Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods of the Tropics: The More-than-Human Worlds of Manasa and Olokun

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3980

Keywords:

Decolonisation, Myth, Demigod, Anthropocene, Climate Crisis, Posthumanism, more-than-human, Manasa, Olokun, Bengal, Caribbean

Abstract

In response to the current age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanist studies explore multispecies' entanglements and encounters in order to move away from the colonial binaries that separate humans from the environment. Adding to these studies, this paper explores the role of mythology in decolonising the Westerncentric strategies of narration. Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, envision the relationship of the human with other species against the deepening climate crisis, bringing to the fore the often-discounted discourses of cultural myths. In Gun Island, Manasa, the quintessential nagini is a folk deity of fear-based Nature worship from the Bay of Bengal, and an outsider to the established pantheon of Hindu gods. The Yoruba deity, Olokun, and his/her incarnations, move across the three time periods in Tentacle emerging as the saviour of the Caribbean islands. The novels reinterpret and re-evaluate the tropical Indigenous myths to implement alternate approaches of knowing and being in the world. This article seeks to explore how posthumanist and decolonial perspectives in these mythologies create new alliances that stretch across space, time, and species, symbolising the relationality of all life. The paper delves into the power of the mythical deities to highlight the existence of an interconnected network of human and more-than-human realms.

Author Biographies

Sunu Rose Joseph, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

Sunu Rose Joseph is a full time PhD candidate in Humanities at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India. She is an early career researcher, pursuing her research since 2019 in the area of Postcolonial Anthropocene Literature. She holds a Masters in English Literature and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering, and has previously worked as a faculty in English Literature and as a Software Professional. She has lived and worked in southern India through her entire career and is attempting to look at environmental humanities through postcolonial South Asian perspectives, while also seeking comparative environmental cultural perspectives (especially post-colonized perspectives) across the tropics and beyond.

Shashikantha Koudur, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

Shashikantha Koudur is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India, with over 20 years of academic experience in teaching and mentoring a socio-linguistically diverse student population from across India. He has supervised three PhD candidates in literature and has a significant number of publications to his credit. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Hyderabad. As a researcher, his major areas of interest include Comparative Literature, Indian classical music, Translation and Literary Cultures in South India. His research is informed by the lifeworld of postcoloniality in South Asia, and is the result of privileges (or lack of them) therein. He was awarded the Charles Wallace Short Research Grant to undertake short archival research in the United Kingdom.

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Published

2023-07-03

How to Cite

Joseph, S. R., & Koudur, S. (2023). Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods of the Tropics: The More-than-Human Worlds of Manasa and Olokun. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 22(1), 155–174. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3980

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 1 (2023): Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One

Section

Literatures and Literary Analyses

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