The Environment of South Asia: Beyond Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha greatly influenced the field of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism when, at the end of the 1980s, after studying the Chipko and other peasant environmental movements in India, he pointed out, quite rightly, that deep ecology’s central tenet of distinguishing between anthropocentrism and biocentrism is of little use to the vast majority of the world’s population. Guha insisted that wilderness preservation cannot be pursued without considering social “equity and the integration of ecological concerns with livelihood and work” (Guha 1989, 71). Humans are animals, after all. We are not separate from the environment. If we are to think globally, then we must move away from deep ecology, which is an ideology for the sparsely populated regions of the world with no relevance in places like South Asia. Thus, Guha and others, such as anthropologists Annu Jalais (2010) and Radhika Govindrajan (2018), remind us not to make impossible choices protecting nonhuman animals and environment at the expense of humans or vice versa. Thanks to their work, we have come a long way toward understanding how the move from deep ecology to environmental justice has infused postcolonial theory into ecological thinking; consequently, we can no longer think of social and environmental justice, humans and nonhumans, and the global north and global south separately.

These ideas about human and nonhuman relations percolating in other disciplines are very much a part of the early work produced by postcolonial ecocritics working on South Asian texts in the first three monographs of the field published by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2010), Shazia Rahman (2019), and Sundhya Walther (2021). The essays collected in this volume of South Asian Review explore and extend a number of trajectories that have emerged at this historical moment in the development of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism. In fact, the trajectories represented in this collection are surprising in their striking variety of interests – showing how, far from consolidating around one issue, location or language, the field is alive with multiple objects, aims, and narratives. By considering glaciers, fossils, nonhuman animals, and indigeneity, these essays trace, propose, and affirm forms of resistance that contest the anthropocentric capitalism often held responsible for the exploitation of nature. Each essay, in its own way, addresses not only the questions we can and should be asking in the current moment, but also envisions the possible solutions that writers, ecocritics, and environmentalists are individually and jointly imagining in a South Asian context. Thus, these essays take the ideas of Marxists, ecofeminists, and animal studies scholars and extend them by pushing the boundaries to include questions relating to the Anthropocene, indigeneity, and caste. The result is nothing short of an exciting blend of questions and debates that can only help us as we imagine multiple future possibilities.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010) continues to be the first highly influential monograph that shaped the field of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism by analyzing a number of novels using what he theorizes as an eco-materialism which combines both ecocritical and postcolonial criticism with “Marxist historical materialism” (Mukherjee 2010, 77). As a leftist, Mukherjee differs from Guha in his thinking even as he agrees with him about the importance of critiquing deep ecology because “Humans cannot be looked at as a category distinct from the natural” (Mukherjee 2010, 64). Mukherjee asks us to think of “‘Postcolonial environments’ … [as] the entire network of human and non-human material existence that is marked by the particular dynamics of historical capital at a specific stage and location” (Mukherjee 2010, 15). This emphasis on the workings of capital and eco-materialism continues to inspire Marxist ecocritics of South Asian literature, especially Sourit Bhattacharya in this special issue. However, Bhattacharya’s essay moves beyond Mukherjee’s work by engaging a novel written in Bengali about a tribe of, arguably, Indigenous peoples of India. I say “arguably” because claims to indigeneity in India continue to be fraught, as another contributor to this special issue, Joya John, helps us understand.

Sourit Bhattacharya’s essay “Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha” explores indigeneity in Bengal and shows how this novel empathizes with the social and cultural practices of the Kahar tribe in rural Bengal who may vanish “in the face of an aggressive capitalist modernity.” He astutely analyzes the regional novel in India as “marked by a conflict between … one socio-cultural order that has encouraged … veneration of nature … and the other that sees these relations as … ‘backward.’” What makes Bhattacharya’s historical contextualization of regional ecologies particularly helpful is the fact that he ascribes the former view to Gandhi’s ruralism and the latter to Nehru’s desire for “progress.” After providing this historical context, Bhattacharya’s analysis of the novel shows that the character of Karali represents capitalist modernity because of his “logic, rationality, and way of life,” which leads him to kill a python even though the tribe considers snakes sacred. His lack of remorse is an immediate indication of the difference between his values and those of the Kahar tribe. Through this conflict in values in the novel, Bhattacharya is able to show that the novel “renders how industrialisation and modernization encroached and uprooted tribal lives.” Bhattacharya’s analysis is grounded in South Asian history and the lives and culture of Indigenous peoples as they navigate the increasing demands of capitalism.

