster. The documentary exposes the first ten months of confusion, panic, and vacillation on the part of the state government after the disaster befell on the night of 3 December 1984. In 1988 the national television channel, Doordarshan refused to telecast the film, calling it too dated. The film has been given a U certificate by the censor board after a spate of denials and court trials. The film has been much aired in abroad than in India. 3. On Karva Chauth, married Hindu women and unmarried women especially observe a fast from sunrise to moonrise for the safety and longevity of their husbands. 4. Neoliberalism is the political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following World War II. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. 5. “Remove poverty, save the country” was the theme and slogan of Indira Gandhi’s 1971 election campaign. The proposed anti-poverty programs were designed to give Gandhi an independent national support.

REFERENCES Broughton, Edward. “The Bhopal Disaster and Its Aftermath: A Review.” PubMed Central (PMC) 4, no. 6, (2005): https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1186​/1476–069X​-4–6. Eckerman, Ingrid. The Bhopal Saga. India: Universities Press (India) Private Limited, 2014. https:​//​docs​.google​.com​/file​/d​/0B0FqO8XKy9NRZDNzTkZQeVJQbE0​/edit​ ?pli​=1​&resourcekey​=0​-AQV8IQqhWZocx​_FV5bq11w. Foucault. Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2002. ———. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Anthology, edited by Robert Young, 48–79. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 1981. Kumar, Ravi, director. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain. Rising Star Entertainment, 2014. 96 minutes. https:​//​youtu​.be​/5KDjA54bHGc. Kumar, Sanjay. “Victims of Gas Leak in Bhopal Seek Redress on Compensation.” PubMed Central (PMC), 12 August 2004. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1136​/bmj​.329​.7462​ .366​-b. Mathai, Mahesh, director. Bhopal Express. Highlight Films, 1999. 100 minutes. https:​ //​youtu​.be​/4TEF3re5D​_A.

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Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Mills, Sara. Michel Foucault. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2003. Nayar, Pramod K. Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Chapter 15

Radical Landscapes Analysing Ecodisaster and Human Rights Violations in Irada and Kadvi Hawa Devapriya Sanyal

Oftentimes crisis creates new states of normalcy, and accepting and living with the new normal actually allows calamities to go quiet in the collective imagination. However, sometimes cultural invocations of disaster, including literary writings, films, and art exhibitions, refuse to silence catastrophe and find an urge in themselves to express it. This paper proposes to look at two popular cultural renditions of human rights implications in the face of anthropogenic climate change through the Hindi films Irada and Kadvi Hawa (2017). Both the films look at how individual lives undergo seismic changes in the face of industrial disasters which continue to impact thousands and thousands of lives. In this paper, I hope to address the question of how literary and cultural forms represent the human rights dimension of climate change and also how the positionality of the authors—in this case the film directors—affects the ways in which ecological and most often man-made disasters violate human rights, and which need a redressing of some sort, which they attempt through their respective works. DISASTER AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS Most scholars agree that disaster refers to large-scale shattering events that may occur once or constitute an ongoing process. Emerging in the discipline 225

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of sociology in the 1950s, disaster studies typically focus on the causes, risk, effects, and management of natural, political, human engineered, and technological disasters. The utility and morality of art in mediating distress has a long history of philosophical and literary deliberation. With the advent of cinema as an influential art form in the twentieth century, one can conclude that the telling of disaster or rather the representation of it will find a place in it as well. However, the important questions in this regard are these: How is the “other” constructed? And how does one respond to the communal scale of suffering in ongoing disasters? This paper seeks to address the extensive and widespread damage that disasters can cause to a large and often national collective and their representations on celluloid in the Indian context. Pallavi Rastogi argues in her book that in disaster fiction—and perhaps we can extend it to disaster cinema as well—the story (which is the literary elements of the tale) and the event (i.e., the real-life disaster, its deleterious effects, and the need to manage those effects through narrative exposition) exist in a day-to-day dialectical tension with each other. And this in turn depends upon their temporal distance from the disaster. “Disaster terminates normalcy for the individual and for the social collective often creating a newnormal condition for existence” (Rastogi 2002, 17). However, since the disasters discussed in this paper are ongoing calamities requiring either urgent or long-term redressal, the event is always a central guiding principle in the story of the films under discussion here. In an interesting way, the political punctuates the personal and vice versa. Literary scholarship on postcolonial trauma, mourning, and melancholia has been the subject of study for close to two decades now. Disaster, which is their natural extension, has barely been represented, which is why a study of such films in the national context becomes extremely crucial. Instead of individual or even group suffering, national wounds that disasters come to inflict are what will be explored or studied in this paper. Sometimes one may claim that the catastrophe depicted is too large to be contained within the bounded confines of the visual image but an engagement with the same may yield newer ways of not only coming up with definitions of the term based on the debates in the field but can also enhance the standard definitions of disaster at the same time creating room in cinema as an important part of disaster studies. India along with a few other South Asian nations has been subjected to British colonialism, as a result of which crises of epic proportions, since the turn of the century, ranging from environmental disasters to epidemiological, financial, and geopolitical catastrophes, have erupted. The response to such ongoing crises can be found through what Pallavi Rastogi calls “The Disaster Unconscious,” which not only anchors the literary narrative to disastrous events which are often socio-political and economic in nature but also helps

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focus the reader’s attention on the need to disseminate information about, as well as manage, catastrophe through narration. The failure of the postcolonial nation to adequately redress the effects of disasters further places an ethical burden on art and literature alike to seek mitigation that the government often fails to provide. Several films from Hollywood as well as web series have addressed concerns such as this. While this paper’s seminal focus is on Indian films’ representation of ecodisaster, I will also be touching upon the differences in representation between Indian and American cinema. DISASTER STUDIES AND LITERATURE What one tries to achieve through the representation of disaster in literature is perhaps the need to find answers, find some warning, even some lesson for living life wholly, perhaps some literary value or even derive aesthetic pleasure in telling stories about it. Literature, culture, and the arts can lodge crisis into the midst of political and public consciousness while looking for new ways of negotiating with disaster. What it does is also examine the worst possible forms of suffering in the postcolonial world—those of non-human as well as human crisis. The role of art in mediating distress has a long history of both literary as well as philosophical deliberation. “Literary disaster studies reveal the continued relevance of issues such as how to best build a nation” (Rastogi 2020, 21). George Eliot, the celebrated Victorian novelist, wrote on tragedy while Aristotle philosophized on catharsis—an important aftereffect of the experience of tragedy. In the twentieth century, the theorist Theodor Adorno deliberated on poetry after the Holocaust which is at the heart of all literary theorizations of disaster and other types of communal suffering in which he makes a case for the superiority of the cultural critic to provide remedies to civil society, “The Position of the cultural critic, by virtue of its difference from the prevailing disorder, enables him to go beyond it theoretically . . .” (Adorno 2000: 19). Susan Sontag examined the crises in the twentieth century, especially wars, in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2004): “Being a spectator in an –L/ other country is a quintessential modern experience.” (Sontag 2004, 17). Literary criticism made forays in the field of disaster studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially through the rise of trauma studies and the “environmental turn” in the humanities. Frenchman Maurice Blanchot is considered one of the leading literary theorists of disaster. He is one of the first to engage with the struggle which other literary theorists of disaster have grappled with and continue to do so, namely: how to

