Myth, Modernity, and the Failure of the Secular Imagination: A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban

 

Myth, Modernity, and the Failure of the Secular Imagination: A Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban

 

Sandip Sarkar

Ph.D. Research Scholar,

Department of English,

Raiganj University,

Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India.

 

Abstract: This article undertakes a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s graphic verse novel Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarbans (2021) as a sustained interrogation of the secular imagination and its constitutive inability to think the nonhuman as agents. My argument is that the “great derangement” Ghosh diagnoses in his 2016 polemic is not merely a failure of literary form, nor even a failure of political will.More fundamentally, it is a failure of the secular imaginary itself. In other words, it is a failure of the epistemic dispensation. In the very act of disenchanting the natural world, this epistemic dispensation rendered ecological catastrophe not only possible but, in a sense, inevitable.I argue that JungleNama retrieves the Bon Bibi legend of the Sundarbans not as nostalgic primitivism but as an alternative cosmological constitution, a mode of ecological governance in which the nonhuman possesses voice, will, and juridical authority.Drawing on Charles Taylor’s analysis of the immanent frame, Bruno Latour’s critique of the Nature/Culture divide, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of “provincializing” secular reason, this article argues that the text stages a confrontation between the mythic and the modern. At its core, this is a confrontation between two fundamentally irreconcilable imaginations of the earth.

Keywords: Myth, Secular Imagination, Ecological Crisis, Non-human, Postcolonial Modernity

 

Introduction

There is a moment in Jungle Nama that, in my reading, constitutes the philosophical crux of the entire poem. Bon Bibi, the guardian spirit of the Sundarbans, having defeated the tiger-demon Dokkhin Rai and rescued the poor boy Dukhey from sacrifice, establishes what the text calls a “dispensation”:

“Thus did Bon Bibi create a dispensation,

That brought peace to the beings of the Sundarban;

Every creature had a place, every want was met,

All needs were balanced, like the lines of a couplet.”  (Ghosh sec. I).

The word “dispensation” is not incidental. It carries, quite precisely, the weight of a cosmological order, a system of governance that encompasses not only human communities but all beings, the tiger, the bee, the crocodile, the mangrove and the spirit world that, in this cosmology, sustains them all. The dispensation is not secular law. It is not a social contract between rational individuals pursuing their self-interest. It is, rather, a covenant, one in which the nonhuman is not mere resource but co-participant, not object of management but subject of rights. And it is this dispensation, this mythic constitution, that modernity hascompletelydismantled.My argument in this article is that Ghosh’s Jungle Nama stages a confrontation between two fundamentally incompatible modes of imagining the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, between what Charles Taylor calls the “enchanted” world, in which nature is populated with agents, spirits and forces that constrain human conduct and the “disenchanted” world of secular modernity, in which nature is inert matter, available for extraction, exploitation and commodification (Taylor 25-43). This confrontation is not merely thematic.I wish to suggest that it is structural.Amitav Ghosh does not simply narrate the myth of Bon Bibi within the conventions of modern literature.He narrates it in a pre-modern verse form, the Bengali dwipodi-poyar. In this way, he enacts, at the level of literary form the very retrieval of the mythic that the narrative itself thematises. The form, or, rather, the choice of form, is itself a philosophical argument, an argument against the sufficiency of the secular imagination.

          The article proceeds in three sections. The first examines the concept of the “secular imaginary” and its implications for the ecological crisis, drawing on Taylor, Latour, and Ghosh’s own The Great Derangement. The second offers a close reading of the Bon Bibi dispensation as a mode of ecological governance, or, to be more exact, as a cosmological constitution in which the nonhuman possesses juridical standing. The third considers Ghosh’s formal choices, his turn to verse, to myth, to the pre-modern. This is a deliberate strategy of what I call “re-enchantment from below”. It isthe retrieval of subaltern cosmologies not as objects of anthropological curiosity but as living practices adequate to the planetary emergency.It is not unfruitful to begin with a question. What is it, precisely, that the secular imagination cannot think? The answer, in my reading of Ghosh, is quite straightforward, even if its implications are immense: it cannot think of the nonhuman as agent. It cannot conceive of the forest as possessing will, the river as bearing intention, the tiger as embodying a juridical authority that constrains and regulates human conduct. This incapacity is not accidental. It is constitutive. The secular imaginary, as Taylor has argued in the book A Secular Age, emerged through a process of progressive disenchantment. This is the same Entzauberung that Max Weber described, where “the world is disenchanted” and no longer governed by “mysterious incalculable forces” (Weber 139).Taylor extends Weber’s thesis into the domain of the social imaginary. The “enchanted” world is the world of spirits, demons, sacred groves and divine dispensations. This world was systematically emptied of its nonhuman agents. It was then reconceived as a field of inert matter, governed by impersonal laws (Taylor 25–43). To think in secular terms is, by definition, to think nature as object. To think nature as object is to make extraction not only permissible but rational.

          Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) diagnoses this incapacity very strongly, sometimes almost sounding frustrated. The modern literary imagination, Ghosh contends, has inherited the Enlightenment’s suspicion of the “uncanny,” its refusal to admit into the space of serious fiction those phenomena, storms, floods, the unpredictable agency of the nonhuman, that resist assimilation to the probabilistic frameworks of bourgeois realism (Ghosh 17-23). The novel, in particular, with its commitment to the gradual, the everyday, the humanly scaled, has proven itself constitutively incapable of representing the planetary crisis. “In a substantially altered world,” Ghosh writes, “when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans” (Ghosh 14) and made much of Bengal uninhabitable, it is certain that this era will be remembered as the time of the “Great Derangement”. The derangement, in Ghosh’s formulation, is not madness. It is the calm, systematic refusal to see what is before one’s eyes. And at its root, as I wish to argue, lies not a failure of science, nor even a failure of politics, but a failure of the imagination, that is, of the secular imagination, which has so thoroughly evacuated the natural world of agency that it can no longer conceive of nature as a force that acts upon us, rather than a stock that awaits our action.Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, provides the theoretical architecture for this diagnosis. Latour argues that the modern “constitution,” the implicit agreement that separates Nature from Culture, the human from the nonhuman, science from politics, has always been a fiction (13-48). In practice, modern societies produce “hybrids,” entities that are simultaneously natural and cultural, human and nonhuman, material and semiotic, at a rate that far exceeds that of any pre-modern society. Yet the modern constitution insists on purification, on maintaining the conceptual separation between the natural and the cultural, even as the hybrid proliferates. The consequence is a fundamental inability to think the very entities that modern activity produces most abundantly: climate change, ecological collapse, pandemic, the entanglement of human and nonhuman on a planetary scale. Latour’s provocation, that “we have never been modern,” (46) that the separation of Nature and Culture was always a pretence, resonates powerfully with Ghosh’s project. Jungle Nama, in my reading, is nothing less than a demonstration that the mythic imagination, the imagination that never accepted the Nature/Culture divide in the first place, possesses resources for thinking the planetary crisis that the secular imagination has forfeited.

            The Bon Bibi legend, as Ghosh retells it, is not merely a story. It is, to use a term from Ghosh’s own commentary, a “charter,” a foundational narrative that “regulates every aspect of life” for the communities of the Sundarbans (Ghosh, Afterword). Annu Jalais, whose authoritative ethnographyForest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans remains the most sustained scholarly account of the Sundarbans’ human-animal entanglements, has demonstrated that the Bon Bibi cult functions as a “moral ecology” in which the forest’s human inhabitants negotiate their relationship with tigers, crocodiles and the tidal landscape through ritual observance and narrative performance (Jalais 57-80). The word “charter” is significant; it implies juridical authority, binding force, constitutional standing. The myth is not decorative; it is normative. It establishes not only what the world is but how one must act within it.The dispensation Bon Bibi establishes after defeating Dokkhin Rai is, in this sense, a cosmological constitutionand its central provision is the regulation of the boundary between the human and the nonhuman:

“They drew a line, to mark a just separation,

Between the forest, and the realm of the human.

To Dokkhin Rai was given the jungles of the south,

Where land and water mingle, at the rivers’ mouth.” (Ghosh, sec. I).

The separation is not exclusion. Dokkhin Rai is not banished from existence; he is given his territory, his jurisdiction, his sovereignty. The human is confined to one domain, the nonhuman to another. And the law that governs the boundary is not a human law, not a statute enacted by a legislature but a divine dispensation, an arrangement imposed by a nonhuman authority whose jurisdiction supersedes that of any human institution.

