‘Hopeful genres like solarpunk can help bring climate discussions to dinner tables‘
Some Indigenous communities such as the Maori of the Aotearoa New Zealand understand time as a non-linear concept and navigate their relationship with the non-human environment accordingly. This helps them visualise life and their actions in a scale larger than the "present", shaping how they care for the planet and prepare for crises.
Rajat Chaudhuri's 2018 climate fiction novel The Butterfly Effect encourages its readers to think about the world in a similar way, pushing the limitations we have set on time, geography and species.
The binary-smashing thriller is now being taught in the English literature curriculum at universities within and outside India, with the Delhi University recently adopting it in their "Genre Fiction" course. Chaudhuri, who has advocated for climate solutions, sustainability and justice at global fora, including with the United Nations, has been working to communicate science through fiction, which he believes has a role and responsibility to engage with people's ecological consciousness.
In his other works like the novel Spellcasters, where smog is a character, or the short story collection Wonder Tales For A Warming Planet on the theme of planerary crisis, he makes a conscious attempt to use familiar spaces and narrative tropes to breathe life into mundane facts, especially to make the concepts accessible to young minds.
In this conversation with Down To Earth, he talks about the evolving role of fiction in the anthropocene, the psychology of caring for other species and the traditional ideas of dealing with civilisational crises such as global warming.
Preetha Banerjee: You have said climate change is a "hyperobject". How has literary imagination changed in response to it?
Rajat Chaudhuri: The sinking islands of the Sundarbans, the unprecedented summers in Europe, the restless Himalayas delivering death and devastation, the increasingly powerful cyclones, are all manifestations of a giant, massively distributed `object’ and its interaction with other systems and processes. Climate change is this massively distributed entity working across time and space, which is why professor Timothy Morton has conceptualised it as a hyperobject.
Because of the vastness of its extent, the variety of its manifestations and the long time scales over which it has developed, fictionalising climate change through stories has been a challenge. In fact, this, as I argue in my new book, The Climate Crossroads, has brought cultural producers like writers, artists and others to a crossroads where they need to rethink and reimagine their craft.
However, it is heartening to find that many writers have accepted this challenge and are fashioning and improvising new kinds of stories that can be included under the genre of climate fiction or cli-fi. Within this broad category we have dystopian, realist as well as hopeful sub-genres of storytelling like solarpunk.
Every fiction-writer, including myself, writing cli-fi today has reinvented their craft to engage with the peculiarities of climate change, especially the variety and wide distribution of manifestations and effects as well as the slow progress from unsustainable production and consumption to global warming. In my novel The Butterfly Effect I have yoked together a fast-developing incident arising from a scientific experiment going wrong with worsening climate impacts, giving the readers a flavour of overlapping crises as well as the narrative velocity necessary to hold the reader’s attention.
The challenges for this new kind of storytelling exist at many levels, including that of balancing science and facts with imagination, focusing on particular manifestations of the hyperobject while not missing the planetary connections and, most importantly, not ignoring the issue of justice which is at the heart of the climate crisis. I have found, and this I discuss in detail in my new book, that stories that balance their aesthetics with their politics and have a clear sense of planetary connections and the agency of non-humans, work very well as tools for influencing the reader’s imagination.
PB: Your 2018 climate fiction novel The Butterfly Effect has been introduced in the university curriculum. Why is it important for students to critically engage with speculative ways of imagining Earth's future?
RC: Yes, the book has been adopted into the syllabus by Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh Muslim University among other institutions in India and abroad, and I am really grateful for this development. The engagement with speculative futures is important for several reasons. First, it allows us to reflect upon possible scenarios and help us mentally inhabit these worlds, whether they be dystopian or hopeful futures. When these books are placed alongside the shared socio-economic pathways (SSP) narratives of the future, and the connected emissions scenarios, they can provide useful visualisations for backcasting exercises, which in turn can influence policy in the present time.
There are several other reasons why such stories are important but most of all it is because stories influence the imagination while bare scientific facts or media reports do not leave such a deep impact. It is well known that once the collective imagination transforms, we can expect the politics necessary to deal with planetary crisis to also change, and when that happens, policies and practices are expected to change rapidly.
Stories are really powerful in influencing the imagination even more so if they are placed within the structure of a new kind of education that steps beyond maintenance learning and anticipates change. Today’s students may have to bear the brunt of increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change and overlapping crises, but they are also the ones with the energy and receptiveness for new ideas that are necessary for transformative change. It is therefore important for young people to engage with these literary imaginaries of climate change as much as it is important to know a bit of the science and the bare facts.
PB: The narrative in your stories is at times non-linear and sometimes spiral. It reminds me of how certain indigenous communities in different parts of the world imagine time — not as something that perpetually moves forward but also goes in a spiral, with the actions of the past, present and future overlapping and interacting at certain points. Is this form a resonance of your understanding of the climate crisis?
RC: The structure of The Butterfly Effect arose from the demands of the multi-stranded plot and the planetary scope of the story I was trying to tell. The narrative sequence and the real sequence of events had to be different as the real sequence has the vast time-scales of climate disruptions slowly creeping up upon us. Also, as there is a detective character in the novel, it was useful to play with the narrative sequence to hold reader interest.
Time for many indigenous communities is indeed non-linear and seems to mirror the inherently regenerative adaptive cycles of the natural world, where the output of one process becomes input for another, which, in the absence of human interventions can continue almost perpetually. I may not have been consciously thinking of this while structuring the story but who knows if it was not sitting there in the subconscious and affecting my choices!
PB: Do you consciously balance dystopia and hope in your stories? How have your readers reacted to these elements over the years?
