Fluvial Imaginaries: Rivers as Ecological Witnesses and Narrative Agents in Select Indian English Novels
Author : Md Sahinur Rahaman
Abstract :
This essay examines the river as a recurring and structurally significant presence in Indian English fiction. Rather than treating rivers as decorative settings or fixed metaphors, it reads them as cultural memories, narrative spaces, ecological witnesses, and material forces. R. K. Narayan’s The Guide, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide provide a useful literary sequence through which this changing representation can be traced. The discussion draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, postcolonial ecocriticism, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s environmental justice perspective, and the material ecocriticism of Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo. The essay argues that the river occupies three overlapping registers: it carries inherited mythic and devotional meanings; it organizes narrative time and space; and, increasingly, it acts as a nonhuman ecological force whose currents, pollution, erosion, tides, and floods shape human histories. The riverbank becomes a meeting point for sacred and secular time, personal and collective memory, and human intention and ecological process. Across the novels, the fluvial imaginary reveals that environmental history and human history cannot be neatly separated.
Keywords :
Indian English fiction, ecocriticism, chronotope, postcolonial ecology, river narratives.
