Posts in category: Blog

Abstract:

This article highlights how Pakistani authors are
responding to the importance of preservation of natural paths of water, exploring how these paths have been affected by water distribution treatises and how it causes the suffering of both human and nonhuman parts of the ecosystem. Although the loss was mutual, the loss of humans remained at the center of discussion and they were
the ones getting compensation and alternative habitats while nonhumans remained in the background. Pakistani writers are not only foregrounding the misery of nonhumans but also extrapolating the consequences for human beings. They are arguing that the interdependency of the human and nonhuman parts of the ecosystem has made the negative consequences seep through the human lives too, thus making it a mutual concern. However,  the anthropocentric ideology never allowed humans to take serious actions to preserve what is left and to mitigate the damage already done. Water has been the center of environmental debates since the commencement of a wave of environmental awareness in the eighteenth century (Mascarenhas 2007; White et al 2010; Vanderwarker 2012; Schaider et al 2019). This article is going to focus only on the Indus Water Treaty (1962) which divided the river waters between two nation-states India and Pakistan, thus causing a great havoc to the ecosystem of region Punjab where all these rivers flow. I chose the novel Pani
Mar Raha Hai (Water is Dying 2018) by Amna Mufti, which is a magical realist novel based on the impact of the Indus Water Treaty on the drying riverbed of Beas and humans indifference towards nonhuman victims of the
deteriorating ecosystem. Drawing upon the idea of Anthropocene Age and the Great Acceleration by Paul 
Crutzen, Will Stiffen and John McNeill, I use the term ‘terraforma’ as used by Joseph Masco to elaborate the human desire to bring geomorphic changes, and his term ‘fallout’ to explicate the role of Indus Water Treaty as ‘an unexpected supplement’ to apocalyptic environmental crisis ‘that is in motion, causing a kind of long-term and unexpected damage’.