This book is an anthology of key essays that foregrounds coasts, islands, and shorelines as central to the scholarship on the oceanic environment and climate across South Asia.
The volume is a collaborative effort amongst historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists to further understand the lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Terra Aqua invokes a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water—deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats—and engages in a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. The book explores uniquely endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against rising seas and climatic disturbances with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines.
A critical, transdisciplinary contribution to the study of climate change in South Asia, Terra Aqua examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the depletion of littoral lifeways impacting marine communities and biospheres. It will be of particular interest to scholars of environment studies, ecology and climate change in the Global South, hydrology, geography, ocean and island studies, environmental justice, colonialism, and imperial and maritime history.
Author(s): Sudipta Sen, May Joseph
Series: Ocean and Island Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 116
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Figures
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Littoral Frontiers
Amphibious Terrains
The Five Chapters
Lifeworlds of the Terra Aqua
References
1 Kerala Coast and the Environmental Ethics of Precarity
The Climate Is Personal
Toward a Blue and Brown History
Nervous Archipelago
Disappearing Ecologies
Archipelagic Awakening
The Torrent
Climate Anomalies
Terror of the Deluge
Environmental Ethics of Precarity
Bodhisattvas By the Sea
Notes
References
2 A Monsoon Miracle: Naming and Knowing the Mudbanks of Malabar
I The Malabar Mudbanks
II Narratives of Exception
III Describing Difference
IV Conclusion
Notes
References
3 “Source to Mouth”: Engineers, Rivers, Coasts and the Bengal Delta (1750–1918)
Introduction
Surveyor and Statistician
Change Leads to Centralization
Notes
References
4 Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh: Whiteheadian Perspectives On Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir
Whitehead Within the Riverine Context
Ganga Ma and Khwaja Khijir: The Event of Paradox
Khidr as Varuna/Shiva And/or Khidr as Ganga
Islamic and Greek Prefiguration of Paradox
Paradox in the Pathways of the Char?
Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Earth, Water, Salt: Amphibious Pasts of the Lower Gangetic Delta
The Bengal Delta
Ancient Peat
Mud, Fish, and Tides
Salt and Sweat
Enduring Lifeways
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
