Indra’s Net, Climate Concerns and the Posthuman Turn by Chitrangada Deb

Physicist and Professor Vandana Singh’s Speculative Fiction Indra’s Web foregrounds alternative templates of the future with a fervent critique of the man-made transgressions that have rocked the current geological era. As a solar punk fiction, Singh’s short narrative deliberates on the perils of ecological disaster and critically considers alternate forms of energy production and conservation to empower the posthuman subjects of a futuristic fully-globalized Indian subcontinent. It envisions a semi-fictional space that is outwardly modernized, technologically upgraded, and yet battling grim and realistic issues that threaten to injure its apparent excellence. The growing problem of refugee influx into the mainstream city of Delhi functions as a formidable challenge to the notion of a happy ideal, a super position that the country has claimed for itself. It also directs out attention to the escalating energy crisis fueled by an excessive and perennial demand in a world where sources of power are gradually but severely diminishing. All these and more lead us to a frightful recognition of the environmental degradation caused by unrestricted human pursuits that define the Anthropocene. In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti acknowledges climate change crisis as a destructive threat to the planetary bonding between mankind and nature. She observes,

In the age of Anthropocene, the phenomenon known as ‘geo-morphism’ is usually expressed in negative terms, as environmental crisis, climate change and ecological sustainability. Yet, there is also a more positive dimension to it in the sense of reconfiguring the relationship to our complex habitat, which we used to call ‘nature’. The earth or planetary dimension of the environmental issue is indeed not a concern like any other. It is rather the issue that is immanent to all others, in so far as the earth is our middle and common ground. This is the ‘milieu’ for all of us, human and nonhuman inhabitant of this particular planet, in this particular era. The planetary opens onto the cosmic in an immanent materialist dimension. (81)

Singh imagines a post-Anthropocene near future that has replaced traditional forms of survival with hard core emergent technology. Here biological diversity has already been cruelly compromised upon and natural resources strategically depleted. These have rendered the environment sufficiently weakened and its capacity for life support reduced. Consequently, an artificial environment, underpinning an emergent technologically mediated society, steps in to promote posthuman prosperity. Indra’s Web unfurls within a tech-empowered society dominated by spectacular innovations of the Biometric Energy Material Lab, such as stress reducing music apps, production of hydrogen from water molecules, raising fish stock in artificial marshlands, strong sensors that receive, analyse and utilize the coded frequencies of nature,  environmentally benign artificial cells termed as ‘suryons’ that regulate solar energy, construction of smart cities and self-supporting  residences that replenishes its own needs of food and energy. The sewage-fed biogas plants, cool comfortable buildings needless of air conditioning, solar panelled rooftops, and sustainable waste management embrace adaptability and secure greater energy savings without jeopardising the environment. However, everything do not perform seamlessly even within a controlled environment. The grand failure of Ashapur’s first smart energy grid, the Suryanet, the symbol of raw technology, is a case in point.

External sophistication and the wonders of scientific evolution have adversely affected the ecology, ruined its inherent balance and forcefully and even internally displaced a major population rendered vulnerable to the face of natural disasters. In Indra’s Web, severe climate stressors have evicted the poverty-stricken survivors of coastal Bangladesh, now sheltered in the fringes of the capital city Delhi, under the benign banner of the ‘Ashapur Project’. This evokes an awareness of the surging consequences of climate abuse faced by Bangladesh coastline in the contemporary present, considered as the frontline of climate change, perpetually battered by destructive super-cyclones, growing water salinity, land erosion, drainage congestion, rising sea level and flood.  Rendered vulnerable to the fluctuating forces of weather, climate migrants are compelled to abandon their original rural residences permanently and seek out alternate urban spaces of survival. The United Nations report of 2019 claims, “Today, around 12 million of the 19.4 million children most affected by climate change live in and around the powerful river systems which flow through Bangladesh and regularly burst their banks… The last major floods to hit Bangladesh were in 2017 when something like eight million people were affected by a series of flooding events that took place.”  According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, “It has been estimated that by 2050, one in every seven people in Bangladesh will be displaced by climate change. Up to 18 million people may have to move because of sea level rise alone.”

Singh dwells on the gruesome realties of climate abuse and cross border movement (to its closest neighbour India) through the imaginative lens of futurism and tries to adjust to a more liberal perception where the ancient and the modern must mingle to save the biosphere and assure human survival.  As a philanthropic undertaking, Ashapur manifests the affirmative ethics of technology. It symbolizes a safe haven for the climate refugees, fully reconstructed using traditional housing methods and supervised by hi-tech engineering. Victimised by harsh natural impacts and the wrath of climate change, here everything is recycled and the natural resources wisely preserved. Mahua, the protagonist and leader of the Bio-Lab, observes

A former slum, it used to lie on the edge of Delhi like a sore. In the last ten years the Ashapur project had transformed it. The hutments of cardboard and tin had been replaced by dwelling houses built mostly by the residents themselves with traditional materials: a hard mixture of mud, straw, rice husk, surfaced with a lime-based plaster. In use for thousands of years, then forgotten, and revived in the 20th century by vision­ary architects like Laurie Baker, the material had so far survived nearly ten years of baking heat and monsoon rains… When Mahua looked at Ashapur from this height she saw mostly an une­ven carpet of green and silver—rooftop gardens broken by the gleam of solar panels, and corridors of native trees, neem, khe­jri, gulmohar, running down the hill from her forest like green arteries through the settlement. (Singh 69)

A scientist by profession, Singh allows her research in the Earth Sciences and her fascination with speculative sciences to be conveyed through elaborate descriptions and imaginative richness. Ashapur, is a “surrealist’s dream” (Singh 69), a triumphant response to the reigning environmental concerns, achieved through a wise synthesis between tradition and technology. As a glorious marvel, it promises to provide better living conditions to its inhabitants and also encourage the erection of multiple such settlements to eliminate the raging crisis of the climate refugees. Here artificial gardens and cultivated greenery compensate for the loss of actual biodiversity. Ashapur represents a return to nature and Singh describes Ashapur lovingly.

