GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.2 No.1, December 2012
An Exegesis of Postcolonial Ecofeminism in
Contemporary Literature
Gurreet Kaur
English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, United Kingdom
[email protected]
field. These facts, however, elide two important
points that are of central concern to me. Firstly, the
historical trajectory that precedes the formal
establishment of ecocriticism as a field of study in
the Anglo-American academy; secondly, the
sustained critical and creative work of postcolonial
writers and activists that has largely been lost or
marginalised—ecocriticism has been a largely
American-centric field in which postcolonial
literary perspectives have made only a very belated
entry. Ecocriticism as a proper academic discipline
started taking on a more definitive shape in the
1990s although William Rueckert first used the
term in 1978 in his critical essay “Literature and
Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” in The
Ecocriticism Reader. If we were to look at some of
the postcolonial countries such as those in Africa
and South Asia, particularly India, we realize that
these nations have a history of environmental
activism and movements even before ecocriticism
emerged as an academic discipline in the Western
world. This is indicative of the fact that
environmental consciousness in the postcolonial
world in terms of activism precedes the formation
of ecocriticism as a discipline.
In Nigeria, Africa, Ken Saro-Wiwa, an
Ogoni author and environmental activist was
executed in the year 1995 while actively
campaigning and fighting against the destruction of
his native people’s farmland and fishing waters by
oil conglomerates of European and American
origin such as Shell and Chevron. The despotic
African regime was intimately involved with the oil
companies, thus creating a situation where the
unquestionable and transnational power of
multinational companies combined with the
internal government results in a neo-colonialist
enterprise. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s writings, however, do
not find a place in the environmental literary canon
which predominantly outlines a Western lineage.
Some aspects of the male-dominated AngloAmerican canon are the prioritisation of “extrahuman concerns over the interests of disadvantaged
human groups” [3] as well as the marginalization or
even omission of both “feminist and ecofeminist
literary perspectives” [5].
Abstract—This paper outlines the lineage of
postcolonial ecofeminism in India in terms of both
activism and fiction that explicitly foreground
women. I argue that women’s relationship to the
environment is ambivalent, thus disputing the
dualism of nature/culture and yet straddling the grey
area between these two binaries. This is particularly
highlighted by women writing indian fiction in
English.
Keywords-Postcolonial; ecofeminism; Indian fiction;
women writers; ambivalence.
INTRODUCTION
I.
Cheryl Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as
“the study of the relationship between literature and
the physical environment” [1]. By the year 2004,
Greg Garrard’s definition of ecocriticism goes a
step further to define it as “the study of the
relationship of the human and non-human,
throughout human cultural history and entailing
critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself” [2].
Such a definition raises the question of what it
means to be human and the ways in which we
construct ourselves against nature is at times
complicit with colonialist and racist attitudes till
the present day [3]. Furthermore, in the
postcolonial context, the category of human as
‘not-animal’ has had catastrophic consequences for
human beings as well, especially groups which
have been marginalized by dominant Western
discourses and ways of seeing and being treated as
‘savages’ or ‘animals’.
Ecocriticism as a critical approach has
been to date, projected as a predominantly White
and Western movement. Rob Nixon writes in a
New York Times article in the year 1995, titled
“The Greening of the Humanities”, that there were
“twenty-five writers and critics whose work was
central to this environmental studies boom…[and]
all twenty-five writers and critics were American”
[4]. Today, although the field of environmental
studies and literature has developed further to
include sub-sections such as ecofeminism and
postcolonial ecocriticism, it is still perceived as an
“offshoot of American studies” [4]. Furthermore,
ecocriticism has been a largely male-dominated
DOI: 10.5176/2251-2853_2.1.78
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Tide), Indra Sinha (Animal’s People) and the only
female writer to be included in these works is
Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things). Women
writing postcolonial Indian fiction in English have
generally not been accorded much attention in the
ecocritical field. A case then needs to be built for
why women writers are crucial to this project.
