Things to Consider

Here are some questions and observations to consider for our class discussion.

• In an interview with Readers Voice, Ghosh claims that “one of the major characters in the book, actually, is the landscape in which it’s set.”  Did you feel this?  And if so, how did it inform your overall reading?
• What issues of postcolonial environment does this text seem to want to engage with?  What environmental themes does Ghosh seem to care about?  For our purposes in this class, should we care about them, too?
• It’s been duly noted by many critics that, of the novel’s central characters, none of them are native to the Sundarbans.  What effect does focusing on diasporic characters achieve?  And is it easier to accept and process their relationship to the region, given their various claims to Indian identity, than it would be, say, to digest a western white scientist’s presence?
• What do you make of the tiger scene?
• How are the two storylines working together in the novel?  While the forced eviction of Morichjhapi is certainly a horrible and under-remembered event, why focus on it in this otherwise pleasant story of identity and desire and mangroves and river dolphins?  Do the storylines feel set in opposition, and if not, why not?  What are we to do with Kusum’s lament: “Who are these people [...] who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them?”  Surely, we are not implicated, are we?
• Ghosh, whose doctoral training is as a social anthropologist, has referred to the novel, as a form, as one of the “other forms of knowing.”  That sure is strange, is it not?
• What are the two waves of ecocriticism?  How do they differ from each other?
• What is the difference between environmentalism and ecocriticism?  How is this important when taking an eco-critical approach to a work?
• How colonial is environmentalism? Is it really just a form of neo-imperialism?
• How do environmentalist ideas such as Deep Ecology affect how we interpret literature? Do solutions to environmentalist problems, such as ecotourism, really fix the problem between environmentalist concerns vs local needs?
• What are some of the short comings of ecocriticism?  How much of this is attributed to the intellectual origin of the theory?
• How do post-colonialism and ecocriticism interact?
• What are some similarities shared between post-colonial and ecocritical approaches to literature? 
• What are some problems with ecocriticism when approaching a work with in a post-colonial framework?  How much are these problems connected to the history of the field?  Are they problems that can be overcome?