Paper short abstract:

This research aims to read selected Bangla novels from the late colonial period in India, within an Eco-Marxist framework. A realist representation of rivers and riverine communities narrates their metabolic relationship and historicizes the responsibility of colonial ecocide on colonial Capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Bengal is home to critical riverine systems, housing the Sundarbans forest in its deltaic region. The entangled lives of humans and nonhumans along these riverine systems have found space within Bangla literary and cultural productions. This research deals with Bangla fiction from the late colonial era that carries the river as a central motif. Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi, Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam, and Samaresh Basu’s Ganga deals with humans and nonhumans, whose lives are forged within the entanglements of economic and ecological relations. This research studies the interdependencies and vulnerabilities of human life in the natural world, represented in the realist narratives, and connects it with the ecological rupture caused by colonial Capitalism.

This research also historicizes the debate between Ecological Marxists and New Materialists that has been raging since before the ‘material turn’ in Environmental Humanities. This research tries to situate the selected narratives of ecological entanglements onto the frameworks offered by the Ecological Marxists. Empirically testing the fictional narratives of human-nature representation, using the Marxist frameworks of ‘historical-materialism’ and ‘dialectical analysis,’ requires us to recognize the necessary boundaries within the natural world that those human characters populate. However, this Marxist framework of ‘metabolic rift’ instead of the ‘social metabolism of Capital’ helps our understanding of ‘metabolic interactions’ and ‘ecological rifts’ between humans and their environments, in this case, the rivers and their riverine communities. An Eco-Marxist reading of the narratives gives birth to the possibility of demanding accountability from colonial Capitalism for colonial ecocide.