Many Indian women novelists not only
explore female subjectivity in order to establish an
identity that is not imposed by a patriarchal society,
but their work also retains currency for making
social issues a key part in their novels. Indian
women’s writing, especially from the twentieth
century onwards, is starting to be viewed as a
powerful medium of modernism and feminism.
Indian women authors writing in English such as
Kiran Desai and Arundhati Roy have earned
international renown by winning prestigious
awards such as the Booker Prize, and their presence
in the English-speaking literary world cannot be
ignored or sidelined. Elleke Boehmer states that
“postcolonial women writers from India…are
equally concerned to bring fore the specific
textures of their own existence. Both as women and
postcolonial citizens they concentrate…on their
own ‘distinct actualities’ [and] often this is a
political commitment” [6]. But Indian women
authors in the present milieu have begun to voice
their concerns on globalization in India, and its
impact on gender and family relations as well as
the environment understood in its broadest sense.
By including Indian women writing
postcolonial fiction in English, this study hopes to
explore the intersections between postcolonial
ecocriticism and ecofeminism. Doing so would
make it possible to generate further theoretical
possibilities such as postcolonial ecofeminism, a
concept which has been in circulation but is still at
a nascent stage. Both the fields of postcolonial
ecocriticism and ecofeminism do not address the
issue of postcolonial ecofeminism adequately,
where both fields need to recognize “the “doublebind” of being female and being colonized”
(Campbell, xi) when moving outside the
parameters of a typically Euro-American point of
view. A postcolonial ecofeminist perspective would
involve the coming together of postcolonial
ecocriticism and ecofeminism into one analytical
focus, where it would be necessary to recognize
that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of
women are intimately bound up with notions of
class, caste, race, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
This paper puts for the argument that the
relationship between women and the environment
shows the existential crises of the women
protagonists in novels written by Indian female
fiction writers, highlighting the ambiguous
relationship women have with nature and their
immediate environment, rural and urban (rather
than just simplistically and neatly being aligned
II.
WOMEN-LED ENVIRONMENTAL
ACTIVISM AND WRITING IN
INDIA
Similarly, in India, the 1970s saw a
powerful social and environmental movement led
predominantly by women, known as the Chipko
movement. This movement brought about the
concept of tree-hugging to stop activities such as
deforestation, lumbering and mining. The
movement originated in the Garhwal region of
Uttaranchal in Uttar Pradesh, India. The state’s
increasing
commercialisation
and
underdevelopment of the Garhwal region was
instrumental in the conceptualisation of this
movement, where local women were affected by
state-level decisions such as granting private
contractors harvest rights for the trees to
manufacture cricket bats. Due to excessive
deforestation, the year 1970 saw its most
devastating flood and equally destructive
landslides. The Chipko movement has gained
iconic status and is now cited as a highly successful
example of grassroots environmentalism in India.
This movement is also key for the way in which it
mobilised women. The first recorded event of
Chipko, however, took place in village Khejarli in
the Jodhpur district in the year 1731. The Bishnoi
community in that district led by Amrita Devi, a
local Bishnoi woman, sacrificed their lives while
protecting local green Khejri trees which were
considered sacred by the community. An estimated
three hundred and sixty three Bishnois hugged the
trees and braved the axes of loggers sent by the
local ruler. Today this episode in India’s
(environmental) history is seen as a precursor to the
Chipko movement of Garhwal.
The two examples above illustrate the
emergence of an ecocritical consciousness from
realising how nature is being turned into a
commodity for profit by the postcolonial state and
multinational capital. It is a perspective which
refrains from romanticizing nature in any of its
aspects. For many women around the world, their
day to day lives depend on the survival of the
forests and land that sustain their daily activities.
Their interest to conserve and preserve the
environment around them stems from a daily effort
to survive materially.
