Community Resilience and the Cosmopolitan Role in the Environmental Challenge-Response Novels of Ghosh, Grace, and Sinha

My title brings together three key components for this study: resilience, cosmopolitanism, and challenge-response. The designation of the texts considered here—Patricia Grace's Potiki, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People—as challenge-response novels is loosely based on Arnold Toynbee's theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. I revise his concept, however, by focusing on the orientation that he took regarding the minorities within a society, which leads to a focus on microsocial units of local communities, whose actions Toynbee envisioned as being the key factor in whether a society would evolve into a civilization, collapse, or decay: "A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge."¹

"Member" here refers not to individual people but smaller units of a civilization, such as the city-states of the early Hellenistic society. Successful responses, Toynbee believed, resulted from an unleashing of activity by creative minorities that found a way to respond to significant challenges that, in essence, required a society not only to change or to die but to change in ways that either enabled it to conserve social cohesion or else to refashion itself into a new society. For Toynbee, the refashioning is of greater interest than the conservation. Bluntly put, "a challenge has administered an effective stimulus and provoked a successful response."² Yet it is important to bear in mind that the degree to which society can be reorganized in the face of changing environmental, political, and economic pressures is not coterminous with the degree to which a population can maintain cultural continuity or integrity. Nor should it be thought that a successful response will always fulfill popular expectations of "progress" in either a technological or ideological sense of stages of development, for example, higher levels of abstraction or a machinic separation from physical labor. Rather, the successful change enables what Gerald Vizenor has termed "survivance," a neologistic combination of "survival" and "resistance," and may involve a decreased reliance on nonhuman energy in one case and an increased reliance in another.³ As climatic conditions change, for instance, agriculture may have to pull back on monocultural crop-yield maximization and return to the standard indigenous practice of a "diversified resource base," wherein crop diversity is expanded in order to ensure consistency in total caloric yield in the face of uncertain weather conditions.⁴

Toynbee does realize that challenges can be sufficiently weak to elicit a response that will not have any significant impact on social formation, while too severe a challenge can cause an entire society to collapse (the focus of books by Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter).⁵ These considerations, then, indicate that the "challenge" has to be sufficient to elicit a response that causes significant change in social behavior, that the "response" can be varied, and that the success of any given action is "unpredictable," even when the same action is taken by two different groups because the exact conditions under which the activity is carried out cannot be identical, either spatially or historically.⁶ In like manner, the relative cohesiveness of a society at the time of crisis could be a more important variable than either the magnitude of the challenge or the choice of response. For example, in Potiki, the Tamihama family has a high level of social cohesion because its spiritual core has been strengthened by the potiki named Toko, and it also has historical precedent for the success of its resistance in the Te Ope family's successful recovery of government seized land. Further, Toynbee is well aware that environmental factors, human factors, or both simultaneously can present the challenge to which a community must respond. To that I would add human-induced environmental factors, such as development-induced erosion, climate change, or acid rain.

For example, beginning his massive study only a decade after World War I...