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represent the unrepresentable and how to speak about something which is big and terrible, so much so that it literally incapacitates the human to articulate it or even represent it: “ . . . it is dark disaster that brings the light” (Blanchot 1995: 7). Many literary studies of disaster have a tendency to theorize literature and catastrophe through what is known as ecocriticism. This paper tries a similar path through a close examination of two feature films produced by Bollywood on ecodisaster. REPRESENTING DISASTER IN HOLLYWOOD The way we think about, talk about, and construct the natural world forms the central tenet of ecocriticism. Since this paper deals primarily with cinema, it only makes more sense to look at how disaster has been represented in other cinemas before delving into Indian cinema. The reality of global warming entails the fact that natural disasters are becoming more frequent and more severe. The Roland Emmerich film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) depicts a series of extreme storms as precursors to a cataclysmic shift into a new Ice Age. While Geostorm, (2017), and San Andreas (2015) are other films which depict the various dangers associated with climate change and global warming, the film Erin Brockovich comes closest in sensibility to the two films discussed in this paper since it too deals with themes of industrial disasters. Both Irada and Erin Brockovich are based on true events. Erin Brockovich, made in 2000, is an American biographical legal film directed by Steven Soderbergh. The film is a dramatization of the true story of Erin Brockovich, portrayed by Julia Roberts, who fought against the energy corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) regarding its culpability for the Hinkley groundwater contamination incident. There are also other contemporary environmental films like Happy Feet and Ice Age: The Meltdown, which provide obvious ecological messages couched in comedy or melodrama. These films indicate a move in Hollywood towards making what David Ingram calls “film vert.”1 Apart from the more recent films made by Hollywood, Clint Eastwood’s remake of Shane (1953) called Pale Rider (1985) highlights and critiques the consequences of 1850s–1880s corporate mining and its continued repercussions into the 1980s. Pale Rider provides its audience with a clear vision of the environmental horrors hydraulic mining causes even including detailed descriptions of the technique, while showing the devastating results of this great engineering feat. Interestingly, The Fast and Furious films (2001, 2003, and 2006) demonstrate that the environmental impact of cars and the car culture in America has been treated as natural and desirable and mostly as a given. Often times films

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related to environment-friendly approaches to filmmaking like carbon neutral production can be seen in such films as The Day After Tomorrow or set recycling as seen in The Matrix 2 and 3. Films with environmental politics as their scope have become more prevalent from the 1990s onward. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore argues powerfully for sustainable development policies by invoking both personal and universal ecological memories. The film not only offers a general hope for earth’s future if we as individuals make the changes Gore shows us during the film’s credits but also illustrates that Hollywood can go green. These films inspire ecological action because they reveal much about the current state of environmental politics afoot in Hollywood and the United States as well. Several critics such as Ingram have however critiqued the representation in these films as “Male heroism in environmentalist movies is identified with saving as well as conquering nature” (Ingram 2000, 47). IRADA Irada is a 2017 Hindi film directed by Aparnaa Singh which raises the contemporary ecological issues related to Uranium poisoning, reverse boring, fertilizer poisoning, and so on, as an aftereffect of the Green Revolution on the people living in the Malwa region of Panjab. Colonel Parabjeet Walia leads a somewhat happy life with his young daughter Riya who is preparing for her CDS exams in order to join the Indian Air Force as a pilot. As a part of the drill, she swims in a canal honing her physical stamina which is a requirement of the exams. As a matter of routine both father and daughter practice every day until one day Riya collapses in the water and has to be taken to the hospital where several tests confirm that she has developed lung cancer. There are many subplots bolstering the main plot and one of them is unearthing the reason for ground water toxicity, which an RTI activist and journalist attempts to do. He is murdered by Paddy Sharma, the industrialist (who is actually the culprit for ground water contamination and also indirectly responsible for Riya’s condition), but the activist’s girlfriend, the journalist Maya Singh, takes over the research using evidence her boyfriend had dug up, which later ensures Sharma’s eventual capture and incarceration. Parabjeet Walia decides to take on Paddy Sharma by blowing up his factory, which is revealed gradually in the narrative. Arjun Mishra’s character is one of yore, reminding one of Om Puri in Govind Nihaani’s 1983 film Ardh Satya, in which an honest police officer tries to fight corruption in the system but ultimately succumbs to it. However, Arjun in this film is a wily character who is smart enough to play the game and, in the end, even succeeds in turning the table on the perpetrators.

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Instead of indicting the individual (although we do have characters who come across as corrupt, unethical, and unscrupulous), the director seems to hint that the rot which has set in the system is used by individuals within it to further their own ends. Arjun very early on in an exchange with a junior IPS officer who is aiding him in this investigation is seen talking about it. Indeed, the plot of the film seems to hinge on this very aspect. The protagonist Parabjeet Walia likens himself to Bhagat Singh, a popular nationalist freedom fighter who used his writing to propagate his message to defeat the British. Parabjeet Walia too turns out to be a gifted poet who uses poetry to send messages to set into motion the conspiracy to sabotage Paddy Sharma’s business and thus avenge the death of his daughter. However, Walia’s action is almost heroic as he challenges the powerful without a single thought of his own well-being. And one can see Aparnaa Singh’s efforts to indicate a real change on the worldview, or at least in trying to change our worldview as audiences. While the film remains problematic at the level of execution it may inspire ecological action because it reveals much about the existent state of environmental politics in the heart of Panjab. Parabjeet Walia is a father first and foremost and is not heroic in the traditional sense of the term. He only seeks to save his own child from an environment that has been made toxic in multiple ways. But what marks him out is a willingness to sacrifice himself in order to build a better community at large. Parabjeet Walia is neither a tragic hero nor a bumbling comic one but a loner who is ready to serve the community. Interestingly his background is also that of a celebrated army officer. Arjun Mishra, too, in his own way answers to this description except that he has a lot more to lose than Walia. Nevertheless, he finds it within himself to make the ultimate sacrifice—giving up the coveted position at the PMO, which meant that he could have spent more time with his own son. He is able to do so because he at last is convinced of Walia’s selfless cause and decides to help him by punishing the villains, making him as much a hero as Walia. What it also shows is the fact that one can make a difference even if one is within the system and if one is willing to make a change. What is highlighted in the film is the evil nexus between politics and business and the CM goes so far as to threaten the officer Arjun Mishra from the investigating agency—the NIA—to complete his work at the earliest, giving a verdict which ensures that Paddy Sharma can claim his insurance money. She is keen on helping Sharma as he is the fund raiser for her party and which helps her to win elections—she comes across as ruthless, power hungry, and rather self-serving, a fact which is commented upon by her own mother. Even though the film revolves around Parabjeet Walia, as he is the protagonist who sets things in motion, the character of Arjun Mishra who eventually begins investigating the matter while getting more and more involved personally in

