This chapter looks at the literary and cultural legacy of the 1947 India-Pakistan partition to uncover and interrogate some motifs that are associated with political partitions – that they are inevitable and all-pervasive, that they are violent, that they are moments of complete disorder, and, most importantly, that they are examples of imperial powers getting things wrong. In this chapter, I explore the ramifications this historiographical narrative has had on the production and reception of partition literature, and argue that across multiple genres of literary texts, characters are depicted as bewildered or confused by the events happening around them, and that this confusion has important political ramifications for the nature of partition, and for our understandings of the extent to which people who lived through partition experienced agency over the trajectory of their own lives.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

This essay argues for the distinctiveness of the call to the planetary in its twenty first century form, without discounting its historical antecedents. It considers nodes of a distinctive necropolitics related increasingly to climate change, which break with the world-now of 1989 and its aftermaths in contemporary theories of world literature. Issues of death and its contemporary modes are worked with, alongside figurations of water and plant life. The essay is cautious yet insistent that we enable a conversation about planetary form as literary form in thinking about world literature.

Rights discourse is marked by ambivalence – the enunciation of rights alongside the attendant exclusions and violations of said rights. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the language of rights was used to justify the French and American revolutions even as women and the enslaved were excluded from the category of rights bearers. The human-based conception of rights also excluded the environment. This chapter proposes that extension of rights to both humans and nonhumans is at the core of the environmental humanities (EH). EH discourse of rights attends to the marginalization of communities disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks and nonhuman ecologies threatened by anthropogenic activities such as resource extraction and energy use. Enunciations of rights in EH demonstrate a commitment to not only a select group of humans but to all humans as well as to the rights of nonhumans. However, EH discourse of rights is not without tensions, including the competing claims to rights among humans and between the interests of human and other-than-human worlds. The chapter concludes with an exploration of these tensions in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh sets out to explore how literary forms and conventions have contributed to a ‘narrative imagination’ that is ill-equipped to grapple with climate change. He claims in passing that in comparison with the novel, which is his primary generic focus, literary non-fiction has been better able to circumvent culturally embedded ‘modes of concealment’ that prevent us from thinking the ‘unthinkable’. Yet, Ghosh does not explore how and why creative non-fiction might be more amenable to addressing climate change. Through a reading of The Great Derangement as creative non-fiction, as well as other examples of the genre, this chapter examines the genre’s potential benefits and limitations for shaping a ‘narrative imagination’ that disrupts the ‘modes of concealment’ bequeathed by colonial modernity.

Accelerated developments in the publishing industry have caused a shift in the conception and reception of South Asian Anglophone fiction. This fiction is branching into other sub-genres to question the historical, political and ecological realities of post-colonies. Decoding the complexities of the Anthropocene epoch, South Asian authors Amitav Ghosh and Osama Siddique fuse fictional and non-fictional modes of narration in their novels to explore the relationship between humanity and climate change. This chapter examines Siddique’s Snuffing Out the Moon (2017) and Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) as post-colonial ecological crime fiction that investigates the intensification of climate breakdown. The chosen texts incorporate crime fiction elements of historical retelling, partial detection and quests for justice to trace the causality of anthropocentric climate change and its material ramifications (climatic cataclysms, habitat loss, mass migrations, species extermination) for human and animal life, thereby highlighting the significance of climate as a determinant of planetary survival.