I came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when apocalyptic fiction was much in vogue because of intensifying nuclear anxieties. As a teenager, I devoured books set in the aftermath of an atomic catastrophe, like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.

Apocalyptic fiction was then more or less exclusively the preserve of Western writers: as far as I know, no Indian novels of this kind existed at that time. Perhaps this was because we, in India, did not have nuclear weapons targeted directly at us back then; we were merely spectators in a conflict that had two blocs of powerful nations as its main protagonists. In the event of a nuclear war, we would be merely collateral damage; our elimination would be an afterthought.

Today the risk of nuclear war is greater than ever before, yet it hardly merits so much as a headline. This is possibly because the world as we know it could now be brought to an end in many other ways as well – for instance, through biodiversity loss, runaway artificial intelligence, unstoppable viruses and, of course, abrupt climate change. It is hardly surprising, then, that we are now in a new golden age of apocalyptic fiction: never has the world been so awash in novels, movies and TV series about planetary disasters and catastrophes.

Despite their number and variety, apocalyptic narratives generally follow a familiar storyline. Almost always, the central characters are scientists who stumble upon an imminent threat to the world. Their first instinct is to protect their loved ones, usually their immediate families, but they also feel compelled to warn important politicians, who are, more often than not, the president and vice president of the United States. Initially thwarted, they become heroes when the warned-of threat materialises.

The imagined apocalypse, when it comes, is usually presented as a sudden and explosive event that unfolds within a highly compacted time frame. But, no matter how brief its duration, it is understood that the disaster will annihilate vast numbers of people. The few survivors are those who have been forewarned by virtue of their expertise; or they are a small number of resourceful individuals equipped with the skills to deal with the new, devastated world. Experts and expertise are as central to these stories as wizards and alchemy were to medieval wonder tales; roles that were once assigned to oracles and soothsayers are now played by datasets, computer models and AI.

I have long been an unabashed fan of such stories. I especially love the opening sequences, in which beeping computers hint at viral mutations or strange goings-on in the outer atmosphere. Of course, like other fans, I am well aware that the conventions of apocalyptic fiction are necessitated less by science than by the demands of storytelling. In constructing an apocalyptic story, it is much easier to focus on a few characters than to depict the travails of a multitude. Similarly, a compacted timeframe is demanded not only by the 90-minute running time of a film, or the 300-or-so pages of a novel, but also by the classical unities of time, place and action. The slow and dispersed violence of heatwaves, prolonged droughts, and sea-level rise is much harder to fit into a compact storyline, even though these disasters can affect vastly more people than more spectacular weather events.

Yet, despite being largely an artifact of storytelling, the apocalypse has now come to exercise a powerful influence on the way the future is imagined – and not just by readers of fiction, but also by the experts and professionals who design and administer plans for dealing with climate change. Nowhere is this more evident than in a part of the world where my own ancestral roots lie: the southwestern quadrant of Bangladesh. This coastal region is contiguous with the Indian state of West Bengal, and it includes a substantial segment of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.

Because of its low-lying terrain and its exposure to cyclones, Bangladesh has long been known as a climate change ‘hotspot’ and is often described as the ‘ground zero of vulnerability’. This view rests on the assumption that, as global warming intensifies, sea-level rise will lead to the swamping of large parts of the country, displacing as many as 26 million ‘climate refugees’, who will then be compelled to flee to nearby cities, or other destinations overseas.

This vision of Bangladesh’s future is shared by many of the foreign aid agencies, charities and development consortiums that have been active in the country ever since it gained independence in 1971. At that time, the conditions in the poor and war-torn nation were such that these organisations rose to a position of unusual salience: in those early years, foreign aid sometimes accounted for as much as a fifth of the country’s gross national product. It has been estimated that Bangladesh has more Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) per capita than any other country, and that NGOs are active in 90% of Bangladeshi villages. Nor are the major donors squeamish about asserting their influence: they believe that their financial contributions give them the right to dictate the path of development in the country.

As a result, Bangladesh has become a privileged site of experimentation for ‘climate solutions’ that are mostly devised and implemented by Western-educated professionals in accordance with their imagining of the threats of the future. Their prescriptions have already had momentous consequences for the region’s inhabitants, and they hold important lessons for the rest of the world.

