Vol. 1, Issue 4, Part A (2019)

Ecocriticism, which is loosely described as the study of literature in relation to the physical world, has emerged as an indispensable critical tool of analyzing how texts encode, challenge or reproduce environmental imaginaries and environmental crisis (Glotfelty and Fromm). This discussion overlaps with the history of colonialism and postcolonialism, local cosmologies, and fast neoliberalism in the Indian context and Indian English poetry is a strong source of exploring such entanglements of nature, culture and ecological crisis. This essay analyzes the works of the selected Indian English poets such as Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arun Kolakkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Gieve Patel, Dilip Chitre, Mamang Dai and Temsula Ao based on the ecocritical approach. The study mainly relies on theoretical approaches formulated by William Rueckert, Lawrence Buell, Cheryl Glotfelty, Greg Garrard, Rob Nixon and postcolonial ecocritics and the role of their poetry in creating landscape as physical milieu and cultural memory, the negotiation of forces of urbanization and industrial modernity, and environmental injustice as a kind of slow violence. Through a qualitative textual analysis of a purposive sample of poems with a supporting simple thematic frequency counts, the paper identifies three prevailing patterns, which are sacralized nature and indigenous ecological wisdom; ecological estrangement in urban and industrial space; and expression of crisis as images of toxicity, waste, and injured nonhuman life. The paper claims that Indian English ecopoetry is not just a record of environmental crisis, but also re-conceptualizes ethical relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, as it mediates between the traditional cosmologies and new environmental justice discourses. It ends with recommending that Indian English poetry is a critical cultural database to reconsider development, resilience, and sustainability in the Anthropocene.