She always found it calming to walk through Ashapur. The narrow roads were not built on a rectangular pattern but instead curved, mov­ing obligingly around an ancient peepul tree or dwelling… Large, coarse, fewer pathways for cars, smaller, more dense ones for people. And for other animals as well as people, the green corridors that branched into the city, maintaining biodiversi­ty and the psychological benefits of closeness to nature, while providing Ashapur with cooler summers, seasonal supplies of fruit and nuts, and raw material for a new cottage industry in crafts. (70-71)

Ashapur delineates a sharp ecological concern and focuses on the unique power that unrolls when science and nature combine. The central motto of the Bio-Lab, “To learn from nature. Not to exploit it” (Singh 71) vivifies a paradigmatic shift that acknowledges the vastness of the universe against trifling human inventions that thrive on hard sciences. In an interview with Melina Kurtz, Singh opines, “The universe is a far more creative, happening place than I imagined—matter speaks, we make cuts that create worlds, and it is in these intra-actions with matter that cultures and sciences come into being” (539). Singh resists the overt technomania through a deep appreciation of the natural systems that harmonise and sustain all living species. In this context, Ashapur is truly liberating.  

Indra’s Net allows a robust reacquaintance with geology through a renewed recognition of the interconnected complex patterns, the non-human players within the surrounding geography, that influence the narrative generously. The intrinsic and reviving potentials of the greater cosmos are evoked through the resurrection of a long-forgotten cultural heritage, the myth of Indra’s Web. Evolution through adaptation is the key to survival. Singh derives from the pages of Indian mythology and advocates environmental justice through the fusion between the ancient and the contemporary. The growing discipline of posthumanism allows regimented borders to go fluid and dynamic as human sovereignty is undermined and “ The ‘new’ developments in technology and prosthesis,…are prefigured in myth and legend, folk tales and animal fables in which the human/non-human boundaries are blurred. (Nayar 36). The recognition of humankind’s profound interaction with the other organic and even non-organic forms is enriching as Singh takes on the issue of energy creation and conservation through the path of re-accepting myth and nature. One must retrace one’s steps back to the past to become an actant in “a revolution that might just save our earth from the climate crisis” (Singh 72). The defeat of Suryanet could be reversed and its dysfunctional status remedied with an earnest cognizance-“ We’re just mimicking the natural control systems that exist in nature” (Singh 72). Consequently, Mahua and her team of young scientists turn towards the natural systems of the Earth to figure out “ a fungal network… a secret connection between the planets of the forest” ( Singh 68). Singh contends techno-madness not with extreme technophobia, but advocates a Posthuman balance where tradition and technology mingle. Her fiction explores a new world where sustenance is possible only through a return to its aboriginal primitive links. This lost world of indigenous wisdom is indicated by the cosmic web of the great God Indra, whose mystical web functions as a filter net, as elaborated in the Vedic and Buddhist philosophies.

              The porosity of Speculative Fiction permits a serious reflection on planetary crisis and raises intense questions on the place of human beings within the immeasurable cosmos, which is also one of the prime concerns of ancient philosophy. Vandana Singh takes a deep downward journey in quest of her cultural roots, through the reminiscences of Mahua, a name from nature itself, and her numerous conversations with her dying grandmother. Here traditions, past, memory and myth are entwined with one another. Mahua perceives all relationships in terms of an interconnected network, and “remembers a story her grandmother once told her about Indra’s Web, the ultimate cosmic network in which every node mirrors the whole” (Singh 77). Originating in the Atharva Veda and later entering Mahayana and Chinese Buddhism, the Net of Lord Indra is a cosmological principle, the web of life, which is perceived as a “web of connections and interdependences among all its principles, wherein every member is both a manifestation of the whole and inseparable from the whole” (Malhotra 5). It is a metaphor for the infinite, indivisible and organic unity between the different living species, both mighty and marginal. Indicated by the image of a multidimensional spider’s web, the mythic Net of Indra claims inter-relatedness of all ecological systems around the universe and causes the awareness that human survival hinges crucially on the preservation and protection of nature and its balance. Rajiv Malhotra further identifies forests as symbolical of the Indra’s Net, where “thousands of species of animals, plants and microorganisms exist in a state of mutual interdependence” (7). The regenerative qualities of the forest is hailed as Mahua finds her solution ultimately- “…she goes back into the night, thinking about the networks in which she exists, and how tomorrow a major node on which her very life depends will be taken off-line forever. She thinks of the forest on the ridge. The forest lives on because it accepts death—with every twig that falls, with every ant that meets its annihilation, a thousand life-forms come into being” (Singh 77).

Suparno Banerjee in “An Alien Nation: Postcoloniality and the Alienated Subject in Vandana Singh’s Science Fiction” calls attention “to the different types and levels of alienation that haunt the people who negotiate their surroundings and identities in this new world order” (283). Anglophone speculative fiction, as an emerging genre, often addresses the pervasiveness of climate emergency, the most pressing challenge of the entire human civilization presently. As a mode of re-writing literature, Spec-Fic offers alternate realities and sciences, as well as messages of harmonious and shared living, redirecting the human species towards different and more productive ways of being. Vandana Singh’s Indra’s Web does not become a technologically heavy tale, a transhumanist conquest of the universe, but contrarily advocates the legacy of Indian myth imbued with positive future possibilities. Climate collapse can be combatted and glitches within raw miracle machines could be cured through a posthuman synthesis of ancient wisdom and contemporary techno-innovations.