Ecological Form

System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

Nathan K. Hensley, Philip Steer, Nathan K. Hensley, Philip Steer

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823282135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate "natural" questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book's most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

PART I

Method

CHAPTER 1

Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire

The Play of Indigo

Sukanya Banerjee

In his thought-provoking exposition on climate change, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh, an anthropologist by training, leverages his formidable reputation as a novelist to dwell at length on the failure of our literary imagination. According to him, the realist novel, as it developed over the past two hundred years, expunged what our understanding of the Anthropocene has now alerted us to, namely a “renewed awareness of the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings and even perhaps the planet itself.”¹ For Ghosh, the realist novel, in its preoccupation with the routinized everyday of bourgeois life, progressively unlearns this intimacy of shared agency and consciousness, casting it to the realm of the “unheard-of” or the “unlikely.”² Casting a wide net, he discusses Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1862) as examples, suggestively adding that, “It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Chatterjee, and their like, mocking their mockery of the ‘prodigious happenings’ that occur so often in romances and epic poems.”³

There is much that is persuasive about Ghosh’s claims, and one cannot, of course, turn away from the urgency of his overall argument. But his literary assumptions also invite debate. One can, for instance, take issue with Ghosh’s conflation of the literary imagination with a novelistic one, or with the relation that he etches between realism and genre fiction, or, indeed, with his reading of Rajmohan’s Wife itself inasmuch as that novel is shot through with elements of the gothic and supernatural.⁴ Set in nineteenthcentury rural Bengal, Rajmohan’s Wife—the first Indian novel in English—deals with the imputed infidelity of the eponymous character (it is not because of its realist aspirations alone that Ghosh pairs it with Flaubert’s classic). I draw attention to Rajmohan’s Wife because this essay examines the literary landscape that Chatterjee’s novel inhabits. By reading Dinabandhu Mitra’s play, Neel Darpan (1860), which was contemporaneous with Chatterjee’s novel, this essay discloses a more mottled—and contested—site of literary production than Ghosh amply intimates. It is worth noting that Rajmohan’s Wife was barely read when it was published in installments in the journal Indian Field.⁵ On the other hand, Neel Darpan, which is a play about indigo cultivation, captured the popular imagination soon after it was published and attracted an enthusiastic audience wherever it was performed. Acknowledging this varied literary milieu, I suggest, is significant for our own methodologies, not least because it brings drama (particularly that of colonial provenance) into the ecocritical conversation in ways that expand the formal as well as geoimperial scope of that conversation.

Interestingly, Ghosh has very little to say about drama, which was a highly popular form in mid–nineteenth-century Bengal (though, to be fair, he admits that as a novelist, he is drawn to discussing the form closest to his heart). Of course, Ghosh is not the only one guilty of overlooking drama. Drama, by and large, has received short shrift in Victorianist scholarship as well. Redirecting attention to drama (to include both play and performance) does not only recompense for the lapses in our scholarship but, as this essay argues, also shines light on the dramatic form as one that keeps alive the sense of “shared agency and consciousness,” whose loss in an individualized, novelized modernity Ghosh laments. It is telling that in his formulation of actor-network theory (which Ghosh cites for its salutary undoing of the Cartesian divide), Bruno Latour seems to rehearse the classical principles of drama. To be clear, Latour does not use “actor” in the conventionally used dramatic sense of the term; for Latour, “actor” extends well beyond humans to include any entity—human, nonhuman, unhuman—that “acts or to which activity is granted by others.”⁶ But if for Latour, the “actor”—or actant—qualifies for that designation by being the source of action or “doing,”⁷ then it is worth keeping in mind that as Aristotle notes in the Poetics, “drama” originates from the word dran in the Megarian dialect, which means “doing.”⁸ “[In drama],” Aristotle points out, “agents accomplish the imitation by acting.”⁹ Here “acting” seems to connote representation as much as it connotes action, and Aristotle accords a higher level of action to drama than to epic poetry.¹⁰ Significantly, when rethinking human-nonhuman networks on the basis of an entity’s “acting,” Latour often resorts to vocabulary that is redolently of and from drama.

One objective of reading Neel Darpan, then, is to underscore the salience of drama to the ecocritical imperative of drawing attention to a “multiply centered expanse” in which humans are not the only agentive entities.¹¹ After all, as Baz Kershaw notes, the very process of staging drama underlines the extent to which drama is constituted by “unavoidable interdependencies between every element of a performance event and its environment,” which makes “theater ecology a matter of living exchange between organisms and environments.”¹² But while this point could perhaps be made through the analysis of just about any play, to read a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation is also to bring home the materiality of empire to the study of Victorian ecology. Neel Darpan details the brutal effects of forced indigo cultivation in lower Bengal and Bihar. Indigo was indigenous to the Indian sub-continent and was grown and processed mostly in the western part of the country. In fact, the first commercial venture of the East India Company (EIC) in Surat in the seventeenth century consisted of a highly profitable investment in indigo.¹³ Over the seventeenth century, however, indigo cultivation moved to the West Indies, where European planters began producing a superior quality of indigo that fulfilled the high demand for indigo dye in the European market. But the planters in the West Indies soon diverted their attention to growing even more profitable crops such as sugar and coffee, and the cultivation of indigo moved by the mid–eighteenth century to southern Carolina, Spanish Guatemala, and French Santo Domingo. The outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, in turn, made it difficult for the British to access their trade routes for indigo, and the East India Company began to revive its interests in the crop. But this time it decided to grow indigo in Bengal and Bihar, where the company had by then established a stronghold but where indigo had never been cultivated before. Nonetheless, by 1842, indigo accounted for as much as “forty six per cent of the value of goods exported from Calcutta.”¹⁴

