Chapter 1 Introduction Relearning the Coast

Erosions, Absences, Loss

This book traces what it means to live on a landscape implicated in the slowly unfolding processes of coastal erosion. In young delta landscapes at the interface of older continental landmasses and oceans, the twin processes of erosion and accretion are the norm. Tides or floods washing over lands leave sediments behind, thus raising the land over the course of years or centuries. Similarly, sediments sink whenever the flow of the water carrying them abruptly reduces its speed, which happens, for instance, when the river meets the sea. Sinking sediments may amass and rise into accretions, perhaps washed away again very soon, perhaps rising into sandbars or islands.

When accretion outweighs erosion and the delta effectively grows land into a watery expense or above the high tide line, it is a cause for celebration, the solid rescued from the amphibious much to the liking of terrestrial forms of governance (D’Souza 2009; Elden 2007; Lemke 2015). Erosion captures the darker side of this process. Sediments get washed out, sandbars disappear, and islands may vanish. Rivers give and take, as my interlocutors say. At its extreme, erosion punctuates areas and lives as water nibbles at the landmass, unsettling chunks or collapsing embankments.

Erosion may thus be understood as a process that is inverting the hospitability of places, turning lush and productive homes into—what to most eyes would be—amorphous expanses of brackish waters. What I try to capture in this book, hence, is not simply the loss of place, but the long processes of seeing it fade out and turn increasingly thinner, increasingly lifeless. I turn to lives lived amid the slow disappearance of the ground beneath one’s feet, and to the ways people resuscitate life in terms of struggling with brackish waters, of moving and settling elsewhere, of crafting pasts in order to come to terms with what it was they went through.

I am interested, therefore, in the experience of erosion as a specific form of demise and ruination that sends all kinds of ripple effects. I explore its unraveling of promises, materialities and, partly, socialities. And I explore the emergence of new socialities fostered in the enduring presence of coastal erosion: those that emerge amid the ghostly remains of formerly lush landscapes, and those that emerge elsewhere, in places removed but always still within the long shadow cast be the experience of coastal erosion and displacement.

Coastal erosion has, as I demonstrate, various temporal dimensions. It consists of drawn-out processes that frequently culminate in catastrophic instances. Liquified pasts haunt the present. Living amid eroding, liquefying, or sinking lands means straddling an uncertain present and looking anxiously into what is a mostly bleak future. Erosion is nowhere only local it comes imbricated into, and informed by, wider socio-ecological political-economical processes. It is a specific mode of the social and the material being entangled in decay.

In this view, Enduring Erosions contributes to the growing scholarship on life amid planetary injury (e.g., Tsing et al. 2017; Bellacasa 2017; Kawa 2016), this time by turning to everyday life and narratives along the edges of some of the fastest-shrinking settled islands along Asia’s shores. I follow individual trajectories, practices, relations, and narrations on the watery edge in order to account for the ripples sent by environmental degradations, as well as to situate these very degradations across scales and across classes of actors involved in localized transformations. Through the prism of coastal erosion, I explore water and sediment flows as unnatural environments combining anthropogenic interventions—some nearby and recent, some removed in time and space—with vivid divinities and the characteristic unruliness of the matter water is. In short, I read coastal erosion on these shores as an articulation of the Anthropocene, and seek to uncover how life is being lived in its looming presence.

The concept of erosion carries myriad meanings. Contemporary social commentators frequently decry the erosion of values, for conservatives, or the erosion of, say, the welfare state, for those on the Left. Erosion threatens something crucial in a manner that is both pervasive and barely visible. Its outcomes are problematic, and—crucially—preventing it is almost always challenging. In other words, erosions appear to threaten the underpinnings of the everyday, the consequence of overarching forces working at a slow speed. In erosion, temporal modalities are knotted. Invisible at a given moment, their workings become evident only across a longer time span. Likewise, upending or undoing erosions takes time. There are no immediate solutions, and no easy fixes. A lack of consensus on how to undo erosion is then often paired with what I call a deadening certainty about what is going to disappear.

On a different level, the trouble with erosion is not one of excess or disruption but rather of making something glide out of sight and disappear. As Rachel Carson (1962) famously noted, it is hard to notice the specific silence sustained by the absence of birdsong and the erosion of birds’ habitats. It is therefore challenging to assess waterscapes in terms of the land they were and could become all over again.

Scholarship in environmental studies considers several articulations and contexts of erosion. Soil erosion—the depletion of topsoil aggravated by intensive farming or desertification—is the subject of debates that turned formative for the field of political ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Furthermore, riverbank erosion is the subject of a strong body of interdisciplinary scholarship (e.g., Hutton and Haque 2004; Rahim, Mukhopadhyay, and Sarkar 2008). Both classes of phenomena—the loss of topsoil and the morphing of banks—are intimately related to one another via the flows of sediments. Washed out in one place, sediments find their way into rivers before being dropped on a massive scale as the river draws near the sea. Novel land formations bloom, only to become subject to coastal erosion by the combined forces of tides, currents, and waves that attack soft soil. Such processes are, as noted, the delta normal. The combination of large amounts of sediments and mild wave activity allows some deltas to grow very large; others are kept comparatively small by coastal flows.

This “normal” turns problematic once erosion outweighs accretion in landscapes settled by societies preferring land-based lives. And it may turn disastrous once people have to endure them within the double constrains of political economy and ecology.

Between the River and the Deep Blue Sea

This book turns to lifeworlds on a small group of coastal islands all of which are, to varying degrees, in rough waters. Situated at the southwestern edge of the active Ganges delta, at the sea-facing perimeters of an area known as the Sundarbans, these islands are in close vicinity to one another. They are drawn together, as my chapters demonstrate, by shared histories and ties of kin or friendship, situated within the same administrative units and in roughly the same pathways of storms, currents, and tides. Yet the islands differ, as do villages on these islands, and the contrasts documented in this book will help to elucidate the political ecology of loss and adaptation.

I call the islands I focus on in this book the Sagar Islands, consisting of Sagar Island and the much smaller islands of Ghoramara and Lohachara. Vernacular Bengali features a similar denominator (Sagar Dvip, Sagar Dviper Kache). This reflects that the latter two islets grew out of the former, as the historical and geographical account validates. More importantly, Sagar will be used as a common denominator due to being by far the biggest, most populous, and best known of these islands.

Sagar is home to a population of some 120,000 inhabitants spread across hundreds of hamlets with one urban center. It benefits from two aligned development trajectories. The most recent one targets the development of its southern shore as a beach tourist destination alongside Bakkhali and Digha. The other trajectory mobilizes the island’s key role within Hindu religions as a site of mythical occurrences that led to the descending of the Ganges from heaven down to earth. Not far from Botkhali—the ruined village I am constantly relearning—stands the pilgrimage complex of Gangasagar, home to an annual pilgrimage festival that attracts several hundred thousand visitors every year. Besides catering to the masses arriving here every mid-January, rendering Gangasagar Mela India’s second-largest religious congregation, the pilgrimage centers also accommodate a continuous stream of pilgrims arriving from across North India to offer prayers to the divine river. Yet many of the islanders perceive this holy river to be a threatening and voracious goddess, which spells out a deep rift between pilgrims and villagers when it comes to the nature of divinity. I will engage with this rift in detail in chapter 7, where I unpack ritual and gendered dimensions of environmental relations sustained in visions of risk and protection.

