Three Incompatible Resistances: Narrative Arrhythmia and the Politics of the Capitalocene in South Asian Fiction

The paper argues that, in select South Asian ecological fiction, a novel’s temporal organization and the politics of resistance it makes available are inseparable. Reading Rao’s The Fertile Earth, Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, and Johal’s Saraswati, it illustrates that ecological Marxist categories of metabolic rift and oikeios usefully map the field of extraction, but appear inadequate in explaining why the novels diverge in the resistance they permit. To address this, the paper adapts Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to narrative time and Gérard Genette’s concepts of narrative order to describe temporal structure independently of political content. It identifies three forms of arrhythmia namely, analepsis, durational compression, and simultaneity, each of which makes a different kind of politics legible as insurrection, secession, and reproduction, respectively. Each novel also presents a different agent of extraction: a joint family functioning as a firm, a state apparatus divided against itself, and a civil society executing ideology on behalf of the state. Given these divergences in temporal organization, politics of resistance made available, and agents of extraction, the paper argues that the novels allow comparison but not reconciliation. The paper contends that this incompatibility is not a failure of the corpus of fiction but its finding.