The River as Witness and Wound: Reimagining Riverine Entanglements in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines how Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River (2021) reconceptualizes riverine agency through the framework of the Blue Humanities. It argues that the novel positions the Mahanadi not as landscape but as a sentient protagonist whose shifting states reflect the complex and often unequal relationships between human and nonhuman worlds. Through its polyphonic form and interlinked stories, the novel highlights the experiences of fisherfolk, weavers, Adivasi healers, and other marginalized communities whose identities and livelihoods are inseparable from the river. Drawing on the histories of displacement caused by the Hirakud Dam, the novel situates water as both cultural archive and witness to ecological and political violence. The paper contends that by foregrounding riverine agency, Mahanadi advances a Global South perspective on watery entanglements and calls for ethical frameworks rooted in indigenous epistemologies. The novel, therefore, serves as a literary archive for rethinking water, culture, and survival in an era of ecological precarity.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
Acosta, A. (2013). Extractivism and neoextractivism: Two sides of the same curse. In M. Lang & D. Mokrani (Eds.), Beyond development: Alternative visions from Latin America (pp. 61–86). Fundación Rosa Luxemburg.
Agarwal, B. (1992). The gender and environment debate: Lessons from India. Feminist Studies, 18(1), 119–158. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178217
Agnihotri, A. (2021). Mahanadi: The tale of a river (N. Sen, Trans.). Niyogi Books.
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana University Press.
Appadurai, A. (1988). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Boast, H. (2020). Hydrofictions: Water, power and politics in Israeli and Palestinian literature. Edinburgh University Press.
Boelens, R. (2015). Water justice. Cambridge University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.
Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S., & Levine, D. J. (2016). Planet politics:
A manifesto from the end of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44(3), 499–523. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829816636674
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222.
Chakrabarty, D. (2021). The climate of history in a planetary age. University of Chicago Press.
D’Souza, R. (2008, July 1). Framing India’s hydraulic crisis: The politics of the modern large dam. Monthly Review. https://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/framing-indias-hydraulic-crisis-the-politics-of-the-modern-large-dam/
DeLoughrey, E. (2019). Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.
DeLoughrey, E., & Handley, G. (Eds.). (2011). Postcolonial ecologies: Literatures of the environment. Oxford University Press.
Feltham, O. (2008). Alain Badiou live. Continuum.
Guha, R. (1995). The small voice of history. In S. Amin & D. Chakrabarty (Eds.), Subaltern studies IX (pp. 1–12). Oxford University Press.
Guha, R., & Martínez-Alier, J. (1997). Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South. Earthscan.
Hart, H. C. (1956). New India’s rivers. Orient Longmans.
Iqbal, I. (2023). Locating the riparian commons in Eastern South Asia: A trans-local perspective. In I. Talbot & A. Ranjan (Eds.), Urban development and environmental history in modern South Asia (pp. 107–117). Routledge.
Kaushal, N. (2009). Displacement: An undesirable and unwanted consequence of development. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 70(1), 77–89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41856497
Linton, J., & Budds, J. (2014). The hydrosocial cycle: Defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. Geoforum, 57, 170–180.
McCully, P. (2001). Silenced rivers: The ecology and politics of large dams (Updated ed.). Zed Books.
Mentz, S. (2015). Shipwreck modernity: Ecologies of globalization, 1550–1719. University of Minnesota Press.
Miller, E. C. (2021). Extraction ecologies and the literature of the long exhaustion. Princeton University Press.
Mirza, M. M. Q., Ahmed, A. U., & Ahmad, Q. K. (Eds.). (2008). Interlinking of rivers in India: Issues and concerns. Taylor & Francis.
Moore, J. W. (2010). The end of the road? Agricultural revolutions in the capitalist world-ecology, 1450–2010. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(3), 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00276.x
Nayak, A. K. (2010). Big dams and protests in India: A study of Hirakud dam. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(2), 69–73. https://www.epw.in/journal/2010/02/notes/big-dams-and-protests-india-study-hirakud-dam.html
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of The Poor. Harvard University Press.
Poray-Wybranowska, J. (2021). Climate change, ecological catastrophe, and the contemporary postcolonial novel. Routledge.
Randell, H. (2022). The challenges of dam-induced displacement: Reducing risks and rethinking hydropower. One Earth, 5(8), 849–852. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.07.002
Serres, M. (1995). The Natural Contract (E. MacArthur & W. Paulson, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990)
Sinha, U. K. (2016). Riverine neighbourhood: Hydro-politics in South Asia. Pentagon Press.
Smith, L. C. (2020). Rivers of power: How a natural force raised kingdoms, destroyed civilizations, and shapes our world. Little, Brown and Company.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power. Oxford University Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2011). Depoliticized environments: The end of nature, climate change and the post-political condition. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 69, 253–274. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246111000300
Žižek, S. (2002). Revolution at the gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 writings. Verso.
