An Ecocritical Perspective of Ruskin Bond’s “My Father’s Trees in Dehra†and “The Leopardâ€

Abstract

The term ‘Ecocriticism’ which first arose as a concept in the late 1970s, is coined by William Rueckert in his essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism†(1978) but it gets its massive popularity only in the hand of Cheryll Glotfelty, an American ecocritic, in the late 1980s. The literary ecocritics like William Rueckert and Cheryll Glotfelty meticulously examine the relationship between literature and environment in their theories in order to appraise how literary texts treat the subject of nature. In this context, an exact delineation of such issue in Ruskin Bond’s two well-known short stories, “My Father’s Tree in Dehra†and “The Leopard†could be done where nature or environment remains an imperative stuff of discussion. The paper also inspects how Bond has exercised the Wordsworthian sense of belief on nature in these short stories. The paper not only reveals the beauty of nature but also explores why its downfall transpires and it’s not the scientist or conservationist who can give the best protection to birds, animals, and trees living around us rather it is ‘common man’ who can give the best protection to them in the long run, only by maintaining the natural poise.