Contextualizing oral tradition in climate change discourse : the Sundarban in contemporary literature and performance

Abstract

This thesis explores selected literary works and performances to examine how they resort to oral traditions in order to conceptualize agency as a common phenomenon of all living species in the context of anthropogenic climate change. It examines why rethinking agency is crucial for human understanding of nonhuman life forms and human entanglements with nonhumans to keep the biodiversity of a biological contact zone like the Sundarban safe. Hence, the study argues that by circulating ecological wisdom and ethics to the residents of this bioregion, the oral tradition contributes to these people’s understanding of their existence in relation to the forest and the nonhumans and forms their sustainable attitude toward the forest. The first chapter explores the presence of the Sundarban and the Bengal tiger in cultural discourses and literary expressions. The oral tradition of the Sundarban adopted in folk epics (punthi) since the seventeenth century reveals the region’s sociopolitical history and how the image of the tiger went through a series of transformations, indicating varying human approaches to the forest and animals, from wholesale deforestation to a sustainable mode of livelihood and forest preservation. The second chapter deals with adapting oral tradition in contemporary literature and performances, emphasizing interspecies co-existence and co-emergence. It inspects how Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide recalls the oral tradition of the Sundarban, where the marginalized residents’ traditional knowledge and ecological ethics informed by a mythical worldview confront scientific studies, stringent conservation policies, and political bureaucracy. The chapter also analyses Leesa Gazi’s play Daughter of the Forest, which emphasizes upholding the spirit of human-nonhuman co-existence and sustainability principles of the forest deity Bonbibi when manmade ecological disasters like oil spills and deforestation threaten the existence of the Sundarban. The third chapter looks into Ghosh’s novel Gun Island, which attempts to overcome the realist novel’s shortcomings in illustrating nonhuman agencies and observable and latent climate change phenomena. Linking the past and present climate crises through the Little Ice Age – the seventeenth-century planetary climate crisis, a mythical merchant, and interspecies migration, the novel uses the image of the flood to connect distant places affected by climate change. However, toward the end, the novel seems suddenly move away from realism as it resorts to a series of miraculous events to illustrate human migration. Finally, the fourth chapter discusses theatrical performances from Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands region, attempting to trace multispecies agencies by recalling traditional ecological knowledge and human attachment to the land they inhabit. Despite their essential differences, these performances contribute to a global repertoire of stories, images, and creative practices that writers and artists can refer to in their creative responses to climate change envisioning an eco-cosmopolitan world and thus complementing each other. By selecting and analyzing literary works and performances, this study finds that the oral tradition of a place is an important source of alternative worldviews and ecological ethics, which creative works adopt and adapt to rethink agency and form a counterdiscourse to anthropocentric approaches to the environment, and anthropogenic climate change.