Climate-Induced Migration and the Decline of Ecological Wisdom in the Sundarbans

Abstract

Due to the rising sea level, increased salinity, and decreasing scope of traditional professions, many of the residents of the Sundarbans ecoregion are leaving their ancestral home to find better lives within the country and abroad. Battered by cyclones and tidal surges, frequent climatic extremes in recent years, life in the lower Bengal delta is becoming very difficult for the residents. Consequently, people’s faith in the folk deities, largely related to their professions of hunting and gathering, is dwindling as they are migrating to other places, and the performative practices related to these deities are declining gradually. Coupled with climatic effects, a rise in religious fundamentalism has also been creating doubts and divides among the residents and obstructing the syncretic character of these deities. These declining numbers and cultural practices might prove fatal to the wellbeing of the largest single tract of mangrove forest on earth as the cultural discourse of this area has been dominated by the rituals connected to these deities promoting ecological wisdom and principles of coexistence between humans and nonhuman species. Moreover, a growing number of floating workers unfamiliar with the cultural teachings and devoid of ecological ethics is partially replacing the local forest workers and extracting natural resources heedlessly and thus disturbing the ecological balance of this area. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) and Leesa Gazi’s play Daughter of the Forest (2016) address the issue of climate-induced migration from the Sundarbans and extend it in terms of scale and space to shape it as a global issue affecting geopolitics. This paper shows how Ghosh’s and Gazi’s texts critically reinterpret the plight of climate refugees by imaginatively situating it at the intersection of discourses of contemporary globalization and indigenous ecological wisdom.