{"id":33901,"date":"2016-05-06T09:24:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T09:24:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-01T09:53:46","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T09:53:46","slug":"8901-water-speaks-in-asian-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/nature\/8901-water-speaks-in-asian-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Water speaks in Asian literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the\u00a0<\/span>Berlin Family Lectures<\/a>\u00a0in Autumn 2015, Amitav Ghosh, the famous Indian author, spoke on the topic of \u201cThe Great Derangement: Fiction, History, and Politics in the Age of Global Warming\u201d. Ghosh\u2019s deeply researched books have won him great acclaim in both India and abroad, and in these lectures\u00a0he emphasised the role of fiction when it comes to dealing with the scale of the challenge<\/a>, and its interlinkages with history.<\/p>\n

Given this, it is surprising how few works, whether of fiction or non-fiction, have come out of Asia that emphasise the centrality of water. \u00a0<\/span>thethirdpole.net\u00a0<\/a>did a short search on works on the subject and came up with these:<\/p>\n

The Hungry Tide<\/a>, by Amitav Ghosh<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>Set in the Sundarbans of India\u2013 an immense labyrinth of tiny islands and mangroves in the Bay of Bengal \u2013 and a fragile ecosystem under siege \u2013 this is Ghosh\u2019s one work of fiction set directly in an area where climate change is having a massive impact.<\/p>\n

The novel brings to life one of the most dynamic ecological systems of the world and its fragile relationship with the people that live there. For hundreds of years, only the truly dispossessed and hopeless dreamers braved the tigers and crocodiles to eke a precarious existence in the salty mangroves. The settlers in this land were refugees from Bangladesh, and unrest and eviction are constant threats. Without warning, at any time, tidal floods rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. Woven through with both history and mythology, this novel showcases the distance between an arrogant, detached urban elite and the people who live in such regions.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Cry Lake Tai<\/a><\/span>, by\u00a0Qiu Xiaolong<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/strong>Part of the acclaimed Inspector Chen series, this book follows Chief inspector Chen Cao from the Shanghai police bureau is sent for an all-expenses-paid holiday to the lake city of Wuxi and finds himself caught in an intrigue of industrial pollution, corruption and murder. The story was inspired by the real story of the\u00a0Lake Tai<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 one of China\u2019s most polluted water bodies in the lower Yangtze delta. The lake turned fluorescent green contaminated by waste from thousands of chemical plants that sprung up in the rice paddies along its banks. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores.<\/p>\n

When a chemical company boss is murdered just before his factory is privatised and a young attractive environmentalist tries to uncover the culprits, Chen cannot but resist following the trail of political corruption to the route of the lake\u2019s demise.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>The Man with the Compound Eyes<\/a>, by Wu Ming-Yi<\/strong><\/p>\n

This work of science fiction is hailed as one of the newest and best thinking on humanity dealing with natural disasters and human made ones. A Pacific Islander, Atile\u2019i, is swept up in a tsunami freighted down by trash, and hurled onto the eastern coast of Taiwan island. As the tsunami creates a trash vortex threatening the island, Atile\u2019i and Alice Shih, an academic, find ways to somehow bond and work towards saving the beauty of the island.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>Empires of the Indus<\/a>, by Alice Albinia<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a work of travel, anthropology and history, as Alice Albinia travels upriver, from Karachi to Tibet, from the end of the river to the mountains from whence it springs. Through the journey, Albinia manages to reveal the complex history of the river. One of the delightful by-products is\u00a0<\/span>this map of the songs<\/a>\u00a0that are sung along the length of the river.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>Waters Close Over Us<\/a>, by Hartosh Singh Bal<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Narmada river is one of the most important in India, and the only river around which a parakrima \u2013 or pilgrimage by circumnavigation \u2013 is conducted. The political journalist Hartosh Singh Bal, circumnavigates the river in his own way, looking at political developments along the river, the creation of a mega dam, religious rituals, the fate of forest dwelling tribal populations and lonely feudal rulers who have nothing left except their guns and their history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indian graphic novels<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Graphic novels may be capturing the challenges the best, with India\u2019s first graphic novel, \u201cRiver of Stories\u201d<\/a>, by Orijit Sen, being about the Narmada river, the dam being built there, and the movement against it. Published in 1994, it has been largely out of print since then. And then there is Amruta Patil\u2019s \u201cAdi Parva<\/a>\u201d, a telling of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, through the voice of the personification of the river Ganga. Sarnath Banerjee, probably the best known name among graphic novelists in India, recently came out with \u201cAll Quiet on Vikaspuri<\/a>\u201d, which deals with a dystopian future where Delhi is starved of water.<\/p>\n

All images are sourced from the websites of various publishers, with the exception of \u201c The River of Stories<\/a> \u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n
This article was first published on\u00a0thethirdpole.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As climate change makes a greater impact on peoples\u2019 lives, thethirdpole.net looks at how the writers of Asia have portrayed water<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1667,"featured_media":58689,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[764],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-33901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWater speaks in Asian literature | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As climate change makes a greater impact on peoples\u2019 lives, thethirdpole.net looks at how the writers of Asia have portrayed water\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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