ABSTRACT
Postcolonial ecocriticism has transcended the anthropocentric, pantheistic, and romanticized conception of the natural environment by giving contingency to the struggles of the marginalized human and the non-human through the textual and visual media. Thus, it has acquired a new dimension in the era of the Anthropocene by significantly using the tropes of anthropogenic climate change, global warming, and subsequent resource crises. It exposes how any resource scarcity, in general, and the impending fresh water crisis, in particular, will make the subjugated lives more vulnerable to the exploitation by the dominant neoliberal forces. By contextualizing Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001) and Girish Malik’s Jal (2014) in the postcolonial ecocritical paradigm, this chapter studies how global warming and the capitalist machinery accelerate unquenched thirst for water resulting in pandemonium, global disaster, and unwarranted deaths. Despite the difference in the narrative mode—a fiction and a film, respectively—The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Jal can be gelled together as they foreground the violations of the rights of the poor, the ethnic, and the religious minorities owing to the onslaught of globalization, where monetary and technological prowess determine a person’s claim on the planet. While Jal condemns the faulty Western conservationist principles of compartmentalizing human and non-human species by arranging water for the eye-catching flamingos but not for the moribund villagers, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh mocks at the catastrophic deprivation of the common citizens who lack financial stability to procure potable water in a neoliberal state. In conclusion, the chapter advocates for democratic socialization of natural resources through the egalitarian materialization of a bioregional community.