Of the final two essays of this special issue, which are both devoted to issues of indigeneity as they relate to the environment of South Asia, the first is Joya John’s essay “The American Indian Adivasi: Writing Adivasi Indigeneity in Ranendra’s Lords of the Global Village.” This essay helpfully provides a context for the debates about Adivasi indigeneity given that official responses to Adivasi communities in India from the postcolonial nation-state and from more global forums have denied them “the status of ‘Indigenous’ peoples.” Even as John shows us the obstacles to embracing the idea of indigeneity in India, she, nonetheless, chooses to analyze Lords of the Global Village (2016) because it “is the first novel in Hindi that explicitly compares the political economy of land grab in contemporary India to the settler colonialism of the Americas.” John argues that this comparison within the novel “re-legitimises” Adivasi “countercultural narratives of minority history and subnational struggles for regional autonomy.” Set in Jharkhand, the novel describes the lives of the Asur, an Adivasi community that resists “the takeover of their lands for bauxite mining.” As such, Joya John’s analysis is crucial not only for understanding the importance of Indigenous resistance movements for protecting local environments in South Asia from global capitalism but also for expanding “the temporality of colonialism to the ongoing displacement and cultural misrepresentation of Adivasi communities in the Indian subcontinent.” In this way, Joya John helps us remember that Adivasi struggles are historical and ongoing, and that, therefore, India is a settler state.

In emphasizing indigeneity in Hindi and Bengali language novels, both John and Bhattacharya have moved well beyond the scope of Mukherjee’s ecocritical study and added further layers to postcolonial ecocriticism in South Asia. Nevertheless, other approaches, especially those that center animals and those that center gender, cannot be ignored. Taking animals seriously in a range of Indian texts is Sundhya Walther’s 2021 monograph Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature, which brings together the fields of animal studies and postcolonial studies in order to explore human and nonhuman relations. Walther’s innovative and original analysis argues that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern “is clearly and significantly applicable to nonhuman animals” (Walther 2021, 7–8). Thus, in her readings, Walther finds that disorderly multispecies living not only resists the hygiene of modernity but also creates alliances between human and nonhuman subalterns. She provides us not only with an ethics of reading but also with an ethics of representation, which we can use in our interpretations of literature and of life.

For those South Asianists with a feminist take on the environment, my Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism (Rahman 2019) analyzes a number of Pakistani women’s novels and films in order to explore alternative, environmental modes of belonging even when the texts are not overtly environmentalist. As I bring a postcolonial and feminist lens to environmental studies, my work privileges place over nation and religion in order to illuminate Pakistani women’s stories about the place that is Pakistan. My goal is to encourage scholarship about and activism in Pakistan that connect conversations about women to conversations about the environment. The ongoing effects of climate change make it vitally important that we do so.

In fact, patriarchy oppresses women and nonhuman animals and environment in similar ways and this is especially visible in the debates around animals in a postcolonial context, as Nandini Thiyagarajan shows in her essay in this special issue. Thiyagarajan extends both Walther’s work on animals that does not center gender and my work on ecofeminism that only considers animals in two chapters and caste in one. Thiyagarajan’s “Inevitable Lives: Connecting Animals, Caste, Gender, and the Environment in Perumal Murugan’s The Story of a Goat” moves beyond our work by bringing animals, caste, and gender together in a truly groundbreaking analysis that inspires us to consider the lives of animals with compassion. Thiyagarajan begins with an autobiographical prologue, which draws us into the place that is Tamil Nadu in India where, as a 13-year-old, Thiyagarajan encounters a goat who awakens her curiosity. This curiosity leads her, eventually, to contend that in the same way that the inevitability of our death does not lead us to conclude that our lives should not matter, we should not conclude that nonhuman animal lives do not matter. In fact, Thiyagarajan argues that this novel about a goat named Poonachi “resists the inevitability of Poonachi’s death” in a number of crucially important ways. First, the novel refuses “a complete denial of animal complexity” by showing the complexity of Poonachi as the main character of the novel. Second, the novel “encourages us to consider what goats might mean to each other” by depicting deep relationships between Poonachi and other goats. And lastly, the novel pairs “the inevitability of Poonachi’s death with the precarity of caste and gender” by “creating a parallel between the experiences of an ordinary goat and women who are vulnerable to similar forces of reproduction, labor, and the ‘appropriate’ uses of their bodies.” Thiyagarajan’s analysis of this novel helps us imagine a more just way of living in relation to other species.

