Reading Environmental Relations in Contemporary Indian Fiction In

Reading Environmental Relations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English by Allison Nowak Shelton B.A., University of California Santa Cruz, 2005 M.A., City University of New York Hunter College, 2013 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2019 This thesis entitled: Reading Environmental Relations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English written by Allison Nowak Shelton has been approved for the Department of English Laura Winkiel, Dissertation Director and Committee Chair Karim Mattar, Committee Member Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Abstract Nowak Shelton, Allison (Ph.D., English) Reading Environmental Relations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English Thesis directed by Associate Professor Laura Winkiel This dissertation is concerned with what environmental historian Ramachandra Guha calls a “marriage” of social justice and sustainability in contemporary Indian fiction in English. The project considers how Indian fiction in English represents contemporary environmental issues—including threats, crises, instability, and injustice—as interwoven with policy legacies, culture clashes, and communal activities. I focus on the textual relationships between the human and the non-human that evolving socioeconomic and political contexts in India place in flux, such as the fight for Dalit and Adivasi rights and representation amid calls for environmental conservation. Following from materialist ecocriticism (Alaimo, Iovino and Oppermann, etc.), I explore how humans and nonhumans alike are given agency in the texts, how characters cross into primarily nonhuman spaces, how they reassess themselves as both individuals and parts of human-nonhuman collectives, and/or how their sense of self is informed and destabilized by the nonhuman elements around and passing through them. Rather than a specific generic or authorial investigation, I seek to privilege the environment itself as interrelational and continually remade, despite being physically and discursively segmented by human action and representation. To this end, the dissertation is organized around specific environmental resources and concerns in India, including forests, rivers, animals, and climate change, though each chapter does privilege one primary Indian English novel. I then intervene in current ecocritical and social justice discourse by using ecology as a lens to examine representations of those resources and concerns within the texts, which in turn combine mythology, history, and environmental justice narratives. I argue that the inherently relational nature of ecology, which the literature helps illuminate, challenges the anthropocentrism, androcentrism, and classism inherent in Indian environmental policy and politics and, more broadly, also allows us to reconsider humanity’s ethical presence on the earth. Through this study, I reconceptualize what environmental humanities critic Rob Nixon calls “site-specific struggles” of environmental injustice while also considering broader cultural and sociopolitical implications. Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Hallucinations in the Forest: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People……………………………………………………………29 Chapter 2: ‘A Rushing, Rolling, River-Sense:’ Reading the Meenachal in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things……………………72 Chapter 3: Human-Animal Relations in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide…………………………………………………………109 Chapter 4: Poverty and Agricultural Insecurity in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps………………………………………146 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………167 1 INTRODUCTION In the West, the environmental movement [arose] chiefly out of a desire to protect endangered animal species and natural habitats. In India, however, it arose out of the imperative of human survival. This was an environmentalism of the poor, which married the concern of social justice on the one hand with sustainability on the other. -Ramachandra Guha, “The past & present of Indian environmentalism,” 2013 Ramachandra Guha’s statement above provides, at least in part, the impetus for this dissertation project, his concerns providing parallel to the concerns of a large body of Indian literature written since the late 20th century. Many Indian novels have taken on the important task of illustrating the historical patterns of entanglement between environmental exploitation and human exploitation in India. In some cases, these patterns reveal complex, multi-scaled networks of cause and effect that reach into the Indian past as well as reflect the globalized present. These texts often depict the connection between environmental injustice1 and state violence against the poor. India’s poor is comprised of a variety of communities, including slum-dwellers and rural pastoralists, Dalits (formerly of “Untouchable” caste) and Adivasis (tribespeople, Indigenous to India), and Muslim migrants and immigrants (Biswas)—all communities already maligned by the caste system, colonialism, and/or Partition, and often still at odds with the policies of the Indian nation-state against a backdrop of global neoliberal capitalism. Guha also makes a poignant comparison between Western and Indian environmentalism that launches the question of state violence onto a global scale. In asserting that Western environmentalism did not arise out of direct threats to humanity as Indian environmentalism has, he highlights the particularly intertwined nature of humans and the “natural” environment in India, as well as the particular vulnerabilities of Indians, especially the 1 Environmental injustice refers to the unequal and unfair treatment of certain peoples with respect to environmental policies, as well as the devaluing of their cultural and material relationships to their environments. In India, this manifests at various times as displacement, the physical alteration of homelands and/or resource loss, and careless administration that results in industrial catastrophe. 2 poor, who subsist on various natural resources that are under threat. Thus, Guha also gestures toward the uneven power relations—economic and social in nature, national and transnational in scope—that have aided in creating sites of environmental injustice and unsustainable living conditions for poor communities in India. This dissertation is concerned with what Guha calls the “marriage” of social justice and sustainability in contemporary Indian literature that presents specific contemporary Indian environmental issues, including threats, crises, instability, and injustice, and interweaves them with clashes between cultures and castes, nationalist progress, colonial infrastructure legacies, and globalization. This dissertation endeavors to go further than a simple state vs. local analysis; instead, I link together casteism, colonialism, decolonization, religious strife, poverty, violence, global capital, and environmental degradation by teasing out the layers upon layers of stories offered in a selection of globally recognized Indian novels. I pose questions about power and process, marked by interrelations of both material and discursive networks, by focusing on the texts’ complex layering of local, national, and global interests that present varying and often confusing levels of agency with regard to environmental conditions. In order to understand these layers, I examine the tenuous yet formative relationships between humans and nonhumans, variegated actors within environmental networks that evolving socio-economic and political contexts in India place in flux. Specifically, I analyze representations of particular environmental resources in the novels not as static places or things that reflect the world of humans, but systems that are active in creating the histories of Indian sociocultural and sociopolitical organization. In other words, environmental elements are not simply assigned meaning, but are active in their meaning-making processes. I then use the literature in conversation with environmental policy as a lens to examine India’s profound and variegated relationships to these environmental resources. With this work, I seek to reconceptualize what Rob Nixon calls “site-specific struggles” of environmental injustice through the texts (Slow Violence 4) by 3 exploring the contemporary Indian (Anglophone) literary space as a nodal point of imaginative environmental exchange. The project also builds from my examination of environmental relations to interrogate the environmental ethics offered to the global reading public of these particular Indian texts, which are heavily marketed toward the West. My primary methodology in this dissertation involves reading environmental relationality as a critical concept that implies that one’s story is bound up in that of another; environmental relationality encompasses how human and nonhuman agents and forces, such as weather, water, animals, and vegetation, relate to and within ecosystems, especially the ways in which people interact with and are constituted by the environment beneath and around them (the places in which they dwell, live, and work). It is important here that the environmental resources I have chosen to analyze, forests, rivers, endangered animals, and land, are not just topics, settings, or objects of degradation

Load more