Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing: Rethinking Human and More-than-Human Relationality as Planetary

Contemporary debates on the climate crisis and the Anthropocene increasingly distinguish the ‘planet’ from the ‘globe’ as a means to understand and address the interconnected ecological, political, and humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century. This planetary perspective emphasises Earth as a shared ecological system, shaped by profound human–more-than-human interdependencies across deep spatial and temporal dimensions. Contemporary fiction actively engages planetary imaginaries, offering critical frameworks for examining ecological trajectories and envisioning alternative futures. Yet few studies explore how South Asian fiction contributes to this discourse through narratives rooted in regional ecologies and cultural cosmologies. Shubhangi Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing (2018) exemplifies this literary potential. Through close readings informed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru’s theorisation of planetarity: a term used as an alternative or critique of globalization or related ideas like the ‘globe’, this paper aims to show how the novel articulates a planetary consciousness by foregrounding Earth system materiality, geological deep time, and multispecies entanglements, thereby challenging anthropocentric assumptions. Ultimately, the study concludes that the novel’s narrative strategies reveal the limits of global frameworks for addressing the present crisis and underscore the need to reconceptualise the planet epistemologically and ontologically.