ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND POSTCOLONIAL SOUTH ASIA: AN ECO-AESTHETIC READING OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN NOVELS

Abstract

This thesis attempts to explore, through a reading of postcolonial South Asian novels, the environmental crisis in (post)colonial South Asia. Environmental crisis in (post)colonial South Asia is understood as a combination of social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological crises emerging from processes of (post)colonial modernisation and its uneven development. These crisis conditions are manifested through several environmental catastrophes – war, genocide, communal violence, climate change, and so on. By analysing three environmental catastrophes and its consequent crises as reflected on three marginalised communities – the female Muktijoddhas in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the indigenous Gujjar communities in the aftermath of 9/11 Pakistan, and the poor communities of Sundarbans, India on the onslaught of 2009 Cyclone Aila and rapid consequences of climate change – this thesis argues that a detailed reading of the dialectic of (post)colonial modernisation and environmental crises can offer crucial insights into the environment of postcolonial South Asia. This thesis claims that novels through which socially committed writers register these catastrophic events and their traumatic aftermath are capable of documenting this dialectic through their experimental use of the aesthetics of realism. However, since these catastrophic crises differ in their characteristics, orientation, and outcomes to different marginalised communities, the aesthetics of realism undergoes several stylistic innovations. These experiments are shaped by adapting the aesthetics of realism to the narrative modes specific to an environmental catastrophe. Thus, to represent the marginalisation of female Muktijoddhas in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, this thesis argues, Selina Hossain uses eco-musical realism aesthetics, while Uzma Aslam Khan represents the exploitation of Gujjar communities in postcolonial Pakistan in the aftermath of 9/11 through an eco-folkloric realism aesthetics. For the climate crisis in the aftermath of 2009 Cyclone Aila, Amitav Ghosh uses the eco-mythical irrealism aesthetics. These eco-aesthetics in the selected novels transform the aesthetics of realism and shape the literary form of realism into a profoundly varied and experimental entity. In contrast to the prevalent literary perspective that environmental crises impose imaginative crisis, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial South Asian context, the environmental crises have provoked several ecologically conscious, innovative, and experimental forms of ‘postcolonial eco-aesthetics’.