Ecological Migration: An Ecocritical Study of Padma Nadir Majhi

The study of climate change or environmental humanities have evolved as a new epoch in literature during the latter half of the twentieth century. Many researchers and critics argue that human activities have altered the geographical and environmental aspects of the earth and that it is now impossible to reverse the process. Consequently, cyclones, floods, and other natural disasters have become more frequent and they have contributed to human migration, displacement, and loss of biodiversity. For a few decades, researchers have been studying the consequences of ecological imbalance on the co-existence of humans and animals. Ironically, South Asian novelists and authors have seemingly overlooked this complex phenomenon of climate change in their writing as well. As the sense of climate refugees looms large in the backdrop, this multidisciplinary article explores Manik Bandyopadhyay ’s Padma Nadir Majhi (1936) from a postcolonial eco-critical perspective in order to understand how a Bangladeshi novel depicts the lives of marginalized people who are fighting for their lives and livelihoods while living on the banks of Padma, one of the largest rivers in the Ganges delta. This paper also delves into postcolonial literary theory to draw conclusions on the observations.