On 27 April, when weather-monitoring platform AQI reported that 97 of the world’s hottest cities are in India, it felt like a ringing validation of the way I have been feeling since I set foot in my hometown a week ago to vote in the assembly elections.
With temperatures crossing 30 degrees Celsius, the heat and humidity in Kolkata has been unbearable this April. If you are lucky to have the option of working from home, you could avoid the worst of the heat. Even a walk after sundown can leave you drenched and exhausted. The few days I had to go out in the morning or afternoon, my mind went back to Megha Majumdar’s novel, A Guardian and A Thief (2025), a powerful reimagining of the city as a near-future dystopia, under siege from excruciating heatwaves and their attendant calamities.
Having read Majumdar’s novel just last year, I decided to pick up another work of fiction also set in an unstable world, where sea levels and temperatures are rising uncontrollably. If the protagonists of A Guardian and A Thief are desperate to leave their simmering city for cooler pastures before it is too late, in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), the situation is much more peculiar and perverse.
Set in a distant future (which, alarmingly, no longer feels distant for us), The Drowned World takes the reader to an earth where solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, which has led to massive floods all over. Except for Camp Byrd (“a city of ten thousand in Northern Greenland”), civilisation as we know it has been largely wiped out. The conditions that have precipitated this disaster are no longer the stuff of science fiction either.
Around 60-70 years before his story begins, Ballard writes, “a series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminished the Earth’s gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere.” This cosmic disruption caused human beings to perish en masse—and led to the eruption of a variety of flora and fauna: gymnosperms that were last seen in the Triassic age, a wild variety of fierce reptiles, and a profusion of “freak botanical forms”. The extreme climatic conditions have also brought on frequent outbreaks of malaria caused by swarms of Type X Anopheles mosquitoes, ghastly skin cancers, and lethal attacks by iguanas, who shriek all night and fill with terror the hearts of those who are still alive.
Ballard’s novel begins in what used to be London but is presently mostly submerged under water. A group of men, led by Colonel Riggs, is stationed there to study the changing contours of wildlife and vegetation. The lead biologist is Robert Kerans, also the protagonist of the novel, who works with Alan Bodkin, a physician, at the research centre. Among the former inhabitants of the city, only Beatrice Dahl, a wealthy heiress, continues to live in the dwindling comforts of her penthouse, unheeding of the dangers that lurk around her.
As this motley crew begins to spend days and weeks in this outstation, the temperatures continue to rise, and so do the water levels. With the earth regressing to a state of primordial chaos, a strange transformation begins to take place among a section of the people. They begin to inhabit what Dr Bodkin calls “deep time”, where ancient biological memories are awakened inside them, transporting them back to their earlier evolutionary states. Those who are affected by this phenomenon begin to experience vivid, almost hallucinogenic nightmares. Their connection with the present becomes increasingly tenuous. They become lethargic, withdrawn, preferring reclusion over the company of others.
“These are the oldest memories on Earth; the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene,” as Bodkins explains his theory to Kerans. “Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs.” Initially disbelieving of his colleague’s ideas, Kerans begins to feel the shifts in his own body and mind before long. A military officer called Hardman, who was part of the team, first falls sick, then loses his bearings and escapes into the wild. When Riggs urges Kerans and Bodkin to return to Camp Byrd with him, they refuse, as does Beatrice. All three, it seems, are stuck in the Triassic time zone, like Odysseus’ companions get trapped in the infamous Lotus-Eaters’ island in Homer’s Odyssey.
The second half of The Drowned World becomes manifestly more “Ballardian”, a term that has come to symbolise emergent technologies, bleak man-made landscapes, and a breakdown of ethical behaviour, among other modernist calamities. It is with the arrival of Strangman, who is ostensibly a scientist but more interested in looting the drowned cities, that life for Kerans and his companions hit a real crisis on their island.
In the hands of Strangman and his band of pirates, they are turned into mere puppets, forced to become complicit in their evil deeds. Together, this boisterous and unpredictably violent group begins to build a fortification around the drowned city and pump water out of it. Each passing day, a major street, a museum, or a high street shop is exhumed and plundered by the rapacious men for anything of value.
As more of the city emerges, the silt hardens into dry land, while the wild marine life is forced to find their own escape routes or are shot dead by the men. The stage is set to revive the old world order as the men attempt to tame the elements and undo the damage caused by climatic fluctuations.
In the hands of a more conventional writer, this moment of flux, despite the bloodshed and destruction it brings in its wake, would have signalled a glimmer of hope. But not for Ballard any such optimism. Instead, his anti-hero Kerans tries his darndest to sabotage any plans of revival. Like philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage” he wants to preserve the status quo and continue living in the drowned world, untouched by the corrupting hands of society and technological advances. Ballard described this urge felt by Kerans as “inverted Crusoeism”. Unlike Daniel Defoe’s famous castaway, Kerans wants to wilfully embrace the reclusive life, he wants to be marooned on a remote island, instead of rejoining humanity.
For him and, by extension, his creator, resurrecting the old order may usher in a new world, but there is no guarantee that it is going to be a qualitatively better world than the one there was. Instead of hanging on to the ruins of a failed civilisation, perhaps it is better to start again from scratch. Kerans takes this message to heart as he goes off, like “a second Adam”, “searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.”