Words for Water: Wetland Lexicons, Flood Memory and Ecolinguistics in Kerala Fiction

Abstract

In August 2018, Kerala's worst floods in nearly a century were measured against an older disaster remembered by name: "the flood of ninety-nine," the great flood of 1924, called after its year in the Malayalam calendar. Taking this linguistic survival as its starting point, the essay argues that Kerala's literature of water works as a lexical and narrative archive of ecological knowledge. Recent criticism of climate fiction has emphasised the gap between human-sized narration and planetary process. This essay proposes that a regional language offers an intermediate scale, larger than any individual and older than any lifetime, through which environmental memory is carried. Drawing on ecolinguistics (Einar Haugen, Luisa Maffi, Arran Stibbe), Robert Macfarlane's work on place-words and Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence, it reads three texts: Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's short story "Vellappokkathil" ("In the Flood"), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and Sarah Joseph's Malayalam novel Aathi (2011; translated by Valson Thampu as Gift in Green). It shows how these works preserve a vocabulary of floods, paddy fields, canals and embankments that encodes how water moves and how communities have lived with it, and how they register the degradation of wetlands and rivers as a loss of language. The essay concludes that an ecolinguistic reading, attentive to vocabulary, translation and community storytelling, can recover forms of environmental knowledge that criticism focused on English and on planetary scale tends to miss.