“This was no Swarga”: Negotiating ‘Ecoprecarity’ and Mythology in Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale

Abstract

In his seminal work, Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019), Pramod Nayar defines “ecoprecarity” as the representation of “the precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster” (7). This concept of ecoprecarity also brings to the surface the numerous ways the dialectics of the environment get “rendered precarious due to human intervention in the Anthropocene” (7). Ambikasutan Mangad’s acclaimed Malayalam novel Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017), translated into English by the eminent historian Jayakumari Devika, canvasses the years-long battle against the devastating impacts of endosulfan usage in producing extensive cashew crops at Kasaragod district, Northern Kerala. Neelakantan and Devayani, outraged by the mechanisms of the capitalistic gig economy of the metropolitan space, decide to settle in the remote, peaceful, dense jungles of Swarga to live in a deep symbiotic relationship with non-human entities. The ruinous consequences of chemical pollution at this indigenous site prompt this couple to protest against the degradation of environmental resources in association with the brave, honest journalist Jayarajan. This article maps how the prevailing idea of “ecoprecarity” as an “intertwined set of discourses of fragility, vulnerability, power relations across species” (6) pinpoints the “vulnerability of all lifeforms, their attendant ecosystems and relations between and across lifeforms” (14) in Mangad’s eco-narrative. By foregrounding Hindu mythology as a living ontological framework, this paper further interrogates how the climate catastrophe has become a peril of the rich Keralite culture and heritage as God’s own country in this fiction.