An Ecocritical Probe into Amitav Ghosh’s Non-Fictions

Abstract

Ecocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to observe the relationship between literature and environment, comes into being as a critical idiom at an official sitting of the Western Literature Association (WLA), an association working for diverse literature founded in 1965, in the late 1970s; and later the concept was carried out as a literary concept from the USA to other countries. William Rueckert, in his 1978 essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Eco-criticism, first coined the word ‘eco-criticism’ focusing the use of environmental concepts to the study of literature. This paper intends to analyse Amitav Ghosh’s (India) non-fictions such as-Overlapping Faults, No Aid Needed and The Town by the Sea published in India’s daily The Hindu from January 11 to 13, 2005 after his visit to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Folly in the Sunderbans (2004), Confluence and Crossroads: Europe and the Fate of the Earth (2012) from eco-critical point of view. The definitive detection, however, is that the eco-structures of Amitav Ghosh’s narratives, be it of fictions or of non-fictions, render multi-borne meanings surpassing nature’s anthropocentric ethics. What he seems to desire to excavate through environmental imagination is perhaps a human space more specific and more turbulent even more drastic than physical environment.)