Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia

Description

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. 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