Retreat or Remain? Notions of a Full Life and a Slow Death from Sundarbans’ Eroding Coastlines

CASI Seminar

in partnership with the South Asia Center, South Asia Studies Dept, EnviroLab & Environmental Innovations Initiative

Megnaa Mehtta
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Anthropology, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

About the Seminar:
As sea level rise erodes coastlines of the Sundarbans, “managed retreat”—a process of relocating people to supposedly safer areas—is put forth by policymakers globally, and in India, as an adaptation solution. Through long-term ethnographic research with residents of Sundarbans’ coastal communities, this seminar examines their desires to remain in their villages despite recurrent experiences of floods, cyclones, and land erosion. The motivations to remain are because many know the alternative—enmeshing themselves within India’s precarious and risky informal economy—to be worse, akin to what some call a slow death, even as coastlines classified as uninhabitable by policymakers, counterintuitively, offer a safer and fuller existence. Furthermore, this seminar disaggregates what it means to remain and capacities (or incapacities) of aspiring for relocation, in relation to residents’ land ownership, livelihoods, gender, disability, and age. Prof. Mehtta examines the dense relational webs of kinships, sociality, ritual, and non-human life that make a space into a shongshar (household/home/world).

About the Speaker:
Megnaa Mehtta is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London (UCL). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Conserving Life: Political Imaginaries from a Submerging Forest, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. Her writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Current Anthropology. Her next phase of research, funded by an AXA-UNESCO research fellowship, is interested in migration, informality, health, and social reproduction as these themes intersect with climate adaptation policies, land dispossession, and long-standing vulnerabilities. This research is multi-sited and follows a rural to urban continuum of migrant labor from the coastlines of Bengal to a range of worksites, including factory shop floors and construction sites across India, Bangladesh, and Italy.

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The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.