Panchamahabhuta and Climate Fiction: Elemental Epistemology in Indian Knowledge Systems and the Cli-fi Novel

Abstract

This paper attempts to read climate fiction through the lens of
Panchamahabhuta, the five-element cosmology that runs through several major
schools of Indian thought, including Ayurveda, Samkhya, Vaisheshika, and
Nyaya. Most critical work on climate fiction leans heavily on the Western
Anthropocene framework, and while that framework has genuine value, it rests
on an assumption that Indian Knowledge Systems do not share: that human
beings and the natural world are separate categories. Panchamahabhuta, by
contrast, holds that the human body and the environment are made of the same
five substances, namely prithvi (earth), jal (water), agni (fire), vayu (wind and
breath), and akasha (space or ether). When any of these elements is disturbed,
the disturbance appears at once in the landscape, in the body, and in social life.
Reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, along with Indra
Sinha’s Animal’s People, through this framework shows that these novels do
something that Western ecocriticism has not yet found language for. The paper
introduces the term “elemental epistemology” to describe this mode of reading,
and suggests it as a modest corrective to the dominant Eurocentric approaches
to cli-fi criticism.