Megnaa Mehtta (University College London). Retreat or Remain? Notions of a full life and a slow death from Sundarbans’ eroding coastlines
| Dates: | 10 November 2025 |
|---|
| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
|---|
| Speaker: | Megnaa Mehtta |
|---|
|
As sea level rise erode coastlines of the Sundarbans, “managed retreat”—a process of relocating people to supposedly safer areas—is put forth by policymakers globally, and in India, as an adaptation solution. Through long-term ethnographic research with residents of Sundarbans’ coastal communities, this paper examines their desires to remain in their villages despite recurrent experiences of floods, cyclones and land erosion. The motivations to remain are because many know the alternative—enmeshing themselves within India’s precarious and risky informal economy—to be worse, akin to what some call a slow death, even as coastlines classified as uninhabitable by policymakers, counterintuitively, offer a safer and fuller existence. Further, this paper disaggregates what it means to remain and capacities (or incapacities) of aspiring for relocation, in relation to residents’ land ownership, livelihoods, gender, disability, and age. I examine the dense relational webs of kinships, sociality, ritual and non-human life that make a space into a shongshar (household/home/world).
Megnaa Mehtta is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London (UCL). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Conserving Life: Political Imaginaries from a Submerging Forest based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Current Anthropology, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her next phase of research, funded by an AXA-UNESCO research fellowship, is interested in migration, informality, health, and social reproduction as these themes intersect with climate adaptation policies, land dispossession and long-standing vulnerabilities. This research is multi-sited and follows a rural to urban continuum of migrant labour from the coastlines of Bengal to a range of worksites, including factory shop floors and construction sites across India, Bangladesh, and Italy.
Speaker
Megnaa Mehtta
Organisation: UCL
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
