PAEDEIA: NSU Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law

From novelist Amitav Ghosh to historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the imaginative impediment at the heart of the climate crisis appears to be widely felt. Ghosh has argued that conventional novels often fail to grapple with the scale and improbability of climate change, while Chakrabarty has identified a methodological tension between postcolonial studies and the emerging field of Anthropocene scholarship. This paper attempts to reconcile the rift identified by Chakrabarty through a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of South Asian novels – that is, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India. In doing so, it argues that these texts subvert the Western anthropocentric human-nonhuman binary that Ghosh and Chakrabarty have articulated. The paper illuminates how boundaries between human and nonhuman actors are often refracted through caste and social hierarchies in South Asia, and how alternative conceptions of the natural environment and nonhuman agency are intricately woven into the narrative fabric of these works I further contend that environmental insensibility reflects a colonial mindset embedded within historical and social structures. Overall, this paper seeks to reconsider literature’s capacity to overcome its imaginative limitations in addressing climate change—a challenge both enabled and constrained by literary form, as Ghosh notes. Ultimately, the texts under analysis reveal that the project of reassessing human and nonhuman agency and reimagining their relationship in the age of the Anthropocene is well underway. In the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and more than ever, the current climate crisis underscores the urgent need for writers to engage their imagination in shaping a more ecologically conscious world.

Keywords: Postcolonial Studies, Anthropocene, Ecocriticism, South Asian Literature, Fiction.