"Dystopia, Climate Fiction, and Globalisation: Reading Rajat Chaudhuri’s The Butterfly Effect"

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a little short of a dystopian novel becoming a reality. The warnings of climate crisis and devastations have been present around us through various studies as well as through unexpected climatic changes and disasters. The increasingly interconnected and global world has been witnessing climate migrations, global diseases, along with global solidarities and support. This paper would attempt a reading of Rajat Chaudhuri’s “The Butterfly Effect” (2018) as a literary narrative on climate changes, global forces, and dystopian futures. The pandemic has highlighted the inequalities that have existed in our societies in multiple forms. The power structures are magnified in any ecological crisis and unprecedented crisis such as the pandemic. This paper would attempt to read Chaudhuri’s text to understand how fiction represents the global, interconnected world, the uneven class structures, and the impending disasters. Rajat Chaudhuri’s text will be read and analysed as a dystopian climate fiction in this paper. Hughes and Wheeler contend that, “In the last few years, literary responses to climate change have proliferated, to the extent that a new term - 'cli-fi' - has been coined to identify this new body of work that centrally addresses the issue of climate change and its associated environmental consequences (2013: 2).” This paper would try to understand the role of climate fiction in contesting and deliberating present and future catastrophes and the impact of these catastrophes on the uneven power structures.