https://ir.vidyasagar.ac.in/jspui/handle/123456789/7258 2026-02-17T14:45:33Z 2026-02-17T14:45:33Z Ali, Dr Sk Tarik https://ir.vidyasagar.ac.in/jspui/handle/123456789/7382 2025-02-20T02:06:41Z 2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Sundarbans Disappeared, Kolkata Drowned: Climate Peril, Planetary Precarity and the Uncanny in Wade Authors: Ali, Dr Sk Tarik Abstract: Upamanyu Bhattacharyya and Kalp Sanghvi’s Wade (2020) is a dystopian eco-horror animated short film that imagines Kolkata as a deserted wetland after the climatic apocalypse inhabited only by a band of climate refugees and a roving gang of hungry tigers from the Sundarbans. Through scary frames of the landmark places of the climate-imperilled city in the first part and the dreadful encounter between the human survivors and the aggressive predators making extreme choices for survival on the flooded streets of the abandoned city towards the end, this “cinema of catastrophe” (Keane) engages with such significant issues as planetary crisis, climate migration, climate change denial, plastic pollution, endangered ecosystem and the human-animal conflict for survival in a vulnerable ecology. This paper reads Wade through the lens of “eco-horror studies” (Tidwell and Soles) to see how the film imagines a climate-ravaged future by representing the city of Kolkata as an inhospitable and unfamiliar space where death, displacement and disorder prevail. It focuses on how the eco-cinema evokes the idea of “ecoprecarity” (Nayar) in its representation of the fragility and contingency of human lives in a world of anthropogenic geological disaster where all forms of life are uncannily precarious. Finally, it engages with how the uncertain lives, bizarre scenes, spectral landscape, and empty public spaces produce an “ecological uncanny” (Carroll) which serves as an eco-cautionary trope in making people see an ominous climate future, a catastrophe of their own making. Description: PP:136-147

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z Balo, Baloram Dhabak, Dr. Mahamadul Hassan https://ir.vidyasagar.ac.in/jspui/handle/123456789/7381 2025-02-20T02:05:23Z 2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Relocating “Slow Violence” within the Discourse of Anthropocene in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up Authors: Balo, Baloram; Dhabak, Dr. Mahamadul Hassan Abstract: On May 10, 2024, The Times of India reported that Venezuela was the first country to lose all its glaciers due to climate change. Now, the question arises: Whom should we hold accountable for that? The obvious answer is the Anthropos, who are responsible for the Anthropocene to which the earth’s geology, ecosystem, and climate are subjected. The discourse of Anthropocene questions the idea of a singular Anthropocene as, according to Claire Colebrook, there is no singular Anthropocene, but there are many. It also questions who/what affects and who/what is affected. The “biopolitics” of the Anthropocene is interlinked to violence. This violence exercises exclusionary politics and results in the gradual degradation of the environment that affects not only humans but every other entity on the earth and leads towards a precarious survival, which, according to Elizabeth Povinelli, is the “anthropology of ordinary suffering”. Rob Nixon introduced the phrase “slow violence”, which includes environmental degradation, long-term pollution and climate change. Taking the cue from Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, this paper aims to relocate it within the discourse of the Anthropocene in John Brunner’s dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up (1972). The novel takes place in an unspecified year in the near future when human activities have resulted in the wholesale destruction of the environment. Therefore, this paper aims to use Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” along with John Galtung’s “structural violence”, Michel Foucault’s “making live and letting die”, and Georgio Agamben’s “bare life” to show how human activities guided by economic greed, power, anthropocentric worldview, and global capitalism results in the ecological and climatological destruction. It will also try to show how the dystopian narrative can significantly shape ecological consciousness. Description: PP:1-11

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z Mukherjee, Dr Indrajit https://ir.vidyasagar.ac.in/jspui/handle/123456789/7363 2025-02-18T03:17:02Z 2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Title: “This was no Swarga”: Negotiating ‘Ecoprecarity’ and Mythology in Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale Authors: Mukherjee, Dr Indrajit 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. Description: PP:12-25

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z Rani, Jyoti https://ir.vidyasagar.ac.in/jspui/handle/123456789/7362 2025-02-18T03:16:20Z 2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Voices of the Marginalised: Environmental and Social Struggle in Ho Tribal Poems Authors: Rani, Jyoti Abstract: The indigenous community named Ho in Jharkhand traditionally exhibits a profound sense of responsibility towards their ancestral territories and resources, portraying themselves as guardians of their own habitats. Their association to their sacred locations, ancestral burial sites, and culturally significant areas is strong. However, the pre- and post-colonial interferences into the tribal world impacted their social bonds, communal values, and cultural traditions. Therefore, an illustration of this is the initiation of development projects purportedly for the benefit of the Ho community. One such project, the Subarnarekha Multi-purpose Project, was proposed in 1973 and aimed at constructing dams, barrages, reservoirs, and canals in Jharkhand. A dam was planned for construction at a place called Icha near Chaibasa in West Singhbhum of Jharkhand, forcing the clearance of tribal land, which, in turn, resulted in extensive deforestations in the Ho area. Surprisingly, a Jungle Kaato Andolan was also launched by the Government of India in 1978. This resulted in the rise of anti-government sentiments, social exclusion, displacement, detachment from their land, and an identity crisis. Hence, this paper seeks to explore the distressing encounters of the Ho community in Jharkhand during the colonial and postcolonial periods through the analysis of select Ho poetry. The study will employ Subaltern Theory to examine epistemic violence and Frantz Fanon’s concept of mimetic violence. The poems under scrutiny serve as a poignant portrayal of the intersections between government policies, environmental crises, indigenous crises of livelihood and identity, on the one hand, and varied Ho literature that responds to these issues, on the other hand. Description: PP:26-36

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z