We had been sitting facing the river as the rain slapped its surface. In the course of just half an hour, we counted five barges that passed us. Tarun da, a fisherman and a resident of a village named Mathurakhand, located opposite the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve in West Bengal said:

This erosion (bhangun) here is happening because of the ship vessels (jahaaz). The ships do not let the sandbanks (chars) settle. Just as a sandbank is created (balir char), it is broken (bhengey jaye) again. Last year, one of these ships sank right here. For six months, there was no fish to catch. The ships are causing damage (khoti) to the fish and crabs too.

These ship vessels primarily transport fly ash, a byproduct of coal, from India to Bangladesh. The barges are old, rusted, and so decrepit that they often capsize, causing immeasurable damage to the biodiversity of the river and forest. Trade on India’s National Waterways including the Hooghly River has expanded with adverse consequences for fishing communities. While conducting fieldwork on inhabited islands in the Sundarbans over the past decade, the disruption caused by ship vessels came up frequently in conversations.

Muddied Planet

Accretion and erosion are what make and remake the Bengal Delta. Sediments are brought down by the rivers, but they are also brought in from the sea. As land is lost from one area, new riverine chars are formed nearby. Sediments are perhaps the main protagonists not just in the creation of the Bengal Delta, but of the entire Earth. Nigel Clark (2017) reminds us that “in the oldest storyline we can conjure up, territory emerges dripping from the watery dynamics of sedimentary geology.” Referencing the Earth geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, Clark says, “so significant is fluvially transported particulate matter to shaping the Earth” that in relation to other planets in the solar system “one might . . .  denote this planet as the muddy planet, for it is the only one to be encased in a thick shell of mud and mudrock” (Zalasiewicz 2008, 22, in Clark 2021, 179). In the Sundarbans, one can see, sense and feel this muddy encasement: mangrove forests emerged from mud, the river water was muddy both in colour and content, and the paddy fields and dirt roads were muddied by the rain.

Geological and hydrological processes and the interactions of the inner earth with the outer earth have created this encasement of mountains, rivers, mud and mangroves. This geomorphological history matters because it creates the conditions for life, for cities to emerge or collapse, for civilizations to build alongside river courses or to change their locations, for the building and breaking of roads and ports, for agriculture and aqueous life to flourish or perish. The Earth’s dance has many ripples and reverberations. There is dynamism and an “elemental forcefulness of the earth itself” (Clark, 2017,  223). For example, in the Bengal Delta, tectonic shifts and an eastward tilt of the plates changed the course of the Brahmaputra and eventually the Hooghly.

The Hooghly River has been a crucial artery for centuries of trade, commerce, and the expansion of empire. The Calcutta Port on the Hooghly was one of the most active (and extracted from) ports for the British empire in the Indian subcontinent. Ever since the establishment of the port, there have been concerns about the navigability of the Hooghly due to its large quantities of silt. Historically, upstream fresh water sources from the Ganges helped flush out the silt. Over centuries, and due to shifts between the Indian, Eurasian, and Burmese tectonic plates, there were changes in the course of the river and fears of the Hooghly becoming unnavigable. In postcolonial India, the fear of losing the navigability of the port launched what was a mega-infrastructural project to dam the Ganges to divert a great proportion of its water to the Hooghly. This was the Farakka Barrage, introduced to keep the Calcutta port alive and to counteract the elemental dance of the Earth. Very soon after the construction of the Farakka problems emerged.

Infrastructural Tectonics

If “most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out,” (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 3), the Anthropocene is forcing social thought to engage more closely with the geological movements and the dynamics of earth systems, whether fluvial or igneous, as social and political agency is constrained, made possible and emergent with Earth forces. In other words, alongside the geological formations and sometimes in response to them, other scars and gashes are engineering the earth’s surface. The Farakka Barrage, the port-complexes on the Hooghly and its accompanying activities of dredging and the movement of ships, is one example of a gash among thousands of others across the delta and the world that are creating “tectonic” shifts on the Earth’s surface. This intentional earth moving has made human technical and infrastructural interventions into one of the earth’s preeminent geologic agents.

