‘We are the dispossessed’: Displacement, knowledge production and bare life in West Bengali climate fiction

The works of fiction that I have analysed here offer locale-specific insights into the historical and culturally significant ramifications of contemporary mobility in West Bengal through their construction of narratives that bind such movement to previous forms of Partition-related loss and displacement. By comparing the present-day experience of climate refugees from the Sundarbans to those of refugees condemned to bare life at Morichjhãpi, The Hungry Tide laments that ill-managed climate migration might cyclically consign communities from a region still recovering from such horrors to further ordeal. Leila, meanwhile, compares the state of exception enacted following Partition to the emergency posed by climate change, warning that crisis may re-result in radical political solutions. In doing so, both texts warn that recent regional traumas might be re-lived if political institutions persist to ignore local-cultural values and experiences, and leave potential climate refugees rightless in their unending prevarication. I suggest, following this reading, that these associations should be at the forefront of displacement considerations in West Bengal, highlighting the need for a more flexible and co-operative framework between expert and local knowledge production. Recent tensions between climate activists and the West Bengali state regarding the controversial construction of the Rampal Power Station highlight the ongoing challenges faced by non-expert actors in the region to gain a stake in the conversations that most concern them. Literature is not, of course, a substitute for policymaking or academic research but, at present, offers a rare opportunity for regions significantly affected by climate change to draw attention to the challenges they face and the disruptions and losses they fear. In this, The Hungry Tide and Leila serve both as products of experiential knowledge in their own right and as an encouragement for the inclusion of other forms of local knowledge within scholarly and political circuits concerned with climate mobilities. I offer this analysis of West Bengali novels as one example of the prescience of literature to political conversations on environmental displacement. Numerous other literary-cultural productions from communities at the frontline of global warming offer ample room for further research, which I hope will be explored in the future.