Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities

Postcolonial Approaches

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, Anthony Carrigan, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, Anthony Carrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317574309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria y naturaleza

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature.

The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

Part I
The Politics of Earth

Forests, Gardens, Plantations

1 Narrativizing Nature

India, Empire, and Environment

David Arnold

Over the past thirty years, “empire” and “environment” have become closely entangled concepts. This connectivity can be traced back at least as far as Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (1986), but it is a conjunction evident in many other books since then, including John MacKenzie’s Empire of Nature (1988), Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism (1995), Peder Anker’s Imperial Ecology (2001), and William Beinart and Lotte Hughes’s Environment and Empire (2007).¹ This confluence of environment and empire studies marks a significant shift away from imperial historians’ earlier neglect of nature and is indicative of the wider move to the “greening of the humanities” (Nixon 2005, 233). While many historical studies remain doggedly attached to one particular empire (usually the British), the scope of eco-imperial analysis often ranges much wider, embracing entire continents or examining a long sequence of imperial interventions.² There is, though, no clear consensus as to what in essence characterizes the eco-imperial relationship. Approaches vary enormously—from the aggressive pathogen- and species-driven expansionism that energizes and naturalizes empire in Crosby’s (1986) seminal tale of biotic conquest, to understandings of empire as a site of constructive Western engagement with indigenous environments and epistemologies, to scientific savants as ecological pioneers in Grove’s rendition of what was “green” in imperialism. As opportunity and resource, the environment is mobilized to explain the political logistics of empire and the expanding of commodity frontiers. It is equally used to critique the inherent violence of empire, its territorial appropriation, and its subordination, marginalization, or elimination of nonwhite populations. If empire gave privileged access to an expanding world of nature knowledge, the imperialization of the environment provided the means to build scientific careers, creating new professional roles and institutional domains. Beyond establishing that empire’s entanglement with the environment was complex, multistranded, and place-, time-, and culture-specific, it is not always clear whether empire gives retrospective valorization to precolonial states of nature or is a surrogate for, and agency of, emergent global capitalism, or even both simultaneously. All that can be said with confidence is that for most environmental historians there is a dynamic, even symbiotic, relationship between modern empires and the global phenomenon of environmental change.

If empire serves as a historical approximation for the global, then conceptually and methodologically postcolonialism brings an added sensitivity to the sources employed and to the positionality of author and text. There are various ways in which historians construct their environmental narrative or see that narrative as constructed for them by the sources on which they depend. There is, thus, a contrast between those accounts that represent nature as place-specific, fixed, and sited within a single biogeographical locale: Gilbert White’s classic study, the Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789, is one example of this narrative genre. In works of this kind, nature comes to the author as he or she potters in the garden or goes on local walks, in the process observing changing seasons, the arrival and departure of swallows, the onset of autumn rain and winter frost. They have their counterparts in more scholarly bioregional studies of environment and history that at times stray into a kind of “romantic primordialism” or “eco-parochialism” (Nixon 2005, 236–38).³ In this place-sited narrative, the environment is not, however, without a sense of historical sequence or even catastrophic intervention: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) shares something of this place-specific quality in which a much-loved environment (North America) undergoes calamitous disruption from industrial pesticides and toxic pollution.

Such an approach contrasts with those narratives in which nature is represented primarily through a process of observer itineration or through the experience of spatial and social displacement, and this second type of narrativization lies closer to most postcolonial concerns. It has at least two dimensions—the imperial and the diasporic. The former is represented by what Mary Louise Pratt identifies as the mode of perception produced by “imperial eyes” and which I have discussed similarly as “the traveling gaze” (Pratt 1992; Arnold 2006). Such narrativizations can be found in most European or North America travel accounts from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The author goes to nature and makes comparisons and contrasts with what he or she already knows (or imagines as knowing). In these itinerant narratives, where the narrator is almost constantly on the move, there is scant possibility of developing an awareness of any cyclical pattern in nature or of registering periodic shifts in the landscape, as between drought and abundance. It is only possible to gain an immediate, often highly subjective, impression of what appears at that moment to be “picturesque” or repellent. Often enough, the standard by which such judgments are made is that of the society from which the traveler originates and regards as normality. Despite recourse to the apparent impartiality of science, such narratives project the self-importance of the traveler. Travel feeds the imperial self, and even if the experience of travel educates and transforms him or her, and opens up spaces for “transculturation,” it tends to confirm many of the observers’ environmental preconceptions. Not unrelated to this are narratives of diasporic replacement. In these the observer is conscious of having moved between different places of nature and the cultural and social worlds that enclose or inform them. Individuals carry with them mementos and impressions from some previous, perhaps natal, environment, but that primordial engagement is overlaid by, or in conflict with, the experiences and associations a new locale creates. The observer’s gaze is that of the exiled and dispossessed rather than that of the footloose and imperious traveler, and yet a sense of disjuncture, of being out of place, is arguably common to both.