In light of such developments, especially
in India, it is then surprising that most of the
ecocritical writings and activism from this country
are not included in the environmental literary
canon. Recent developments in the field of
postcolonial ecocriticism (Upamanyu Pablo
Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments; Graham
Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial
Ecocriticism; Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt’s
Postcolonial Green) have included male writers
from India such as Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry
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with nature or being opposed to urban and
technological development)—disputing the binary
of nature-culture and yet straddling the grey area
between these two binaries. The women in the
novels also realise (and in certain instances also
resist) forms of oppression which are
interconnected with the environment.
The novels written by women in India
highlight issues and themes which are considered
urgent and pertinent in the postcolonial and
environmental context. Apart from foregrounding
Indian women writers, the novels (and in certain
instances, non-fictional essays written by writers
such as Arundhati Roy) espouse a “global
“ecological
citizenship”
[that]
requires
commitments to human, as well as wider ecological
justice, engendering the recognition that nature has
extrinsic, as well as intrinsic value for us all” [7].
The novels and essays also “call for a carefully
case-based, historically contextualised analysis of
contemporary social and environmental problems”
[7]. At the same time, they draw attention to issues
of gender, caste, class, race and positing the
writings as a site of resistance to prevalent attitudes
and social practices that not only denigrate specific
human individuals (both women and men) but also
non-human entities. Most of the work on
postcolonial ecocriticism has focused on writers
from countries such as Africa, the Caribbean and
Canada. Postcolonial ecocriticism focusing on
South Asian literature in English, particularly
written by women, is still at a nascent stage and
relatively unexplored.
and spiritual practices …[thus] making women’s
ways of knowing and moral reasoning better suited
to solving environmental problems” [9]. The canon
of female writers in cultural ecofeminism is very
much dominated by Western writers as well, with
names such as Starhawk, Ursula Le Guinn,
Margaret Atwood and Jane Carson appearing with
most frequency in critical and scholarly works.
Ecofeminism which has its roots in
cultural feminism is also closely associated with
the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock
and Lynn Margulis. The Gaia hypothesis states that
“the Earth is an organic whole—Gaia—[and] is a
total self-organizing and self-reproducing, organic,
spatio-temporal and teleological system with the
goal of maintaining itself. …Man’s development of
the technosphere is viewed as a threat to the
survival of Gaia” [10]. The Gaia hypothesis has
also been associated with the strain of deep ecology
and has given rise to theories of interdependencies
within the human (inorganic) and non-human
(organic) world.
Cultural ecofeminism has its fair share of
critics. Ynestra King, for example, says that
cultural ecofeminism
By itself …does not provide the
basis for a genuinely dialectical
ecofeminist theory and practice,
one that addresses history as well
as mystery. For this reason,
cultural/spiritual
feminism…is
not
synonymous
with
ecofeminism in that creating a
gynocentric culture and politics is
a necessary but not sufficient
condition for ecofeminism. [11]
III.
LINEAGES OF ECOFEMINISM IN
THEORY
Ecofeminism argues that there are
important connections between the domination and
oppression of women and domination and
exploitation of nature by masculinist methods and
attitudes. The term ecofeminism was coined by
Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 in the book Le
Feminisme ou la Mort. In the book, d’Eaubonne
suggests that “women…have been reduced to the
status of a minority by a male-dominated society,
although their importance in terms of numbers, and
even more significantly in terms of reproduction,
should have permitted them a dominant role…[and]
women must act to save themselves and the earth
simultaneously. The two needs are intimately
linked” [8]. The first strand of ecofeminism, which
is still predominant in the current day and age, is
cultural ecofeminism. Developed in the 1970s,
“cultural (eco)feminism reclaims women-nature
connections as liberating and empowering
expressions of women’s capabilities to care for
nature” [9]. The women-nature connections that
hold particular importance for cultural feminists are
“embedded in deep social and psychological
structures…resurrection of pre-patriarchal religions
King’s reservations have been echoed by Simone
de Beauvoir who says that to define women as
beings who are closer to nature than men is a sexist
ploy, a notion that gained wide circulation through
her famous book The Second Sex. She further
expounds that
Once again, women are being
defined in terms of “the other”,
once again they are being made
into the “second sex”. …Why
should women be more in favour
of peace than men? I should think
it a matter of equal concern for
both! …Equating ecology with
feminism is something that
irritates me. They are not
automatically one and the same
thing at all. [11]
Such criticisms of cultural ecofeminism are based
on the notion that this particular framework
reinforces sex-role stereotyping. As such, it is seen
as making “essentialist, universalist and
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ahistorical” [9] claims about women and nature.
