The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
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Hello reader
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books!
This month, in honour of LGBTQIA+ Pride, Chintan Girish Modi’s essay introduces us to the world of queer literature for children in India. Chintan speaks to parents and community libraries turning to children’s books with queer themes to help young minds understand and be sensitive towards the lives of people who challenge heteronormativity and the gender binary. Himal co-published the piece with queerbeat, and you can read it here.
In another recent piece, Evan Tims asks, “Why, of all regions, is Southasia so prominent in contemporary climate fiction?” Evan takes a look at how Western cli-fi seems almost addicted to Southasia as a theatre for exploring its greatest concerns, yet often falls prey to stereotypes and uninformed perspectives.
Evan also notes that authors like Amitav Ghosh, Arif Anwar and Saad Z Hossain, either Southasians or members of the Southasian diaspora, have been pioneers of the literary movement to address climate change. And as we look to climate fiction for insight and reflection on our shared future, one has to read the climate literature of Southasia by Southasians, of which there is a sizable and growing tide. You can read Evan’s essay here.
Take a look below for a special interview with Evan, plus his recommendations for further reading.
Shwetha Srikanthan: Could you tell us about climate fiction’s potential to reshape the global understanding of climate change?
Evan Tims: There are a few major currents of thought on the positive potential of climate fiction. One of them is that novels and stories are far better communicators than numbers and facts ever will be. When you hear a story, you relate to the characters and you feel drawn into the plot – and you’re more likely to grow attuned to everything else happening in the narrative, including climate change. So it has powerful potential as a tool for both education and inspiration.
There is also a question of what kind of climate fiction gets written, because different types have different influences. Some authors have criticised the negative and apocalyptic content of a lot of the genre, reasoning that it might make people feel hopeless or present an uncritical view of the complexities of climate change. This is also where diverse voices come in. Despite the genre’s roots in Afrofuturism and Southasian literature, most of the cli-fi writers dominating the bestseller lists are white Americans. These voices are, of course, less likely to accurately represent the impacts of climate change on regions and communities they’re not a part of, as I write in my longer essay. So I think the answer is multifold – cli-fi can inspire and change people’s minds, perhaps encouraging the kind of actions or mass consciousness we may need to avert the worst-case. But we also have to be attentive to the kinds of stories we tell, and which voices are given the most space.
Shwetha Srikanthan: In the essay, you write that climate fiction has had a major impact in bringing the message of the climate crisis to a mass audience while exploring possible political, social and technological responses. What are some examples of how storytelling can help with that?
Evan Tims: I think my own history is a good example of the power of these kinds of stories. I grew up in a relatively rural town in a coastal state of the United States, and I was always conscious that the natural world was changing around me. I was also a passionate reader and writer, so I was drawn to the kinds of fiction that engaged with these problems. Over time, I think a lot of my reading – especially authors from Southasia – inspired me to pursue a career in climate. Lynn Hunt, a significant historian, wrote a book called Inventing Human Rights that I was really interested in during college. She hints that the popularity of the novel in the 18th century may have had something to do with the development of the idea of rights and justice. Perhaps encountering narratives of suffering through the eyes of relatable, meaningful characters taught readers to care more about others or broader societal issues – or that the broader trend toward this awareness inspired more writing on the subject.
Fiction also doesn’t have to be about climate change to inspire climate action or awareness. A lot of thinkers dismiss young adult fiction and science fiction stories like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Harry Potter, etc. Overall, in the United States, many of the most popular books of my generation were generally full of tropes about saving the world. They also had a strong sense of apocalypse. I think it’s undeniable that this type of writing has had some influence – or, of course, that the popularity of this type of writing reflects an existing cultural tendency.
There’s another interesting point to make here that has to do with many of the legal arguments surrounding climate change. There have been a number of legal cases, as well as a good deal of scholarship, that basically argues that people who don’t exist yet – but we can assume will exist – should be given human rights. For example, young people have tried to sue governments and corporations by saying that climate change violates their future right to a safe and healthy environment. There are obvious ethical and social conundrums to this kind of logic, but sidestepping those, it’s worth simply pointing out how much of climate discourse depends on the idea of the future. Climate predictions, emissions scenarios, arguments about the rights of those in the future – so much of the problem with climate is that its worst impacts simply aren’t visible yet, so we have to project and make claims about the future. One argument for the positive potential of cli-fi is that it lets us think through these possible futures – worlds we want, worlds we don’t want, and what we might be able to do to make a difference.
