A Chronicle of Nature, War and Code: An Indian Perspective

PostScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies, 2018

The author teaches English Literature in Shibpur Dinobundhoo College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta where he is an Assistant Professor. He is pursuing his doctoral research on Eric Rolls and Australian Environmentalism from Burdwan University. He has received the Australia-India Council Fellowship to visit reputed Australian Universities for research activities. He also has interest in travel writing, particularly pilgrimage writing on the Himlayas in late 19th and early 20th Century Bengal. He has completed a UGC Minor Research Project on that subject.

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. IV, Issue 2 , 2019

Since its emergence in the last half of the twentieth century, environmental discourse in connection with the anthropogenic Climate change has always betrayed a steady adherence to the rhetoric of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic rhetoric, as Greg Garrard argues in his book on ecocriticism, polarizes people, engenders paranoia, and produces crisis as much as it responds to it. In literature, this proclivity of Western ecological thought becomes most apparent through the emergence of what Elizabeth Rosen calls neo-apocalyptic narratives that function as a cautionary tale while jettisoning the sense of a new beginning that characterized the traditional stories of the apocalypse. Whereas the spectacle of visual culture has calcified the presence of these narratives in the western genre of Climate fiction, Indian English literature has had far fewer confrontations with the question of the Anthropocene to have a decided shape. Such hope moulds the heart of this paper as it takes a critical eye to investigate the representation of ecological crises in Contemporary Indian English literature with particular attention to the treatment of the apocalypse – as a trope, as rhetoric, and as aesthetic. The paper takes four texts – Arun Joshi’s The City & the River (1990), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015) as examples of how the apocalypse has surfaced in Indian English literature of ecological crises and attempts to encourage and critique different aspects of that presence to cultivate a literature of the Anthropocene beyond spectacular visions of disaster.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

We all are human beings and live in the environment. We are all using the environmental resources like air, land, water to fulfill our needs. The term "development" also means fulfilling our needs. Environment includes all the living and non-living objects. While fulfilling our never-lasting needs, we are putting pressure on environment. It creates a serious problem of environmental degradation. If we use any of environmental sources beyond its limit of replacement, we may lose it forever. Many rules and regulations are made at national and international level for protection of environment. It is also the responsibility of everyone to use our environmental resources with care. Unplanned human activities is the main cause of environmental degradation. We must protect them from degradation for our next generations. Therefore, there is a need to create awareness about environmental protection, otherwise soon there will be nothing like beautiful will remain in the environment to be proud of. Through the research paper entitled "A Study Of Ecocritical Perspectives In Indian English Novels", we will study ecocritical perspectives through select Indian English novels. The concept of human development is causing threats to the beautiful nature and environment. The novels selected for study are "Softly Dies A Lake" by author Akkineni Kutumba Rao and the other one is "The Hungry Tide" by Amitav Ghosh.

This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in The Oxford History of the Novel, Vol 10, The Novel in South and South-East Asia since 1945. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press The chapter examines three key strands of ecology in novels from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, showing how symbolic economies of water, waste, and land mediate political questions around land ownership, agriculture, urbanization, and resource extractivism. The subcontinent has functioned as a testing-ground for large-scale environmental engineering, from the tea plantations, cash crop monocultures, and mass hydraulic schemes and river diversions of the colonial period, to the modernization schemes and Green Revolution in the twentieth-century, to transnational extractivism and bio-piracy in the neoliberal era. As Roy writes in her searing indictment of the privatization of resources in twenty-first century ‘Shining India’, Indian nature has been relentlessly plundered to fill the bank accounts of national oligarchs and foreign corporations in a deeply asymmetrical exchange: “By caving into this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology” (2011, 26). Environment, as a web of relations between both human and non-human agents, is not only a prominent thematic presence in the content of South Asian fiction, but ‘a formal and stylistic presence’ mediating uneven development, ecological imperialism, and environmental degradation (Mukherjee 2010, 11). This chapter analyses the distinctiveness of place and environment in the South Asian novel and broaches related political questions about land trusteeship and resource insurgency. The rural emphasis on the green fields of rice agriculture in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1955), Sri Lankan tea country in Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge (2002), Himalayan foothills in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), or the mangrove-forests of the Sundarbans in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), is counterbalanced by fictions representing the mass expansion of South Asian megacities, as dispossessed peasantries and evicted tribals are driven off the land by large-scale agri-business, mining, and mega-dams. Urban environments are inextricably bound up with the production of nature in the countryside, and the reduction of certain populations to ‘disposable people’ (Bale 2004) and ‘ecorefugees’ (Guha 2006), stripped of basic environmental rights to water, food, or land. Agricultural modernization and mining have resulted in desertification and pollution, produced severe asymmetries in distribution of and access to water. Thus, in addition to representations of land, this chapter will analyze representations of hydrological crisis, dams, and water privatization in and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2002), I will conclude by exploring the representation of the Bhopal chemical disaster in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), showing how it criticizes the toxification of environments and contests notions of devalued populations and natures as waste or surplus.

