Green Indigeneity: Forest Gynocracies and Subaltern Ecomasculinities
Journal Title: IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science - Year 2018, Vol 23, Issue 5
Abstract
One of the ways in which Mahasweta Devi authors an ethnocentric ecological discourse is by devising an ecofeminist model rooted in maternal restructuring of power relations. She uses a postcolonial version of ecofeminism to counteract the phallocentric narrative of capitalist development and to simultaneously recuperate the aboriginal woman. Mahasweta‟s subaltern Eco-history of the forest (Aranya) becomes a recuperative Eco-feminist history and a revisionist Eco-Ethnohistory. She forces the bourgeois reader to rethink the forest as a unique Bio-Habitat with its own relations of social and economic exchange, its own cult of diffused maternal principle existing in the interpersonal relation between women and nature and its own natural laws serving the predesignated function of safeguarding the “Mother” Forest from phallocentrically constrained models of development. The history of the forest and its denizen predates contemporary epistemological disciplines like anthropology and palaeontology. Mahasweta‟saranya in gestating insurgent Ecomasculinities/femininities goes beyond being a reified feminine cosmos for the Santhals, Mundas and Doms. It prefigures a fluid, permeable and genderless model of Enfleshed Bioregional Ecocentric Subjectivity. The forest becomes the locus of reclaiming the lost ecocentric maternity and “natural history”; of reinstating one‟s attachment to the abandoned maternal principal of nature. Vandana Shiva in Ecofeminism identifies the Third World woman as a custodian of indigenous knowledge and biodiversity, whose non-dominant culturally embedded practice of bio-conservation, differs from the androcentric, masculinist and Eurocentric dominant model. In Armenian Champa Tree, Little Ones, Salt, The Book of Hunter, Kunti and Nishadinand Water;Mahasweta shows the intimate correlation between transplantation of native aboriginals, forced migration, cultural disappearance of Third World indigenous life forms and globalised development.
Authors and Affiliations
Arunabha Bose
Keywords
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- EP ID EP418729
- DOI 10.9790/0837-2305014854.
- Views 59
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