“Witnessing” Like Mangroves: Everyday Encounters from a Fluidscape

Abstract

This photo essay foregrounds the mangroves as a metaphor, grounded in its materiality, to explore how communities in the Indian Sundarbans inhabit environmental precarity and negotiate risk. It employs “witnessing” through the metaphor of mangroves, engaging critically with the socioecological complexities of the Sundarbans. Drawing upon frameworks from the environmental humanities, this photo essay positions mangroves as paradigms of ecological adaptation, resilience, and relationality. By embodying flexibility, frugality, and fluidity, mangroves challenge anthropocentric notions of stability and control, serving as material and semiotic figures of “thinking with” for adaptive and survival practices. “Witnessing like mangroves” is the methodological operationalisation of this epistemic orientation: a field practice that draws directly on mangrove traits to guide how we comprehend and describe island life. Using visual documentation from the Kumirmari island village located at the Gosaba Block of the Indian Sundarbans, this article interrogates the reductive “risk space” discourse perpetuated by climate change frameworks, which advocate for “managed” and “strategic retreat” from the delta. Instead, this essay foregrounds the nuanced, situated adaptive resilience of local communities, whose intergenerational knowledge and socioecological ingenuity resist linear narratives of crisis and displacement. By navigating the entangled thresholds of land and water, the islanders exemplify a situated engagement with the volatile and hybrid ecologies of the delta that can be explored and captured through visual ethno-graphy techniques.