Relationship between Colonialism and Environmentalism in Canonical Texts: A postcolonial ecocritical study of The Sea of Poppies & The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, River of Stories by Orijit Sen, and Animal’s People by Indira Sinha

Abstract

In the foundation of colonialism, the exploitation of the environment, the extraction of nature and humans as a resource, and the resultant destruction and disruption of the climate and environment, both human and non-human, as well as both immediate and distant, have been central. Postcolonialism, and especially postcolonial environmentalism, often examines and probes the relationship between colonialism and environmentalism. South-Asian canonical literature upholds these concerns, both in traditional novels and more recent graphic novels. With the help of close reading strategies and critical theories from environmental criticism, and postcolonial environmental criticism like ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’, ‘Slow Violence’, ‘Decolonial Ecocriticism’, ‘Postcolonial Ecocriticism’, and many others, the paper attempts to explore and expose how these South Asian canonical authors stage the profound yet hidden relationship between colonialism and environment. The findings reveal a nexus of racism, speciesism, and anthropocentrism with Eurocentrism that has wreaked havoc in the past and continues to corrode the present and future of the former colonies and the whole world. The analysis also showcases that literature skillfully represents that it is actually the colonizer and his profit-making policies, with a disregard to all ‘others’, be them the sub-human ‘others’ or the non-human ‘others’, that set the planet on a course of unprecedented climate crisis; and in its current phase of neoliberal, neocolonial, capitalist form that the same destruction is carried out on the underdeveloped and developing world.