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the case also comes to occupy center stage. This is also a case in which it is almost as if Mishra comes of age, beginning to understand the world around him better, fighting for justice, and also discovering himself in the process. Indeed, he is one of the few characters who evolves in the film and whose trajectory is a complex one. Some of the images and sequences stay with the viewer long after the film is over and one of them is that of the cancer train which runs between Bhatinda and Udaipur revolving around the ecodisaster created by the greed and selfishness of a few individuals, also those of the pictures of real-life victims of the cancer belt in Panjab created by the use of pesticides, and the like, in the Green Revolution, which are powerful enough to evoke horror in the minds of its audience. KADVI HAWA Kadvi Hawa, directed by Nila Madhab Panda, is a short fiction film based in the village of Mahua in the Bundelkhand region of central and North India. Hit by drought and an unforgiving landscape, it tells the story of Hedu, an old man who lives in constant fear of his son Mukund committing suicide in the face of backbreaking debt, which is a common feature of this region. Hedu’s antagonist is Gunu, a collection agent from the local bank, which lends money to the farmers. While Hedu and his family live in drought-stricken Mahua, Gunu has had to relocate here from distant Orissa in order to earn a better income and be able to send money to his family who live rather precariously on a coastline which is constantly ravaged by storms and the sea. He lives with the hope that one day he will be able to earn enough money so as to be able to bring his family to live with him in Mahua. The film is based on true stories from drought-prone Bundelkhand and the vanishing villages of coastal Orissa primarily. The establishment shot is that of a bleak landscape—arid, dusty brown with slight hints of green in between. With that Panda sets the tenor of his film, which is bleak in tone as well and acts as a warning for the havoc that global warming wreaks, resulting in drastic climate changes. Along with that, Panda chooses to tell the story of the burden of loan on farmers and the shockingly high rate of them committing suicide to escape it all.2 Panda’s tale is peopled with characters who are fighting personal demons along with their bid for survival. Gunu and Hedu enter into an unholy alliance in which Hedu extracts important information from the villagers, enabling Gunu to sweep in and recover the loan amount from the unsuspecting villagers. Since Hedu is old and blind, all that he has to do is be at the right place at the right time so that he can glean the correct information for Gunu.

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Nila Madhab Panda is known for making documentaries that address environmental issues while his feature films also address social issues alongside the environmental. Hedu combines the wisdom of an old man along with the wiliness of a deprived person, which evokes pathos when Mukund, Hedu’s son, goes missing one day. Hedu decides to call off the deal fearing divine retribution. Soon enough Gunu too is privy to bad news as a call from his ancestral Orissa informs him that the coastal village in which his family lives has been swallowed by the sea. Although the film is a fictional one, there is an attempt to depict real-life disasters brought on by climate change. But unlike Irada it does not have a hero in the narrative. Hedu comes across more as an anti-hero with shades of gray but also with moral qualms. In fact, Gunu, although referred to as an agent of death, is not totally evil. He has his own set of issues to grapple with. In this regard, he is a lot like Arjun Mishra of Irada, who has his own inner demons to deal with on an everyday basis; however, unlike Mishra, he is unable to rise above his situation and instead goes under. Panda’s film is not preachy; it simply lays bare the despondency of debt-ridden farmers while portraying accurately the parched lands, which the camera ably does. The wind here is not a harbinger of good news but rather ill tidings. Hedu keeps wishing for it to change so that it can bear rain clouds that will ensure a plentiful crop. When it does not ensure survival, he only offers to help Gunu recover loans so that his own son’s principal sum and the interest comes down, which makes his fault, if we may so deem it, rather human. While Panda refrains from making his film a tale of good and evil, he does, however, leave us with images that are powerful and evoke plenty of questions whose answers are hard to come by. OTHER FILMS BY BOLLYWOOD India has produced a number of documentaries3 on ecodisaster and one other fiction film. Made in 1999, Bhopal Express is an indirect representation of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy which occurred on the 2–3rd of December at midnight in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, leaving several thousand dead and others maimed for life. Even now, the area in old Bhopal continues to remain sensitive and affected. The narrative is built around the life of Verma, a factory worker at the Union Carbide factory, whose newly acquired wife Tara goes to her father’s house as a part of the Hindu marriage rituals. As the narrative unfolds, we are shown happy scenes that depict Verma as devoted to his wife and adoring his wife beyond measure. While she is away at her father’s, the leak at the

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factory takes place, and Verma roused to action looking at the devastation around him, even losing his close friend Bashir, decides to save his wife’s life as she makes her way back to Bhopal in a train. The last one third of the two-hour-long film narrates how he goes about doing it. While several people lie dead in his path and before he can meet his wife, we are treated to a bit of suspense. However, as all Hindi films go, here too love triumphs in the end and it actually ends in the union of the two lovers. The film does not raise awareness in the same manner that the two films Irada and Kadvi Hawa, under study in this paper, do. It is rather a fictionalized representation of what might have happened to real people on that fateful night and the aftermath of the tragedy. In fact, various characters people this narrative and the film shows in great detail how the tragedy affected their lives as well. What is most important here is the poignant representation of a community caught unaware at the outbreak of a disaster on such a massive scale and what is termed as one of the greatest industrial disasters in the history of the world. INVISIBLE DEMONS: A DOCUMENTARY Rahul Jain recently made a documentary which deals with pollution in the Indian capital of New Delhi with the bigger aesthetic of climate change dominating the rationale of the film. What it also tries to depict in a way is the human disconnection with the natural world. Since it is in tune with the kind of films that I have examined hitherto, I felt it would be a good addition to this study. It is also more relevant because it is a more recent study based on facts even though at times it has not been well received by certain critics. Before plunging into examining more natural resources and the effect of pollution on them in and around Delhi, Jain takes the viewer through some of the busiest locations in New Delhi that somehow have a dystopian feel about them. But what one is constantly reminded of is the fact that unlike the other two films which this paper deals with in detail, these are based on palpable, felt truths of everyday life affecting a megalopolis of millions of people and equally at that. A documentary film can lay claim to the truth in a way that feature films cannot and so that in a way they always make for a more interesting study. The critique directed by Jain at the perpetrators is manifold; he questions what is development and who stands to benefit by it and shows how Man has destroyed his relationship with nature utterly and ruinously, and how a select few or the privileged have access to things that make life seem imminently better and comfortable. Items such as air conditioning and water