Given the importance of global warming in this story, it might be thought that the dystopic imagining of coastal Bengal is a consequence of advances in climate modelling. But this is actually not the case: colonial officials in the nineteenth century took an equally grim view of the region’s ecology. (In 1825, one J.B. Gilchrist wrote of the Sundarbans: “[It is] in truth, a hideous belt of the most unpromising description, such as must cause any stranger wrecked on that coast… to pronounce it a country fit for the residence of neither man nor beast.”) Like today’s development experts, colonial officials also conceived of flooding as the greatest environmental threat to the region. As a solution, they launched an ambitious project of embankment-building, which extended over many decades, well after decolonisation and the bloody civil war that led to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. In recent years, experts, aid agencies and even the World Bank have continued to advocate for embankments, although under a modified rationale: they are now presented as ‘climate solutions’, intended to stave off flooding and the salinisation of soil.

However, many critics now contend that the construction of embankments was founded, from the start, on a serious misreading of the landscape. As a deltaic region, southern Bengal has always been subject to several different kinds of flooding, some of which are beneficial, and have long been actively managed by farmers in order to fertilise their land through siltation. Not only can embankments disrupt the productive interplay of land and water in certain seasons, but they can also create new kinds of flooding. Most damaging is the waterlogging that occurs when embankments prevent rain or floodwaters from finding their way back to drainage channels. This is now a major problem in the region.

That the construction of embankments is sometimes counterproductive is a key finding in three recent books by social anthropologists who have conducted field research on aid-funded development projects in Bangladesh.^[1] These are specialised, academic monographs of the kind that a lay reader is unlikely to pick up, but they tell a powerful story of how apocalyptic narratives have come to shape the lives of Bengalis on the ‘climate frontier’. “Embankments are cast as solutions in certain climate change narratives,” Camelia Dewan notes in her ethnography of development professionals, researchers and farmers, even though “historically, and locally, they are known to disrupt ecological processes”.

It is important, therefore, to remind ourselves, when we see images of floods in Bengal, that what we are looking at is not just the result of weather events: it is also the product of a project of terraforming that began in colonial times and has continued until the present day. It is a telling fact that, even after decolonisation, the governments of both East Pakistan and its successor state, Bangladesh, sought the advice of Dutch experts in these matters. Extrapolating from the experience of the Netherlands, these experts advocated the building of polders – low-lying tracts of land enclosed by dykes – on their native model.

The Dutch are justly famed for their prowess in managing the waters of their own country. But the Rhine delta of the Netherlands receives only 1% of the silt that the Bengal delta does. To expect lessons from the former to apply directly to the latter is not just unrealistic; it ultimately rests on a blind faith in the belief that the historical experience of Europe prefigures that of the rest of the world.

Unsurprisingly, the polders have also had mixed results, exacerbating the problems created by embankments in some areas and bringing about the subsidence of land in others. Bengali activists and environmentalists have forcefully pushed back against these interventions. Dewan quotes one local scientist as saying: “Do not relate everything to climate change, it blinds against the role played by embankments and the environment.”

Yet the weight of aid money often allows Western experts to ignore or silence indigenous voices. When local authorities try to prevent the building of embankments, they are often simply brushed aside. Faculty members of Bangladesh’s Institute of Water and Flood Management “rarely if ever have funding for implementing independent research of their own design and conception”, Kasia Paprocki notes in her study of climate change adaptation projects. The terms of reference of at least one Western-funded project explicitly required hiring international consulting firms, thereby excluding local experts.

As for the Bengali consultants who work with foreign agencies, they are all too aware of who pays for their salaries and contracts, so they rarely voice objections to the plans proposed by Western experts, even when they know that those proposals will not work. Knowing that global warming is a major concern for Western aid agencies, they now routinely add ‘climate’ to their proposals, whether it is relevant or not.

“Climate change shobche darun masala [is the most amazing spice]” for boosting a proposal, one tells Dewan. “Add climate change, poverty alleviation and gender and you will have a recipe for success for your [funding application].”

This pattern, in which interventions spearheaded by foreign officials and experts end up by compounding problems on the ground, has repeated itself over and over again in coastal Bengal. Of these, none has been more destructive than the introduction of prawn and shrimp farming.