Shwetha Srikanthan: You say in the piece that it is more crucial than ever that Southasian writers are listened to and read by a global audience, and that this has driven you to teach climate-fiction workshops around the region. Could you tell us more about how the workshops started, and anything you can share about publishing the work coming out of them?
Evan Tims: When I first moved to Nepal, I planned on doing an ethnography of how different communities felt about the future of climate change. I conducted a lot of interviews where I asked people how the world would look in twenty, fifty, even a hundred years. I was surprised by how challenging it was to encourage other people to speculate about those types of timelines. Instead of finding a wealth of different imagined possibilities, I mostly found that people didn’t feel they could speak to those scenarios, or that the conversation simply wasn’t worth having. I started to think about what it would be like to open a space to encourage free, open speculation, without a sense of expertise or judgment.
It sort of just clicked – I’d always loved writing, reading, and engaging other people in dialogue. I was like, of course. A cli-fi workshop. The issue was I had barely ever taught anyone anything, and I definitely didn’t feel qualified to do so. I treated it more as a space for mutual invention. I wanted to avoid any kind of lecture-type situation, or even a typical teaching style. Part of this was recognising that I knew very little about what types of climate speculation might arise from writers from Nepal, and I didn’t want to interfere too much with my own assumptions or tendencies. Part of this was also an awareness of what I’ve talked about elsewhere – that speculative writing is so often dominated by Westerners, and I didn’t want to be a part of that problem. So most of my prompts were simply questions – what do you think Kathmandu looks like in fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred years? And then I would let the conversation grow, and I’d structure storytelling prompts and see what people came up with. And, honestly, I was completely blown away. It was so exciting to watch a group of writers come up with brand new ideas – speculations, stories, scenarios that had never been thought of before. It didn’t hurt that I had a really fantastic group of writers, from a ton of different professions and backgrounds, but who were all around the same age and equally passionate about writing.
In the end, it just kept snowballing. Halfway through the workshop, I was like, these writers are incredible, and their work has to go somewhere. I came up with the idea of creating an anthology to share with a broader audience. To share it, I had to also have a platform, other people who were interested, and so on. It turned into a larger effort almost by itself. After leaving Nepal, I did a shorter-term workshop in Bangladesh, and later a long-term project in Bangladesh on a remote basis.
I’m really excited to say that I’ll be publishing the work of those writers in the coming month or so on my website: in100yearsproject.com. I also organised a contest in the country with the help of friends, and I’m currently reviewing that work with the aim of putting out another small collection. I’m really lucky to have found the support of an organisation, eco.logic programmes, that has helped me organise and host projects like this. Currently, I think the snowball is still rolling and I can’t wait to see where it goes. The most rewarding part of it is all of the writers who are passionate, creative and ought to be heard, and I’m really excited to keep building a platform for them.
Shwetha Srikanthan: Compared to when you first encountered Amitav Ghosh’s work, when there was far less climate fiction to read, what are some notable shifts you’ve observed in the genre?
Evan Tims: I definitely think that the work I read back then was more apocalyptic in nature. There were far more stories about the end of the world, or at least its complete ruin – books like Gold Fame Citrus, The End We Start From and American War. A lot of recent climate fiction has a much more positive spin. Rather than climate change being regarded as a totalising apocalypse scenario, it’s either a more gradual decline or a situation that we can solve. I think part of this has been a response to the critique I mentioned above – a sense that negative literature has been counterproductive in some way, or maybe simply less interesting to a broad audience. After all, we tend to like happy endings. There’s also been a major shift toward the political complexities of climate and governance and even technology. Books like The Ministry for the Future and The Deluge are the clearest examples of these – they’re basically political dramas, or policy thought experiments, that explore all of the institutional machinations that might be leveraged to fix climate change.
