From Padma’s Bank to Gun Island: A Narrative of Ecological Witnessing

In 2016, when Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement came into prominence, he made an argument through this book that climate change is not only a problem of politics or science but also a crisis of literature and imagination. To him modern bourgeois fictions view the non-human or the environment as a mere background to stage human drama. As a result the modern fictions that was initiated in the 19th century and still dominating the literary world, fail to confront or bear testimony to phenomena like climate change. The reason he provided, was that of modern fictions inclination towards “probability,” “realism,” and “regularity of bourgeois life,” which he calls “derangement.” However, this paper challenges Ghosh’s diagnosis or his argument, which is basically based on modern English fiction, by discussing four fictions from Bengal delta. It ranges from Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi (1936), to Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1956), to Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019) through a single, evolving practice of ecological witnessing. This essay uses these texts as counter-archive, where it will try to establish that fictions from Bengal Delta never rejected or neglected its non-human part ever. This essay tries to read this dialectic through a special lens, called ‘ecological witnessing’. By the term ‘ecological witnessing’ I mean a voice, a record in literature on behalf of those who find it difficult or fails to raise their voice in front of the word. It is a testimony that refers to harm, damage or catastrophe done to a body of non-human. It could be a river, a forest, animals, insects or the very body of flora and fauna. Therefore the key thrust of this essay is to see the drying up of river, gradual degradation of mangrove forest, decrease of fishing stocks, rise of silt bed on river or beached dolphin not as the setting or the symbol of a human drama. Instead the paper will see them as ‘ecological witness’ that literature preserves or bear. In order to make the argument clear, this paper draws together testimony theory of Giorgio Agamben, Shoshana Felman and Laub, Rob Nixon’s account of slow violence, Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thesis of geological agency, and Ghosh’s own argument from The Great Derangement. In so doing this paper shade light to a riverine and mythic tradition where non-human holds a position of an agent.