Ecological Concerns in Arundhati Roy's Selected Essays

The kinship between nature and literature is age-old. Almost every literary genre such as poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction has been dealing with themes about nature or environment. However, the twentieth century has witnessed a great number of incidents of degradation of natural environment in the wake of industrial and technological development all around the world. Literature has constantly been recording the ecological disasters caused by human beings. Various fictional and nonfictional writings have criticized human activities responsible for the destruction of nature and supporting ecosystems. Many contemporary writers have written dedicatedly about emerging ecological concerns in their works. Among them, Arundhati Roy is completely devoted to throw light on various ecological issues through her essays. In the history of Indian English Prose tradition, she has achieved an enviable position as an essayist with her political and environment essays. In view of this, the present research paper aims to trace the ecological concerns in Arundhati Roy’s selected essays. Her essays are a powerful voice of human rights and environmental issues. For the purpose of study in the present research paper, Roy’s four essays titled “The End of Imagination” (1998), “The Greater Common Good” (1999), “The Road to Harsud” (2004), and “Listening to the Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration” (2009) have been selected. This research paper mainly focuses on the destructive aftermaths of numerous development projects on environment as well as on those who live in close association with the environment such as tribal communities. It offers a trenchant critique of imperial forces of neo-colonialism which subjugate country’s natural resources; depletion of environment caused by various dam and mining projects; and ostracism of a large number of indigenous people from the places of their natural habitat.