Toxic Bodies, Drowning Islands: Slow Violence and Vernacular Ecologies in South Asian Environmental Fiction

Abstract

Recent criticism of climate fiction has framed the genre's central problem as one of scale: the gap between human-sized narration and planetary process. This essay argues that such a framing, built largely on Euro-American novels, leaves out a second and equally formative problem, which is the problem of location. In South Asian environmental fiction, the Anthropocene seldom appears as an unrepresentable totality. It arrives instead as poison in a particular body, salt water in a particular village, and a pesticide sprayed over a particular hillside. Drawing on Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence, the "environmentalism of the poor" theorised by Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier, and Stacy Alaimo's account of trans-corporeality, the essay reads four texts: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004), Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), Ambikasuthan Mangad's Malayalam novel Enmakaje (2009; translated by J. Devika as Swarga, 2017), and Mahasweta Devi's novella "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" (translated from Bengali by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Imaginary Maps, 1995). It identifies three formal strategies th rough which these works narrate environmental harm: the damaged body as narrator and archive; the vernacular, multilingual texture that ties ecological knowledge to local speech; and the conflict between conservation and survival, in which the nonhuman is never innocent of human politics. The essay concludes that South Asian environmental fiction does not so much resolve the scalar disjuncture of the Anthropocene as relocate it, measuring planetary process against the endurance of the marginal body.