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Paper short abstract:

Indian writers have used realism as a mode for writing on ecological themes from the early 20th century. Postcolonial ecocriticism’s neglect of this body of writing and their histories needs to be addressed through critiques of anti-mimetic literary theories and a focus on non-Anglophone literature.

Paper long abstract:

A defining feature of literature and cinema in modern Indian languages was the espousal of realism—sometimes described as “peripheral” realism—by many leading writers and filmmakers of the last century. In this regard, modern Indian artists were markedly different from their Western counterparts in their aesthetic and political aims. Through their espousal of realism, Indian writers sought to represent, analyze, and critique social issues, including human beings’ relationship with nature. Consequently, works of ecological fiction came to be written in Indian languages from the early twentieth century, their origins going further back in the past. Yet, neither the relationships of human beings with the environment that these texts sought to analyze, nor the impact of these texts on readers has been of interest to postcolonial ecocriticism because of the peripheral status of modern Indian languages, their literary histories and milieus, and, most importantly, postcolonial ecocriticism’s methodological rootedness in postmodernism (with its attendant suspicions regarding the representation of a world existing outside of language). Consequently, histories of non-Anglophone writings on the environment and the ecologies described in these texts have, at best, been studied in a piecemeal fashion. Taking my cue from recent critiques of anti-mimetic theories of representation (e.g., Lazarus, Buell, Gikandi, Esty and Lye), I argue in my paper that a renewed—albeit qualified—engagement with mimetic theories of representation is necessary if ecological fiction from the Third World, in general, and those in modern Indian languages, in particular, are to receive the critical attention they richly deserve.