          The implications for the concept of ecological governance are far-reaching. In the secular imaginary, nature is governed, if it is governed at all, by human law: environmental regulations, conservation statutes, carbon markets. These instruments presuppose that the human is the sole agent of governance, the only subject capable of enacting, interpreting, and enforcing law. In the dispensation of Bon Bibi, by contrast, it is the nonhuman, the goddess, the spirit, the force of the forest itself, that legislates. The human is not sovereign; the human is subject. The forest is not managed; it is obeyed. Dipesh Chakrabarty, inProvincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, has argued that the secular, rationalist framework of modern political thought systematically excludes what he calls “other ways of being in the world,” cosmologies in which the divine, the spectral, and the nonhuman are not objects of belief but constitutive elements of political and social life (15-16). The Bon Bibi legend is precisely such a cosmology. It does not “believe in” nonhuman agency as a proposition to be assessed and either accepted or rejected by the rational mind. It inhabits nonhuman agency as a condition of existence, a structural feature of the world that is no more subject to sceptical interrogation than gravity.

 

The figure of Dhona crystallises what happens when this dispensation is violated. Dhona is, in my reading, the secular subject par excellence. He recognises no nonhuman authority. He treats the forest as a storehouse of extractable resources: “There’s much to be had there, I’ll take all I can see; / honey, wax and timber, and all of it for free!” (Ghosh, sec. II). The word “free” is crucial. For Dhona, the forest’s wealth has no cost, because there is no one to pay. He does not recognise the forest’s sovereignty; he does not acknowledge the dispensation that governs the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. He crosses that boundary not with rituals of propitiation, not with the humility of the honey-gatherer who asks the forest’s permission before entering but with the confidence of the modern entrepreneur for whom nature is, quite simply, raw material. Val Plumwood argues, in her critique of Western rationalism, that the tradition systematically denies agency to the nonhuman, producing forms of perceptual and moral blindness that render the natural world as mere “background” to human projects (Plumwood 97–122).Dhona embodies this blindness with pitiless exactitude. His brother Mona warns him: “Those who enter the forest should go out of need, / or they’ll  court danger; tigers know the smell of greed” (Ghosh, sec. II). But Mona’s warning is couched in the language of the mythic dispensation, the language of need as the legitimate boundary of human action. Dhona does not speak this language. He speaks the language of accumulation, of excess, of the unlimited.The bargain with Dokkhin Rai reveals the full horror of the secular logic taken to its terminus. Dokkhin Rai demands a human sacrifice, the life of Dukhey, in exchange for the forest’s wealth. What is remarkable is not that the demand is made but that Dhona accedes to it. He calculates. He weighs the boy’s life against the profit. And the profit wins. This is not irrationality; it is, rather, rationality of a particular kind, the rationality of the cost-benefit analysis, of the utilitarian calculus, of the secular imagination that, having emptied the world of sacred agents, is left with nothing but the mathematics of advantage. The boy’s life is a cost; the wax is a benefit; the calculation is straightforward. Ghosh’s genius is to demonstrate that this calculus, which modernity presents as the height of reason, is experienced from the vantage point of the mythic dispensation as sheer insanity, as a “derangement” so profound that it sacrifices human life for commodity.

