Environmental awareness through Indian green literature: an eco-critical reading of Aranyak and The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the developing literary theory of ecocriticism on two chosen Indian green literary texts; Bibhutubhushan’s Aranyak and Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. The theory of ecocriticism is still going under development which means it is still evolving and exploring by various environmentalists and eco-critics. Its main goal is to explore the environment and nature through the portrayal of literature, especially environmental texts. By doing so, it examines the nature, environment which includes both the humans and nonhumans; lives and relationships between human-nature, and human-animal, and the environmental issues we are dealing with day by day along with providing possible solutions. It emphasizes one main conflict of anthropocentrism vs. biocentrism; where the environmentalists and eco-critics tends to blame the anthropocentric views as a cause to imbalance the ecosystems and all the environmental crises, and focuses on the biocentric views. Regarding it, several naturalists have come out with environmental ethics such as land ethics, bioethics which mainly calls for a biocentric understanding and mix of both the anthropocentric and biocentric views for the “common good” of all, and all such can be seen through the stories of these two selected novels. In this thesis, I am going to imply ecocriticism in these two chosen texts by discussing environmental issues and ethics by exploring mainly the human-nature relationship in Aranyak and man-animal relationship in The Hungry Tide.