An Ecofeminist Reading of Amitav Ghosh's The Living Mountain

Abstract: The paper attempts to explore Amitav Ghosh's Novella The Living Mountain: A Fable For Our Times through the lens of Ecofeminism; an interdisciplinary approach that links the Patriarchal ‘subjugation’ of women and ‘subjugation’ of nature on the hands of the

Anthropocentric world. The contemporary ecofeminist concerns align with the reductionist nature of science and technology, which uses reductionism as a sign of patriarchy to subjugatenature and exclude women as knowers and experts. Vandana Shiva says, “The reductionist mind superimposes the roles and forms of power of western male-oriented concepts on women, all non-western peoples and even on nature, rendering all three 'deficient', and in need of 'development”, Ghosh's novella presents a picture of this very superimposition of reductionist mindset on nature, women and the indigenous people who were marginalized and were brought to the periphery (Shiva, 1988). The Paper attempts to explore the interchange of relationship

between the nature and human through the change in the importance of the role of women who were called Adepts in the novella, who were very significant figures for the indigenous people before the arrival of Anthropoi into the valley, but with their arrival the scientific and technological model of marginalization, reductionism superimposed upon the people's minds and this resulted in the marginalization of Adepts hence of sacred ‘Mahaparbat’, bringing in natural disaster for all. Through the works of ecofeminist scholars such as Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, and Caroline Merchant the paper will be set into the ecofeminist framework. Vandana Shiva's work, moreover provides an Indian ecofeminist framework for the analysis and interpretation of text, which worships nature as ‘Prakriti’.