Abstract: Sea is not just a setting, and to read it as one is only a misinterpretation. This paper undertakes a sustained literary-critical inquiry into Anees Salim’s The Small Town Sea (2017) through the analytical lens of Blue Humanities, an interdisciplinary paradigm that interrogates the dynamic, historically layered relationship between human civilisation and aquatic environments (Mentz 3). The novel narrated in epistolary form by an unnamed thirteen-year-old boy situates the sea not merely as a backdrop but as an active, symbolically dense participant in the processes of mourning, identity formation, and ecological imagination. Drawing on the theoretical formulations of Steve Mentz, John Gillis, and Stacy Alaimo, this paper argues that Salim constructs the sea as simultaneously a mnemonic archive, a site of ecological consciousness, and a medium of existential reckoning. The analysis proceeds through three interconnected axes: the narrator’s affective and developmental relationship with the ocean, the father’s maritime nostalgia and its transcultural resonances with India’s coastal heritage, and the sea’s symbolic function as a force that both creates and dissolves selfhood. This paper further demonstrates how Blue Humanities, with its foundational concern for coastal cultures and environmental ethics, enables readers to perceive the novel’s elegiac coastal south not as mere regional colour but as a site of deep maritime consciousness. The study contributes to the growing field of Indian Ocean literary studies and argues for the urgent relevance of Blue Humanities frameworks in reading postcolonial South Asian fiction.

Keywords: blue humanities, coastal identity, Indian ocean, ecocriticism, grief, memory.

Download: | DOI: 10.17148/IMRJR.2026.030307