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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Bengali 'Mangalkabya' as a crucible of elemental narration, where earth, water, fire, air, and animals act as sacred agents, advancing decolonial epistemologies and posthuman ecologies for the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

Indian cosmological imaginaries conceptualize the natural world as an ontologically vibrant and agentic matrix, wherein rivers, mountains, celestial configurations, and animal species manifest as agential interlocutors integral to the cyclical constitution of cosmic order and ethical regeneration. This paper foregrounds historically neglected South Asian paradigms—the ritual veneration of serpents, tigers, and avifauna—as exemplars of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism,” revealing a pluriversal landscape that systematically disrupts anthropocentric epistemic monopolies and reconfigures agency as diffuse and distributed across matter. Such entanglements, rendered legible through indigenous taxonomies of purity, pollution, and sacred geography, align with Bruno Latour’s imperative to subvert the entrenched nature/culture binary, thus reorienting ecology as an assemblage of co-constitutive agencies and situated knowledges.

Despite their epistemological fecundity, South Asian cosmological traditions are persistently marginalized in the architecture of global ecological theory. Indigenous textual ecologies, however, are not inert folkloric substrates but rigorous archives of ontological critique, offering decolonial correctives to paradigms of extraction, separation, and human exceptionalism characteristic of Eurocentric thought. In this cosmopolitical terrain, Bengali 'Mangalkabya' emerge as vital repositories of “species history” (Chakrabarty), where elemental and nonhuman actors—rivers elevated as sentient caretakers, tempests as juridical disruptions, forests as sentinels of ethical reciprocity, and animals as moral interlocutors—are intricately enmeshed in planetary relationalities opposing extractivist logics. 'Mangalkabya' thus enact an eco-hermeneutics predicated on relational materialism and immanence, challenging reified binaries, and inaugurating cosmopolitical imaginaries imperative to reimagining Anthropocene ethics as fundamentally plural, situated, and ecologically attuned.