Colony Para, the resettlement colony Ganesh calls home and where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork, sits in the shadow of the pilgrimage complex. Home to some 180 households of varying sizes, it is one of five resettlement colonies dotted along Sagar Island—the other four being Harinbari, Bankimnagar, Jibantala, and Beguakhali (see map 1.1). All these colonies were established more than thirty years ago and turned into crowded settlements since. And all of them mirror the demographics shaping the island and the Indian parts of the delta front as a whole: a Hindu majority, composed of lower castes of the OBC category—that is, Other Backward Castes—to middle castes, locally referred to as “general caste,” and complemented by a Muslim minority, made up almost entirely of low-ranking Sheikhs. Taking the number of households as an indicator, my census shows Colony Para’s Muslims to amount to roughly 30 percent and Hindus to 70 percent, again mirroring district-level demographics. Occupations and livelihood appear of similar types, and diversities, as is being reported from all parts of the Sundarbans. Most people engage in seasonal mixes of providing services in the pilgrimage complex, construction activities, or fishing, backed up by agricultural work on their own fields. The considerable investments needed prevent all my interlocutors from owning their own fishing trawlers. Instead, many are employed on trawlers owned by investors or merchants, and work either as day laborers or for the duration of a season, or on similar terms on dry fish operations, drying low-quality fish for the domestic market in camps set up by investors. Members of the poorest households would also catch tiger prawn seeds (meen) or small fish with retrofitted mosquito nettings along the shores and banks, selling the former to middlemen fueling the highly disruptive global prawn industry (Jalais 2010a; Paprocki 2019).

Circular labor migration (Massey 2009) appears an essential strategy to make ends meet in virtually all households across all my field sites. It might be in the form of regular circular migration, such as women staying as servants in urban middle-class homes (Ray and Qayum 2009) or men spending the better part of every year on poultry farms in places as far as Kerala on India’s southwestern tip. Most often, however, it takes the form of groups of men, sometimes accompanied by women, taken by middlemen to construction sites across Eastern India on shorter assignments, ranging from a few weeks to a few months.

Given the shifts in governance policies and the mounting scarcity of land, the process of official land distribution has long been closed, and displaced islanders now face bleak outlooks. Following relations and stories along this morphing coast allows me to put the experience and afterlife of coastal erosion, as well as the politics and poetics of resettlement, to ethnographic scrutiny. This book does so by drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork, spread out across ten years, using the full spectrum of ethnographic research, including participant observation, various forms of interviews, and focus groups, enriched by the analysis of textual and graphic material all along the way.

The disruption and liquification of homes and villages on Sagar Islands’ worst-hit stretches may—as this book argues—be particular, but are not unique. Across the Sundarbans, coastal erosion is endemic. Coastlines morph rapidly, given the triple pressures of waves, currents, and tides in a rising sea. The demise of rivers due to the combination of geomorphological shifts and anthropogenic interventions at various scales only aggravates the situation, as I show in chapters 3 and 6. For decades now, more land has been washed away than what is deposited. Where substantial land was accreted, however, as on the now rather massive island of Nayachar, state authorities precluded the settlement of farmers for the benefit of, first, industrial complexes and, since this provoked resistance, salt-water aquacultures.

Against this backdrop of erosion and inaccessibility of other lands, long coastlines have become zones of despair, impoverishment, and failed hope. It is a development that leaves an ever-increasing number of villagers stripped of their lands and displaced from their homes. Being endemic, coastal erosion is particularly swift and visible in a number of hotspots. Botkhali is among them, as are the islands of Moushuni and Ghoramara nearby (Aditya Ghosh 2017; Harms 2015; Danda 2007; Centre for Science and Environment 2012). Furthermore, coastal erosion never stands still, as I show in this book. That is, as water encroaches, shorelines crumble and people retreat, zones of erosion wander and engulf landscapes and lives hitherto removed from the shore. There is little doubt that what now occurs in Botkhali will eventually descend on inland villages, the next targets once Botkhali is gone. In effect, the sea is literally encroaching upon people, one layer at a time. And many of my interlocutors look back on pasts shaped by micromigrations, receding with the shore, rebuilding and again losing their homes—frequently more than five times.

But if erosion is endemic in delta fronts and if the amphibious character of the land is a fact taken for granted, where does trouble emerge, and when does disaster strike? It lies, I suggest, in a double bind concerning the nature of land. On the one hand, settlement patterns staunchly defy the amphibious, as I detail in chapter 4. On the other, land has ceased to be available. In the course of settlement, most jungles have been axed and swamps drained. Others have been fenced off as protected areas. Still others appear earmarked for industrial development. Now, the time-honored strategies of moving on and finding another swamp to drain and colonize lead nowhere. Land is exhausted and forests are beyond reach, the agrarian frontier melting away.

To suffer coastal erosion is not unique to the larger region. Similar can be said about the majority of all coastlines in the vast Bengal delta stretching from here eastward for some one thousand miles and covering most of the coastal tracts of India’s West Bengal and of neighboring Bangladesh. These are extremely dynamic shores, subject to complex, local geomorphological scenarios (Brammer 2014). And while accretion seems to increasingly outweigh erosion the farther one moves to the east, coastal erosion affects populations all along the shoreline, at least in pockets. Zooming out even further, coastal erosion is now causing suffering across the low-lying, densely populated, and rapidly urbanizing coastlines of Asia and the world. Scholars, activists, and journalists highlight the plight of living in, and living with, disappearing shorelines in circumpolar regions and Small Island Development States (Marino 2015; Maldonado 2018; Rudiak-Gould 2013). With the Bengal delta expected to be hit particularly hard, it makes sense to conjure up a map of zones of coastal erosion and land loss dispersed on the globe. The morphing of the coast also intersects with state neglect, endemic poverty, and extremely high rates of population density. Exploring how people live with eroding—and liquifying or shrinking—landscapes in the Sundarbans, this book provides a nuanced account of localized “environmental suffering” (Auyero and Swistun 2009) that has import for coming to terms with planetary injury.

Multiple Sundarbans

The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands; some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’ restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable.… There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, the river from the sea.… The currents here are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily—some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks were there were none before.

—Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

Considering life amid environmental injury on extremely low-lying shorelines, I traverse the immediate coastal fringes, which, despite being situated just south of the East Indian metropolis of Calcutta/Kolkata,³ seem worlds apart from the city. This is an area of superlatives and extremes. It forms a part of the world’s largest delta, housing the largest-remaining uninterrupted stretch of mangrove swamp on earth, home to the highest number of South Asia’s much adored royal Bengal tigers. To make room for feline beasts and mangroves, both regarded as obnoxious and awe-inspiring at the same time, colonial governments created schemes of protecting their habitat (Greenough 1998). Continued by the postcolonial states of India, East Pakistan, and, later, Bangladesh, these schemes resulted in the establishment of substantial protected areas at the heart of the delta’s coastal tracts (Greenough 2003; Jalais 2008, 2010b). True to the notion of “fortress conservation” (Brockington 2002), environmental protection here continues being a militarized affair, with fences, patrols, fines, and incarceration. Everyday violence is carried out against unregulated forest users, and came to the boil most destructively with the massacre of Marichjhapi in 1979 (Jalais 2005; Mallick 1999).

