Sundarbans Disappeared, Kolkata Drowned: Climate Peril, Planetary Precarity and the Uncanny in Wade

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.