https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.060
Wasted Ecologies: Anthropogenic Degradation and Vulnerable Communities in Akkineni Kutumbarao’s Softly Dies a Lake
SK TOUSIF HASAN
Doctoral Research Scholar
Department of English
Aliah University, Kolkata, India
DR. ROHAN HASSAN
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Aliah University, Kolkata, India
Abstract: This article illuminates Akkineni Kutumbarao’s eco-memoir Softly Dies a Lake (2016), a poignant narrative rooted in the collective memory of Lake Kolleru in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This article interrogates the disposability of vast geophysical entities in the Anthropocene. Firstly, the article elucidates the intricate entanglement between the narrated wetland and dependent communities around it and how these communities become vulnerable through consumerist ideologies and unscientific developmental interventions that degrade both the ecosystem and the lives around it.
Secondly, it scrutinizes the human-induced natural degradation through Rob Nixon’s “slow violence”, which renders certain communities as “disposable” or “expendable”, echoing Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “wasted lives” as a result of socio-ecological ignorance. Thirdly, it probes how anthropogenic resource extraction and encroachments render spaces themselves disposable, manifesting India’s entrenched crisis of wetland grabbing and pseudoscientific urbanization of vital water bodies. Deploying slow violence, material ecocriticism and critical waste studies as interlocking frameworks, the article uncovers the implicit discourses that obfuscate human-nature interdependence.
This article urges a paradigm shift towards sustainable cohabitation that enables it to look beyond academia. It also negotiates the sociological ramifications by critiquing the view of nature as a resource rather than a space of cohabitation.
Keywords: Anthropocene, ecocriticism, Lake Kolleru, slow violence, wasted lives, wetland degradation, environmental justice
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