Authors: Research Scholar Kawya Pandey, Professor Dr.Pramod Kumar
Abstract: Indian English poetry offers a distinctive field for developing an eco-poetic framework in which nature is not merely represented as landscape or aesthetic ornament but functions as a repository of cultural memory, traditional knowledge, ethical relationships and resistance to dominant structures of power. This paper proposes a critical framework for reading Indian English poetry through the interdisciplinary lens of the Green Humanities, particularly by bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with postcolonial studies, indigenous epistemologies, cultural memory, ecofeminism and the study of more-than-human agency. The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Ranjit Hoskote and Tishani Doshi demonstrates an important intergenerational movement: from nature as a culturally embedded field of memory and human experience to nature as an active participant in questions of displacement, ecological violence, climate anxiety and cultural resistance. Ramanujan's "Ecology" and "A River" expose the relationship between traditional cultural imagination and ecological perception; Moraes's landscape poetry connects nature with memory, estrangement and belonging; Hoskote transforms ecology into an archive of histories, migrations, architecture and climate crisis; while Doshi's Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and A God at the Door connect ecological vulnerability with gender, embodiment, violence and planetary precarity. The paper argues that Indian eco-poetics should therefore be understood not simply as poetry "about nature" but as a form of cultural knowledge in which the natural world becomes a site for recovering suppressed histories and challenging anthropocentric and colonial ways of understanding the environment.
