Local water bodies and the threat of Slow Violence in Subhash Vyam’s Water

ABSTRACT

The developmental projects like dams and other capitalist structures in India, allocate the natural water reserves to elite industrialists and state apparatuses, leaving the local ecosystems impoverished and in the hands of capitalism driven policies, which milk the indigenous population to mollify the materialistic needs of the affluent. This predicament is vividly illustrated in Subhash Vyam’s graphic narrative Water that employs the traditional Gond Art to anchor the consequences of the ‘Slow Violence’ rendered to the local ecosystems owing to the development policies. As the revered natural sources of water in Vyam’s village are regulated through a dam, the rural Indigenous community is deprived of its basic rights to survive, vandalising the pious ‘human-water’ relationship, resulting in ‘a serious ecological crisis’. Drawing theoretical insights from Rob Nixon, Ramachandra Guha and Vandana Shiva, the proposed paper attempts to emphasize that the graphic narrative Water, through its remarkable graphic visuals, conjoined with local customs and folklores, is a reflection of the agony of the indigenous communities. Further, the paper analyses the grim reality that privatisation not only leads to exploitation and consequent depletion of the natural resources, but also robs the local communities of their ways of survival and resource sharing practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Slow violence
• water crisis
• local ecologies
• graphic narratives
• dams
• Anthropocene etc

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Tara Books India and Subhash Vyam (Art and Text from the book titled Water by Subhash Vyam Copyright © 2017 Tara Books Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India. tarabooks.com) for providing us the permission to use the graphic illustrations in Water. We are eternally thankful to the Editors as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the content of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Followed by the Holocene – the post glacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years of the Palaeolithic Ice Age (Crutzen n.pag.), the Anthropocene is the current geological epoch, where the human activities such as – plundering of the Earth’s natural resources, Chlorofluorocarbon emission, deforestation, fossil- fuel burning, dumping of excessive amount of waste in rivers, oceans, coupled with over-population and technological advancements, have led to extinction of various species, making the humans as the geological agents i.e. the main determinant of the environment of the planet Earth. The term was first coined by Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen and his collaborator Eugene E. Stoermer, a marine scientist. Though the consequences of the Anthropocene- Climate Change, Global Warming, Loss of Green Cover, Floods and droughts are having a ruinous impact on every country, the lives and livelihood of half a billion population of south and southeast Asia is at risk, where the incumbrances of these impacts will be endured by the impoverished strata and their local ecosystems.

2. A recurring motif in Gond Art illustrations, The Tree of Life represents the Mahua tree, classified by the scientific names Bassia longifolia or latifolia Madhuca indica. The Mahua tree is revered and considered sacred in the Gond communities due to its life-sustaining attributes. (Arur and Wyeld n. pag.).

3. As Gadgil and Guha (Ecology and Equity) observe; the omnivores are the urban inhabitants that feed on the he natural resources of the local ecosystems, rendering the indigenous communities impoverished.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manvi Sharma

Manvi Sharma is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand. She has presented her papers in various National and International Conferences including ASLE EmergencE/Y 2021, ACLALS International Conference on the Ruptured Commons 2022, and has a Scopus-Indexed Publication entitled, “Climate Change in India: A Wakeup Call from Bollywood” to her credit. Her areas of interests include Climate Change, Anthropocene, Popular Culture, Film Studies, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, and Literature of the Indian Diaspora, etc.

Ajay K. Chaubey

Ajay K. Chaubey (Ph.D.), formerly a Senior Assistant Professor (English) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Uttarakhand, is an Associate Professor of English at the Department of English, Jananayak Chandrashekhar University, Ballia (U.P.). His major publications include V S Naipaul (Atlantic, 2015), and Salman Rushdie (Atlantic, 2016) followed by his volumes on South Asian Diaspora (Rawat Publications, Jaipur). He has widely published his essays, interviews, and book reviews in national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies, indexed in the UGC-CARE and the Scopus. His latest volume is Gandhi across Disciplines: New Millennial Responses.