Volume 03: Issue 01, 2021

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Open Access
Of devouring waters and unforgiving lands: An analysis of premonition ecology in two wetland narratives from West Bengal
(In Search of Fearlessness Research Intitute & The Fearology Institute, 2021-04-08) Sarkar, Sanchar; Rangarajan, Swarnalatha
Biren Sasmal's Jolkor (The Water Tax) (2019) and Dhrubajyoti Ghosh's The Trash Diggers (2017) are anthropocene narratives that vividly detail the degradation of aqua-littoral wetland ecosystems of the Sundarbans and East Calcutta wetlands in West Bengal, India. Sasmal's fiction written in Bengali and Ghosh's anglophone nonfiction forcefully engage with the inequalities of speciesism and the implications of urban indifference regarding the 'ecosystem people' inhabiting these ecologically sensitive threshold regions. This paper will articulate the pervading sense of 'ecopremonition', a term we have coined to describe the anticipatory fear of ecological collapse caused by rapid and unpredictable changes in the geomorphology of places like Sundarbans and East Calcutta. This paper expands the framework of fearism proposed by Subba in his work, Philosophy of Fearism where he defines fear as the 'director of life and civilization' (Subba 11) by proposing the concept of ecopremonition that calls for a heightened engagement with environmental degradation in new ways that use fear as a proactive tool to promote greater earth stewardship and sustainability.