The Voice of Andaman: An Ecocritical Reading of Pankaj Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave

Abstract

Pankaj Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave (2014) is an island fiction set against the backdrop of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave focuses on the Jarwa tribe, exploited by the British during colonial times, and the Inland Indians. It explores how, from colonial times to the present day, outsiders entered the island through government support and corrupt politicians and occupied the land of the Jarawa tribe. They cleared the forest and made houses, fields, plantations, and thus the ecosystem lost its balance, thereby the Anthropocene was seen at its peak. The Jarawas’ interaction with mainland Indians resulted in catching diseases and harmful habits like tobacco, which pushed them towards annihilation. It also shows illegal timber extraction and logging by the forest department. The novel ends with the 2004 tsunami, where nature avenged the human beings for the overexploitation. Through a qualitative methodology, this article argues how modernity and globalization alienated man from nature, who are blind in the shade of the Anthropocene, ravaged the Andaman and Nicobar islands; how their overexploitation pushed the indigenous tribes to annihilation and totally disrupted the balance of the ecosystem.