Reimagining Environmental Justice in Indian English Fiction: A Multiscalar Ecocritical Reading of Forests, Villages, Cities and Rivers

Abstract

Environmental degradation in South Asia is deeply intertwined with colonial histories, uneven development, ecological injustice, and social inequality, making literary texts valuable sites for examining the complex relationships between human societies and the natural environment. While Indian English fiction has received considerable attention within Eco-critical scholarship, existing studies have largely examined forests, villages, cities, and rivers as discrete ecological settings or symbolic landscapes. This study develops the concept of Multi-scalar Environmental Forms as a comparative Eco-critical framework to investigate how narrative structures construct ecological knowledge and environmental justice across interconnected scales of experience. The study comparatively analyses four seminal novels Aranyak by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Employing an interdisciplinary qualitative methodology that integrates close textual reading, comparative literary analysis, environmental humanities, literary geography, postcolonial Eco-criticism, and scalar analysis, the study examines how narrative form mediates relationships between individual experience, ecological processes, and broader socio-political structures.
The findings demonstrate that forests, villages, cities, and rivers function not merely as narrative settings but as dynamic ecological forms that expose the interconnected realities of colonial dispossession, agrarian vulnerability, biodiversity loss, urban ecological risk, scientific governance, environmental toxicity, and caste-based environmental injustice. Across the selected texts, literary techniques such as catalog narration, domestic realism, documentary montage, and recursive temporality enable movement between embodied experiences and planetary ecological processes, thereby revealing how environmental crises are produced through historically uneven social and political structures. The study advances environmental humanities by proposing Multi-scalar Environmental Forms as an original analytical model that integrates literary form with ecological scale, environmental justice, and spatial politics.