Living around-with-in: A review of Dr. Sayan Dey’s Interwoven Human and More-than-Human Worlds (2026)

Even as you witness erosion of morality.

Even as you witness downfall of humanity.

Why do you still flow as lazy and shameless.

There are illiterate and obtuse millions

There are food starved civilians.

Still why you turn a blind eye and maintain silence.

Bless with hysteria of thousand rains

Bless all these masses in millions

Vigorous revolutionaries and leaders why don't you organize.

You are filled with several glories.

You are definitely not lifeless.

Then why don't you ignite inspirations.

Breaking hard fury craziness.

Embracing those sleeping on beds; .

Millions & millions of Indians; why didn't you make them conscious.

If people are egocentric

Then society is no more dynamic.

Then why don't you break such static societies.

(Translation of Bhupen Hazarika’s “বিস্তীর্ণ দুপারের” by Deepankar Choudhury)

Let us face the fact that we are too late in properly addressing and undoing anthropocentric planetary environmental and ecological harms on the scale required. At this point in time, when our very existence as humans is at risk, we are finally getting serious about these harms. This only indicates that the ongoing discussions on planetary environmental and ecological concerns across various academic disciplines and governmental and commercial sectors should not be interpreted as evidence of humans becoming more empathetic, entangled and rhizomatic in their relationship with nature. These are mostly anthropocentric, self-interested initiatives.

On a larger scale, we remained silent, ignorant and apathetic when certain groups of humans—industrialists, capitalists, urbanists and strategists—exploited and destroyed natural resources, non-living beings, plant species, animal species, aquatic organisms and, to a large extent, marginalised, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities. We remained silent, ignorant and apathetic when the existence of these beings and communities was threatened by selfish, greedy, profit-driven humans. Any discussion of anthropocentric planetary environmental and ecological harms should begin by penalising these groups of humans and holding them accountable as those primarily responsible for healing the dying planet and its inhabitants. Change must be brought about from the top down, and every human being must be involved to the extent of their capacities. Otherwise, it may already be too late.

In this context lies the importance of Dr. Sayan Dey’s book, Interwoven Human and More-than-Human Worlds, which offers us pragmatic ways to live an eco-entangled, cobwebbed, rhizome-rooted life—a way of living that should be our utmost priority at this moment. It also enriches our understanding of the evils and goods that have shaped the planetary environmental and ecological context and shows us how we can embrace the good and abolish the evil. At this extreme moment of crisis, the book comes as what the author himself calls “an urgent invitation, provocation, and proposal to devise theories, methods, and practices of eco-entangled, cobwebbed, symbiotic, and chaotic forms of existence between human and more-than-human species”. In this context lies its importance, and, in my reading, it should be regarded as a ray of hope for every reader who still believes that the Earth can be healed.

The book is the fourth and latest in Dey’s series of monographs, following Green Academia (2022), Performing Memories and Weaving Archives (2023) and Garbocracy (2025). This book gathers, repeats and extends the ideas explored in the previous works, organising them into a series of turns: the rhizomatic, narratological, vegetal, aesthetic and pedagogical turns, ending with a chapter on confusions, chasms and chaos. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, a form of existence that is detachable, connectable, reversible and without a centre, Dey asks us to live “around-with-in” nature rather than above it, outside it or in command of it. The most striking proposal, for me, is the shift from the hum-an, a singular, self-circumscribed, all-knowing composition, to the hum-us, a collective, decomposed, regenerative, sympoietic and rhizomatic composition like humus. The entire philosophy of the book is concealed in that small play of letters.

What makes the book powerful is that it never remains suspended in abstract theory. The author exposes, with an unfiltered honesty and boldness that I admire, the hypocrisy and double standards of our society: those of ordinary people, religious institutions, commercial companies, political parties and governing bodies alike. The hypocrisy of “smart housing” and “greenwashing” is laid bare. Real estate organisations promise green and eco-friendly houses and offices by chopping, pruning and erasing green spaces from their natural surroundings, only to relocate them into artificially curated pockets within gated complexes. Ironically, passers-by, roadside sellers and delivery workers are considered insufficiently ecologically qualified to sit under the shade of a tree. Industries deliver motivational lectures on sustainability at the front door while discharging toxins and waste into residential areas, water bodies and forest lands through the back door. These are not abstract accusations. They are scenes that readers can recognise from their own neighbourhoods.

The same exposure extends to the state and religion, and here the book is at its most uncomfortable and, therefore, at its most honest. The Siddi participant in Ahmedabad who was invited to perform on the condition that they dance like Black “Africans”; the Indigenous communities paraded before national and international guests and subsequently deported to geographically marginalised locations, where they were denied adequate resources and opportunities for social and economic mobility; and the selectively captured photographs of the revived Varanasi riverbank, while other stretches remain littered with plastic and lower-caste people are denied funeral pyres and their bodies are slipped into the river—all these examples reveal the true nature of our society.

Hinduism’s conflicted approach is also pointed out with equal courage: water, soil and fire are worshipped as gods and goddesses, while the ritual leftovers of flowers, plastic and bottles are left to rot in the same water and soil. Dey does not spare the political present either, noting how forest and Indigenous rights laws are being twisted under the BJP regime to hand over land for shopping malls, highways and entertainment parks, and how resistance is punished as a violation of law and order. Yet the author is careful to clarify that institutions are not solely responsible and that no collective ecological transformation is possible without the habitual and conscious awareness of the masses. This balance, I think, prevents the critique from becoming a mere complaint.

The book’s strength lies in its use of stories. The anecdotal narratives have an affective quality, which is essential to ensuring that they remain in the reader’s mind and help transform our attitude towards the world around us into a rhizomatic one. We forget statistics, but we do not easily forget the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands, who read the advancing sea, cloud movements, and bird and animal calls on 26 December 2004 and escaped deep into the forest, while so-called “educated” and “modern” tourists ran towards the waves to take photographs and perished.