This is an area where tigers are gods and gods are tigers, embedded within Hindu and Muslim lore. It is an area where land cannot be trusted. Colonial authors were irritated by these shifting landscapes, halfway between liquid and solid (see chapter 4). Novelists turn to them for their marked fluidity, defying easy categorization and, as such, housing strange creatures. It is no coincidence that the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s delightful novel Midnight Children nearly goes mad in these swampy lands, or that Amitav Ghosh (2004, 2019) keeps returning to the Sundarbans. The landscape is brimming with monsters and stories, enchanting not in spite of but precisely because of its shapeshifting nature.

Trees growing in salty water, archipelagoes rising and sinking with the diurnal tides, and expanses of monotonous salty green rising from amorphous muddy lands embody the tattering ends of some of Asia’s mightiest and most revered rivers. Long rendered obnoxious and vilified (Sarkar 2010), the protected heart of the Sundarbans now attracts an ever-growing number of visitors keen to admire the greenery, big cats, and what appears to be the lure of the jungle right at the gates of the Bengali metropolis.

In descriptions of the Sundarbans, references to any superlatives are interlaced with references to marginality. Its soggy, remote terrain also figures as a poorhouse, full of swamps and uncertainty, coupled with a sense of chronic existential dread. Entering the chronicles of modern history as a destination for the destitute masses squeezed out of rapidly populating land-stressed Bengal, as a colonial dream where immense profits can be plundered from footloose settlers (Sarkar 2010; I. Iqbal 2010; S. Bose 1993, 2007), it has been reframed as a zone left behind from national aspirations by virtue of its inaccessibility, the regular devastation wrought by cyclones and surges, or the stupefying poverty of its soils. For decades, geomorphologists have warned that the area is unsuitable for human habitation, endorsing bourgeois contempt at misers competing with tigers for scarce resources within and along protected areas (Fergusson 1863; Jalais 2008; Bhattacharyya and Mehtta 2020).

But if conservationist or tourist gazes are firmly directed toward the heart of the jungle in the sanctuary, this overshadows life beyond the park and the jungle within the same ecotone. Contemporary usage patterns of the label “Sundarbans” are hence somewhat treacherous. Indeed, my conversations with urban Bengalis would frequently affirm the bias that underpins much scholarly work on the active delta. Upon explaining my research, I frequently encountered resistance, culminating at times in the suggestion to refocus my study away from the immediate coastal fringes of the delta and toward the real Sundarbans—that is, the mangrove jungle shared by big cats, impoverished farmers, and fishermen.

In other words, this book starts from the premise that there are further Sundarbans situated around the core jungle, its buffer zones, and the habituated edges layered around all of them. This premise is well founded, as much larger areas than the protected zone and its immediate environs have historically been considered parts of the Sundarbans (Ascoli 1921; De 1983; Pargiter 1934). They continue being classified as such by many of their dwellers and by bureaucratic routines. More than that, the formerly swampy and now increasingly fragile, ragged islands and tongues of land embodying the archipelago south of the metropolis, between city and sea, share several trajectories. They are of a similar material makeup, characterized by the young accumulation of footloose sediments, stable enough to be called land, yet volatile enough to be quickly washed away; fresh enough to make them eligible for agricultural lifestyles, yet never far enough from the reaches of marine waters threatening agricultural prospects, much to the despair of people who consider themselves farmers. If living surrounded by water defines much of Bengal’s floodplains, with all the awe, sublimity, and terror in the eye of past or contemporary European observers (see, e.g., Gardner 1991), the Sundarbans share in the ubiquity of brackish water. Furthermore, the archipelago that makes up the Sundarbans is marked by being exceptionally hazardous. A glance at the literature reveals that hazards have been and continue to be diverse, and not all of them affect all parts in the same way (see, e.g., Bandyopadhyay 1997; H. S. Sen 2019). My research partners were relieved to say that the times when they had to fight off tigers or crocodiles are long gone, that these deadly creatures would continue troubling people closer to what remains of the forest. Still, the days of tigers are well remembered, alive in folklore, and written into place-names all around. Likewise, a few hazards have diminished in importance, such as earthquakes (Nath, Roy, and Thingbaijam 2008) or fevers (Greenough 2003; Nicholas 2003; U. P. Mukherjee 2013), which gripped colonial observers. Most importantly for this book, however, the entire archipelago continues to be vulnerable to a range of water-related hazards. Journalists frequently portray the Indian parts of the Sundarbans as disaster prone, mirroring diagnoses of Bangladesh as a whole (Haque 1997). Of late, the islands are referred to as a climate frontier, as a poster child of climate change, or as home to India’s or the world’s first climate refugees (see, e.g., Cockburn 2010; AFP 2019; Chowdhuri 2018; J. Gupta 2018). In line with that, West Bengal’s coastlines, of which the overarching majority fall into the Sundarbans, are the shores most rapidly affected by coastal erosion across all India (Kankara, Murthy, and Rajeevan 2018). Finally, sea levels appear to rise more rapidly here, with the mean sea level rising in Sagar amounting to 5.74 mm per year between 1948 and 2004, distinctly above the global average of 3.3 mm per year for the same period (Unnikrishnan and Shankar 2007, 306). As a whole, it appears as what Jason Cons (2018) calls a “climate heterodystopia”—a place of difference, yet of a dark and troubling kind, a place of experimentation and witnessing from afar what the future has in store.

Even if these other Sundarbans have made headlines recently, as actual or potential victims of sea level rise and a range of further anthropogenic environmental degradations, the available literature is still strongly oriented toward the habituated edges circling around the tiger habitat—to the exclusion of millions living on unstable islands in the active delta or the immediate delta front. This book contributes to correcting the picture, demonstrating that the Sundarbans are a diverse and stratified terrain. In her study of tiger relations close to the sanctuary, Annu Jalais (2010b) speaks of hierarchical orderings of islands—the closer to the city, the higher, the farther off, and the lower—mingling urbanization, development, and value in uneasy ways. On top of that, many islands in this vast archipelago are marked, as I will show, by divides between edge and interior. The spaces of slightly wealthier people who own slightly more lands stand out next to a terrain of lesser prospects and higher vulnerability. Such differences can be mapped alongside the dividing lines of political persuasion in a terrain infamous for its deeply entrenched party politics (Ruud 2000; Mallick 1993). Divisions of caste and creed further complicate the picture, yet rarely provide the sort of stark divisions we know from many other South Asian societies. Overall, the volatile frontiers of the delta have been known as regions where caste and creed lose importance against what has been described as a sense of egalitarianism in the face of hazardous natures and troublesome pasts in which paupers were swept into fever-ridden jungles (I. Iqbal 2010; Nicholas 2003). Thus, those who call the swampy frontier home tend to be poor lower-caste Hindus and poor low-status Muslims (for more details, see chapter 4), generally enjoying the absence of strained relations or communalist sentiments. My account stops short of providing yet another portrayal of contemporary Bengali society and politics as if it were untainted by the logic and practice of caste. Caste certainly underpins party politics and the social life of development policies in practice (Chandra and Nielsen 2012; Chandra, Heierstad, and Nielsen 2015). Caste also helps to account for some of the injustices in sustaining environmental injuries (M. Sharma 2017). Yet, as I will argue, the frontier region of the Sundarbans offers promising ground for rethinking the relation of caste and class in a crumbling frontier society.

