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.