Sisyphean Resilience: The Ritual of Survival at the Face of Tiger Attacks

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Acknowledgments

I thank the organizers of the Indian Ocean World Conference, “Adaptation and Resilience to Climate and Environmental Changes in the Indian Ocean World, Past to Present” (2022) for having me present the first draft of this article. The feedback of Prof. Debjani Bhattacharya and Prof. Michael Christopher Low from the same conference has proved indispensable to the development of the final draft. I thank the organizers of the River Island Conference, Ashoka University (2023), which allowed me to garner the valuable feedback of Prof. Annu Jalais on the draft. Without the generous financial support provided by the River Island Conference, I would not have been able to travel from London to Delhi to present my work. I would not come to envision the anthropological stories collected by me from the Sundarbans for over a decade within the gamut of resilience studies without the continuous guidance and encouragement of Prof. Jenia Mukherjee. The peer reviews I received from King’s India Institute during my Work in Progression, PhD showcase and Indian Ocean Working Group presentations during my time as a Visiting Scholar have helped the article shape itself by shaking off the fetters of strict academic article organization and present itself in a more lucid structure capable of communicating with the larger audience. The collection of stories would not have been possible without the CHASE climate justice funds and the OSUN climate activism award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated from French by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

2 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 77.

3 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 77–78.

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Amrita DasGupta

Amrita DasGupta is a fully funded doctoral candidate (SOAS Research Studentship 2020) in the Department of Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She maps the stories of trafficking of climate exiles in deltas of the Indian Ocean World, expanding from Lower Deltaic Bengal to Kenya in East Africa. This research shifts focus to the aqua-centrism of borders and tyrannies of cartographies in the Indian Ocean deltas. She completed her M.Phil. titled “Bonbibi’s Sundarbans: Tiger Widows and Water Prostitutes” at Jadavpur University. This work interrogated the impact of/relation between animal attack widows and the changing norms of widowhood in relation to sex work in the Sundarbans, the world’s only Mangrove Tiger Land. She is a guest teacher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her works have been published in Economic and Political Weekly and Environment and History.