If this brief snapshot of the trade and cultivation of indigo tells us anything, it is that the peripatetic fortunes of colonialism and the indigo plant are inextricably intertwined, and it is impossible to bifurcate social history (of colonialism) from environmental—or even botanical—history (of indigo and its cultivation). Simply put, colonial and environmental histories are interdependent, a fact that, as scholars such as Ramachandra Guha and David Arnold, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, and Rob Nixon, among others point out—and as Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer note in the Introduction to this volume—mainstream Anglo-American ecocriticism has often failed to take due note of.¹⁵ The emphasis on “history in nature” rather than on a dichotomous view of “history and nature,” is also, as we know, crucial to Jason Moore’s formulation of the “ecological” as offering “a holistic perspective on the society-environment relation.” But for Moore, such a perspective also questions how “master processes of colonialism, etc.” remain “resolutely social,” always “ceded to the Cartesian binary.”¹⁶ What this ecological reformulation makes obvious for scholars of Victorian studies is that if over the last two decades we have reached a stage in which it is difficult to absent the history of empire from that of Victorian Britain, then we are now also at the stage where we cannot speak of “empire” in terms of its human constituency alone.¹⁷

Therefore, if the “imperial turn” prompted an interest in the contact and engagement between Britons and colonial peoples, then an “ecological turn” calls for an understanding of the multiple relationalities not just between colonizer and colonized, but between the human and nonhuman, “society and environment,” in Britain and beyond. In this, though, the idiom of mobility, which was key in conceptualizing the imperial turn, is not the only one that is key to expanding our sense of empire. Rather, as this essay argues, an idiom of “groundedness” becomes equally crucial, for we may very well be speaking of entities, objects, and collectivities that literally do not move. Drama, as perhaps the least readily mobile of literary forms (if we take its individual performances into consideration, that is), serves as both a heuristic and an exemplar for a critical methodology that can give due accord to a logic of groundedness.

In reading Neel Darpan, therefore, this essay is attentive to its dramatic features and also takes the play as well as its performance history into consideration. Such an emphasis enables the essay to shift the focus to indigo, which is an integral component of the play but barely receives critical attention, given that much of the scholarship on the play is interested in its purported anticolonialism (the play depicts the popular resentment against the planters, which fueled the “indigo rebellion,” a series of protests that broke out in different areas of lower Bengal in the late 1850s). Such interest is not misdirected; Neel Darpan certainly spoke to an incipient nationalism and was chosen for the inaugural performance of the National Theatre in Calcutta in 1872.¹⁸ But if the objective of this essay is to emphasize the importance of drama to ecology as well as to twin ecology with colonialism, then it becomes something of an imperative to be attentive to the long-neglected role that indigo itself takes on in the play (in ways that are not unrelated to the play’s politics). Such a reading addresses the urgency underpinning the questions that Michael Taussig asks in a broader context about our seeming obliviousness to the vibrancy of indigo as an entity:

Is it not time for blue [indigo] to exert its magic and sexuality . . . so as to undo that which would cast it as “color,” sans history, sans density, sans song? If it could penetrate an egg and make men cough blue, this beauty that is indigo, how much more likely is it to penetrate history as a silent symbol ensconced in a color chart? When will we cough blue?¹⁹

In what follows, I offer an account of indigo cultivation in Bengal and the events leading up to the “indigo rebellion” that prompted the play; then, after placing Neel Darpan in its colonial setting, I show how its overlooked dramatic features foreground the role of indigo in ways that not only enhance the reading of the play but also emphasize the ecohistorical nature of the event that the play charts; finally, I consider how the “groundedness” of drama might be important for twinning ecology with empire in ways that may well make us, in Taussig’s terms, cough blue.

The Play

When the East India Company revived the indigo trade in India in the late eighteenth century, it invited European planters, many of whom had owned and managed plantations in the Caribbean, to take up indigo plantation in Bengal. Much of the indigo was cultivated in villages by peasants (ryots) under contract with the planters who paid them an advance, thereby obliging them to produce a certain amount of indigo. The land on which the ryots grew indigo was land over which they had tenancy rights; this was either land that the planters had leased from local landowners or land that was owned and managed directly by the landowners. Cultivating indigo, however, was simply not profitable for the ryots, and they barely earned enough to recover costs.²⁰ That being the case, it was very common for ryots to be coerced into signing contracts or t...