Therefore, although cultural ecofeminism’s
strength lies in that it is seen to be a deeply womanidentified movement that celebrates distinctive
characteristics about women, it does not take into
account that “men can also develop an ethic of
caring for nature” [12]. Furthermore, cultural
ecofeminism discounts the fact that women’s lives
and identities are “socially constructed, historically
fashioned, and materially reinforced through the
interplay of a diversity of race/ethnicity, class,
sexual orientation, age, ability, marital status, and
geographic factors” [9]. Women as a category are
homogenized and their distinctive characteristics
are romanticized.
The second distinct stream within
ecofeminism is socialist/materialist ecofeminism. It
is my contention that socialist/materialist
ecofeminism strikes a middle ground with both
material and spiritual aspects, that is,
socialist/materialist ecofeminism shows how the
connections between women and nature are
embedded in social constructivism as well as
biological
predisposition.
This
particular
framework also takes into account an analysis of
capitalism and patriarchy (capitalist patriarchy) to
explain the domination and oppression of women
and nature.
Socialist/materialist ecofeminism sees
environmental problems as “rooted in the rise of
capitalist patriarchy and the ideology that the Earth
and nature can be exploited for human progress
through technology” [13]. This proceeds on from
the notion that it is men who are responsible for
labour in the marketplace and women bear the
responsibility of labour in the domestic sphere of
the home. By virtue of the fact that the women’s
main domain of labour is the home, it is unpaid
labour and therefore subordinate to men’s labour in
the marketplace. Nature and human nature are
viewed as being historically and socially
constructed, therefore connections and interactions
between humans, nature, men and women “must be
grounded in an understanding of power not only in
the personal but also in the political sphere” [13].
What this elucidates is that relationships between
women and nature are steeped in social, material
and political realities.
The term ‘ecofeminism’ is besieged with
the problem of multiple definitions . ‘Ecofeminism’
is an umbrella term which encompasses a multitude
of positions and attitudes. As seen from the
discussion in the paragraphs above, some of these
positions are mutually compatible with each other
while others diverge after a point. For Rosi
Braidotti et al, ecofeminism refers to a “significant
stream within the feminist movement, containing a
range of theoretical positions which rest on the
assumption that there are critical connections
between the domination of nature and of women”
[10]. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy offer a
definition that seemingly comes closer to the
purposes of this study, but is still riddled with gaps
and insufficiencies. They say that ecofeminism
is a practical movement for social
change arising out of the
struggles of women to sustain
themselves, their families, and
their
communities.
These
struggles are waged against the
“maldevelopment”
and
environmental
degradation
caused by patriarchal societies,
multinational corporations, and
global capitalism. They are
waged
for
environmental
balance,
heterarchical
and
matrifocal
societies,
the
continuance
of
indigenous
cultures, and economic values
and
programs
based
on
subsistence and sustainability.
[14]
The multiple definitions and viewpoints in
ecofeminism leads the feminist and political
philosopher Noel Sturgeon to claim that “the
ecofeminism movement…is a fractured, contested,
discontinuous entity that constitutes itself as a
social movement” [15] and that movements such as
this are “contestants in hegemonic power relations,
through which change is produced by numerous
kinds of “action”, including that of the deployment
of symbolic resources, shifts in identity
construction, and the production of both popular
and scholarly knowledge” [15]. The many
definitions and diverse standpoints of ecofeminism
are at the very core and heart of ecofeminist theory
and need not necessarily be seen as providing
negative contradictions to each other.
