The talk of a catastrophic contemporary environmental crisis is all around us. Yet the relationship between such a crises and literary and cultural forms remains relatively unexamined. This book offers a way to think about this relationship by reading a number of key contemporary Indian novels alongside accounts of the severely stressed ecology and environment of the country. In doing so, postcolonial environments also suggests a new alignment between the theoretical fields of postcolonial and environmental studies. In showing how such an alignment can provide us with a materialist and historicist account of environments of cultures and cultures of environment, the book makes an original contribution to the emergent area of green postcolonialism.

How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century - south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves.

Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire looks at the relationship between epidemics and famines in south Asia and Victorian literature and culture. It suggests that much of how we think today about disasters, state and society can be traced back to the 19th-century British imperial experience.