“Multiple Anamorphisms”: Imagining the Indigene in Pankaj Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave

Swarnalatha Rangarajan

Swarnalatha Rangarajan

Resumo

Abstract

Postcolonial ecocriticism in the Anthropocene calls for place and displacement as a new locus of critical discussion.This essay attempts to explore the complex state-indigene-place relationships in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, through an analysis of Pankaj Sekhsaria’s novel, The Last Wave, a postcolonial environmental narrative that articulates alterity and the limits of representation.This essay places Sekhsaria’s island narrative in the tradition of ‘nava aranyakas’ or ‘new forest texts’ set in contemporary fractured Indian forestscapes that foreground the troubled history of state domination and also explore the contradictions and ambiguities that emerge in the tribal relationship with nature. At the heart of Sekhsaria’s narrative is the endangered Jarawa who is inaccessible to the mainstream world due to multiple barriers. This essay focuses on the narrative’s anamorphic aesthetics that employs multiple images and disparate measurements to capture the elusive reality of the indigene.

Referências

Works Cited
Aufschnaiter, Claudia. “Reconsidering the Andaman Islands in anthropology and history.” Social Anthropology, 2018, pp. 1-6. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12560. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Bandyopadhyay, Nibedita. ‘The Green Sleuth’: an analysis of environmentalism in the
selected detective fictions of Sunil Gangopadhyay.” Green Letters, vol. 22, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-11. doi: 10.1080/14688417.2018.1431142. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Christensen, Miyase. “Slow Violence in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Rob Nixon on Communication, Media, and the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Communication, vol. 12, no. 1, pp.7-14. doi: 10.1080/17524032.2017.1367178. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Collu, Gabrielle. “Adivasis and the Myth of Independence: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Douloti the Bountiful.’” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 43-57. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/236121998.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2020.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2019.
Dutta-Asane, Sucharita. “The Last wave, A Million Mutinies.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, vol. 25, 2014, https://www.asiancha.com/content/view/1855/115/. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Guha, Ramachandra and J. Martinez-Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. Earthscan, 1997.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals and Environment. Routledge, 2010.
Krishnakumar, M. V. “Andaman Islands: Development or Despoilation? - The Andaman Islands under colonial and postcolonial regimes.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, vol. 3, no. 2, 2009, pp. 104-117. https://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v3n2/j.-Krishnakumar-Shima-v3n2-104-117.pdf. Accessed 4 July 2020.
McGrath, Ann. “Deep Histories in Time, Or Crossing the Great Divide?” Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place, edited by Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb, ANU, 2015, pp. 1-33.
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. Penguin Random House, 1989.
Mukherjee, Madhushree. The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Pandya, Vishvajit. “Hostile Borders on Historical Landscapes: The Placeless Place of Andamanese Culture.” Asian Studies Institute Working Paper 9, 1999, pp. 1-25. http://hdl.handle.net/10063/4290. Accessed 6 May 2020.
Pugh, Jonathan. “Relationality and Island Studies in the Anthropocene.” Island Studies Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93-110. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.48. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. “Women writing Nature in the Global South: New Forest Fictions from India.” De Gruyter Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 438-458.
Said, Edward W. “Orientalism.” The Georgia Review, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 162-206. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41397448. Accessed 31 July 2020.
Sen, Uditi. “Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 59, no. 4, 2017, pp.944-973, doi:10.1017/S0010417517000330. Accessed 5 June 2020.
Sekhsaria, Pankaj. The Last Wave: An Island Novel. HarperCollins, 2014.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism. 1980, Verso, 2005.