“Entering Life:” Literary De-Extinction and the Archives of Life in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha

Abstract

In recent years, critics and novelists alike have questioned literature’s potential to represent, register, and challenge environmental disaster. Perhaps the most-discussed interventions into this debate are Amitav Ghosh’s lectures on literature and climate change, published as The Great Derangement in 2016, in which Ghosh posits that contemporary novels are failing to come to terms with the “unthinkable” phenomena of climate change, the Anthropocene, and extinction. In this essay, I wish to deepen and complicate Ghosh’s arguments by turning to another Indian writer, Mahasweta Devi (1926– 2016), whose works not only represent the increasing anthropogenic extinctions of human and nonhuman life, but who in doing so calls into question the very archival drives of literature which Ghosh’s lectures implicitly privilege. In her short novel Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (1989; hereafter Pterodactyl), originally written in Bengali but translated into the Anglophone postcolonial canon via Gayatri Spivak’s 1995 publication of Imaginary Maps, Mahasweta narrates a story in which a dispassionate journalist, Puran Sahay, travels to a famine-stricken tribal village in central India. There, he encounters two kinds of vulnerability which confound his narrow idea of life: an impoverished adivasi (literally, original inhabitant) community who faces continual dispossession by national development projects, and a prehistoric pterodactyl, suffering from a broken wing. Pterodactyl stages Puran’s encounter with the incommensurable figure of the pterodactyl, an encounter which reveals how his humanitarianism is complicit with the slow anthropogenic violence of adivasi genocide and nonhuman ecocide. Pterodactyl thus opens out onto a plurality of human and nonhuman temporalities which trouble Puran’s narrow anthropocentrism. What often goes unexplored in the criticism on Pterodactyl is how its plot hinges on a creative engagement with extinction, what I will call here literary de-extinction. If de-extinction names a bio-technical regeneration of previously extinct species – think of charismatic megafauna such as woolly mammoths and thylacines, brought back from the dead via frozen DNA samples – then I introduce the term literary de-extinction in order to outline