The idea that shrimp farming might be a good way for farmers to earn some extra money was first suggested by Western experts in the 1960s, and the initiative was taken up enthusiastically by USAID 20 years later. Initially intended as an income-generation plan, in recent decades shrimp farming has also been strongly advocated by experts and aid agencies as a ‘climate solution’. The thinking behind it, as explained to Dewan by a Western development professional, was this: “Climate change is a fact. [All of] Bangladesh will become saline; it is inevitable. Bangladesh should accept this and focus on cultivating saline-tolerant species such as tiger prawn… ”

With the forceful championing of aid agencies and government officials, shrimp farming has expanded rapidly across coastal Bengal. Since this kind of aquaculture does indeed generate significant profits for those who have the capital to invest in the industry, it has been eagerly seized upon by moneyed interests and politicians, some of whom do not hesitate to use muscle power and violence to promote their own interests. Prawn and shrimp are now Bangladesh’s second most lucrative export.

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

The strangest part of all this is that the drowning of coastal Bengal is by no means a foregone conclusion. Far from being eaten away by the rising seas, the southwestern region has actually gained land of late. This startling outcome is the result of increased siltation owing to the accelerated melting of glaciers in the Himalayas: some parts of the Bengal delta are gaining the soil that the mountains are losing. Michael S. Steckler, a geophysicist at Columbia University, believes it is quite possible that “Bangladesh will be able to keep up with sea-level rise over the next decades”. Two years ago, Steckler and nearly two dozen other scientists published a paper suggesting “that increased sediment delivery may be capable of offsetting accelerated sea-level rise. This prospect for a naturally sustained Ganges-Brahmaputra delta presents possibilities beyond the dystopian future often posed for this system.”

Little wonder then, that the future looks very different when viewed from the grassroots. Contrary to the beliefs of some experts, it is not necessarily the case that farmers, sharecroppers or even landless labourers want to leave their lands and move to urban slums. For many farmers, rice cultivation is the foundation of a way of life that includes many other activities and pursuits, such as fishing, growing vegetables and raising livestock, all of which are essential for the sustenance of families and communities. For them, rice farming, despite all its rigours, is far preferable to a precarious existence in an urban shantytown. While the bonds that tie farmers to their villages can be difficult for city-bred experts to understand, those attachments are very real. The Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam’s forthcoming novel, Uprising, set in the Sunderbans, captures the intensity of this feeling: “Mala loved the village, the Sundari trees with their upturned roots, the liquid dark that descended at night, the sounds of the forest, the owl and the civet. She loved the clouds that curdled above her and the rain that fell in thick abundant sheets.”

In any event, these attachments to village life have proved powerful enough to generate a growing movement of resistance to embankment building and shrimp farming. Hundreds of thousands of people have now come together to form organisations like Nijera Kori (“We Do It Ourselves”) to undo external interventions and implement their own preferred solutions. One such is to return to planting indigenous salt- and flood-resistant varieties of rice. These strains were almost wiped out by the aggressive promotion of genetically engineered varieties, but they are now making an impressive comeback. Hybrid seeds, for instance, are defenceless against floods, so farmers have begun to plant indigenous strains of rice that respond to submersion by quickly sending out shoots that rise above the flood waters. The idea that salinity is inevitable and impossible to reverse has also been shown to be untrue: in certain areas where farmers’ movements have succeeded in ending shrimp cultivation, trees and rice have slowly made a return.

In short, the grassroots view of the future is completely at odds with that of the credentialled experts. While the latter largely believe that rice farming on coastal land should be abandoned because it will soon become impossible anyway, farmers and local activists are insistent on trying to put a stop to shrimp aquaculture so that the land can be returned to rice farming. In effect, these rural communities are contesting the teleology of anticipatory ruination on which some climate solutions are founded. As Jason Cons notes in his study of how locals and professionals envision the future of coastal Bangladesh, the ideas of the inhabitants of the region are gritty, quotidian and unspectacular, because they “frame the delta not as an immanent site of abstract disaster, but as a lived space of shifting challenges and possibilities”.