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and air purifiers are deemed as luxury items only available to the elite these days, but then again it is a purely subjective viewpoint that is perhaps not entirely untrue. The structure of the film is based on the different seasons, and sheds light on consumerism and inequality. There are interviews of the people who are affected in different ways by the severe pollution and yet are bound by eons of rituals or customs and sometimes even poverty and the desire to earn a decent living. The film also in a way raises awareness about how to film the “other”—for early on in the film itself Jain shows us the world that he is inhabiting. In a voiceover he says, “I just cannot live without ACs and air purifiers. I actually grew up as an air-conditioned child who couldn’t even imagine the natural world outside the city.” And he looks out from inside his air-conditioned bungalow through a floor-to-ceiling glass panel. Within a few minutes of this, Jain’s camera obsessively begins to follow sweaty labourers pulling carts carrying ice slabs, and several aerial shots of stubbles being burnt in empty fields and filling the atmosphere with thick clouds of smoke and contributing a great deal to the level of pollution in Delhi and adjoining areas. In fact, it is this phenomenon which contributes to severe AQI in Delhi every year and the government is unable to do anything about it. There are aerial shots too of a landfill which doubles up as almost a hill. And, as Jain informs us, there are four such sites in and around the national capital. Foamy sewage and industrial waste choke the Yamuna and there are several shots of it too dotting the narrative as there are of women standing knee deep amidst the hazardous waste conducting puja rituals. Climate change is a lopsided phenomenon in which the richer countries are casting waste into the atmosphere that affects the lungs in poorer countries. In India, too, the same kind of hierarchy exists as Jain tries to say tongue in cheek. Jain’s efforts are expressed through verbal invocations and visual gestures of solidarity. What becomes important in such a depiction is the fact that an insider is holding light to the problems in his city of birth and what is also perhaps deemed as one of the most polluted cities in the world. One can only hope that beyond the aesthetic it will also move the people in power to help nature as well as the inhabitants of the city to breathe freely once again. CONCLUSION Besides disaster literature, disaster cinema may teach unaffected yet engaged audiences, action-oriented lessons rather than serving as a template for existence only for those who have to live in and through disaster. One can hope that a study of and discussion of both these films as well as a viewing of the

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documentaries will inspire literary and media ecocritics to begin a conversation and to shape the future of not only both fields of study but also of their audiences. Both the feature films under study here focus on events which are set in similar cultural contexts. And they both provide a vision of the economic devastation caused by nature when man interferes with it. Irada especially reveals some startling statistics about the rice bowl of the country, the Panjab, brought on by the Green Revolution, which while reducing the burden in terms of supplying food to the country and making it self-sufficient inadvertently increased the rate of patients afflicted with cancer, especially poignant being the sequence revolving round the “Cancer train” in the film Irada, which actually runs from Udaipur to Bhatinda. One cannot, of course, say that the ecodisaster was unwittingly done since the fallout from using pesticides and fertilizers is well known. The film attempts to rouse awareness about this problem but how much of it succeeds remains to be seen. The film also evokes fear that this is no country for young people and that it is also a country bereft of hope. As in all long-term disasters here, too, denial runs deep, and it almost seems as if they have been normalized in our imagination. Unless collective action is called for and taken, more young people, such as Riya, will be dying without fulfilling their potential. But what one will definitely agree on is the fact that we have sought to manage our anxieties about disasters through the making of popular films. NOTES 1. Film vert refers to a greening of Hollywood, which relates mainly to the usage of environment friendly means and modes of filmmaking and distribution. David Ingram deals with it in great depth in his book looking at several Hollywood films, citing them as examples to follow. We in India however have no such concepts in place as yet. 2. Vidarbha and Marathwada region in Maharashtra are drought-prone districts in India with a high percentage of farmer suicides due to debt. Possibly economic resources given by the central government are not adequate enough to be shared by the state of Maharashtra with this one region alone to save farmers’ lives. The crisis keeps deepening every year according to veteran activists but they also express helplessness. The farmers borrow money from private money lenders and end up in a debt trap. The soil quality has come down because of the recurring droughts, which deplete the water table to a great extent. 3. The number of feature films dealing with ecodisaster remain surprisingly low in Hindi cinema or Bollywood as it popularly known. It is important because it is one of the biggest film industries in the world. Several documentaries, however, exist; and some of these deal with various environmental issues and make for an interesting watch such as Seaspiracy, India 2050, A Plastic Ocean, Wild Karnataka, and Black Fish.

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REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prism. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1955. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Rastogi, Pallavi. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2004.

Index

Achebe, Chinua 170, 171 Adivasis, 3, 8, 171–73, 176, 177n6 Admussen, Nick, 7 Adorno, Theodor, 227 Agarwal, Smita, 185 Agrawal, Vinita, 3, 14, 180, 185, 186 Ahmed, Tajuddin, 13, 137–47 Akella, Usha, 188–89 Alaimo, Stacy, 13, 126, 129 Alam, Fakrul, 161 Allamneni, Sharada, 12, 61–72 Ali, Sk Tarik, 10, 19–34 Aman, Zeenat, 212 Ameerudheen, T. A., 134n1 Amte, Baba, 162n1 Andersen, Gregers, 2, 25, 33n4 Anderson, Mark, 37, 44 Anthropocene, 3, 21, 61–62, 62–63, 86, 90, 91, 97, 101, 113, 137, 176, 188, 189, 194n14, 199, 200 Ao, Temsula, 186 Astley, Thea, 25 Bachchan, Amitabh, 9 Bacon, Francis, 145 Ballard, J. G., 24 Bandopadhay, Manik, 25 Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 26 Barad, Karen, 51–52

