The Environment of South Asia: Beyond Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Abstract

Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha greatly influenced the field of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism when, at the end of the 1980s, after studying the Chipko and other peasant environmental movements in India, he pointed out, quite rightly, that deep ecology's central tenet of distinguishing between anthropocentrism and biocentrism is of little use to the vast majority of the world's population. Guha insisted that wilderness preservation cannot be pursued without considering social "equity and the integration of ecological concerns with livelihood and work" (Guha 1989, 71). Humans are animals, after all. We are not separate from the environment. If we are to think globally, then we must move away from deep ecology, which is an ideology for the sparsely populated regions of the world with no relevance in places like South Asia. Thus, Guha and others, such as anthropologists Annu Jalais (2010) and Radhika Govindrajan (2018), remind us not to make impossible choices protecting nonhuman animals and environment at the expense of humans or vice versa. Thanks to their work, we have come a long way toward understanding how the move from deep ecology to environmental justice has infused postcolonial theory into ecological thinking; consequently, we can no longer think of social and environmental justice, humans and nonhumans, and the global north and global south separately.These ideas about human and nonhuman relations percolating in other disciplines are very much a part of the early work produced by postcolonial ecocritics working on South Asian texts in the first three monographs of the field published by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2010), Shazia Rahman (2019), and Sundhya Walther (2021). The essays collected in this volume of South Asian Review explore and extend a number of trajectories that have emerged at this historical moment in the development of South Asian postcolonial ecocriticism. In fact, the trajectories represented in this collection are surprising in their striking variety of interestsshowing how, far from consolidating around one issue, location or language, the field is alive with multiple objects, aims, and narratives. By considering glaciers, fossils, nonhuman animals, and indigeneity, these essays trace, propose, and affirm forms of resistance that contest the anthropocentric capitalism often held responsible for the exploitation of nature. Each essay, in its own way, addresses not only the questions we can and should be asking in the current moment, but also envisions the possible solutions that writers, ecocritics, and environmentalists are individually and jointly imagining in a South Asian context. Thus, CONTACT Shazia Rahman