Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: The Ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Toy City Sourit Bhattacharya In an interview translated in this collection as ‘There’s an Uncanny Pluralism in Marxism’, Nabarun Bhattacharya spoke about his long-term interest in science fiction. The 20th century for him ‘was the cruelest century in history’ where millions of human and non-humans were obliterated, first in the World Wars and then in the postcolonial, ethnic, and territory war. What has made these wars the cruelest is the unprecedented use of weapon-technology, which has now ‘merged’ science fiction with scientistic productions and given birth to a deep existentialist crisis as to what ‘man thinks of himself as omnipotent is nothing but a pure fallacy’ (Bhattacharya 2016: 13–15). It is from this sense of crisis Nabarun wrote his dystopian novel, Khelna Nagar or Toy City (2004). 1 Here, Nabarun’s main concern is the apocalyptic nuclear warfare. This theme is repeated in some of his latter writings. For instance, the short story ‘Nuclear Winter’ (2014) begins with a terrifying description of the impact of an impending nuclear winter upon us. At the end of the story, the old, disabled mother of the main character, Jyotish, dies helpless on the roof because of Kolkata’s (mild) cold weather. The narrator wonders if we are so vulnerable to the current cold, how do we plan to survive the nuclear winter, the last of which had managed to obliterate even the dinosaurs from this planet? This idea of