Barnes, Jessica, 137 Baruah, Risha, 12, 77–86 Bhasha literature, 25, 26 Bate, Jonathan, 161, 180, 186, 191 Bengali literature, 25 Bennett, Jane, 208n5 Bhattacharji, Shreya, 14, 165–77 Bhopal, 9, 15, 127, 211–23 Binsar, 185 biochemical pollution, 15 Biswas, Debajyoti, 15, 199–209 Blanchot, Maurice, 227 Bond, Ruskin, 7 Bose, Tapan, 211, 223n1 Boslaugh, Sarah E., 145 Bourdieu, Pierre, 110 Boyd, Brian, 57 Boyle, T. C., 24 Bracke, Astrid, 20 Bradshaw, Gay A., 57 Braidotti, Rosa, 51 Breckenridge, Jhilmil, 183 Bringhurst, Robert, 50 Bronte, Emily, 24 Broughton, Edward, 219–20 Buell, Frederick, 92 Buell, Lawrence, 19, 68, 129, 151, 152, 179 Bump, Jerome, 152 237

238

Bundelkhand, 231 Butler, Judith, 208n2 Cajete, Gregory, 56 Callicott, J. Baird, 144 Campbell, Joseph, 50 cancer, 13, 127, 235 Carey, John, 61 Carrigan, Anthony, 3, 4 Carson, Rachel, 92, 96, 128 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2, 20, 62, 90, 91, 101, 146, 200 Chakravarty, Rohan, 8 Chaturvedi, Sonalika, 13, 125–34 Chaudhuri, Rajat, 100 Chaudhuri, Supriya, 10 Chennai, 13, 138, 141, 143 Chhetri, Rohan, 190 Clark, Timothy, 6, 182, 194n14 cli–fi, 2, 3, 12, 21–22, 89–101, 179 climate change, 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21–22, 89–101, 137–47, 181–83, 202, 233–34. See also global warming climate justice, 165–77 Conrad, Joseph, 24, 109 Coupe, Laurence, 208n3 COVID–19, 2 Crutzen, Paul, 62, 90, 183 Culver, Lawrence, 62 cyclones, 3, 10, 11, 19–34, 94, 139 Dangwal, Renu Bhadola, 11, 13, 49–58, 125–34 Das, Manoj, 11, 21, 26–28 Das, Shruti, 11, 14, 37–47, 180 Davis, John Gordon, 24 deforestation, 3, 186–88, 202 Delhi, 43, 233 DeLuca, Michael J., 3 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 118 Descartes, René, 145 Deshmukh, Kunal, 9 Devi, Mahasweta, 4, 160 Devika, J., 125

Index

Deyo, Brian, 44 Dharmarajan, Geeta, 11, 49–58 Diaz, Junot, 93 displacement, 1 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 53 Dixit, Sitaram, 153 documentary film, 233–34 Dominic, K. V., 189, 191 Dove, Michael, 137 Dreese, Donelle N., 85 Dunning, Kate, 179, 193n3 Dürbeck, Gabriele, 92 earthquakes, 2, 3 Eastwood, Clint, 228 Eckerman, Ingrid, 219 ecocinema, 9, 10, 15 ecocriticism, 12, 228 ecodisaster: fiction, 6, 19–34, 105–19, 206; psychological effects of, 1 ecofeminism, 186 ecophobia, 79, 81, 82, 206 ecopoetry, 179, 180, 186, 188, 193. See also poetry ecotheology, 14 Ehrlich, Paul, 92 Eliade, Mercia, 55 Ellias, Bina Sarkar, 191, 192 Eliot, George, 227 Eliot, T. S., 192 Emmerich, Roland, 228 environmental dystopianism, 92 Erin Brockovich, 228 Escobar, Arturo, 145 Estok, Simon, 206 Felstiner, John, 193 film, 211–23, 225–35. film vert, 228, 235n1 Fixico, Donald, 56–57 floods, 3, 9, 11, 41, 147 Foucault, Michel, 15, 212, 217– 18, 220, 221 Frodeman, R., 144

Index

Gadgil, Madhav, 33n6, 106 Gandhi, Indira, 214, 223n5 Garrard, Greg, 33n1, 93 geocriticism, 12 Ghosh, Amitav, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 21, 22, 28–32, 33n7, 61, 62, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 100, 103n28, 137–47, 199– 208, 208n1, 208n4, 208n5, 209n6 Ghosh, Joydip, 13, 137–47 Ghosh, Joyjit, 14, 179–95 Ghosh, Kunal, 26 Gillespie, M. A., 145 Global North 2, 201 global warming, 3, 183–86 Global South, 2, 12, 83 Godfrey, Luke, 145, 146 Goodbody, Axel, 77 Gore, Al, 92, 228 green criminology, 11, 37–47 green humour, 9 the grotesque, 125–34 Guha, Ramachandra, 33n6, 41, 42, 45, 100, 106 Haraway, Donna, 3, 8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 63 Hawthorne, Susan, 25 Heckenberg, Diane, 44–45 Heise, Ursula, 85, 180, 183 Hewitt, Kenneth, 3 Hiaasen, Carl, 24 The Himalayas, 37–47 Hobbes, Thomas, 145 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 159 Horkheimer, Max, 63 Hoskote, Ranjit, 190 Hultman, Karin, 52 Hume, Angela, 180 hurricanes, 2 hydropower projects, 1 imaginaries, 2, 3 Ingram, David, 228 Irshad, S. Mohammed, 129

239

Jain, Rahul, 233 Jalais, Annu, 205, 209n7 James, Erin, 51 Jharkhand, 3, 14, 165–77 Joseph, Jacquleen, 128 Joshi, Hridayesh, 2, 11, 38–39, 42–43, 45–46 Joshi, Umasankar, 154 Joshimath, 1, 37–38, 42, 156–57 Kane, Sean, 57 Kannabiran, Vasanth, 7 Kant, Immanuel, 54 Kanth, Rajani Kannepalli, 54 Kapoor, Abhishek, 9 Kasaragod, 6, 13, 125–34 Kashmir, 10 Keats, John, 186, 188, 189 Kedarnath Valley, 1, 11, 37–47 Kephart, Beth, 25 Kerketta, Jacinta, 3, 14, 165–77 Kerridge, Richard, 128 King, Stephen, 177 Kolkata [Calcutta], 30, 68–70, 138, 143 Koll, Roxy Mathew, 140 Krebber, Andre, 127 Kumar, Ravi, 215 Kumar, Sanjay, 220 Kumar, Sukrita Paul, 4, 181–82 Kutumbarao, Akkineni, 7, 8 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 12, 61–72 land subsidence, 1, 10, 40 Laskar, Samrat, 12, 89–101 Latour, Bruno, 143 Lawrence, D. H., 190, 191 Lehane, Denis, 24 Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi, 52 Lewis, Simon, 90 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 195n31 Locke, John, 144, 145 Lovelock, James, 97 Madhya Pradesh, 4 The Mahabharata, 39–40

