Caste as Ecology: The Mangrove Archive, Slow Violence and the Labouring Dalit Body in the Sundarbans Stories of Shyamal Kumar Pramanik

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/10/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 5 (2026)

Article No.

062

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.67693/BJCR-BMQI6W5Z

Received

25 Sep 2026

Views

27

Downloads

15

Abstract

The Sundarbans has been written, mapped, legislated and lamented into international visibility, yet almost never from the vantage of caste. This article reads five short stories by the Bangla Dalit writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik— “In Dakshin Rai’s Land,” “Bhajahari and His Family,” “Champaburi, or the Story of a Village,” “Homeland” and “Life in the Forest”—to argue that in his fiction caste is not a social variable located within an environment but the mechanism by which that environment is distributed, priced, permitted and made lethal. Reading these stories together through Ritam Dutta’s “Dalit Botanics,” Ritam Dutta and Indranil Banerjee’s “Eco-Delirium,” Rob Nixon’s slow violence and Mukul Sharma’s eco-casteism, the article shows how the mangrove functions at once as pedagogy, archive and tribunal; how the Brahmin’s mantra and the state’s conservation permit operate as structurally identical instruments of extraction; and how Marichjhapi marks the point at which green law turns lethal. It contends further that Pramanik’s is an eco-delirious realism in which the unseen tiger, the sudden storm and the pugmark in the silt register the unassimilable excess of a caste-stratified environment.

License

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.