I will explore these dimensions at length. Suffice to say for now that against these cascading differences, one might think of the archipelago as one of multiple Sundarbans. There are more than one Sundarbans and “less than many,” to adapt Annemarie Mol’s (2002, 52) phrasing, and they all hang together in tension. Coastal erosion is messing up such neat socio-spatial arrangements. In their brute and tumultuous ways, encroaching and eroding shorelines move the coastal fringe toward the islands’ interiors. Neighborhoods are impoverished and rendered frontier zones. Meanwhile, in many cases—what by local standards count as—wealthy peasants become landless have-nots over the course of years and decades.

Anticipating Loss and Distributed Disasters

We are living through an extended phase of planetary injury and fragmentation. More than ever, survival seems at stake. Mourning the disappearance of life-forms and whole ecosystems—not long ago a pastime limited to activists and scholars—now permeates public debate and intimate encounters with nature. Scholars at the intersections of the social sciences, psychology, medicine, and philosophy call attention to specific modes of suffering that require being addressed through novel categories. Albrecht (2019) speaks of solastalgia, Sarah Jaquette Ray (2020) of climate anxiety, while Bruno Latour (2018) identifies a sense of displacement without moving as a marker of the present.

This predicament manifests, I contend, in intricately knotted temporalities. As always, it is one of path dependencies, historical burdens, and uneven responsibilities stemming from past actions. For one, the Anthropocene’s anthropos is a splintered and torn, and more or less privileged and more or less responsible, conglomerate—not a unified actor—that must be scrutinized with the help of the analytical toolbox of postcolonial studies and political ecology (Baldwin and Erickson 2020; Gibson and Venkateswar 2015; Moore 2016). A lot has been written on excess and accumulation in the worlds of environmental decay. In this age of fallout, past emissions accumulate in the air and in rivers, as bodies accumulate toxins (Masco 2015; Murphy 2015). Industries and cities clog landscapes, their excesses embedded well into the future (Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014). In addition to the excesses of emission ousting and poisoning, the globe also sustains a biodiversity implosion and the disappearance of ecosystems or landscapes (see, e.g., Kolbert 2014; Hallmann et al. 2017)—in short, the thinning of life. Irrespective of considerable successes in the field of environmental conservation, environmental degradation intensifies steadily. We now live through collapsing ecosystems and vanishing worlds. Future possibilities diminish, and the present turns stale against the background of what we know it used to be. This predicament of thinning futures accentuates temporalized, increasingly fragile encounters with nature marred by an anticipation of want. Alongside apparitions of lost species and the monsters of runaway growth (Tsing et al. 2017; Tsing 2015), people increasingly look at valued parts of their material environments—say, individual plants, species, landscapes, or meteorological appearances—as if they are disappearing, even as if they are already gone. This calls forth a sense of bidding farewell, often accompanied by an ethics of enjoying that which is disappearing as long as it lasts. In such takes, the contemporary appears as the ghost of an even more precarious future.

Meanwhile, when approached differently, our present is saturated with nostalgia, particularly when social movement and writers imply that in some ways it is already too late, that climate change and mass species extinction have already arrived (Franzen 2019; Farrell et al. 2019). This book contributes to coming to terms with this moment of anticipating futures marked by loss, of relating to the present as a stale reminder and a ghost to become. When I think landscapes or people through the lens of future ghosts, I do not mean to subscribe to visions of the wholesale inundation of entire coasts or deltas amid sea level rise, nor do I intend to subscribe to discourses of victimization and the erasure of agency. Such visions would disregard coastal heterogeneity, resilience, and adaptive interventions that hold the potential to transform battered coastlines into mosaics of endurance. While this is generally true, a long history of neglect and the sidelining of comprehensive adaptation measures along Bengal’s rural coasts make the thinning of futures and a turn to the ghostly appear very likely.

In turning to the disappearance of land, homes, and swamps on eroding coasts, this book accounts for one of the most extreme articulations of environmental degradation. As coastal erosions and ensuing population displacements are now a widespread reality on low-lying coasts across the world, this is an essential endeavor. It is also imperative to understand and act upon a range of environmental transformations that appear to be unrelated yet share similarities with respect to textures of morphing and modes of navigating. This materializes in processes of desertification and the poisoning of landscapes, as well as continued industrial and infrastructural developments in the age of mushrooming population density. Ethnographically scrutinizing the ways in which the rural poor navigate eroding terrain amid social constrains and fragile hope, the following chapters offer an account of the multiplicity of disappearance, accounting for temporal rhythms, multiple natures, technological interventions, and political dynamics.

In attending to long-deforested and drained landscapes at the outer marine limits of the delta, and being attuned to the shifting, messy nature of life enmeshed in erosion, this book makes the case for using loss as a prism to think coastal futures. This is not to say that coastal dwellers are easily overpowered and victimized, or that loss afflicts all humans proportionately. Instead, this book posits that we must remain alert to the ways in which loss as an anticipation and as a condition informs the way the present is dealt with and the way futures are made on sinking and battered coasts. Meditating on loss, Judith Butler notes: “Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community, where community does not overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community” (2003, 468, emphasis in original). To think coastal erosion through the prism of the community of loss captures not only the totality of devastation, but first and foremost this shared sense of bereavement. At the same time, it invites us to attend to the state of absent materialities and the conflation of diverse temporal modes through the specter of loss. Focusing on loss and suffering as a shared predicament helps us to grasp, I contend, instances of solidarity, care, and tolerance essential for navigating the onslaught by the sea. This is not to suggest that instances of generosity and altruism can surmount the toll of past tragedies, but rather that it helps to account for the moments of care that crop up amid competition for scarce resources (Werbner 1980, 1996; Khan 2022).

Coastal erosion overflows the conceptual apparatus applied in research and practice on disasters. Navigating terrain as it gets undermined or washed away not only entails a process of relearning and readjustment. It also requires a kind of accounting for and of tackling these devastating developments. Turning our attention to lives lived amid encroaching seas, liquefying lands, and collapsing hopes, this book makes the case for the analytical and practical value of attending to the middle ground between endemic crisis and specific catastrophe, between chronicity and disruption. Coastal erosion appears, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, as a distributed disaster spread out across time and space. It is one of the concerns of this book to help to reorient the way disasters are thought about, discovered, and combated on a planet in peril.

To address coastal erosion means to get attuned to drawn-out processes. Plots get washed away across a span of months or years. Decisions to abandon homes are frequently not taken in a rush—they are years in the making. Villages and islands disappear within decades, as everything that cannot be unanchored slowly and relentlessly gets consumed by water. Yet, ruptures animate this violence of attritional changes, coalescing into moments of heightened dangers and intensified suffering. Cyclones not only are a recognized threat to survival, they also magnify—as I show in chapter 3—the reality of rather ordinary coastal erosion. Surges overrun shore fortifications, flooding, morphing, and washing out villages. Tidal waters enter freely through breaches, and homes are washed out as terrain becomes marine. Such an entanglement of event and process is reflected on the level of individual navigation of eroding terrain, spelling out times of being, as I call, in the fold of erosion interspersed with moments of flight, quick dispersal, and letting go. If we zoom out, what appears as a highly individualized process of being ousted from one’s home by a stalking sea turns out to be shared as an experience by swaths of the population. As vast shorelines are affected by dramatic morphing, waters close in on people spread across the archipelago, affecting some coasts and sparing others. In time, people move out of flood zones often only to be grabbed again. My notion of the distributed disaster thus occupies the middle ground without losing sight of either pole. I claim that to attend to this middle ground is critical for a better understanding of disasters, and thinning, in this moment of planetary peril.