Bearing all of the points above in mind, it
is then important to look at works of (eco)feminists
and environmentalists from India who have richly
contributed to academic theory and activism, not
just locally, but globally as well. The most
prominent Indian ecofeminist till date is physicist
and environmental activist Vandana Shiva. Shiva
asserts that “[w]hile gender subordination and
patriarchy are the oldest of oppressions, they have
taken on new and more violent forms through the
project of development” [16]. She argues for the
recovery of the feminine principle—Prakriti—to
counter the destructive effects of the Western
model of development, which she calls
maldevelopment. She defines Prakriti as “the
feminine principle as the basis for development
which conserves and is ecological. Feminism as
ecology, and ecology as the revival of Prakriti—
the source of all life [16]. Shiva characterises
maldevelopment as “a paradigm that sees all work
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that does not produce profits and capital as non- or
unproductive work” [17]. Shiva convincingly
argues and shows that the Western model of
development, or maldevelopment, has been violent
for many people, especially women and local
environments [10], as the violence that arises from
such a model “is rooted in the patriarchal
assumptions of homogeneity, domination and
centralisation that underlie dominant models of
thought and development strategies” [18].
Shiva’s
aforementioned
critiques,
although useful in critiquing certain paradigms of
development and globalisation which question the
inherent Western bias in values and models of
progress, however, do come across as reductive and
anti-developmental in several instances. For
example, she says that “[t]he visibility of dramatic
breaks and rupture is posited as progress.
Marginalised women are either dispensed with or
colonised” [18]. While recognising that capitalism,
progress and development have problems, it is not
productive to use the development paradigm as a
scapegoat for all of society’s ills or to dismiss it
completely as Shiva does. As Meera Nanda
convincingly argues,
The total rejection of modernity
by Shiva, Mies and most postdevelopmentalists represents a
lament against this globalization
of the capitalist mode of
production and indicates their
desire to hold on to the local
narratives in some imagined
authentic form. This kind of
assertion of difference, however,
is not very incompatible with the
cultural
logic
of
global
capitalism, which can easily sell
any such cultural difference as
ethnic chic or cannabalize it in
order
to
better
market
commodities. The celebrity status
that Shiva has acquired in the
West cannot be understood apart
from
the
surge
of
multiculturalism in the West,
which, as Dirlik points out,
serves
the
interests
of
transnationalized capital. In India
itself, however, Shiva’s work has
been received a lot more
critically. [19]
essentialise the women. In explaining the feminine
principle, she says that “[w]omen in India are an
intimate part of nature, both in imagination and in
practice” [18] and that by virtue of this fact, they
have a privileged access to the feminine and
sustaining principle. To further cement her point,
she claims that “Third World women, whose minds
have not yet been dispossessed or colonised, are in
a privileged position to make visible the invisible
oppositional categories that they are the custodians
of” [18]. Such claims are problematic on multiple
levels. Firstly, Shiva romanticizes the Third World
Indian women in question here, completely
obscuring the rural-urban divide between them as
well as the conditions of poverty the rural women
live in. Such celebratory romanticization has the
effect of invisibilising the wretchedness of the
conditions of their lifestyles and the “work that
gives Third World women their supposedly
superior cooperative and ecological sensibilities”
[19]. Furthermore, Shiva’s overarching argument
of the feminine principle Prakriti is steeped in
Hindu Brahminical philosophy, thus putting forth a
didactic one-dimensional religious framework
opposing the mechanistic scientific viewpoint of
the West. Shiva’s rigid argument also does not
accommodate the effects of the developmental
paradigm and environmental degradation on
different groups of men in different ways.
IV.