240

Index

Mahapatra, Jayanta, 179, 186, 188 Maharashtra, 235n2 Malhotra, Chirdeep, 97 Mallabarman, Adwaita, 25–26 Malladi, Amulya, 100 Malone, Karen, 51 Mangad, Ambikasutan, 2–3, 6, 13, 125–34 Marcuse, Herbert, 70 Markandaya, Kamala, 12, 105–19 Maslin, Mark, 90 Mathai, Mahesh, 212 Mathew, Varun Thomas, 12, 93–95, 97, 101 Mbembé, J–A, 118, 221 McKibben, Bill, 23, 81, 137–38 Meek, Margret, 52 Menon, Kay Kay, 212 Mika, Carl, 51 Mills, Sara, 220, 221 Mining, 176 Modak, Debabrata, 15, 211–23 Moore, Helen, 180 Morton, Timothy, 180, 190, 204 mourning, 12, 118 Mukherjee, Upamanyu P., 82 Mumbai, 9, 12, 13, 93–100, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143 Murthy, Sudha, 53 Murugan, Perumal, 12, 77–86 mythical imagination, 49–58 Nancy, Jean Luc, 50 Nandy, Ashis, 105 Narmadā Bānchāo Andolon, 162n1 Narmada Dam, 8 Nayar, Pramod K., 9, 15, 113, 181, 200, 208n2, 214 Newton, Isaac, 145 Nihaani, Govind, 229 Nixon, Rob, slow violence, 6–7, 11, 13, 20, 32, 33n2, 125, 126, 128, 134, 200, 203 Nocella, Anthony, 131 Nussbaum, Martha, 52–53

Odisha, 9 Oliver–Smith, Anthony, 3 Oreskes, Naomi, 90–91 Osborne, Gillian, 180 Palmer, Vance, 25 Panda, Nila Madhab, 9, 231, 232 Pandey, Dheeraj, 12, 105–19 Pandey, Richa Joshi, 12, 105–19 Parkar, Medha, 162n1 Pattnaik, Devadutt, 53 Penn, Kal, 215 pesticides, 13, 125–34 plastic pollution, 3 Plumwood, Val, 44, 68 Poe, Edgar Allan, 24 poetry, 3, 14, 158–59, 166–67, 170–77, 179–95 Poray–Wydranowska, Justyna, 30 postcoloniality, 4, 12, 13, 68–70, 79, 226, 227 posthumanism, 11, 82 poverty, 4 Pradyumna, Adithya, 126 Prince, Gerald, 115 Puchner, Martin, 62 Punjab, 127, 229 Quijano, Romeo, 126 Raghuraman, Nethra, 212 Ramesh, Mridula, 41–42 Rangarajan, Swarnalatha, 205 Rashtrapati Bhavan 183 Rastogi, Pallavi, 226 Rasula, Jed, 195n40 Rautio, Pauliina, 52 Ray, Pratibha, 25 Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 129, 130 Ready, Kevin, 33n4 Reeman, Douglas, 24 Rigby, Kate, 21 Rigveda, 152–53 river pollution, 10 Roberts, Julia, 228

Index

Robinson, Marilynne, 24 Romantic ecology, 161 Roy, Arundhati, 100 Roy, Sumana, 184 Ruddiman, W. F., 90 Rushdie, Salman, 30 Saetra, Henrik Skaug, 144 Sahgal, Nayantara, 100 Samkaria, Ashwarya, 15, 199–209 Sanyal, Devapriya, 15, 225–35 Saranda, 173–74 Sardar Sarovar Dam, 162n1 Sarkar, Sonali, 189 Sasen, Saskia, 65 Scarr, Simon, 56 Schätzing, Frank, 33n4 Schumacher, E. F., 42 Scigaj, Leonard, 179, 193n3 Sekhsaria, Pankaj, 4, 29 Sen, Orijit, 8 Sen, Sudeep, 3, 182, 185 Senapati, Tarakeshwar, 15, 211–23 Sengupta, Joy, 215 Sengupta, Kalyan, 154, 161 Sengupta, Kiriti, 187 Shah, Naseeruddin, 212 Shakespeare, William, 24 Sharma, Mohan, 9 Sharma, Susheel Kumar, 179 Sheen, Martin, 215 Shikhandin, 183 Shiva, Kartikey, 126–27 Shiva, Vandana, 45, 126–27, 132 Shoptaw, John, 180, 191 Sibara, Jay, 129 Sikkim, 132 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 92 Singh, Aparnaa, 229, 230 Singh, Roshan Raj, 14, 165–77 Singh, Vandana, 100 Sinha, Indra, 6, 100 Slovic, Scott, 15, 201, 206, 208 Soderbergh, Steven, 228 smog, 3

241

soil erosion, 11 Soman, Dona, 11, 49–58 Sontag, Susan, 227 species extinction, 3, 188–91 Spenser, Edmund, 192 Spicer, Chrystopher J., 24 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 4 Sreepadre, 129 Steward, George R., 24 Stoermer, Eugene F., 62, 90 Sundarbans, 10, 28–32, 199–209 Sural, Goutam Buddha, 14, 151–62 Swyngedouw, Erik, 34n8 Tagore Rabindranath, 14, 151–62 Taylor, Diana, 13, 107–08, 110, 111 Temin, Elizabeth, 2 Terang, Longbir, 181 Thomas, Dylan, 194n20 Thornber, Karen L., 31 Tiwari, Paresh, 187 Toor, Salman, 10 trauma, 12, 77–86, 118 Trexler, Adam, 21, 62, 86 tsunami, 4, 72, 142 Umunc, Himmet, 152 Upadhyaya, Jagriti, 191–92 Upanishads, 153, 154 urbanization, 3 Vachharajani, Bijal, 12, 93, 98–100, 101 Vecsey, Christopher, 54 Vedas, 153 Vermeulen, Pieter, 20, 35 Vidyarthi, Lalita Prasad, 166 Voie, Christian Hummelsund 184 Wahl, Daniel Christian 53 Walker, Alice, 168 Wallace, Molly, 4, 182 Walton, Samantha, 180 Ward, Jesmyn, 25 White, Lynn, Jr., 145 White, Patrick, 25

