Ecological Elements And Environment Discourse In The Selected Works Of Arundhati Roy And Amitav Ghosh: A Comparative Literary Analysis

Abstract

Eco-criticism has been a dominant term in post-colonial fiction. Many post-colonial writers of Indian origin tried to throw some light on environmental issues. It becomes very crucial to talk about ecological issues in the 21st century through literature; however, ecocriticism became popular in the year 1978 when William Rueckert wrote an essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism (1). Through the literature, we can portray environmental justice as a reflection of society's ambivalence towards environmental issues. Our efforts aim to give voice to the unexpressed feelings of plants and animals by using characters in selected works. Nature treats us equally, and she represents the soul and the power of unspoken words for plants, animals, and other animated things. They possess an innate instinct to express their strength, serving as a metaphor for the silenced voices of the modern era. This research paper examines the interrelationship between human activities and natural elements, which influence each other. Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh have depicted how natural habitat and human instinct bond for dominance over it, and subsequently, our paper investigates how natural resources have been exploited in the name of modernization in two of the famous works: The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide.