Disaster’s gift: Anthropocene and Capitalocene temporalities in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’

What is the time of the current, ongoing environmental disaster? I argue that the uncanny temporal torsions of anthropogenic climate change, and the need to understand disaster as a historicized process, mean that neither the prevailing Anthropocene narrative, nor Jason Moore’s world-ecological ‘Capitalocene’, are adequate on their own. Rather, a synthesis of the two is necessary, via the notion of life and disaster as both possessed of a gift-form, in which to be human is
in the gift of the inhuman, indifferent forces of Earth’s climate systems as well as neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Nigel Clark’s work on the gift as a mode of ecological thought, as well as recent work on the ‘ecogothic’, I propose that Mahasweta Devi’s long story, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’, represents multi-layered intervention: not only a compelling indictment of colonial modernity’s disregard for tribal peoples caught in the jaws of India’s Green Revolution, but also poses more wide-reaching questions about how a time of environmental crisis can be imagined in terms of this gift-relation.