242

White, Rob, 44–45 Whitmore, Luke, 39, 47 wildfires, 202 Wisner, Ben, 3 Woodhouse, Richard, 186

Index

Wordsworth, William, 156, 160 Wright, Alexis, 25 Yadav, Rajpal, 215

About the Contributors

Tajuddin Ahmed works as an associate professor in the Department of English, Aliah University, Kolkata, West Bengal. He has published academic papers on a wide variety of topics including Latin American fiction, Dalit poetry, and Partition literature. His area of research is early writings of Indian Muslim women. Author and editor of several books including Travel Writing, Writing Travel: An Anthology of Critical Essays, Dr. Ahmed writes essays, review articles, and short stories in Bengali, which have been published in newspapers and magazines like Anadabazar Patrika, Desh, Baromas, Ei Samai, and Boi er Desh. Sk Tarik Ali, an assistant professor in English in the West Bengal Education Service, teaches in the PG Department of English, Hooghly Mohsin College, Chinsurah, Hooghly, West Bengal, India. He has completed his PhD on the representation of resource conflicts in Indian eco-fiction from the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. He has published research articles and book chapters on a variety of topics including eco-cinema, cyclone fiction, nuclear literature, and cli-fi, among others. Sharada Allamneni is a professor in the Department of English, at Vignan’s Foundation for Science, Technology and Research (a deemed to be university), India. She has three decades of rich experience in teaching courses on language and literature for students at both bachelor’s and master’s level. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, literary theory, gender studies, ELT, and education theory. Risha Baruah is currently pursuing her PhD from the Department of English, Cotton University, with specializations in research areas such as ecocritcism, animal studies, anthropocene studies and posthumanism, and Indian literature. She has contributed to research through chapters in national and international books along with national journals that have been UGC-CARE 243

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About the Contributors

approved along with other UGC journals that have Scopus and web of science index. She has been engaged in part-time teaching for more than two years in the Department of English (Cotton University, B. Barooah College, and S. B. Deorah College). She has also written academic content for university books (for UG and PG levels in the Department of English in IDOL and KKHOU respectively). Further, she has been constantly providing services as a freelancing reviewer to journals such as AJILE and LLIDS as well as to PhD research scholars from various departments in Cotton University. She had completed her master’s degree in English literature from the Department of English, Cotton University, as a Gold Medalist in the year 2016. At present, she is also a part of the reviewing team of Aesthetique Journal for International Literary Enterprises (AJILE) and Language, Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS). In addition, she has also been engaged as a resource person to college level academic events. At the moment, she is working as an assistant professor in the Department of English, D. K. Girls’ College. Shreya Bhattacharji is associate professor in the Department of English Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, India. Her academic interests include postcolonial studies, especially African, Afro-American, Caribbean, queer and women’s writings, border and partition studies, and contemporary literary theories. She has published widely and has been invited to numerous conferences in India as also in the United States, France, Hungary, South Africa, and South Korea. Formerly a civil services officer, she also nurtures a keen interest in human rights, and tribal and gender issues. Debajyoti Biswas is associate professor and head of English Department at Bodoland University, Assam. His research areas are Northeast India, nationalism and identity, and environmental humanities. He teaches courses on critical theory, environment and literature, and Anglophone writings from Northeast India. His writings have appeared in international journals like Journal of International Women’s Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, English: Journal of the English Association, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Postcolonial Studies, Revista Interdisciplinar de Literatura e Ecocrítica, The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Policing: Journal of Policy and Practice, Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communication. He has coedited two books—Nationalism in India: Texts and Contexts (2021) and Global Perspectives on Nationalism (2022). He is currently working on a book titled Disabilities in Northeast India (forthcoming in 2023). He is the founding editor of Transcript: An E-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies (Published by Department of English, Bodoland University).

About the Contributors

245

Sonalika Chaturvedi is an institute fellow (PhD) and teaching assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand (India). She has presented papers in national and international conferences held in India. She is working in the field of environmental humanities with particular focus on ecological disasters narratives. Renu Bhadola Dangwal is assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand. She has published in several national and international journals and books. Her research pursuits explore central issues in postcolonial and eco-cultural studies including her reading of eco-cultural threat in Mahasweta Devi’s narratives. She has also worked on indigenous experiences in the light of multiculturalism and human rights and has presented her studies in prestigious conferences and seminars. Shruti Das is professor and head, Department of English, and director, Centre for Canadian Studies Berhampur University. She is a critic, translator, and poet, writing bilingually in English and her native tongue Odia. She has given lectures as plenary and keynote speaker in many national and international seminars and webinars on English language, literature, and ecocriticism in India, Malaysia, Nepal, the United States, and many European countries. She has been a visiting lecturer in two Universities in Poland and has the distinction of being placed in the ALA Directory of Scholars, Princeton University. She has the honour of being the guest editor of the special issue Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis of the eTropic journal (September 2021). She has published more than seventy research articles in reputed journals. One of her papers has been cited in the seminal book Ecolinguistics written by Prof Arran Stibbe (2021). She has written the foreword in Crisis of Imagination published in 2018. She has published eleven books (including two volumes of poetry). Seven Scholars have been awarded a PhD and twenty-one an MPhil under her supervision. She is widely traveled and is a member of the board of editors and a member of the advisory body of many national and international literary journals. She is the editor of Literary Oracle, a highly acclaimed peer reviewed journal. Her poetry has been published in many anthologies and journals in India and abroad. She has been placed in the Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Writers for her first volume of poems. She has received the ASLE Travel Award–2019 at the University of California (Davis). Her special interests are postcolonialism, ecocriticism, South Asian feminism, Indian aesthetics, and English language teaching. Joydip Ghosh bears a long teaching career. He was engaged as an assistant professor of English at Chanchal College, Chanchal, Malda since December

