Imagining the Forest, Imagining the Self in Modern Indian Literature By Prof Alan Johnson

Prof Alan Johnson began the talk by pointing out ironies in our everyday life which we often ignore as normal. On one hand we have software professionals creating photo-real forests for The Jungle Book and on the other, we have people uprooting entire forests. These ironies lead us to the symbolism of forests in Indian literature and the common parlance. Starting from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath in 1882 to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in 2016, Indian Literature has carried forward the image of Forest, or the ‘Aranyaka’, with critical fervour.

Dr Johnson cited excerpts from several Indian works to show how Forest was used as a nationalistic symbol, evoking historical identity. Chattopadhyay, in Anandamath, portrays an exile into forest as a process of rejuvenation. This echoes the underlying symbolism of a process, in which Indians recreate their identity and recognize their ‘self’. While doing so, he largely draws from the Indian epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The speaker also made a distinction between Forest and Jungle, the former carrying modern ideals and positive connotations and the latter as wild and mysterious, carrying elements of fantasy and danger.

In The Hunt, Mahasweta Devi, paints a feminist picture of a tribal woman, using symbols from the Forest. The cataclysmic events that follow the cutting down of forests are portrayed to parallel the harassment of the tribal woman. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, centres around the slow decline of Rupi, an Adivasi girl, and her family. Although it is not a political work, the novel is reflective of the falling of Adivasi aspirations in Jharkhand. Several such examples were mentioned.

Dr Johnson also brought to light the emergence of ‘CliFi’, the genre of Climate Fiction. The talk was followed by a Question-Answer Session.

About the Speaker –

Alan Johnson is Professor of English at Idaho State University and his expertise lies in postcolonial literature and theory, with an emphasis on South Asia. His current project is an interdisciplinary study of literary and popular depictions of the jungle in Indian literature, which draws on, among other fields, postcolonial critique and ecocriticism. His other projects include Hindi (Bollywood) film studies, and religion and literature in India.

– By Akshay Patil