Mud, Water, and People

In coastal erosion along the Bengal delta front, event and condition intertwine. Seen from afar, the morphing of coasts has long been considered the norm in the Sundarbans. For current scientific publications, this is a textbook case of delta dynamics. Accretion and erosion go hand in hand in crafting an amphibious terrain that always seems likely to expand, shifting the delta’s seafront elsewhere.

Not erosion per se but its increased pace and scale render it a deeply problematic affair—indeed, an abnormal and malevolent process. Fear of submergence runs like a thread through modern thought and beyond, as the preoccupation with sunken cities or continents, such as Atlantis or Lemuria, demonstrates (Ramaswamy 2005). It is the sheer speed and the preponderance of erosion in the westernmost parts of the Bengal delta that make them, I suggest, a laboratory for living with sea level rise and a smokescreen for anxieties about supposedly shared futures from afar. Concomitantly, it makes headlines as a disruption—disrupting rural riches, and lives, at the fringes.

Geographers argue persuasively that the actual shape the delta takes is deeply anthropogenic. The long history of deforestation and intense agriculture in the extensive drainage areas, have, via soil erosion, increased the amount of sediments swept downriver for centuries (Chakrabarti 2001), thus facilitating the blooming of landmasses at the rivers’ mouths. Likewise, the colonial obsession with checkering floods—now identified as a threat rather than a replenishment—has greatly contributed to the siltation of rivers, as sediments were blocked from being spilled across emerging landmasses with floods and tides. This siltation again has choked whole channels, blocking waters and forcing new pathways, which made the emblematic madness of the rivers human administered to a significant degree (Dewan 2021; D’Souza 2006).

The Ganges delta in Bangladesh and adjacent East India have been critical sites for researching erosion at the land-water interface. Considering the erratic nature of South Asia’s rivers, which ferociously swell during monsoons and transform the plains with a perplexing arbitrariness, it is little surprise that riverbank erosion in the delta was a major cause of concern for colonial authorities (D’Souza 2006). However, the literature appears to be strongly tilted toward inland estuarine lifeworlds in flux, at the expense of what I understand to be eroding landscapes on threatened seafronts. In Bangladesh, generations of geographers and their allies investigated the social consequences of land erosion by major rivers (Lein 2009; Zaman 1989, 1991; Schmuck-Widmann 2001; Hutton and Haque 2004, 2003). Dispute ensued about whether this was something calamitous or simply business as usual in a young waterscape where people are well accustomed to living with volatile and rarely controllable rivers, and whether land loss sustained by rivers’ shifting courses led to displacement and strife or was cushioned by rules attributing newly emerging lands to displaced people (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2007). This debate is mirrored on the other side of the border dividing Bengal and India since the partition. Here, one series of publications explores riverbank erosion explicitly as a disaster, a disaster that liquifies assets and pushes farmers into destitution and displacement (Rahim, Mukhopadhyay, and Sarkar 2008; S. Iqbal 2010). Another set of studies emphasize the fluidity of riverine worlds, addressing the practices of adaptation and flexibility required to live on ephemeral, constantly shifting lands. Intriguingly, this latter body of scholarship mostly turns away from settlements by the side of the river and refocuses instead on life between the banks, focusing on highly instable sandbars and islets that harbor specific forms of life, chars. People appear to move along with fickle floating lands, showcasing mobilities, economic rhythms, and forms of social organization suitable for engaging in, as Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta (2013) evocatively put it, dancing with the river.

Thus conceived, char life calls attention to mobility as adaptation, to the frontiers of terrestrial life-forms, and to the limited practicality of organizing property in terms of the rigid, supposedly stable grids and land registers seen in so-called modern states (D’Souza 2006). As an empirical entity and an inspiration to make up more environmentally modest futures, the char keeps on traveling. It is being discovered far beyond the Bengal delta (N. Sinha 2014; Albinia 2009; P. Sen 2008). Yet its presence, and its salience in thinking about amphibian life, is restricted, I argue, by specific environmental relations as well as by approaches to land and self. Char life, in other words, is decidedly riverine, not estuarine or coastal. To dance with the river requires water to be fresh, or mishti, sweet, as Bengalis would have it. To people of this delta, freshwater floods are not per se calamitous, they can also be invigoratingly fertile, creating new lands that are almost immediately fit for cultivation (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2007). It’s different at the seafront—here floods by uniformly brackish waters ravage harvests, with newly emerging land needing time and sustained effort until its salinity can give way to sweetness, the precondition for agricultural use. To live in such a state of flux and to move along with floating lands is unappealing and even morally suspicious to large swaths of society (Schmuck-Widmann 2001). Literature on chars alerts us to all too familiar distinctions articulated by bank people or village people, who chastise floating people for living morally hazardous lives, as well as by char settlers who pride themselves on living lives less touched by restrictive social norms and etiquette.

In being concerned with islands that are also in flux, this book still discovers lifeworlds that contrast decidedly with chars. Given the salty conditions, char life is just as unfeasible on the seafront as it is on the estuarine reaches. Islanders subscribe, as I will show, to a view of land that revolves around a modest level of stability and reliability. In this, colonial regimes of settlement coalesce with Bengali notions of rural beauty and the good life. Taken together, however, they underline the point that erosion on the seafront has a different texture than it has in the freshwater worlds far up the river, as I demonstrate in detail in chapters 3 and 6. Complementing the literature on a somewhat playful morphing of amphibious islands deep in the interstices of monsoon rivers, I reveal life on submerging coastal landmasses as it is lived by people who must adhere to an ethics and aesthetics of terrestrial life. It is a life permeated by loss.

Landscapes implicated in coastal erosion call into question how we think mobility. Nature and material environments themselves seem to be in a whirlwind of movement, their impermanence and transformation dramatically accelerated as shifting shorelines swamp and remold terrain. In a sense, the world is out of joints and terrestrial thinking is numbed by the force of waters operating in the mode of excess, spilling, soaking, and submergence. In contrast to parched regions where water’s incremental absence or dispersion is seen to thin out places and leave people stranded, I engage with lifeworlds as they turn untenable through the overwhelming incursions of water of a disruptive, saline kind. In both cases, matter’s mobilities, fluidities, and cascading transformations, accelerated in configurations of crisis, unveil specific patterns of human mobility. It will not suffice to situate such mobilities only against a backdrop of environmental transformation—for the routes and trajectories of human mobilities are clearly demarcated by layers of political and economic constraints. Nor will it suffice, as I argue in this book, to conceptualize mobility in this shapeshifting world within a dyad of staying and fleeing. They come entangled, and one feeds into the other.