246

About the Contributors

2000. He has a number of publications in academic journals, both at national and international levels. His articles have been published in Symposium, Literature and Society, Comsomath, The Criterion: An International Journal in English, and the Galaxy International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. He has presented papers in national and international seminars and has published articles in several books such as Different Americas: Resituating American Identity in the Post 9/11 Third Worldian Classroom and Literary Theory: Textual Application as well as other prestigious publication houses. He has also coedited a book titled Spirituality and English Literature. Currently he is working as an assistant professor of English (senior grade) at Magrahat College, Magrahat, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal. Joyjit Ghosh is professor, Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India. His published works include a fair number of articles/book chapters on D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahasweta Devi, among other great minds. His book Imaging D. H. Lawrence: His Mind and Art in Letters (2012) has been widely acclaimed by Lawrence scholars. His research interests include Indian writing in English, Bangla Dalit literature, environmental studies, vegan studies, diasporic literature, and translation studies. The Bleeding Border: Stories of Bengal Partition (2022), coedited with Mir Ahammad Ali, is one of his recent publications. Samrat Laskar is an associate professor of English in the West Bengal Education Service. After teaching in different colleges across the state, he is presently serving as a joint director of public instruction, education directorate, Government of West Bengal, and is now posted at GTA, Darjeeling. Having earned a PhD from the University of Calcutta in 2013, he has published extensively in the areas of ecocriticism, postcolonial fiction, cultural studies, and linguistics. He can be contacted at his email id: samlas0@ gmail.com. Samit Kumar Maiti is presently working as an assistant professor in the Department of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, Jhargram, West Bengal. He has been awarded a PhD degree by Vidyasagar University, for his doctoral thesis titled “From Nationalism to Universal Humanism: A Study of the Select Writings of Rabindranath Tagore.” His articles appeared in such journals as Middle Flight, Wisdom and Himalayan Culture, The International Journal of English Language and Literature, and Literary Insight. He has presented papers in many national and international level seminars and conferences. His other areas of interest include Indian English literature, diasporic literature, environmental humanities, and postcolonial literature.

About the Contributors

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Debabrata Modak is an assistant professor of English at the Centre for Distance and Online Education, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. He has presented a paper titled “Politicising the Mystic: Understanding the Anti-Orientalist Approach in Sri Aurobindo’s Critique of Freudian Psychoanalysis” in an international webinar on “Makers of Indian Literature,” organized by the Department of English, Vidyasagar University on 28 January 2022. His area of interest includes political philosophy, British romantic poetry, and the literature of the subaltern. He is currently working on his first novel. Dheeraj Pandey is a 2004 batch Indian Forest Service officer from the Uttarakhand cadre. He is a fellow of the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy and holds master’s and PhD degrees in agronomy and advanced plant physiology. He is a recipient of the prestigious HRH Prince of Wales Commonwealth Scholarship, which enabled him to earn an MPhil degree in conservation leadership from the University of Cambridge, UK, where he focused on an interdisciplinary approach to conservation, finance, innovation, governance and management. He has also worked on a project with Fauna & Flora International, with particular focus on Marine Protected Areas and a strategic assessment of the Blue Carbon field in Honduras, Turkey, Tanzania, and Kenya. Currently posted as the field director, Corbett Tiger Reserve, Dr. Pandey has over eighteen years of experience in the field of natural resource management in the upper and middle Himalayan ecosystems. As additional secretary (forest and environment), Government of Uttarakhand and as joint director, directorate of environment conservation and climate change, Government of Uttarakhand, he has also worked at the policy and planning level in the government sector. Dr. Pandey is a nature and wildlife enthusiast, by passion and profession. He loves his work and finds his sanctuary in the natural landscape of Uttarakhand and his own humble collection of books. Richa Joshi Pandey is an assistant professor at the Department of English, School of Languages, Doon University, Dehradun, where she has been working for the last eight years. She earned her PhD on Amitav Ghosh from HNBGU, Garhwal University, Srinagar, Uttarakhand. She trained as a physiotherapist and worked at Nanavati Hospital, Mumbai, before completing her master’s degree in English literature. Her areas of interest include environmental humanities, medical humanities, Indian writing in English, literary theory and criticism, as well as gender studies. She has published research papers and articles in journals of national and international repute and has organized and convened various national and international workshops, seminars, symposia, and conferences.

248

About the Contributors

Ashwarya Samkaria is currently working as an independent researcher. She has a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi (India) and in performance studies from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi (India). Her research interests are ecocriticism, performance studies, postcolonial literatures, and creative writing. Her ecofictions have been published by EcoCast, official podcast of the Association of the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), Benelux Association for the Study of Art, Culture, and the Environment (BASCE), and Samyukta Fiction. Her writings on ecocriticism in Indian fiction have been recently published as a journal essay in Ecozon@ (European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment) and as book chapters in edited collections such as Reading Contemporary South Asian Literature: A Postcolonial-Ecocritical Approach and Postcolonial Literature: Selected Essays on Past, Present and Future Trends. Her article on body and performance has been published in the recent issue of the journal Performance Research. She has also been trained in the (neo)classical dance form Odissi and has performed abroad and extensively in India. She aspires to teach literatures in English and write novels. Devapriya Sanyal is an assistant professor, Department of English, Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She has degrees in English literature and cinema from Lady Brabourne College, Calcutta, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD was based on the cinema of Satyajit Ray. Her monograph on Satyajit Ray, titled Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema: The Women in Satyajit Ray’s Films was published in December 2021. She is also the author of Salman Khan: The Man, The Actor, The Legend published in January 2022. She is also the author of From Text to Screen: Issues and Images in Schindler’s List, Through the Eyes of a Cinematographer: The Biography of Soumendu Roy. At present she is working on another book on cinema which is to be published in 2023. Tarakeshwar Senapati is now working as assistant professor in Department of Environmental Science, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. Dr. Senapati has completed his MSc, MPhil, and PhD degree in environmental science from the University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. His area of research includes ecotoxicology, monitoring of environmental pollution, and climate change. Now he is working on socio-cultural issues related to degradation and conservation of environment. Roshan Raj Singh has completed his master’s degree in English from Central University of Jharkhand. His master’s dissertation was titled “Ecological Violence and It’s Ramification: A Study of Climate Change Through Select Texts.” At present he is a junior research fellow at the Department of English

About the Contributors

249

Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. His areas of interest include climate fiction, dalit literature, holocaust literature, and partition literature. Scott Slovic is university distinguished professor of environmental humanities at the University of Idaho. He served as the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in the early 1990s, and from 1995 to 2020 was the editor in chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, a central journal in the field of ecocriticism. His many books include, most recently, the coedited volumes Nature and Literary Studies and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the MedicalEnvironmental Humanities. Dona Soman is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand. Her area of research is posthumanism and children’s literature. She has presented papers at national and international conferences across India. She also has a Scopus indexed paper in a reputed journal. She has experience of teaching at university and school levels. Goutam Buddha Sural, professor, Department of English, Bankura University, has been in teaching since 1990. Prior to joining his present institution, he served as associate professor in Bankura Christian College and as professor of English at Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, briefly. He went to Bristol University, UK, in 2006 as a visiting fellow. He is the author of a book, Hopkins and Pre-Raphaelitism, and has edited four books on tribal life. A number of his papers have been published in different national and international journals and books. His areas of interest are Victorian poetry, Indian English literature, and tribal and Dalit studies.