Progress versus Regress: Critiquing Sen’s River of Stories in the Context of Hydrocolonialism

Abstract

Postmodern discourses are exhaustively suspicious of the Eurocentric notion of ‘Progress’. Progress in human civilization in the material sense has been accelerated through modern technoscience and instrumental rationality. Progress therefore exemplifies one of the key signifiers in Modern epistemology. Modernist discourses believe in the idea of progress which is liner and chronological in character. Modernist ideologies aided in harbouring an anthropocentric attitude towards Nature which invariably typified the inception of the era of the anthropocene. Colonialism as an immediate and an ‘unfortunate’ aftermath of Enlightenment Modernity caused a systematic destruction of Nature. Nature eventually broke down both literally and metaphorically. Afterwards colonialist ideologies began taking up multifarious strategies for domination. Hydrocolonialism is one such paradigm which centres around confiscation of waterbodies for capitalist gains at the cost of rigorously dismantling the ecofriendly ways of living of indigenous populace. Orijit Sen’s River of Stories (2022) is a graphic novel which deals with colonialization of water through the construction of Rewa Sagar Dam which is subsequently followed by gruesome expostulation carried out by the Adivasis of Jamli village. Sen compellingly illustrates the tension among the Adivasis which is exacerbated through hydrocolonializing effects like displacement, migration, dispossession of land, loss of the indigenous knowledge systems etcetera. Sen’s acute expertise in presenting a graphic text as a ‘serious fiction’ is furnished with the propagation of a decolonial stance through tribal ecoconsciousness. The Adivasis are seen clinging onto a ‘regressive’ outlook which denounces the Modern vision of progress by reverting back to their earlier standards of living driven by environmental ethics. This paper is a modest attempt to analyze how ‘regression’ works as a modus operandi in the decolonial project against hydrocolonialism.