            If the secular imaginary has failed, what imagination is adequate to the planetary crisis? Jungle Nama proposes a simple yet radical answer. It points to the mythic imagination. This is the imagination that never disenchanted the world. It has always known what the Enlightenment forgot. The nonhuman is not inert, not silent, not available for appropriation without consequence. This retrieval is not nostalgia. Ghosh is not suggesting that we return to a pre-modern cosmology. He is suggesting, rather, that the pre-modern cosmology contains within it resources, conceptual, narrative and formal, that the modern imagination lacks and that the ecological crisis demands.The formal dimension of this retrieval is, quite precisely, as significant as the thematic. Ghosh does not retell the Bon Bibi legend in the realist prose of the novel, the genre he has spent his career mastering. He retells it in verse, in an English adaptation of the dwipodi-poyar, the “two-footed line” of Bengali folk and devotional literature. This is not an incidental choice. The poyarmeter, as Ghosh explains in the Afterword, is “meant to be chanted, sung and read aloud” (Ghosh Afterword). It is, in other words, a ritual technology, a formal structure designed not for the silent, solitary reading that the novel presupposes but for communal performance, for the ceremonial enactment of the mythic narrative before venturing into the forest. The meter is not merely aesthetic; it is apotropaic. It wards off danger. It enacts the covenant between the human and the nonhuman.By writing in this meter, Ghosh performs what I call “re-enchantment from below.” The phrase requires some elaboration. “Re-enchantment” has become, in recent years, something of a commonplace in the environmental humanities, invoked by scholars who seek alternatives to the disenchanted worldview of secular modernity. The risk of such invocations is that they aestheticise the sacred, treating nonhuman agency as a literary trope, a figure of speech, a metaphor for ecological sensitivity. Ghosh’s re-enchantment is of a fundamentally different order. Philippe Descola, in Beyond Nature and Culture, has demonstrated that the Nature/Culture binary which structures Western ontology is not universal but parochial, one of four possible “modes of identification” through which human societies organise their relationship to the nonhuman (Descola 172-200). The Bon Bibi legend, in Descola’s terms, operates within what he calls “analogism,” a mode of identification in which the world is composed of a multiplicity of singular entities, human and nonhuman, linked by networks of correspondence and reciprocity. Ghosh’s re-enchantment is “from below” in two senses. First, it draws on the cosmologies of subaltern communities, the honey-gatherers, woodcutters and fisherfolk of the Sundarbans, whose relationship to the forest is governed not by environmental policy but by the myth of Bon Bibi. Second, it operates at the level of form, of meter, of the material body of language itself. The poyar couplet, with its insistent rhythm and its rhyming closure, resists the transparency of realist prose. It announces itself as ritual, as incantation, as a mode of speech that does not describe the world but addresses it, not as object but as interlocutor. In this sense, the form of the poem is itself a mode of ecological practice, a way of speaking to and with the nonhuman that the secular imagination, committed as it is to the separation of subject and object, can neither perform nor comprehend.Dukhey’s prayer to Bon Bibi, composed in the poyar meter at the moment of his greatest extremity, exemplifies this performative dimension: “Save me, Ma Bon Bibi, before I’m torn apart; / an unearthly tiger wants to rip out my heart” (Ghosh sec. VI). The prayer works. Bon Bibi comes. The secular imagination would call this “magical thinking,” a naïve confusion of words with reality. But the poem insists, with the full force of its own formal commitment, that words and reality are not separate, that the measured couplet possesses an efficacy that exceeds the semantic content of its propositions. “The bounded syllables gave wings to his prayer, /  to Bon Bibi it went, arrowing through the air” (Ghosh sec. VI). The “bounded syllables,” that is, the formally measured utterance, the couplet constrained by its twenty-four-syllable limit, give the prayer “wings.” Form is not ornament. Form is agency.

Conclusion

“A world of endless appetite is a world possessed”(Ghosh sec. VII).

In this single couplet, or, rather, in its devastating compression, Jungle Nama delivers its verdict on modernity. The secular imagination promised to liberate humanity from the superstitions of an enchanted world. But it has produced a world of unlimited appetite. In this world, no nonhuman authority, no sacred dispensation, and no mythic covenant constrain the extraction of resources. Nature is seen as inert and inexhaustible. The Sundarbans, sinking beneath rising seas, are the material evidence of this failure.Ghosh’s response is not to argue for re-enchantment in the discursive mode of the academic treatise. It is to enact re-enchantment in the performative mode of the verse narrative. Jungle Nama does not tell us that myth is ecologically significant; it gives us the myth, in its own meter, in its own rhythm, in its own voice. It does not explain the dispensation of Bon Bibi; it places us within it. And in this placement, in this assumption of the mythic frame as the condition of narration rather than the object of narration, the poem confronts the secular imagination with something it cannot accommodate: a world in which the forest speaks, the tiger possesses juridical standing and the goddess enforces the law. The secular imaginary calls this superstition. Jungle Nama calls it survival.At the end of the day, the question the poem poses is not whether we “believe” in Bon Bibi. It is whether the imagination that discarded her has proven itself adequate to the crisis it has produced. My reading suggests, and Jungle Nama insists, that the answer is no. The failure is not scientific. It is not political. It is imaginative. And the remedy, if remedy there be, lies not in more science, nor in better policy but in the recovery of precisely those cosmological resources that modernity, in its haste to disenchant the world, consigned to the category of the primitive, the childish, the outgrown. The honey-gatherers of the Sundarbans, who recite the Bon BibiJohuranama before entering the forest, have never made this mistake. The rest of us, perhaps, are only now learning what they have always known: that the earth is not ours to take, that the forest has its own law, and that the failure to imagine the nonhuman as agent is not enlightenment but derangement, the most profound, the most consequential, the most ruinous derangement of all.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP, 2000.

Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd, U of Chicago P, 2013.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.

—. Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban. Illustrated by Salman Toor, Fourth Estate, 2021.

Jalais, Annu. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. Routledge, 2010.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard UP, 1993.

Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge, 2002.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2007.

Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford UP, 1946, pp. 129-56.