Industrial revolution as the harbinger of climate crisis – The Anthropocene epoch in Edasseri Govindan Nair’s “Kuttipuram Palam”

This article examines the role industrial revolution plays in the epoch of Anthropocene by analysing the technological, cultural and geological counterparts by grafting the future as past memories in poetic form. It investigates the way the poem, “Kuttipuram Palam” (Kuttipuram Bridge) by Edasseri Govindan Nair guide us to rewrite, and renegotiate, how a bridge emerges as a level III technology and rework the relationship between level I, level II and level III technologies. The poem demonstrates the destructive power; a level I technology holds in the geological scale as a harbinger of Anthropocene. Edasseri through his poem “Kuttipuram Palam”, challenge the readers to interrogate their understanding of simple technologies in everyday life as a beginning of Anthropocene in a geological scale as opposed to the impact of the very technology’s implication in the linear time. Here the “Kuttipuram Palam” advice the readers to revise their perspective and asks to retrieve the Anthropocene nature of the seemingly innocent and simpler technologies of past. The “Kuttipuram Palam” explores the past of ‘Kuttipuram’ and testify to its ongoing effects as the Bridge (palam) is built across Bharathapuzha, the river and envisages the Anthropocene nature of the technologically transformed future.