“A Vessel Larger Than Reality to Hold”: Water Crisis and Indian Speculative Climate Fiction

Abstract The Anthropocene, today, has gained significant momentum in ongoing environmental, socio-political, and economic discourses. It has revitalised ecocriticism and environmental writing, and has, thus, shaped the social imagination. The effects of this can be seen increasingly in the production and prominence of climate fiction worldwide in recent years. In India, the genre of climate fiction is also growing rapidly. This article critically engages with the emerging genre of speculative climate fiction in India. It discusses three Indian works of speculative climate fiction: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019), and Veena Nagpal’s Radius 200 (2014). It investigates how the texts weave their narratives around the issue of water crisis and their visions of dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds through climate catastrophe. While situating the speculative fiction from India as part of the larger canon of climate fiction, this article also categorises its distinctive features. It does so by entering in conversation with the ongoing scholarly debate on climate fiction’s most effective mode of representation – the speculative vs realism debate. In conclusion, the article argues that Indian speculative climate fiction achieves greater effectiveness in dealing with the climate crisis by representing the ‘futuristic climate-changed worlds’ not as a rupture from the present but as a continuation of the ongoing crisis on the ground.