THE ENVIRONMENT
It is crucial to explain what is meant by
‘the environment’ in the context of this study. The
view of David Mazel, that the environment is a
social and linguistic construct, is increasingly
gaining prominence in the ecocritical field. Mazel
argues that “the construction of the environment is
itself an exercise of cultural power” [20]. Terry
Gifford echoes this view with regards to nature,
saying that “[n]otions of nature are, of course,
socially constructed and determine our perception
of our direct experiences, which, in turn, determine
our communications about them” [21]. He quotes
Simon Pugh to illustrate that “the “natural” is the
cultural meaning read into nature, meaning
determined by those with the power and the money
to use nature instrumentally” [21]. Thomas
Greidner and Lorraine Garkovich express similar
views regarding landscapes and different spaces,
saying that
“Landscapes” are the symbolic
environments created by human
acts of conferring meaning to
nature and the environment, of
giving environment definition
and form from a particular angle
of vision and through a special
filter of values and beliefs. Every
landscape
is
a
symbolic
environment. These landscapes
Women are, in fact, much more ambivalently
placed in relation to colonialism, development,
nature and culture than Shiva allows.
Furthermore, Shiva’s positioning of
women in India with regards to questions of
ecology and development also comes across as
problematical, with a tendency to homogenise and
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reflect our self-definitions that
are
grounded
in
culture.
…Landscapes are the reflection
of these cultural identities, which
are about us, rather than the
natural
environment.
[22]
ecological abuse in conjunction with Ammu and
Velutha’s gender and caste discrimination in
Kerala. If Ammu remains ever hopeful for a better
tomorrow, tomorrow also being the word on which
the novel ends, Baby Kochamma, on the other
hand, becomes the strictest enforcer of love laws
and social norms. Maimed by the love and loss of
the priest, Baby Kochamma reacts in the most
negative manner to the inter-caste love affair.
Significantly, she states her profession as an
ornamental gardener, and her garden is in shambles
once she takes to living her life vicariously through
television. It is against this backdrop that the
sibling incest takes place, a haunting image of the
grotesque that Roy employs throughout the novel.
Even before the phenomenal success of
Roy’s novel, writers such as Kamala Markandya
and Anita Desai have written about women and the
environment. These writers, while writing about
specific and private lives about women,
nonetheless make deeply political statements about
social issues and Indian society at large. The focus
on the specific and the private is one reason why
women writers from this category are often
overlooked and not taken seriously. Markandya’s
Nectar in a Sieve and Desai’s Fire on the Mountain
both portray the darker shades of nature and the
simultaneous conjunction of the darker aspects of
the women concerned. Rukmini and her family
nearly starve to death when nature is unpredictable
and there is a drought in Markandya’s novel. While
Rukmini accepts the lot that is meted out to her, her
daughter Ira is forced into prostitution due to their
dire financial state. Ila Das’s rape in Desai’s novel
is mercilessly carried out in the darkness of the
fields that are supposed to sustain life. The
atrocities that the women suffer in Desai’s novel
find their culmination in Raka who sets the forest
on fire in the end.
More contemporary novels such as
Abdulali’s The Madwoman of Jogare, Mehta’s A
River Sutra, Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of
Impossible Longing and Usha K.R’s Monkey-Man
deal with the relationships that women have with
urbanization, development and the city. The
opportunities that the city presents to the women
has echoes of the rhetoric of globalization—equal
opportunities for all. Such relationships do not sit
comfortably with the dualism of nature/culture. The
shift from rural to urban spaces shows that
postcolonial ecofeminism is not a static theory,
isolated to wilderness or countryside landscapes
alone. These novels also incorporate the
dimensions of urban paranoia and madness, a
manifestation of coping with the tensions of
globalization and development, highlighting that
the urban environment can be a space for both
creation and destruction.