RC: More and more I try to do that. One reason would be the fact that studies have shown that hopeful and solution-focused stories can play a significant role in influencing ideas, beliefs and action. In The Butterfly Effect, we have a utopian community hidden away from the high consumption- , late capitalism-driven world around it. It is a place where the misfits from the high-consumption society take refuge. In the community, such enclaves are sometimes called critical utopias, that is a utopia that stands as a counterpoint to the planet-damaging ideas and practices of the world around it.
Later, I have written stories (in my book Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet) which involve a journey from unsustainable and dystopian settings towards utopian communities or solutions. I have also co-edited volumes of international fiction from the solarpunk genre, which can be called utopian with their focus on community-level action, decentralised governance, use of renewables, ideas of mutuality, conviviality, frugal engineering (jugaad!) and so on.
While dystopia has often attracted more readers, there is a well-discernible and growing interest in so-called utopian or hopeful writing that we find in genres like solarpunk. One of our solarpunk volumes (Multispecies Cities - Solarpunk Urban Futures) has sold extremely well and has also been adopted in syllabi abroad.
Currently, I am co-authoring a book about hope for the Club of Rome and the research has made me more optimistic — I have realised that while darkness seems to prevail, many hopeful practices are afoot and parts of the world are being remade. The experience of writing this book will definitely leave an impact on the stories I plan to write next.
PB: How do myths shape our understanding of the world and the present global challenge?
RC: Myths provide us with structures that, because of their antiquity, have become part of the collective unconscious. Stories that build on mythic frameworks, and here I mean climate stories, may have a better chance to influence certain audiences because of this long-standing cultural memory. Gregers Andersen, the Danish cultural critic has delved into how myths work in climate fiction and has slotted various types of climate stories on the basis of dominant imaginaries connected to ancient myths.
Closer home, Amitav Ghosh’s climate novel Gun Island connected ancient myths with present climate change through a story set during the Little Ice Age. This particular myth, about goddess Manasa, helps to introduce non-human agency into the plot where the goddess features as a kind of portavoce, or `voice carrier’ for the non-human world.
Much of the understanding of our ancestors about the natural world and how to live in harmony with it has been codified in myths and belief systems, some of these buried, destroyed and lost because of colonialism, and postcolonial ecofiction writers are beginning to dig these up, thereby presenting alternatives that we can learn from.
PB: In your fictional worlds, what is the position of human beings in nature and the nature of interspecies relationships?
RC: There are different characters holding different views in my fiction, especially in the novels. In The Butterfly Effect, we have a strong environmental activist character who acts as a foil for the scientist Tanmoy Sen who is pursuing genetic engineering experiments. In another novel, Spellcasters, the principal character develops multiple personalities, one who is a megalomaniac with high aspirations and another who is a nature-lover believing in sustainable lifestyles.
As a literary form, the novel works on conflict. Also, there is this long tradition of the European novel, which avoids certainties and instead juxtaposes various viewpoints and thus mirrors society and the world. But then also there is the literature engagée, writing that takes a stance and actively engages with political, social, moral and now environmental issues. I see my climate novels as well as newer short stories and other work taking a subtle or sometimes obvious stance about sustainable production and consumption, climate activism and so on.
In some stories, the human-nature relationship and kinship concepts are carefully developed as in `The Seventh Sense’, which you will find in Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet. Here, the young boy Gogol has this extraordinary connection with the non-human world and works with them to protect it.
Two volumes of solarpunk stories that I co-edited are all about multispecies justice, more-than-human connections and our entanglement with the natural world.
PB: How do the themes of development, technology and justice intersect in your writing?
RC: In The Butterfly Effect, the intersection of development (in the form of food security) and technology (in the form of genetically modified crops) is at the centre of the narrative, which then impinges upon justice and the whole debate about overconsumption in the rich North and underconsumption in the South.
There are various plot points as well as side stories where the intersection between development and justice are foregrounded, including one about the construction of a highway at the cost of the natural environment and activist groups putting up a strong resistance to it.
In my non-fiction book, The Climate Crossroads, I have dug deep into the philosophical and activist origins of climate justice movements connecting these to climate fiction writing and asking how the issue of climate justice is addressed in climate novels.
PB: Introduce us to the ideas (and thinkers) that have influenced your existing & upcoming works.
RC: There are too many so I will mention a few. Early on, the works of Aldous Huxley had made me aware about the links between techno-utopianism and authoritarianism which, coupled with my activist involvement with the precautionary principle as well as climate change and ozone depletion, had been a major influence for a novel like The Butterfly Effect. You will notice that the book is dedicated to Aldous among others.
A novel’s story is brewed over years absorbing material from a variety of sources and experiences. My involvement with environmental activism was one such source which in turn had been fuelled by the horrors of Bhopal and sustained by the nuggets of wisdom and information that Down to Earth has been providing for so many years. From those early days, I had been closely following CSE’s work and had had the opportunity to hear the great Anil Agarwal speak in Delhi. In recent times the climate writing of Amitav Ghosh has left a lasting impression as has the work of environmental thinkers, educationists, philosophers, and those who professed kindness, empathy, non-attachment, and sustainable living.
My more recent work in the solarpunk genre has been influenced by multispecies thinking, the idea of ecocosmopolitanism and also scholarship about indigenous people that we find in Deborah Bird Rose, Tyson Yunkaporta among others. Talking of Indian thinkers and writers who have left an impression on my thoughts and creativity, I count Tagore (too obvious), Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Anita Agnihotri as influence besides critics and thinkers like Ramchandra Guha and Dipesh Chakraborty.
Beyond these is an outer realm of names from antiquity to the present which include the Buddha, Immanuel Kant, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Kropotkin, EF Schumacher, Paolo Friere, Rob Nixon, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Sunderlal Bahuguna, certain postmodern thinkers, honest and dedicated activists I have met on the field among many others. My debts to them are enormous and I consider all of them my gurus, one way or the other.