Because of the limited production of “travel writings” in India, academic attention to its literary perspectives has been remarkably lacking. For a scholar of literary studies, this is unfortunate because travel narratives compellingly reflect the sociocultural conditions and cross-cultural practices across the world, resulting in an ethnographically sensitive and stylistically complex aesthetics. The essay will, thus, first situate Puri and Castillo’s call for “theorizing fieldwork in the humanities” (2016) as an important reason behind encapsulating the lived experiences of local people as residents and the writer as a literary ethnographer in travel narratives in the postcolonial nations. Then, drawing from recent scholarships on “literary travel” that strategically adapts the fieldwork narrative and literary narrative through the regional travel aesthetics in postcolonial studies, the paper will show how the noted Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, working across a range of geographic contexts, in his The Hungry Tide (2004) and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) historicizes the tragic fate of the people of Sundarbans and their embodied experiences in the face of postcolonial modernity marked with capitalist-carbon economy and increasing ecological catastrophes through his extensive travel to Sundarbans as part of his literary endeavor. Closely engaging with the textual practice of intertwining local dialect and indigenous belief systems in the Western literary forms, specifically the interplay of socioecological issues with his experimental use of the myth of Bon Bibi, without compromising their cultural and performative aspects, the paper argues that Ghosh’s travel aesthetics is literary-ethnographically aware and extensively conscious of the constructed and negotiated differences between the lived experiences of fieldworks and abstract knowledge of travelistic encounters.

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity and ecological crises, the concept of “place” has been profoundly transformed within post-colonised communities. This study examines how literature, specifically Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin (2012), as a medium can revive the sense of place, particularly the place sense redefined by the experiences of post-colonial eco-social catastrophes, as a dialogical co-habitation of human-non-human environment in mainstream academia. This study, at first, moves beyond the Western perception of place as an isolated source of individual identity. It then engages with the recent scholarships on “eco-cosmopolitanism” and political ecology of the global South to show how the forces of (neo)colonial-capitalist modernity and consequent eco-social crises in Pakistan were registered both in Khan’s experimental narrative content and style. This study argues that Khan’s novel employs a “post-colonial eco-cosmopolitan” approach, focusing on the fluidity of place-based identities and the challenges of narrating a post-colonial sense of place in the zones of conflict, catastrophes, and crises. Finally, this study contends that when socio-ecological crises affect various aspects of life—body, home, society, and environment—local cultural practices like oral story-telling, folklore sharing, and traditional rituals serve as sources of collective memory, providing inner stability amid external turmoil.

Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2–3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha’s narrative technique as ‘eco-testimony’, which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state.

The article aims to portray the traumas and sufferings of female war survivors in pre and post-1971 Bangladesh in Selina Hossain’s novel Hangor, Nadi, Grenade (1976), translated into English as River of My Blood by Jackie Kabir in 2016. By using the feminist politicalecological perspectives of Wendy Harcourt and Arthuro Escobar (2002), the constructive framework of the article aims to analyze the changing contours of violence in the spheres of the body, home, environment, and social-public arenas in the lives of the female war-survivors, especially the Muktijoddhas living in the fictional places of Haldi, Bangladesh as portrayed in the novel. Considering the postcolonial ecofeminist viewpoints of Shazia Rahman (2019), this article focuses exclusively on how the bodies of female war survivors as sites of violence become sites of resilience in the face of socio-cultural, political, and ecological injustices and resistance in the face of objectification in the name of ethnocultural nationalism through an attachment to the place Bangladesh and its more-than-human-environment. Additionally, the article seeks to demonstrate how bringing private violence into the public discourse through South Asian writings works as an intervention into the dominant narratives of patriarchal nationalism, gender discrimination, and biased social structures that have been materialized through honor killing, rape, murder, and verbal abuse, and provides a tool for depicting the symbolic, cultural, and epistemic violence that affects women in South Asia

The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of 'literary fieldwork' that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo's (2016) concept of "humanities fieldwork" and Ghosh's (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author's literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author's creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.