Slow Disaster, Changing Ecological Landscape and Disability: A Critical Reading of Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga

Abstract

Ambikasutan Mangad’s novel Swarga which was translated into English by J. Devika is a saga of the enormous suffering of the indigenous people of a village in Kerala named Enmakaje as a consequence of neocolonial endeavour of slow poisoning the environment in God's own country by spraying of poisonous pesticide endosulfan aerially over cashew plantations of Kerala to drive tea mosquitos. Mangad blatantly exposed the various facets of this anthropogenic chemical disaster through literary imagination. The paper argues how the western, patriarchal model of development oppress nature as well as the marginalised strata of society through so-called modernisation in agriculture and its implementation through mono-crop farming and the use of poisonous pesticides. I intend to examine how the novelist presented plights of the neocolonised victims due to slow disaster and how this “faction” portrayed the discernible manifestation of anthropogenic disaster. It seeks to show how the novel depicted the difference between the "survival environmentalism" of developing nations and the “postmaterialist environmentalism” of developed nations. It looks into how this novel portrayed the termination of "normalcy" both for human being and the environment. The paper discusses how the novelist represented the pangs and sufferings of the disabled who were the victims of state-sponsored chemical disaster. Finally, the paper will focus on how a creative work like Mangad's novel becomes a "cultural apparatus" in understanding the narratives of environmental rights.