Climate Grief in South Asian Anglophone Novels (2015–2025): Eco-Critical Readings of Floods, Droughts, and Displacement

Abstract

This study examines how South Asian Anglophone novels (2015–2025) render climate grief—the affective experience of loss produced by floods, droughts heatwaves, and displacement—and how fiction converts ecological catastrophe into personal and social narratives of mourning. The research focuses on a deliberately heterogeneous corpus: River of Flesh and Other Stories (ed. Ruchira Gupta), Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon, and Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, chosen because each text stages environmental precarity in distinct registers (episodic dispossession, landscape as moral witness, and infrastructural scarcity respectively). Methodologically, the paper combines ecocriticism with trauma studies and employs close reading, thematic comparison, and discourse analysis to trace how non-human loss (rivers, pastures, air) and human suffering (displacement, hunger, gendered violence) are narrated together. A key motivating fact is the acute vulnerability of the region—most visibly the 2022 Pakistan floods that affected roughly 33 million people and displaced nearly 8 million—situating literary grief within pressing material realities. Findings reveal that South Asian fiction more often depicts climate grief as ambient, slow, and intersectional—encoded in quotidian shortages, the erosion of lifeways, and gendered precarity—rather than through spectacle. By synthesizing affective and structural analysis, the study expands definitions of climate fiction to include oblique and intersectional narrations of ecological loss. It argues that literature functions as archive, witness, and ethical interlocutor: registering grief, mapping injustice, and making claims for social repair. The paper closes by suggesting further research into vernacular literatures, oral testimony, and interdisciplinary work linking fiction to lived testimonies of displaced communities.