2017

Poetry, as with art in any other form, has an existence that is intertwined with the nature the poet, or the artist, lives in. While they can, of course, be defined and studied separately; it is not possible for poetry to exist bereft of nature. This is especially true for NorthEast Indian poetry as one of the major themes of the poetry emerging from this region is the relationship of the different peoples living here with the space they live in. this paper tries to analyze this relationship and its effect on the English poetry emerging from this region. The paper looks into the concepts of deep ecology to try and find a pattern in North East Indian English poetry. Deep ecology has a profound effect in the poetry of this region where one can clearly envisage a shift in the worldview from anthropocentric to biocentric. The paper also looks at the ecotone as present in the poetry of this region and how far the ecotone is productive in building a bridge between poetic concern and ecolo...

International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), 2022

Indian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature and has been a rich contribution to the world of literature. "Indian poets writing in English have succeeded to nativize or indianize English in order to reveal typical Indian situations" (Wikipedia). An ecocritical approach entails how we look at the literary works with special reference to the depiction of nature and environment. This research paper tries to study the ecological implications in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan and Gieve Patel dealing with their sensitivity towards nature and the environment. The aim of the study is to evaluate how their poetry reflects the eco consciousness in broader sense of the term. It is not merely the aesthetic beauty of nature and the landscape the poets are concerned in the poetry, but they are more concerned with the deterioration of ecology due to man's actions. Their poetry serves as an eye-opener to show the man a true picture that he is just a part of nature and not the master of it.

ASLE-BRAZIL, 2022

It is usually suggested that anthropogenic impacts increased after the rapid rise in industrialization during the period of European colonization throughout the world. Following this, the introduction of colonial modernity and subsequent changes in cultural practices also contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene epoch in many ways. These impacts and effects, however, are very nuanced, evading categorization and separation through recognizable borderlines. On the contrary, these transformations remain located in grey areas where religion, tradition and modernity intersect in peculiar ways. This article analyzes such issues as represented in literary texts from India's North east region. For this purpose, four short stories were chosen. Although these literary texts are not entirely representative of the North east Indian culture or society with which they deal, they do encapsulate the general tendency that prevails in these societies.

In examining the phenomenon of Indian verse in English, an important characteristic of modern Indian poetry in English in post-Independence period emerges and appears as an intrinsic part of it. It is the 'landscape' element that is used largely in the modern Indian English verse and it is deeply rooted in it and stems from the Indian environment as reflected in poet's native place. Sooner or later the poet does come to terms with his own environment-constituted of his physical and cultural landscape. Thus the poet intensely becomes responsive to the unenviable landscape in which he lives and functions as a writer of poetry. The present paper attempts to point out and devise the idea of landscape through the readings of three renowned poets in Indian English literature-A K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra and Arun Kolatkar, through the ecocritical approach. To put in a simple way, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. An ecocritical analysis of the work reveals themes such as nature as abode of the gods, nature as the cause of suffering and nature as mysterious and elusive among others. Here lies the striking contrast between the traditional and modern Indian English poetry. The former were more interested in traditional view of panlandscape and the latter got more and more involved in their native landscape.

Our Heritage, 2020

Eco fiction is a branch of literature which study the nature and nature oriented or environment oriented which is nonhuman things works of the fiction. It represent

Sahityasetu - A Peer Reviewed Literary e-journal, 2021

Literature has undergone a massive change with the course of the time. It holds the mirror up to nature. Environmental crisis is one of the major hazards encountered by the world today. Literature now addresses the current ecological crisis prevalent all around the globe. Ecocriticism has emerged as a new branch of study which observes the interrelationship between literature and environment. This paper aims at exploring the concern for nature and environment in Indian English poetry. The paper makes an ecocritical analysis of Indian poetry written in English and the diverse attitudes of the poets towards the environment and the need for conserving nature.