ABSTRACT
Insights from contemporary ecocriticism and Anthropocene discourse can be channeled into a renewed engagement with setting and the interplay of background and foreground in the short story. Literary critic Eric Hayot calls this byplay between background and foreground in a narrative space ‘amplitude’. Deploying the concept of amplitude, it is argued in the chapter that Indira Goswami’s short story ‘Jatra’ (The Journey) subtly juxtaposes multiple and heterogeneous temporal scales, which include the spectacular effects of sovereign violence, the slow necropolitical violence of bureaucratic neglect, the repeated impact of floods and erosion, changed interspecies relationships, species disappearance, and the shift in regimes of vision once movement has stalled. These heterogeneous and entangled temporalities in ‘Jatra’, are presented to us via a skillful deployment and manipulation of amplitude. Analyzing the use of amplitude, ‘Jatra’ is presented as an exemplary ecocentric literary text that lays bare the dispersed effects of multiple scales of violence on impoverished subjects.