This dichotomy between the fixed and the itinerant allows me to explore two different narrative genres that pertain to the environment of British India. There is a clear distinction between the sources I use—one is a novel, the other a collection of administrative reports. My concern, however, is less with fiction versus factuality than what these sources reveal about the material character of the environments they describe (one rural, the other urban), with the narrative strategies they employ, the positionality of their authors, and the connectedness through empire of their separate approaches to “nature.” The first text is a novel by a well-known Bengali writer; the other is not a single-authored work but a selection of reports and articles on environmental health in colonial Calcutta. My aim is to consider the implications of these apparently contrasting narrative forms for a postcolonial rereading of the imperial environment.

ARANYAK: OF THE FOREST

Aranyak: Of the Forest by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay ([1939] 2002) was first published in the 1930s. He was born in Bengal in 1894: his father was a Sanskrit scholar, a music teacher and storywriter. The young Bibhutibhushan mainly earned his living as a teacher but between 1924 and 1930 he worked as assistant manager on an up-country estate in the Bhagalpur division of Bihar. He wrote short stories and novels in Bengali, including two volumes on the life of Apu, Pather Panchali (1929) and Aparajito (1931), which were adapted as films by the acclaimed Bengali director Satyajit Ray.⁴ Nature, seen from the perspective of the Bengali village and in contrast to urban life in Calcutta, features intermittently in the Apu books and the films derived from them, but it receives the greatest attention in Aranyak, written between 1937 and 1939 and based on the author’s experience of rural Bihar.

In a purely temporal sense, Aranyak cannot be described as postcolonial: it was written a decade before India’s independence, and its author died in 1950, only three years after British rule ended. Written in the first person, the story tells how a young ex-college student and teacher, Satyacharan (or “Satya”) lands a job as the manager of a zamindari estate (one of the many created by the British under the Permanent Settlement of 1793) in the forests of Bhagalpur. He lives there for six years before returning to Calcutta. Aranyak, which might reasonably be regarded as one of the first environmentalist novels written by an Indian, suggests certain parallels with Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Written seventy years later, Ghosh’s novel has a more complex storyline and a more refined environmental consciousness (of reader, author, and characters) to work with. But, like the American-born Piya in Hungry Tide, Satya is an educated outsider, who through experience and empathy becomes an “anxious witness” to rapid environmental change, and whose outlook and identity is transformed by contact with the local way of life and the nature that informs and surrounds it (Bandyopadhyay 2002).

For what purports to be a novel, there is not much of a story to Aranyak, apart from the narrator’s growing love affair with the forest. Aranyak appears in part inspired by Green Mansions, W. H. Hudson’s 1904 novel, in which the itinerant author’s fascination with the South American jungle is articulated through his hero’s love for Rima, a mysterious and alluring forest girl (Reeve 1998, 134–145). Beginning from the perspective of the footloose cosmopolitan, Aranyak similarly traces the unfolding encounter between the city-bred stranger and the people, plants, and animals that inhabit a remote rural environment. There are several, sometimes contradictory, strands to this encounter. Large parts of the estate are uninhabited, causing the narrator, lost in rural solitude, to suffer loneliness and homesickness for Calcutta at first. However, parts of the forest are inhabited and Satya gradually meets estate workers, local officials, and villagers (both low-caste Hindus and tribal Santhals) whose way of life he comes to respect and value without ever losing his middle-class sense of superiority. As his fascination with the forest and its inhabitants grows, immobility overtakes Satya—to the extent that it becomes hard for him to muster the enthusiasm to visit even nearby towns. In this narrative, it is the observer who becomes fixed while the poor, landless denizens of the forest are kept mobile by their constant search for subsistence. “I had come to love the open spaces and the thick green forests so much,” Satya remarks, “that if I went to Mungher or Purnea for work—even for a day—I grew restless with longing to come back to the jungle and plunge myself once more into its deep silence, the exquisite moonlight, the sunset, the rain-bearing dark clouds, and its unsullied starry nights …” (47). He eventually regards the “civilization of the forest world” as superior to that of Calcutta, the city from which he at first felt himself an unfortunate exile (182). Such is his personal transformation that when he encounters a group of city-bred Bengalis picnicking in the forest he is outraged by their crassness, their inability to appreciate the nature around them, and by the discarded tin-cans they leave behind. It is they, not Satya, who now appear “completely out of place” (189).

