The Sensory Landscape of Andaman: A Polysensorial Reading of Island’s End

Geocriticism is an interdisciplinary approach within literary theory that focuses on the spatial aspects of literature and the relationships between place and literature. A key concept in Geocriticism, polysensoriality stresses the point that the experience of an environment comes from all the senses. The dominance of the visual is challenged as the perception of our environment clearly involves all our senses. Padma Venkatraman's 2011 novel Island's End coordinates several types of spatial perceptions, forming a vast polysensory landscape. The novel is set in the Andaman Islands which situates in the turquoise blue waters of the Bay of Bengal, hundreds of miles east of India. The novel speaks about a native tribal group of the Andaman Islands, and how they survived the 2004 tsunami, which wreaked destruction across the globe. An ancient knowledge of the movement of winds and oceans and a sensitivity to the behaviour of sea birds and island creatures might have warned these native people to flee inland in the nick of time. The paper looks into the soundscape, the smellscape, the tactile kinaesthetic qualities of the Andaman archipelago, vividly portrayed in the novel, leading to the representation of a synesthetic landscape.