Beyond Sanitized Ecological Discourses: Uncanny Borderscapes and Emerging Voices Against Ecocatastrophe in Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017)

This chapter investigates how Ambikasuthan Mangad’s Swarga: A Posthuman Tale (2017) reconfigures space, voice, and narrative to confront the endosulfan pesticide disaster in the south Indian state of Kerala. The chapter aims to demonstrate how the novel transforms a localized ecological tragedy into a multidimensional critique of toxic development. Using a close literary analysis grounded in ecocriticism and critical border studies, it examines how narrative form, spatial re-imagination, and subaltern testimony intersect in the text. The chapter develops through three interconnected frameworks of uncanny borderscape, emerging voices, and crisis narratives. Uncanny borderscapes synthesizes Freud’s concept of the unheimlich with critical border theory, revealing how toxicity transforms familiar spaces into threatening terrains where the State enacts violence. Emerging voices analyzes how the novel departs from sanitized ecological narratives that aestheticize eco-disaster, and highlights voices historically excluded from mainstream environmental discourses, testimonies of subaltern and ostracized people who lack formal ecological knowledge, yet emerge as true environmentalist voices. The section on crisis narrative explores the novel’s temporal distortions and speculative mode, connecting “slow violence” with the etymological link between crisis and critique as moments of rupture that demand judgment. The chapter finds that Swarga uses literary form to reveal invisible violence, disrupt developmental myths, and enact narrative justice. It concludes that the novel functions both as an ecological archive and an act of resistance, imagining survival within poisoned worlds.