Attunement to Others: Multispecies Cohabitation in the Anthropocene

Attunement to Others explores how contemporary Indian fiction engages with the crises of the Anthropocene through narrative practices of relationality and care. Reading the works of Arundhati Roy, Nilanjana Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Vandana Singh, Avinuo Kire, and Janice Pariat, Amit R. Baishya shows how these texts register the Anthropocene not as a singular rupture, but as a 'polycrisis' marked by ecological, political, and affective entanglements. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, affect theory, and the environmental humanities, the book examines how acts of attunement-moments of listening to and sensing nonhuman others—shape ethical imaginaries and alternative ways of being. Rather than offering escapist or utopian visions, these fictions reveal how attunement emerges through grounded, affective practices of cohabitation, survival, and resistance on a damaged planet. In doing so, Attunement to Others contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on literary form, planetary crisis, and the nonhuman turn in postcolonial studies.