The novel is enlivened by its descriptions of nature: the hero is not so much Satya as the forest and its inhabitants, and long passages are devoted to this. As part of his local sensitivity, the author is particularly concerned with the names—of people as well as plants—and the identities they convey. The forest dwellers he encounters are duly named and their characters carefully delineated: these are figures who, in many imperial texts, would have remained nameless or been taken as simply representative of a racial or communal “type.” Satya attaches great importance to local plant names, though he often falls back on Bengali, rather than tribal, nomenclature. In a characteristic passage, he writes:

when I had walked on a little further and the katcheri [office] huts were hidden by the wild jhau and the jungle of kash, I felt that I was all alone in the world. As far as the eye could see there were dense forests flanking the expansive fields and it was all jungle and shrub—acacias, wild bamboos, cane saplings and gajari trees. The setting sun splashed the tops of trees and bushes with a fiery orange and the evening breeze carried the fragrance of wild flowers and grass and creepers. Every bush was alive with the cry of birds. (15)

The word “jungle,” used repeatedly here and throughout in Aranyak, is, I will suggest shortly, highly significant.

We can take Satya as a representative of his class, the high-caste, educated Bengali elite, the bhadralok or “respectable people.” He is at first disdainful of the “god-forsaken” environment in which he finds himself and its “barbaric” inhabitants; but he rapidly comes to develop a strong attachment to the “freedom” life in the forest provides (Bandyopadhyay 2002, 12–13, 62). This personal sense of freedom could be interpreted as an articulation of India’s political quest for freedom in the 1920s and 1930s; but the implied contrast appears, more mundanely, to be with the constraints and burdens of middle-class domesticity. Nature, Satya remarks in a passage that seems to echo the sentiments of Hudson’s Green Mansions, “makes men abandon their homes [and] fills them with wanderlust … He who has heard the call of the wild and has once glimpsed the unveiled face of nature will find it impossible to settle down to playing the householder” (97). This individual sense of liberation (or capture) is matched by a growing appreciation of the “riches,” “bounty,” “wealth,” and “treasures” to be found in nature (95, 196, 208, 213). It is as instinctive for Satya, as for earlier European naturalists and travelers, to represent nature through a language of material acquisition and capitalist resource, though he goes further than most of them in attempting to evoke, too, a sense of the magical and mystical in nature. “I felt within myself a sense of liberation, of being supremely detached, untrammeled. … As I stood beneath the moonlit skies on that still silent night, I felt I had chanced upon an unknown fairy kingdom” (23). But Satya is also struck by the poverty of the people he observes (and we can note here, as in The Hungry Tide, how destructive the untamed environment can be). The forest might be romantic to Satya’s eyes, but it remains, for the inhabitants, a “cruel land” (33, 81). Shockingly for a high-caste Bengali, they do not even eat rice but subsist on millets and crude grains. Despite the apparent beneficence of nature, the forest dwellers suffer hunger and thirst. They are afflicted by diseases they cannot cure, wounds and injuries from which they cannot recover. Ignorant of hygiene, they drink polluted water and are poisoned by contaminated food. Exploited by moneylenders, traders, and tricksters, they are further oppressed by landlords and officials. Nature is not all kind.

Despite its romantic engagement with nature, Aranyak is also an ecocritique—critical of the destruction caused by capitalism (albeit spearheaded by the subsistence needs of the poor) and the principle of “progress” it purports to repre...