You also have total counterpoints, The Immortal King Rao or The Storm being good examples of books that, while engaged in policy and technology, are really much more about people and their journeys through a changing world. It’s interesting to note here that the latter two are by Southasian writers, and the former by American men. But, overall, there’s just way more diversity of forms and content. There’s also been a push toward the experimental as the genre has grown. Perhaps at least partly in response to Amitav Ghosh’s arguments about the structure of modern storytelling being ill-suited to climate writing, there’s also been a shift toward the “Russian doll” structure of novels, in which there are numerous, nested plotlines and an abundance of characters. Other structures, like in Jenny Offill’s Weather, which is almost a stream-of-consciousness reflection of the changing planet, have been gaining popularity. It’s becoming more fun to be a reader of cli-fi, that much is for certain.
Shwetha Srikanthan: The essay mentions the rise of climate fiction in regional languages, like the Tamil writer “Ayesha” Era Natarasan’s novel Kaalanilai Agadhigal – “Climate Refugees”. Are there any particular Southasian languages or regions already producing climate fiction of significance, and any you’d hope to see more climate fiction from?
Evan Tims: I think this question is definitely where my identity and positionality makes it hard to answer well. I’ve spent time living in Nepal, India and Bangladesh, and I speak a bit of Bangla, but I still know so little about this part of the world. My personal goal is to be able to read novels in Bangla and Hindi and maybe even Nepali one day, but until then I can’t speak to what’s being written in these languages that haven’t been translated. I will say, from reading the work published in English, that Bangladesh and India have had the largest numbers of authors in the genre. I’m really hoping to read more climate fiction from other countries in Southasia too one day, and I’m intrigued by the unique environmental scenarios of countries like the Maldives, Pakistan, and Nepal. The Maldives is a low-lying country that’s already planning for sea level rise. Pakistan has faced devastating floods. Nepal holds much of the Subcontinent’s fresh water in the form of glaciers, which are rapidly changing. There is so much diversity in terms of the climate scenarios faced by different communities in Southasia, communities that are themselves incredibly diverse. The possibilities of writing and other forms of art and discourse on climate in Southasia are endless, and potentially deeply impactful to the global story of climate change. I’m always trying to read more, so if any readers – or, Shwetha, you’ve already given me some amazing recommendations – want to add anything, please do!
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad. Riverhead Books (2019)
Kundo Wakes Up by Saad Z Hossain. Tordotcom (2022)
The Storm by Arif Anwar. Atria Books (2018)
The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. W W Norton & Company (2022)
Here at Himal’s editing desk, a few new releases especially caught our eye this month. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and Its Diasporas, edited by Shash Trevett, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne, is the first-ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry, featuring over a hundred poets writing in English or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. The collection explores critical events of Sri Lanka’s troubled past, such as the Marxist JVP insurrections, the decades-long civil war, the 2004 tsunami, and the recent Easter Sunday attacks. The poet, translator and co-editor Shash Trevett writes that Sri Lankan Tamil texts, in particular, are fighting back against forces of colonialism, and modern Tamil translators are now “trying to reclaim these texts, re-writing the lived experience of the language itself.”
The photographer, writer and artist Arati Kumar-Rao’s new book Marginlands: Indian Landscapes On The Brink is another title that caught our attention. In her travels across the Subcontinent – from the Sundarban and Rajasthan’s Thar region to Ladakh, and beyond – Arati captures the urgency of preserving endangered landscapes and the lives of those who inhabit them. In an interview for the Hindu, Arati states: “In this age of the Anthropocene, with climate change upon us, the worst thing we can do is undermine the innate resilience of the land. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we end up doing.” Part of a new wave of creative environmental writing from Southasia, the book chronicles the effects of the climate crisis and environmental degradation on both livelihoods and biodiversity. We hope to explore these issues and more in a forthcoming review essay.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve celebrated the inaugural edition of the Himal Fiction Fest, where we published six original short stories by emerging writers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India, with illustrations by Kathmandu-based artist Manjil Rijal. We also hosted two reading sessions and discussions, where figures from Southasian publishing spoke about the present and future of fiction in Southasia.
Thank you to all of you who tuned in, and in case you missed it, you can read all the stories on our website and watch the recordings of the readings and discussions here and here. We hope to see you at our next Fiction Fest, where we will continue to showcase the next generation of Southasian storytellers.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian