Accepted Panels

This paper examines the concept and meaning of resilience as "sojjo khomoto" as endurance; "shoye gache" as 'being used to' from a decolonial perspective in the context of the Sundarbans, focusing on the experience of survival, loss, and adaptability of the local community. The paper emphasizes the historical evidence of the Sundarbans' exposure to cyclones and their unending fury over time, resulting in the loss of human lives, property, and damage to surrounding natural resources and nonhuman entities by centring the local's perspective. The research reconstructs resilience-thinking by analyzing local oral hi/stories-folktales and everyday practices, with a focus on catastrophic cyclonic episodes as a hallmark of the Anthropocene. The study thus evaluates the use of decolonial resilience as a concept for post-disaster reconstruction in the Sundarbans and provides an alternative discourse to the Anthropocene in which the marginalized groups prove to be more resilient than the mainstream. It further critiques the influence of authoritarian connections with the radical conservationists of the Sundarban wildlife meshed with decades of political mismanagement of the Sundarbans' financial and ecological assets by local authorities and political parties. It emphasizes the decadal shift in power inequities as well as the conspicuous nature of post-disaster reconstruction to demonstrate how collective action and direct participation of local actors and communities carve out autonomous spaces of engagement in the construction of adaptive strategies and coping mechanisms. The paper concludes that decolonizing resilience is required to comprehend the Sundarbans' multifaceted climatic tragedy, and it makes recommendations for policymakers to incorporate a decolonial viewpoint into disaster management measures.