Unearthing slow violence in the Anthropocene: A study of myth and ethics in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama

Abstract

The planetary crisis, emerging out of the Anthropocene, significantly contributes to a continuous tension between human needs and desire; and Nature’s capacity to accommodate those by subsidizing the fundamental balance between human and non-human welfare. These long-term invisible phenomena of extreme anthropocentric metamorphoses not only endanger the culture and ethnicity of the indigenous community but also entail invisible and incomprehensible constant suffering in the form of ‘slow violence’. Ghosh’s first-ever book in verse, Jungle Nama, renders two parallel narratives simultaneously – a tale of colonial oppression on the eco-people through the slow aftermath of climatic violence and the establishment of ecojustice through the allegorical rendering of the largest deltaic mangrove forest, the Sundarbans’ mythical tale of Bon Bibi. Given this account, on the one hand, the aim of this paper is to explore the interplay between myth and ecoethics that interconnects human and other-than-human lives in Nature equilibrating human greed and need, with particular reference to the mythical tale of Bon Bibi legend. On the other hand, in contextualizing the complex phenomenon of Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’, where the indigenous people are completely unaware of the fact that they are living through the slow aftermath of climatic violence, the paper, therefore, seeks to highlight the multiplication of existential threats to the sense of belongingness, traditional cultural practices, the ethnicity, and identity of the Sundarbans’ indigenous people due to the flawed notion of settler colonialism.