Thiyagarajan’s insights are crucially important for helping us understand the relation between women and animals. On the one hand, since the 1980s, ecofeminists have insisted that patriarchy oppresses women and animals using similar discourses of power. The dominant hegemonic masculine discourses in our societies are as uncaring toward women as they are toward animals. Marti Kheel writes, “we must develop a little humility toward the rest of the natural world” (Kheel 1985, 44). Our lack of humility has led to everything from toxic masculinity and capitalism to colonialism, war, and environmental crisis. Later, in the 1990s, other ecofeminists like Val Plumwood (1993) and Greta Gaard (1993) continued to encourage us to take animals seriously, to include animals in our feminist fights.

On the other hand, postcolonial critics have come late to animal studies. Huggan and Tiffin (2015) outline part of the reason for this as they point out that people from postcolonial places are uncomfortable with animal rights discourses because they themselves were animalized in colonial discourses, which justified genocide. They state that the

history of western racism and its imbrication with discourses of speciesism … and … the … deployment of ‘animal’ as a derogatory term in genocidal … discourses … make it difficult even to discuss animals … in many postcolonial contexts today. (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 152)

According to Huggan and Tiffin, many people in postcolonial countries avoid talking of animal rights and human rights together. However, this line of thinking is clearly not helpful in a world where time is running out. We need to think about problems together, as Thiyagarajan does, not separately and certainly not one at a time, putting off some as we work on others. Fortunately, the delay in postcolonial studies has finally ended, as it is now clear that we must, as postcolonial ecofeminists, proceed to address all these issues together.¹

The essays collected here stretch the boundaries of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism not only by building on the Marxist, ecofeminist, and animal studies monographs I have mentioned but also, as I will show, by covering the new ground of Anthropocene fictions. Moreover, while most of the essays are about India, two of them engage with South Asian novels from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Even though most of the literature is in English, the novels from India include two that are not Anglophone. Joya John analyzes a novel in Hindi while Sourit Bhattacharya analyzes one in Bengali.

All the essays collected in this special issue are inspired by our need to analyze South Asian literature with an eye to environmental justice. Taken together, the essays consider three main issues that occupy ecocritics: Diviani Chaudhuri and Todd Kuchta write about Anthropocene fictions from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Their ecocritical insights explore the glaciers and fossils of Pakistan and the coral reefs of Sri Lanka, respectively. Nandini Thiyagarajan writes poignantly about the plight of nonhuman animals in Tamil Nadu; and Joya John and Sourit Bhattacharya write about the effects of global capitalism on Indigenous peoples and their environments in Bengal and Jharkhand in India. My groupings of these essays, however, do not show the breadth of all their work. Readers should cross over and between the trajectories offered here. For instance, while Joya John’s essay critiques “wildlife sanctuary,” especially when it displaces Indigenous communities, Nandini Thiyagarajan’s essay reminds us to think of the dignity of nonhuman animal lives as we share our environment with them. While I group Todd Kuchta’s essay with Diviani Chaudhuri’s because both discuss Anthropocene fictions, his essay resonates with Thiyagarajan’s because both essays consider an interspecies perspective. Chaudhuri’s essay is in conversation with Thiyagarajan’s as well because when Chaudhuri draws attention to our histories of colonialism, she too considers intersections between gender and environment. In each case, these essays illuminate the nonhuman animals and environment of South Asia through literary narratives, drawing attention to multiple contexts and histories while providing us with creative and compelling ways to think about the environment of South Asia.