The debate concerning the overlaps of environment and migration appears to be in gridlock. Discussions continue unabated on numbers, on their reliability and suitability to forecasts (see, e.g., Kelman 2019). Very rough estimates travel back and forth between scientific publications, policy papers, and journalist articles, sometimes sticking even after being discredited as bloated or unsupported by evidence (Hunter, Luna, and Norton 2015; Lübken 2012; Oliver-Smith 2012; McLeman and Gemenne 2018). This is not to say that the issue of forced migration in the context of environmental changes or disasters is not of numbing magnitude. It certainly is. And the future appears bleak. On a different note, we need to concern ourselves with what such numbers can do. If all goes well, quantifications seduce by providing a sense of hard data, of truthfulness and the clout of science (Merry 2016). But they are easily harnessed by xenophobic visions and conceal as much as they reveal, both on the criteria they rely upon and on the problems they claim to represent. Finally, numbers and curves are naturally devoid of the empathy and solidarity that comes with adding faces and concrete experiences. This book bets on ethnography. It attempts to steer clear of debates on numbers for the most part and instead highlights the way people move along with shifting coastlines amid social constraints. In doing so, the following pages answer the urgent need for detailed accounts of real-world experiences of environmental displacement on a warming globe.

Furthermore, the debate on environment and migration is imbued with deep rifts on what counts as its object. Quarrels abound on two fronts. On the one hand, scholars provide competing categorizations intended to capture and systematize divergent migration trajectories. Labels cohere with timings (before, during, or after a shock), the degree of permanence of outmigration (when they distinguish between flights or relocation), or the amount of deliberation involved in decisions to move (Suhrke 1994; Black 2001; Castles 2002; Black, Adger, et al. 2011; Morrissey 2012). Much of the debate takes sedentariness as the implicit norm: being anchored in place appears as ideal and mobility as problematic. This resonates with inscribing populations in place at the expense of embracing the fact that migration and mobility have also always been common practice (Appadurai 1988). Subsequent turns to thinking migration in itself as a form of adaptation to environmental transformation have ameliorated this problem to a degree (Black, Bennett, et al. 2011). But this book reveals that the borders between mobility and staying put are not merely porous but collapse in environments characterized by overwhelmingly mobile matter. This distinction fails lifeworlds where engaging in micromigrations following seawater incursions is, paradoxically, a tactic of staying.

My account reveals complex and dynamic patterns of mobility enfolded reiteratively in the fluctuations of this muddy waterscape. These include, but reach beyond, the entanglements of mobility and immobility we know from the worlds of marginalized labor migration. As it turns out, many people are mobile precisely in order to stay put. I elaborate in chapters 4 and 5 on ensuing circuits and risks, relying on the conceptual apparatus of translocality (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013) and migration as adaption (Black, Bennett, et al. 2011). In addition, I discover another mode of being mobile in order to stay put: going through environmental displacement, people are forced to move, yet in large numbers stay in the vicinity. Retreating from the shoreline, for a long time many move not completely away or out of harm’s way. This contrasts with, I argue, much of the migration literature, which evokes swelling ranks of footloose populations crossing continents or even nation-states. What I dub “micromigration” occurs well below the radar of migration regimes and beyond resettlement or planned relocations schemes. Staying put also cannot be explained simply as an outcome of being too poor to move. Accordingly, I analyze short-range migration as a strategy driven by the attempt to tap into desperately hoped for rehabilitation schemes. It is a strategy buttressed by a sense of belonging and the tacit permission of former neighbors, which unfolds as a process of suffering when the shoreline draws near all over again.

Finally, scholars struggle to specify the role and relevance of environmental processes and events within migration trajectories (El-Hinnawi 1985; Klepp 2018). To pinpoint actual triggers and root causes is, of course, critical for any deliberation of legal rights and obligations. However, it fails to encapsulate the complexity of actual decision-making among mobile actors or the distributed and complex—oftentimes invisible and incremental—impacts of environmental degradations. It often remains unclear what role environmental degradations or disasters play within decisions to move—specifically among marginalized populations navigating multiple interlocked crises across the spheres of health, income, land tenure, and education (see, e.g., Klepp 2018; Oliver-Smith 2012; Piguet and Laczko 2014). On the impoverished, hazardous, neglected, and densely populated Bengal delta front, such complexities ensue. A growing number of people move across and out of the delta for various interlocking reasons (Aditya Ghosh 2017), frequently in the aftermath of the latest storm. But here again the extreme event turns out to be, as I will argue, the mere tipping point in altogether unstable lifeworlds and somewhat overdue decisions. I explore this figuration in detail across chapters 3 and 6.

Ironically, the texture of coastal erosion along a choking estuary in a crowded delta relieves me of much of the conceptual troubles. As shorelines encroach on homesteads, embankments collapse, and all that is solid is washed away, there is ultimately little room for debating whether nature figures large in mobility trajectories. When the floor underneath one’s feet disappears, taking with it the home and the most fundamental constituents of livelihood, displacement ensues in a straightforward manner. Across the chapters of this book, I take care to situate erosion within the contexts of history, political ecology, and practice. However, this does not denigrate the immediate rawness of the experience through which my friends and interlocutors saw themselves ousted by turbulent waters. In this sense, coastal erosion of this magnitude may be one of the very few dynamics allowing one to use the label “environmental displacement” in a nonqualified way.

Furthermore, I like to think of the ousting by brackish waters as a dis-placement, attempting to capture therewith the immediacy and force of liquifying places as well as the horror involved in seeing the ground beneath one’s feet dissolving. Clumsy as it is, I occasionally use the hyphenated term across my chapters. “Dis-placement” calls attention to the ambiguities and difficulties sustained by shifting shorelines and the swamping of earthbound human life as well as to the shattering of terrestrial thinking by an encroaching sea.

To speak of dis-placement means also to zoom in on experiences of forced mobility that diverge from the much more familiar contexts of war, strife, and ethnic cleansing (see, e.g., Butalia 2000; Kaul 2001) or urban beautification (see, e.g., Tarlo 2003; Ghertner 2011). The story I am telling in this book only rarely touches upon fences, camps, bulldozers, or weapons. Rather, I follow the gradual dissolution of space and the fading away of places. Through the prism of dis-placement, I ask for the social life and afterlife of lost homes, lands, and landscapes. How, in other words, are retreating shorelines and vanishing islands navigated by marginalized communities? How do islanders live with and make sense of the slow violence inflicted by a sacred river? What kind of disaster is this, and what is its texture? How do people cope with drawn-out changes and deteriorations amid state neglect, and what kind of futures do they anticipate? How are sunken places remembered? How is it to live on land that is thinning, already bearing the mark of the sunken and gone? How is it, in other words, to live on an already foregone land?

Tracing Disappearance along Knotted Temporalities

On that hot day in June 2019 when Ganesh and I were inspecting changes and relearning the landscape, we did so by contrasting older forms of the coast with the present. The transformations we zoomed in on would certainly be lost to most maps. Not because they were too miniscule or irrelevant to mapmakers, but rather because the present scenario had only a short lifespan. It was in the process of being eroded as we walked it. And as this book goes to print, it will most likely have been washed away for good, the village of Botkhali wiped from the face of the earth.

What remains of Botkhali, or indeed of other “dead places” (Read 1996, ix) I am concerned with in this book, is hardly visible to the eye. To experienced navigators, certain currents that reveal bumps in the seafloor will give away the location of former islets. Displaced islanders will point into the watery expanse, expounding on the precise whereabouts of the house they grew up in or the trees whose shade they rested in before both disappeared. Similarly, sturdy infrastructural objects, such as sluice gates or trunks, might continue to signal former contours of the island by sticking out of the water before they also fade from sight. On most accounts, merely a watery expanse remains. As the estuary constantly gnaws away at the land, pushing through embankments and into homes, a rift deepens between the stable coastlines found in maps and the fluid, retreating, morphing character of coastlines in terrains such as the Sundarbans, filled only by water and memory.

