Staging Survival: Popular Performance and Hindu Climate Ethics in the Sundarbans

The Sundarbans is considered one of the most climate vulnerable regions in the world, impacted by erratic rainfall, sea level rise, and more frequent and powerful water-related disasters, such as floods and cyclones. Recent research on socio-ecological change in Bengal delta has explored how heterogenous “development assemblages” (Dewan 2021) comprised of governments, NGOs, donors, and other non-state actors frame and respond to climate change. These discussions have enriched scholarly understandings of the nexus of power and knowledge at work in climate adaptation and how they shape visions of the future and possibilities for climate justice (Paprocki 2022). In general, however, scholars often neglected that cosmological frameworks and actors play in climate change responses. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Sundarbans islands of West Bengal, this paper argues for the importance of considering religious responses to climate change in the Bengal delta. Specifically, the paper focuses on climate awareness programs undertaken by Hindu environmentalists at a grassroots NGO. The paper suggests that these programs not only frame climate change as a moral and ethical issue, but serve as a form of religious pedagogy insofar as they introduce rural audiences to modernizing currents of Bengali Hinduism.  

Previous studies of religious life in the Sundarbans reveal deep entanglements of ecology, livelihood, and local forms of religious belief and practice. Often, such beliefs and practices are shared across otherwise salient religious boundaries. For example, the forest saint Bonbibi has traditionally been venerated by Hindu and Muslim forest workers for protection from tiger attacks (Jalais 2010). Bonbibi is but one of a range of deities and spirits linked to the delta’s ecology and climate. Indeed, people in the Sundarbans only sometimes attribute events like cyclones and floods to climate change. More frequently, my Hindu interlocutors regarded such events as expressions of divine agency and/or discussed them in ways that were shaped by Hindu eschatology. The idea that deities have been angered by human wrongdoing was widespread, framing the effects of climate change as a punishment. Others invoked the temporality of the Kali Yuga, considered a bleak and morally degraded time and viewed disasters as part and parcel of the difficulties of the age. 

This paper focuses on efforts undertaken by Hindu environmentalists at a grassroots NGO to generate awareness about the anthropogenic origins of climate change in a rural village. The NGO embraced a broadly scientific approach in their work, and they wanted to convince villagers that human agency had caused and could ameliorate the effects of climate change. To these ends, the NGO decided to adopt more creative methods of raising climate change awareness. Open-air theater performances, known as jātrā, are a common form of entertainment, often incorporating social and moral critique. The NGO leadership felt that drama would be an effective way to spread awareness, so they partnered with an amateur playwright from the nearby city of Kolkata to adapt a previously written drama to the local context, and then recruited teachers and staff as actors. Importantly, the drama was shaped to a significant degree by modernizing Bengali Hindu frameworks.   

I approach the drama as a form of “civil ritual” (Korom 2011). In the performance, the seasons of the year were enacted as a family, with some family members sick and dying. Greenhouse gas pollution was embodied in an evil king named dūṣaṇāsur or “pollution demon,” who gathers his strength from the moral failings of humanity. Throughout the drama, the pollution demon pollutes human consciousness and encourages bad behavior. However, when the seasons call a doctor to diagnose what is ailing the seasons, he explains that the source of the problem is not pollution per se, but the humans that cause it. The doctor blames the seasons’ distress on human moral weakness and to the six ripu or vices of Hinduism (desire, anger, greed, delusion, arrogance, and envy). The drama then contrasts “true religion” with “polluted religion,” the latter of which causes Hindus, Muslims, and Christians to hate each other and enter violent conflicts, which allow the pollution demon to thrive. Thus, the religious and ethical repertoires deployed in the drama are multifaceted, including not only elements of Hindu theology, but also strands of environmentalist thought. Ultimately, the drama attempts to convince people to conquer vices within themselves, such as desire or anger, which will poistively impact the wider social and natural world. Apart from this, the drama suggests that Sundarbans islanders must unite to launch a collective movement (āndolan), a term which is highly resonant in West Bengal because of the state’s long history of left-wing politics and activism.  

The drama pluralizes climate discourse in a distinctly religious register. Unlike technocratic approaches, it presents climate change as the result of moral pollution fueled by vices like greed. As such, it can be read as a response to climate change and as a critique of the political economic relations that produce climate change. Paradoxically, the drama uses mythological figures to center human responsibility and agency, and in this way, it enacts a novel vision of ecological thought and practice in the region. I therefore suggest that the drama is shaped by modernizing currents of Bengali Hinduism and that this case not only provides insight into Hindu framings of climate change, but also how modernizing Hindu visions encounter and transform existing frameworks divine and human agency.  

References 

Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

Jalais, Annu. 2014. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. Routledge India. 

Korom, Frank. 2011. “Civil Ritual, NGOs, and Rural Mobilization in Medinipur District, West Bengal.” Asian Ethnology 70(2):181–95. 

Paprocki, Kasia. 2021. Threatening dystopias: The global politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh. Cornell University Press.