We do not forget the myth of Bonbibi, which presents the tiger as the invader when it is the settlers and capitalists who have invaded the forests of the Sundarbans. We do not forget Ruben’s Facebook page in Namibia, where baboons, meerkats, mongooses, wild boars and dogs cohabit and care for one another, or the villagers of Wakan in Oman, where natural expanses interrupt the buildings rather than the other way around. Bhutan, with its minimum requirement of 62 per cent green cover, its sewerage pipelines linked to compost pits and its bukharis fuelled by dried, discarded wood, is presented without the tourist glitter. As Dey observes, the communities there do these things for the planet and do not market them as something “extravagant”.

Even the abandoned plots of Sodepur, where wild plants and grasses defeated the chemical and technological methods employed by residents, remind readers that nature can reclaim what has been hijacked from it. Above all, Dey’s personal accounts of his various interactions with non-human beings and nature in different parts of the world are among the book’s most engaging and interesting elements. The book brings together real stories from across the world and incorporates them into specific discussions, placing each story within its context with a clear purpose.

For academics, the book’s contribution is equally clear. It provides a critical vocabulary that includes eco-epistemic ambivalence, the eco-suicidal kamikaze mindset, neganthropic web, alegropolitics, faux aesthetics, shadow kingdoms, congested aesthetics, eco-invasion, tentacular conversations, marronage, critical bifocality, eye-washing policies, slow-motion ecocide, autodidactism, catastrophic convergences, politics of the armed lifeboat, rhizomatic teaching-learning method, Biraha and the Humilocene, among many others.

It also brings together ideas and approaches explored in previous works through recurring references to Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumana Roy, Marco Armiero, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Dey’s own earlier writings, alongside the works of many other authors. This is particularly helpful for academic disciplines engaging with environmental concerns. Students of environmental humanities, cultural studies, urban studies, environmental management, ecocritical studies, critical waste studies, climate change, posthumanities, climate politics, environmentalism, public humanities and critical diversity literacy can find a map of the field in this single book.

Dey himself notes that these subjects have long been in vogue in India, yet they barely address the practical, contextual and locational challenges faced by the natural environment and the Indigenous communities who live around-with-in it. The book attempts to fill this gap and, in doing so, challenges the restrictive, textbook-centric and impractical pedagogical structures to which we have become accustomed.

The book’s most distinctive quality, however, lies in its pragmatic methodology for achieving an interwoven existence with non-human beings. Many theoretical works end by telling us that the world is in crisis and leave us there. Dey offers a clear set of dos and don’ts. We are asked to remove utilitarian words such as “always”, “absolute”, “conclusive”, “superior” and “inferior” from our dealings with nature and replace them with “co-care”, “co-share”, “co-habit”, “welcome”, “love” and “warmth”.

We are asked to introduce animals, plants and birds into our everyday pedagogical practices rather than confining them to showpieces in our homes and gardens. We are asked to stop extracting without consent, to refuse to shake hands with the perpetrators of violence, to mourn collectively, as the hill communities of Uttarakhand did when they hugged trees, and to behave as “passing guests” rather than “possessive hosts” on the planet.

The book helps us identify and work towards small changes in our everyday lives that, collectively, can have a significant impact on the world. This is where the book’s hope resides: in the possibility of a better tomorrow marked by peaceful coexistence, while acknowledging the limitations and challenges that lie ahead.

Another quality that deserves appreciation is the language. The narration is engaging and conversational, moving comfortably between personal anecdotes, stories from different parts of the world, the conceptualisation and theorisation of ideas, and references to other scholarly works. Despite drawing on a substantial body of theoretical scholarship, the book remains accessible. For this reason, I would recommend it to the general public, not only to scholars, since its subject matter is already so essential to everyday life. Those who most need to read it are not always the ones who sit in seminar rooms.

That said, a critical reading must also point to a few issues. The author is open about his use of repetition as a writing method, borrowing from Simpson the idea of “rhythmic repetition” as an act of remembrance and presenting the same experiences, arguments and theories in different versions and contexts. This works as an affective strategy, but readers who prefer a linear and compact argument may find the circling repetitive.

Similarly, the abundance of coined and borrowed terms, some of which are explained only briefly, may overwhelm first-time readers and make a glossary or a slower second reading necessary. The chapter on chaos, in which catastrophes and their wreckage are read as rhizomatic, eco-entangled teachers, is intellectually bold. Yet it sits uneasily alongside the real human suffering it describes, even though the author is careful to clarify that this entanglement is “not the one we aspire for”.

Furthermore, although the book insists that change must come from every level, the weight of its examples falls heavily on institutions and elites. Readers may therefore wish for more guidance on how ordinary individuals can compel these institutions to become accountable. These are not failures of the book. Rather, they are the natural difficulties of a work that dares to combine theory with practice.

In the end, the book returns to the idea that we have spent enough time seeing and interpreting nature through our own eyes and that it is time to see ourselves through nature’s eyes, emotions and perspectives before the “sixth extinction”. Any serious discussion of the harm inflicted on the planet should begin by penalising and holding accountable those who have exploited it for petty profit, and this book does not hesitate to name them. But it also asks every human being to join the journey to the extent of their capacities.

As Dey writes in the closing lines, we have a long way to go, and the collective, planetary, eco-entangled and inconclusive journey has begun. Interwoven Human and More-than-Human Worlds teaches us about the evils and the good practices that have shaped the planetary environmental and ecological context, showing us how we can embrace the good and abolish the evil. It is, without doubt, a book that must be read, shared and, above all, felt and lived.