In light of this rift, this book turns to memories of the past and their narrations as critical resources. Narrations of the past have been the staple of historians and anthropologists, in oral history and beyond. The sphere of intimate recollections, once understood as the private foundation of selfhood, has become susceptible to all kinds of interventions (Halbwachs 1992; Berliner 2005; Augé 2004; Connerton 1989). A number of studies have interrogated the ways in which the past is deemed meaningful or used as a resource to bolster critical accounts of the present (Gold and Gujar 2002). After all, as Michael Lambek (1996, 240) notes, memory is “never out of time and never morally or pragmatically neutral.” Students of disasters have likewise shown that remembrance is a key resource for coping with disruptive events and a vehicle for negotiating meaning and attributing blame (Gray and Oliver 2004; Oliver-Smith 1999a; Simpson 2011). In all these accounts, memory appears as malleable.

To trace disappearance, then, is an exercise in working with, and working against, forgetting—that ubiquitous and by definition invisible yet socially informed counterpart to functional memory (Connerton 2008, 2009; Esposito 2008). Marc Augé (2004) binds erosion and forgetting together in a marine metaphor that shrewdly grasps the workings of memory. He writes, “memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea” (2004, 20). I nurture this concept further by turning to memory and forgetfulness as I excavate environmental relations in this frontier zone. Memory opens up a window to understand how islanders frame a world dramatically in flux, how they navigate displacements and the everyday challenges of living surrounded by a hostile waterscape, and how disappeared lands may persist.

Anthropology has long been concerned with disappearance and loss, cataloging bodies of knowledge and technologies as they disappear in the onslaught of modernization. Lévi-Strauss’s (2012) haunting Tristes Tropiques is emblematic in combining such an approach with cultural critique. While these studies were literally working against the loss of Culture in its capitalized form, present studies rather attempt to make sense of the ways people live through decaying material environments (Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014) or how absent things, places, or people are rendered present in practice (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010; Meyer 2012).

Exploring shoreline morphing and here, specifically, coastal erosion entails engaging with knotted temporalities of disappearance. These come in three modes. The first—I have already introduced it as relearning—involves localized future making in light of assessments of coastal erosion. The second revolves around the complex temporal texture of erosion, involving what I introduce as distributed disasters spread unevenly in time and involving certainty about onslaughts and losses. The submergence of islands in the Sundarbans also renders them, to onlookers from afar, sites to witness, investigate, and depict coastal futures as present condition. I call this third trajectory past futures.

For a while, it had seemed as if the presence of the climate crisis was restricted to the Global South. It unquestionably continues to be more readily discovered in exotic localities far removed from the centers of debate and policymaking. Thus, a small number of marginal spaces have spiraled into fame of global proportion, showcasing what is in store. The sinking state of Tuvalu, eroding remote Indigenous settlements along Alaska’s shores, or the Sundarbans hugging the Bay of Bengal appear to capture some of the horrors associated with sea level rise (Marino 2013; Farbotko 2010; Farbotko and Lazrus 2012; Centre for Science and Environment 2012; Ghosh, Bose, and Bramhachari 2018). All these places inhabit what Michael Goldsmith (2015) calls a “big smallness” since their size, numbers, or geopolitical relevance stand in stark contrast to the role they seem to play in forecasting global futures. At first sight, the Sundarbans appear as an exception here, home to several million people, spread across hundreds of islands and peninsulas. Yet, by South Asian standards, the Sundarbans too might very well appear of a “big smallness” aggravated by their marginal status.

This tendency to discover climate change in exotic places is only partly explained, if at all, by issues of social vulnerability. It reflects a trend of reading, and subsequently heralding, entire global regions as zones of volatility at the hand of wrathful natures, rocked by geological and meteorological upheaval (Bankoff 2003). An obsession with treacherous environments—both seductive in their abundance and shocking with their violent outbursts—has catered to the anxieties of travel writing and the manly conduct of adventurers moving beyond the edges of the temperate West (U. P. Mukherjee 2013). It has also fed into broader patterns of rendering the Non-West Other as zones of chaos and despair, waiting to be pacified and brought to fruition at the hands of (post)colonial enterprises (Said 2014). Superior technological knowledge, “proper” work ethics, and draconian measures could then be legitimized, and desired, as a means of taming the wrathful Other, be it of a social or natural kind. Irrespective of the demise of the colonial project, these patterns continue to wield enormous power. And they make a reappearance in a different guise, I suggest, in climate change debates. Nature, or so they imply, seems to gather force in exotic localities far removed from the West. If debates on climate refugees are anything to go by, these localities are—once again—helpless and in dire need of assistance, be it in the form of infrastructure for drying or drowning lands, passports for citizens of sinking tropical nations, or aid for impoverished masses (Dalby 2005; Hartmann 2010; Piguet, Pécoud, and de Guchteneire 2011).

Furthermore, the reporting on lives in these new disaster zones is informed by a rhetoric of spectatorship. The plight of people already enveloped in sea level rise, desertification, or increasingly fierce storms is, I posit, made relevant as a warning, as a glimpse into what the future might hold for other places. For this purpose, those sticking to increasingly inhospitable lands or weathering devastating events narrate their troubles into cameras or are cited in glossy reports. Sundarbans islanders, alongside Pacific Islanders or Indigenous Alaskans, are put in the spotlight in order to give an insight into anticipated onslaughts, to see possible futures in the present. “Ghoramara is not just any island. It is symbolic of a problem that transcends local, regional and national boundaries. It is the actual face of global warming and climate change, the biggest problems facing the earth today,” said Sunita Narain, arguably the most prominent environmentalist in India today (Niyogi 2009). Ghoramara also features prominently in one of WWF-India’s reports. In the introduction, it reads: “Their [Sundarbans islanders’] lives remind us of how precarious our existence is” (WWF-India 2010, 1). In attempting to direct attention to specific patterns of suffering, such portrayals mobilize people into being proxy witnesses for audiences far removed. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1997) explored what he understood to be a key metaphor in Western thought involving shipwreck and spectators at some length. To him, this figuration was noteworthy for reappearing in wildly different contexts and for emphasizing a not-so-subtle joy among spectators for being safe as they watch other people’s misery. Media representation of climate change’s proxy witnesses actualizes the metaphor. Again, spectators are witnessing other people’s perils from afar, while also shuddering at the very possibility of meeting similar fates.

Within this ambiguous terrain, the Sundarbans take on a distinct role. Temporal inflections have an added twist. As I demonstrate, dreaded futures are both a thing of the past and an ongoing menace. Media accounts only momentarily dwell on what is currently happening, if at all, before quickly turning to islanders’ present as a glimpse into the future. But, as we will see, islanders look back on decades of coastal onslaughts, assessing and evaluating bhangon, coastal erosion, by considering their past, present, and future. In turning to recollection of past and present practices of coming to terms with rough waters, this book unearths future possibilities as past conditions. I call attention to lives that are already being lived through what elsewhere appears as a rather dystopian vision.

