Law at the Edge of the Forest: Ecological Legal Pluralism in Jungle Nama

Abstract

What if our ability to have and use our human rights was based on the balance between our relationships to each other and our relationships to the nonhuman world? It’s not possible to have any sort of discussion about Amitav Ghosh’s _Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban_ without discussing its potential to be a critique of legal and ecological thought. Though most people read the text as a retelling of the mythic Bon Bibi tale, _Jungle Nama_ actually challenges traditional laws of anthropocentric governance. The Sundarban is not presented as merely an object of land or a place of environmental backdrop, rather it is a network of human interactions with nature, social responsibilities, and cultural knowledge, all bounded by the realities of ecology. Ghosh is concerned with building an alternative form of governance. It can be thought of as a form of legal pluralism with an ecological focus. Unlike typical forms of governance which view the state as the center of law, the forest of Ghosh’s storytelling is governed by numerous and different sources of order, including social norms and myth, community beliefs, and nature’s boundaries. Bon Bibi represents the rule of law and orders nature, while Dokkhin Rai disrupts human and non-human binaries. This literary text is positioned alongside other scholarship in ecological and legal thought, such as rights of nature and temporal justice. It suggests that most legal regimes are based on treating nature as an object. However, Ghosh’s work places nature on the same level as humans in terms of rights and obligations. He proposes a model of temporal justice in which the rights of people cannot be used to overrule the processes of nature over longer spans of time and the interests of both people and other species in the future. He argues that we must stop governing in ways that treat nature as an object to be dominated and regulated and instead practice reciprocity, self-imposed limits, recognizing the relationships we have to nature, as well as ecological time.