Amitav Ghosh’s verse adaptation Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) retells an environmentally conscious parable from the widely popular folk legend of Bon Bibi, the guardian spirit of the Sundarbans forest. Ghosh weaves a multimodal reiteration through his eco-poetic narration of a story written in verse for collective recitation, illuminated—not illustrated—by the painter Salman Toor, and adapted into a raag-based audio narration by the musician Ali Sethi. A collaborative spirit commingling text, image, rhythmicality, tactility, and, now, sound, Ghosh’s text is not only thematically environmental. The immersive experience of engaging with such a text and its ecological impetus also posits an environmental ethic premised upon relationality. Jungle Nama’s intervention in humanity’s interactions with the environment does not advocate environmental engagement based on the disembodied intellect in the reading of/for the world-as-planet. Instead, the text promulgates involved interaction through embodied cognition. Studying the performativity of Jungle Nama through eco-narratology and embodied multimodal iterations helps reveal the Bon Bibi myth’s ecocritical storyworld, its non-Western ontologies, and the agentic capacity of nonhumans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Jungle Nama’s epistemological relevance as a literary intervention shaping a sustainable and equitable environmental consciousness in India.

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Amitav Ghosh’s Storyworlds for Environmental Dwelling: Multimodal Iterations and Performativity in/of Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban

  • Ashwarya Samkaria

摘要

Amitav Ghosh’s verse adaptation Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) retells an environmentally conscious parable from the widely popular folk legend of Bon Bibi, the guardian spirit of the Sundarbans forest. Ghosh weaves a multimodal reiteration through his eco-poetic narration of a story written in verse for collective recitation, illuminated—not illustrated—by the painter Salman Toor, and adapted into a raag-based audio narration by the musician Ali Sethi. A collaborative spirit commingling text, image, rhythmicality, tactility, and, now, sound, Ghosh’s text is not only thematically environmental. The immersive experience of engaging with such a text and its ecological impetus also posits an environmental ethic premised upon relationality. Jungle Nama’s intervention in humanity’s interactions with the environment does not advocate environmental engagement based on the disembodied intellect in the reading of/for the world-as-planet. Instead, the text promulgates involved interaction through embodied cognition. Studying the performativity of Jungle Nama through eco-narratology and embodied multimodal iterations helps reveal the Bon Bibi myth’s ecocritical storyworld, its non-Western ontologies, and the agentic capacity of nonhumans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Jungle Nama’s epistemological relevance as a literary intervention shaping a sustainable and equitable environmental consciousness in India.