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Unveiling the Anthropo(s)cene: Burning Seas, Cinema of Mourning and the Globalisation of Apocalypse

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Book cover Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present

Abstract

Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen’s 1995 film Yugant offers a surprisingly prescient reading of what is now understood as signs of the arrival of the Anthropocene. One of the earliest films from the Global South to have invoked the marauding ecological effects of globalisation, Yugant resists easy categorisation as feminist, national or leftist cinema. Primarily a sea narrative in complex, understated ways, the film is about an urbane and estranged couple despondently attempting and failing reconciliation while on vacation on an Indian east coast beach. The film reads their climactic and catastrophic dénouement as symptomatic of the violence against the planet and the sea as both a contrarian participant and spectacular casualty of it. Interrogating the film from the distance of 20 years, the chapter also foregrounds how the film manages to raise a range of questions that humanity can bring to the climate change debate.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Yugant’ literally means end of an era. The official English title of the film is What the Sea Said.

  2. 2.

    The Anthropocene has been defined as rapid, anthropogenic changes to the climate, land, oceans and biosphere signifying the possibility of a new geological epoch that is defined by human action and capacity to bring major and irretrievable shifts of unseen scale, magnitude and significance to the environment, particularly in the context of the Earth’s geological history. For a detailed understanding of the concept, see Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood and Michael Ellis, ‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?’ Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369:1938 (2011): 835–41.

  3. 3.

    For further discussions on Sen’s cinema, see Sayandeb Chowdhury, ‘Postal Failure: Aparna Sen’s ‘The Japanese Wife’ Disappoints’, Moving Arts Journal, published online 19 May 2010. http://www.themovingarts.com/postal-failure-aparna-sens-the-japanese-wife-disappoints/ [accessed January 20, 2015].

  4. 4.

    Yugant; 00:48–00:54.

  5. 5.

    Yugant; 110:24–110:30.

  6. 6.

    Yugant; 114:60–115:10.

  7. 7.

    For more on how globalisation was received through the vernacular in Global South, see Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, The Rumor of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins (London: Hurst, 2013).

  8. 8.

    Andrew Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, Screen, 30:4 (1989): 36–47, p. 37.

  9. 9.

    Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional, National and Global Histories of Indian Cinema’, Journal of the Moving Image (Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University) (2010): 94–117, p. 95.

  10. 10.

    See Prem Shankar Jha, The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 2006).

  11. 11.

    Susmita Gupta, ‘The Cinema of Women’, The Telegraph (Calcutta), 29 September 1985.

  12. 12.

    Mantra Roy and Aparajita Sengupta, ‘Women and Emergent Agency in the Cinema of Aparna Sen’, South Asian Popular Culture, 12:2 (2014): 53–71, p. 56.

  13. 13.

    They leave out Parama because they refer to Geetha Ramanathan’s article as already having dealt with it substantively. See Geetha Ramanathan, ‘Aesthetics as Woman: Aparna Sen’s Parama’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 17:1 (2000): 63–73.

  14. 14.

    Brinda Bose, ‘Sex, Lies and the Genderscape: The Cinema of Aparna Sen’, Women: A Cultural Review, 8:3 (1997): 319–26, p. 326.

  15. 15.

    Yugant; 92:02–92:10.

  16. 16.

    Yugant; 115:15.

  17. 17.

    Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2.

  18. 18.

    Brady Hammond and Sean Redmond, ‘This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27:5 (2013): 601–2, p. 601.

  19. 19.

    Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 1.

  20. 20.

    Caitlin Manning and Julie Shackford-Bradley, ‘Global Subjects in Motion: Strategies for Representing Globalization in Film’, Journal of Film and Video, 62:3 (2010): 36–52, p. 37.

  21. 21.

    Manning and Shackford-Bradley, ‘Global Subjects in Motion’, p. 37.

  22. 22.

    Noel Castree, ‘The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities: Extending the Conversation’, Environmental Humanities, 5 (2014): 233–60, p. 233.

  23. 23.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:2 (2009): 197–222, p. 206.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ambedkar University, Delhi, India

    Sayandeb Chowdhury

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  1. Sayandeb Chowdhury
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Charlotte Mathieson

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Chowdhury, S. (2016). Unveiling the Anthropo(s)cene: Burning Seas, Cinema of Mourning and the Globalisation of Apocalypse. In: Mathieson, C. (eds) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_9

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