Provincializing Climate Change

In unearthing future possibilities as past conditions, Enduring Erosions also contends with using the Sundarbans as a textbook case of climate change victimization. Film teams and professional photographers flock to the islands to produce truly haunting visual material. Over the years, rich documentation has emerged in the form of glossy pictures displayed in art galleries, in YouTube videos, or in scholarly and journalistic texts, all drawing attention to the sinking Sundarbans (see, e.g., Padma 2019; Cockburn 2010). Common to the vast majority is the conviction that what happens here is climate change and that the plight of islanders has something to say beyond local despair or ethical concerns. Images of sinking lands and collapsing houses, maps indicating the decreasing size of landmasses, and texts invoking the horrors of displacement are pitched as a wake-up call to the reality of climate change–induced sea level rise. To be sure, most outputs by artists, journalists, and scientists attest to the diversity of environmental changes that culminate in embankment collapse and shoreline erosions. But these texts and images appear to be organized around climate change, embodied by sea level rise. And there is reason to do that, simply because the Sundarbans today are a palpable zone of global warming’s existence (Mortreux et al. 2018; Hazra 2012).

However, the climate change label can be a misnomer of sorts, and this book takes a more nuanced stance. It does so on three accounts. It first situates current suffering and challenges in their historical contexts, demonstrating that the Sundarbans have been a frontier zone all along, with their watery edges being the site of immense suffering. Second, it argues that the effects of global warming are but one class of anthropogenic interventions into the waterscape causing severe distress and a distinctly textured type of disaster. And third, it demonstrates that the anthropogenic dimensions of coastal erosion, including climate change, are very often cast aside or overshadowed by islanders dealing with more immediate issues. In seeing these concerns through, this book is—to update Dipesh Chakrabarty (2001)—provincializing climate change. If it holds true that climate change demands new histories and new forms of thinking the human, culminating in the notion of the Anthropocene, as Chakrabarty claims elsewhere (2009), these takes need to account for how climate change inserts into already volatile worlds. To call attention to the unevenness of the Anthropocene, to emphasize that the anthropos is not a unified actor but splintered across the lines of class, race, locality, or time, certainly remains an essential endeavor (Haraway et al. 2016; Bauer and Bhan 2018). In addition, climate change also requires being situated as an experience, as a lived reality amid a range of crises and environmental degradations making up life at the margins. Provincializing climate change, then, does not aim to put climate change in perspective or deny that global warming poses existential threats to the archipelago sandwiched between the Bengal floodplains and the bay. It is rather an attempt to situate climate change as process, imagery, and experience in the texture of everyday life on these islands in order to do justice to the complexities of environmental degradation. Yet, among multiple threats and degradations, climate change comes with unique traction. It stands to reason that the ubiquity of “climate change” not only overshadows the multifariousness of degradations but also comes as a convenient signifier to put blame elsewhere and thus negate any detrimental consequences of nearby anthropogenic interventions. To provincialize climate change thus combines being attuned to local experiences and tying them back to diverse transformations and interventions in time and space. It considers responsibility to be close by and afar, further anchoring the concerns of postcolonial studies in coming to terms with planetary turmoil.

Plan of the Book

This book explores how people endure erosions in six substantial chapters. Chapter 2 situates my ethnographic account by drawing out, very briefly and necessarily sketchily, the contours of the social and material landscape of the Sundarbans and Bengal delta.

Chapter 3 explores the specific texture of coastal erosion. Following my friend Nur to the ruins of his former home, I account for a gap between disaster policies and what counts as truly disastrous occurrences along the coast. Official disaster response appears ill-suited to address coastal erosion. As a chronic and dispersed dynamic that hardly ever directly costs lives, coastal erosion remains well below the radar of disaster management. I take this to argue for a different understanding of disasters. Coastal erosion, I suggest, is best understood as a disaster distributed across time and space. Short of serving as a flattened-out chronic condition, it affects people and places differently. The chapter demonstrates how coastal erosion affects individuals and small groups during times of endangerment, which can be mapped on seasonal rhythms and disrepair. I thus shed light on the different temporal faces of erosion. It can quietly linger over people across years and decades, as they find themselves at the watery edge, before dramatically bursting to the fore during rather well-defined moments of risk. This leads me to argue that coastal erosion is a disaster marked by a high degree of certainty—certainty about when, where, and whom it will befall. Yet although coastal erosion is distributed, and as such spells out destruction in an individualized manner, chapter 3 also traces collective dimensions. These emerge not only in accruing large groups of displaced people across time and space, but also apply to people living through seasonal rhythms and sharing narratives of specific events.

Chapter 4 takes issues with mobility being considered as an exception. Exploring divergent historical trajectories that continue to shape environmental relations, I show that islanders look back on deep histories of migration and mobility against the background of scarcity, conflicts, and disasters. Involuntary migration seems to have been the norm, and spread out across long trajectories of what I call “circuits of displacement and emplacement” at—what used to be—the forest frontier.

In chapter 5, I explore resettlement. I demonstrate that rehabilitation used to be an achievement wrought by mobilizing favorable regulations within a climate of land redistribution, and put them to work in favor of environmentally displaced islanders. But resettlement was far from being a placid or homogenous affair, and I carve out two trajectories: from tense relations culminating in a death foretold in one to rather peaceful settlement operations in another. Considering these trajectories reveals the relevance of political and material contexts for actual resettlement experiences, and the salience of fine-grained analyses.

In chapter 6, I analyze embankments as vivid social sites. In a departure from the widely acknowledged fact that embankments are critical for life on the seafront, I take stock of a variety of embankments ranging from the simplest mounds to concrete seawalls. I read embankments as instruments of landscape transformation that instantiate state care or abandonment and profoundly shape everyday life. This leads me to consider the many roles invested in embankments. I show how embankments appear critical venues for income generation and for accessing scarce poverty-alleviation state funds, precisely in their frailty and disrepair. The vulnerability of coastal stretches and economic opportunities appear entangled in paradoxical ways. Below the level of authorized works, I find embankments to be fortified in unauthorized, ad hoc ways. I introduce the notion of minor infrastructures to account for such largely unacknowledged practices geared at upholding failing embankments. This involves unauthorized forms of fortifying embankment stretches deemed critical to businesses or of fixing frail embankments during surges, as well as everyday modalities of caring for homes and enabling human life in areas subject to tidal incursions.

Finally, chapter 7 analyzes ways of attributing meaning and securing a sense of hope on an eroding landmass. To islanders, the precise texture of the waterscape appears as a conundrum of engineering interventions, marine trade routes, playful currents or waves, and the very body of divinity. In demonstrating uncertainty in the attribution of blame and shifting trajectories of explanation, I draw attention to the emergence of what I call the other Ganga on these shores—the one that stands in a largely implicit but consequential opposition to the Ganga revered across India. I show how, in attempts to secure a future, islanders invest hopes in the protection of a hypermasculine god and similarly situated politicians able, or so it seems, to hold the complex muddy waters at bay.

1. 1. All of my interlocutors have been anonymized.

2. 2. Throughout the book, I use the spelling “Ganga” for the mighty river that is referred to in parts of the literature and maps as “Ganges.” The name “Ganga” not only stays close to how Bengali-speaking islanders, or the visitors speaking one of the many North, East, or West Indian languages, address the waters, it also signposts the intricate enmeshment of divinity and materiality (see chapter 7).

3. 3. In 2001, Calcutta was renamed into Kolkata. I use the name as applied at the respective time referred to.