ABSTRACT
Mythical narratives from the Sundarban in the lower Bengal delta have been adapted in folk epics, novels, and plays, foregrounding pressing issues like climate change and the environment. Apart from the challenges in adapting a text across genres, addressing climate issues in literary works is also challenging for the authors regarding the suitability of the text’s forms and functions for the audience at different times and places. Additionally, conventional assumptions about individual agency favoring a specific literary criticism and expectations of the novel (as a genre) have been called into question concerning their shortcomings in illustrating collective agencies and economic interests that shape the contemporary ecological crisis. Amitav Ghosh’s anthropological novel The Hungry Tide (2004) and Leesa Gazi’s play Daughter of the Forest (2016) have adapted the myth of Bonbibi to explore how residents of the Sundarban still live in a mythically “transported” world through their belief in myths and rituals, revealing their attitude to the nonhumans and the contemporaneity of their ecocultural ethics. This chapter explores how the Bonbibi myth has been adapted in these two works and why this narrative is relevant to conceptualizing climate crises in literature and performance and educating audiences about urgent ecological concerns.
