Climate Change and the Politics with the Indigenous: A Comparative Study of The Swan Book and The Last Wave

Resumo

Abstract

The study of Australian literature could very well be analysed in juxtaposition with Indian literature, as far as their postcoloniality and democratic entities are concerned. However, the politics involved in the degradation of their natural habitat and the onset of climate change might be a little seminal one. Discussions on the contemporary issue of the political rights relating to the basic sustainable environmental conditions vis-à-vis the ‘plight’ and ‘identity’ of the aboriginal tribes are relevant in the present scenario. To substantiate this, the novel The Swan Book (2013) by the Australian writer Alexis Wright would be analysed, with parallel reading of The Last Wave (2014), the first island novel by the Indian writer, Pankaj Sekhsaria.

The special thrust of the paper would be to evoke the metaphoric image of the legendary character ‘Rip Van Winkle’, through the perception of Wright and move ahead to the Indian cultural context. It would ponder over the politics involved in the state of affairs which leaves the denizens at the state of slumber, overlooking the ethical dimensions that may lead to the threat towards the ecology that is on the sharp edge of ‘time’ and ‘history’. This threat might be, in the quintessential sense, to the extinction of the ‘Jarawa tribe’ in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands belonging to the Indian sub-continent (as depicted in The Last Wave) or the rape of the protagonist ‘Oblivia’ (as in The Swan Book), an aboriginal lady living in the polluted dry swamp, a habitat for the indigenous in the northern Australia.