Where indigenous ideas depart most significantly from those of experts is that they place communities rather than individuals at the centre of their conception of resilience. The contrast is perhaps best illustrated by Cons’ description of a resiliency project financed by Christian Aid. Cons explains that the project came to his attention because it looked so incongruous amid the flat, deltaic landscape: it consisted of a large mound (mattir killa, literally ‘earthen fort’), 14 feet in height and half an acre in size. Built on the land of a well-to-do farmer, it was meant to serve him and his immediate family as a storm shelter. The idea is that when the Deluge arrives, the farmer and his family will survive by climbing the mound and squatting on top of it, while everything around them goes underwater.

This project neatly illustrates how the tropes of apocalyptic fiction have come to influence projects in the real world: it envisions an isolated family surviving the perils of climate change alone, with the aid of a solution designed by experts. This vision has now become the basis of many projects in coastal Bengal. Among them are ‘climate-smart’ houses with indoor fishponds, window boxes for vegetables and equipment such as drip-irrigation and water-purification systems. These, too, are intended to enable individual families to ride out the Deluge when it comes. But such solutions could only ever benefit a few relatively well-off families, because they are too expensive to replicate for entire communities; nor can most farmers afford the maintenance costs of complicated gadgetry.

Cons speaks to many locals who are scornful of these fanciful projects, which one of them dismisses as an “exasperating waste”. Others regard them with amusement: “Well, when the winds come,” they say, “we will just huddle closer together. That way we won’t be blown off.” One interviewee is more forthright: “I pray to God, ‘Keep the NGOs away from here.’”

One of the most striking aspects of embankment building and other state-sponsored environmental interventions in the Bengal delta is their continuity over time, going back to the colonial era. In Bangladesh, that continuity persisted even after the bloody civil war that led to the country’s independence from Pakistan.

One way of understanding this continuity is through the prism of James C. Scott’s classic work, Seeing Like A State (1998), in which he argues that the reason for the failure of some well-intentioned state-sponsored projects is that the models, data and projections on which they are based do not make adequate provision for the messiness of reality. “The categories that they employ,” writes Scott, “are too coarse, too static, and too stylised to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.”

The tragedy is that, even when such projects go awry – as was the case with the collectivisation of agriculture in the USSR, and Tanzania’s efforts to move subsistence farmers into planned villages – they tend to develop an unstoppable momentum, largely because they reinforce the power of centralised bureaucracies and entrenched elites. This is also why they come to be passed on between left- and right-leaning regimes, and between colonial and post-colonial governments. Indeed, it is usually in highly centralised and hierarchical states, where civil society is weak and power is concentrated in the hands of an elite – in other words, states like Bangladesh – that large-scale projects of social and environmental engineering are implemented.

Bangladesh is therefore a test case in more ways than one. On the one hand, climate science and its predictions have served to make the country exceptionally well informed, at every level, of the looming threats of a global warming. On the other hand, the country’s experience shows that climate solutions that do not make adequate provision for the inherent uncertainties of modelling, or for the wishes, hopes and aspirations of people on the ground, will always run the risk of causing anticipatory ruination. That popular movements have now emerged in Bangladesh to give voice to the poor is therefore a very hopeful sign: if a balance can be found between the predictions of climate science and the hopes and aspirations of those who inhabit the climate frontier, then Bangladesh might be singularly well placed to deal with the challenges of the future.

The notion of anticipatory ruination has implications that extend far beyond Bangladesh: in a sense, it has now become a plan for the future of the entire planet. The actions and policies of ruling elites, especially in the West, suggest that many rich and powerful people have come to believe that a planetary apocalypse is now inevitable, and thus that efforts to prevent or delay it are essentially pointless. There can be no other explanation for the fact that, despite all their pieties about decisive action on climate change, politicians have shown again and again that when it comes to actual practice, this is a low priority. Indeed, some of their actions, such as the Trump administration's reversal of climate-related policies, seem to be fuelled by a desire to actually accelerate towards the anticipated apocalypse.

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

Speaking for myself, I can attest that, despite being a keen reader of apocalyptic fiction, I decided very early on that I would never end a novel with an apocalypse, even if the story seemed to require it. Something told me that to imagine an apocalypse was tantamount to inviting it to happen.

1. The books referred to here are Kasia Paprocki’s Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2021); Camelia Dewan’s Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2021); and Jason Cons’ Delta Futures: Time, Territory and Capture on the Climate Frontier (University of California Press, Oakland, 2025).
   
2. All photographs from Dayanita Singh’s Hungry Tide series (circa 2005), shot in the Sunderbans mangrove forest.