Ecology as a nature-cultural process in Raja Rao's Kanthapura

This article investigates a largely overlooked dimension of Raja Rao's literary corpus, focusing on the depiction of ecological themes and Indian landscapes in his debut novel, Kanthapura. Drawing on recent scholarship in the Environmental Humanities, it adopts an integrated theoretical framework, combining Hubert Zapf's Cultural Ecology (2016), the new materialist concept of the nature-culture continuum (Iovino and Opperman 2013), and Niccolò Scaffai's Ecocritique (2017). This framework is applied to highlight how Rao's novel integrates material and political issues with a reflection on affective and spiritual connections between the human and the nonhuman world that is rooted in local traditions and beliefs. On a thematic level, what emerges in Kanthapura is the search for a new eco-social balance in a nation on the verge of independence. However, in this work, ecology is not only a narrative theme used to criticise colonial ideologies and eco-social legacies, but it also permeates the text in its narratological and semiotical dimensions, challenging colonial literary conventions. On a textual level, this article intends to discuss the effects of nature (Scaffai 2017) in Kanthapura by analysing the literary strategies employed by the author to depict the interactions between the human and the nonhuman world.