Indian women’s fiction on the linkages
between women and the environment then adds on
There is a consensus so far that the environment
consists of nature, landscapes and spaces, and all of
these are socially constructed to give it a meaning,
and meanings are determined by power and
discourses. Such a view, however, reinforces the
anthropocentricity that most ecocritics and
environmentalists strive to break away from. There
is a conflict in viewing the environment as being
dependent on human cognition and language, and
the “existence of this world [as] largely
independent of human social life” [23].
In the context of this study, while I agree
on the composition of the environment to be nature,
landscapes and spaces, a further dimension to add
is that the rural-urban divide within such a
composition will be considered as well. In addition,
the environment here also constitutes the
postcolonial condition characterised by historical,
geographical, political, natural and cultural factors,
and
uneven
development.
A
“mutual
interpenetration” [24] of all these aspects is crucial
to the understanding of the environment, while at
the same time emphasizing that the environment is
also “a multifaceted, diverse order whose patterns
and possibilities extend well beyond our ability to
understand them” [23], thus enabling an ambivalent
positioning of both women and spaces.
V.
WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT IN
INDIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH
For the purposes of this paper, the novels
deliberated upon range from early ecofeminism to
urban ecofeminsim: Nectar in a sieve (1954) by
Kamala Markandya, Fire on the Mountain (1977)
by Anita Desai, A Riversutra (1993) by Gita Mehta,
The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy,
The Madwoman of Jogare (1998) by Sohaila
Abdulali, An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008) by
Anuradha Roy and Monkey-Man (2010) by Usha
K.R.
As mentioned earlier, with the exception
of Arundhati Roy, no other Indian female writer
has been mentioned in the field of postcolonial
ecocriticism or ecofeminism. Critics taking up an
ecocritical reading of Roy’s novel have often left
out the gendered aspects, and significantly, the
many female characters in the novel are not even
considered. Starting with Roy then, the
deterioration of the fictional village of Ayemenem
emphasizes and reflects the moral corruption of the
characters in the larger narrative. The salient motifs
of the pollution of the river Meenachal and the
History House are focal points in depicting
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to the corpus of theory of development and
ecofeminism. In a particular reference to the strain
of cultural ecofeminism and Vandana Shiva, the
works of these women writers subvert the notion
that women and the environment are simplistic and
monolithic categories. These writings posit the
women and the environment in both positive and
negative ways. The unquestioning acceptance of
the woman-nature link, especially in the Indian
context, or in the Third World per se, does not
hold. The idea that since women are most severely
affected by environmental degradation, they
therefore have “naturally” positive attitudes
towards the environment, is shown to be contested
through these writers.
It is important to note that the experience
of postcolonial women writers in India writing in
English (and also the environmental activism in
India in the postcolonial period) is very specific
and therefore not totally transferable to other
postcolonial female experiences, for example in the
African countries, and vice versa. This is because
each group faced (and still do face) a different set
of challenges and different types of needs.
In conclusion, by using postcolonial
ecofeminism as a framework to outline the lineages
of ecofeminism, I have argued that women’s
relationship to the environment is ambivalent. This
disputes the dualism of nature/culture, and yet
straddles the grey area between the two binaries.
Such a stance is particularly highlighted by women
writing Indian fiction in English. A complex
relationship exists between women and the
environment, where aspects such as power, gender
and caste discrimination and the larger sphere of
politics and neo-colonialism have to be taken into
account. Tracing the lineage of activism and
environmentalism in India has been an important
exercise, especially when the writer doubles up as
an activist, seen in the figures of Arundhati Roy
and Mahasweta Devi, among others. Concepts of
women and the land in the fictions register anxiety
over issues such as ownership (especially when
majority of the women till the land), resources and
various meanings it holds for women. Land also
symbolises the rural and urban environmental
divide experienced by women, and is thus also
linked to the ideas of spaces, places, identities and
power, all of which have to be examined in a
gendered dimension.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr.
Rashmi Varma, for all her help and guidance for
this paper.
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.2 No.1, December 2012
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195
© 2012 GSTF