Geosocial Justice through Reparations

This manipulation shapes the current and future conditions of life. For Clark, one of the most promising aspects of the Anthropocene debate is the way in which it brings social thought into an encounter with other geological epochs. It prods the imagination to think with millennia rather than mere centuries and decades. I find Clark’s provocation exciting and yet challenging. As an anthropologist, if I begin to imagine the “politics of strata” and the Earth’s history through deep time and not through the urgency of a few decades, years or months, what might we make of the laments and demands of fishers like Tarun Mondol? The elemental dance of the earth is either too large, too slow or too sudden. We don’t have millennia or even centuries to keep waiting and watching. How might the “geosocial” not paralyze us but instead prod us towards political action, perhaps even act as a ground for experiments with climate justice?

In response to narratives such as the one I began with from fishermen such as Tarun Mondol, and several hundreds of others living alongside eroding coastlines of the Bengal delta, I share one ongoing experiment with climate justice rooted in emergent debates on attribution science with which I’m involved. From 2018 onwards, I have been working with environmental litigators to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) at the National Green Tribunal (NGT) of the Kolkata High Court against specific agents of erosion. These initiatives and court cases have small demands: the routes of the ship vessels carrying fly ash ought to be reconsidered, the vessels ought to be improved, more environmental assessments and pollution checks ought to be carried out. Some of these cases are ongoing, others are yet to be filed. Legal processes are slow. Litigators are overworked and underpaid and the courts are rife with politics. Our goals are both humble and ambitious. Perhaps the authorities will take cognizance of the egregious damage caused by barges capsizing with fly ash in an ecologically sensitive delta. Or perhaps, more ambitiously, these initiatives might be nascent steps towards reparations.

Reparations are insufficient and yet the only path forward. They are insufficient because what is lost is not just land or material resources but all that is attached to and emerges from land, water, forests. This includes livelihoods, relations, skills, mythology, notions of home, identity, and much else that cannot be calculated or mapped through satellite data, reduced to percentages or numbers. What is lost is immeasurable. Despite this, locating specific attributions for loss is with the hope of finding political agency within the “geosocial,” instead of scapegoating onto it.

There is no doubt that Tarun Mondol’s attribution of his island’s erosion is correlated to the increased frequency of ship vessels. But other causes of erosion are beyond his view. The sociotechnical and infrastructural interventions (see Jasanoff and Kim 2019) that are moving the earth’s strata are immense and stretch back to and include centuries of historical wrongdoing. They have colonial inheritances which are pursued in postcolonial contexts. How might we calculate what is a far more complex set of attributions even within a specific ecology and ecosystem? Who do we hold accountable? How far back in time and how far wide in geographical space do we zoom out? These questions have no simple answers. Besides, one might ask, why care about these other causations of erosion when sea-level rise is totalizing. Yet, it is precisely this totalizing force of climate change that obfuscates the specific. It takes away accountability from the regional causes of anthropogenic erosion, scapegoating problems onto the global, all-encompassing, and ultimately depoliticized discourse of climate change.

This essay is an attempt to move away from large abstractions to regional ecological disaggregations within the geosocial. The trapping of sediments through dams and barrages, the increase in salinity due to the diversion of rivers, the expansion of ports and expanding shipping corridors as well as the project to interlink rivers are all a part of a complex yet highly particularized set of causations of loss. Ultimately, as Félix Guattari (2005, 28) put it, “it is the ways of living on this planet that are in question,” those very same ways of ploughing the Earth that not long ago we came to call “civilization.” Meanwhile, as we work towards redefining the very concept of civilization/s on a fast-submerging planet, ethnography that feeds into a legal imagination committed towards reparations might be one step towards “geosocial justice.”