Meditations on Eco-hauntology: An Eco-phenomenological Reading of Selected Recent Indian English Novels

This thesis explores how the imagination of haunting helps us understand and describe our relationship with the natural world. I focus specifically on the works of four contemporary Indian English novelists, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. I experiment with an original methodology that draws environmental knowledge from fiction about haunting, and which combines ecocritical approaches with eco-phenomenological ones, especially those of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I also associate my research with various South Asian cultural traditions and contemporary international social-environmental issues, including immigration, colonialism, water crisis, climate change, and industrial pollution. Inviting the novelists and philosophers mentioned above into mutually enriching conversations on spectrality, I reveal fantasy as a significant philosophical method for dealing with environmental loss, for describing nature’s mysterious agency, and for seeking out ways to coexist with other beings. On the one hand, my eco-phenomenological methods enable me to offer philosophical interpretations of literary and artistic concepts, such as fictionality, symbolism, uncanniness, and musicality: concepts which in turn demonstrate the singularities of the novelists’ work. On the other, my ecocritical perspective allows me to associate stories about haunting with interconnected philosophical themes like thinking and dwelling, body and world, space and time, being and nothingness. In addition, the thesis coins the term ‘eco-hauntology’ to account for a thinking pattern which (1) examines the spatiotemporal, relational, and existential ambivalence of our lived experience; (2) recognizes the ecological significance of storytelling; (3) challenges mechanistic understandings of nature; and (4) empathizes with beings that appear ghostly due to discrimination, dispossession, and disempowerment. Such eco-hauntological meditations help me reveal the entwinement of life and environmental activism, rooted as both are in a natural world that is simultaneously creative and fragile.