One way in which Diviani Chaudhuri’s “Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan” extends the work I did is by engaging not only with Pakistani women cultural producers such as Uzma Aslam Khan and Kamila Shamsie, but also with a Bangladeshi Muslim woman author, Tahmima Anam. In this way, when Chaudhuri writes about individual “investments” in vernacular Pakistani landscape, she includes literature from, what is now, beyond Pakistan. In her analysis, Chaudhuri rightly points out that these individual investments, found in novels by South Asian Muslim women authors, are very different from “colonial spatial discourse” about South Asia, which tended to ignore “its ecological diversity.” Moreover, these women “have responded to the post-9/11 impoverishment in the images and ideas associated with Pakistan … by mobilizing archaeological and palaeontological understandings of Pakistan’s past and its landscapes.” These understandings help us move past current news headlines to a greater appreciation for the place that is Pakistan. Chaudhuri insists that this fiction “is part of a growing body of literatures of the global south which posits the interpretation of the landscape … as a means to generate re-contextualised local histories that swell past present geopolitical formations, reminding us that the prehistory of non-human lives and the more-than-human world far exceeds their territorialization at the moment of the inauguration of the nation-state.” Here, Chaudhuri’s important insights into glaciers and fossils in Pakistan depicted in this literature critiques nationalism by emphasizing our local yet simultaneously planetary existence.

As Todd Kuchta reminds us, when Amitav Ghosh (2016) famously insisted that literary fiction does not help us imagine climate change (7), he must not have been thinking about postcolonial South Asian literature. Continuing Diviani Chaudhuri’s analysis of South Asian Anglophone Anthropocene fictions, Todd Kuchta, in his essay “Reading Reef in the Anthropocene,” finds traces of the Anthropocene in Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera’s novel Reef even though critics often read the dying coral in the novel as symbolic of ethnic violence. As Kuchta points out, “By the late 1980s – about five years before Reef appeared – there was substantial evidence that elevated sea surface temperatures were the primary cause of mass bleaching.” Even though Salgado, the character who is a marine biologist in the novel, does not make this connection between climate change and the eroding reef, his servant “Triton slowly but surely comes to fathom what Salgado fails to grasp: carbon emissions are killing the reef,” according to Kuchta. Rather than conclude, like other critics, that “the novel’s images of dying coral and rising seas” are symbols for the nation’s violent turmoil, Kuchta’s reading of Reef flips this to conclude that “the explosive heat of the civil war” is a “symptom of our warming planet.” Todd Kuchta’s reading of Reef reminds us that the phenomena of ocean warming, sea level rise and acidification bleach and kill coral reefs. These biodiverse ecosystems develop over thousands of years and should not be reduced to merely a metaphor. In this way, Kuchta firmly places this Sri Lankan novel with other Anthropocene fictions and increases our understanding of carbon-induced destruction.

Speaking of carbon-induced havoc, for me, the road to editing these essays began with a visit to Lahore, Pakistan in the middle of smog season, December 2016. My visits in the summers had not prepared me for the intensity of the winter smog and the many reasons for its existence and continuation not only in Pakistan but across the border in India as well. Smog knows no borders. Lahore, the city of my birth, was a city of gardens that I always loved. However, on this trip, the smog made me cough, my eyes water, and my chest hurt when I inhaled it. I could not reconcile these two contradictory images of my time in Lahore, one from my childhood visiting Lawrence Gardens with my father and one so recent and painful. As I consider the environmental degradation of South Asia that I have witnessed firsthand in my own lifetime, I cannot, in good conscience, remain silent. Because I am a literary scholar, this path led me to bringing together thinkers whose concern for literary representations of South Asian environments is both rigorously intellectual and unapologetically justice-oriented. These essays participate in changes to our field of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism and open debates that address ethical questions about how to move forward with regard to environmental issues: from smog to mining, the way we treat animals to capitalism, rising seas to climate change. Refusing to endorse any single mode of inquiry or any one trajectory of explanation, these essays invite us to debate, discuss, and together newly envision our shared futures. The richness of each of these contributions has been a joy for me to read, think about, and edit. I hope you find as much to learn from them as I have.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shazia Rahman

Shazia Rahman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, South Asian literature and culture, environmental justice and ecofeminist theory. She is the author of Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women's Literary and Cinematic Fictions (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019; Lahore: Folio Books, 2021). Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Communication, and Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory.

Notes

1 See the work of Youngsuk Chae (2015), Shazia Rahman (2019), and Laura Wright (2010) for more on the simultaneous use of ecofeminist and postcolonial theory.