Practising
Eco-criticism: Nature and Sustainability in Ruskin Bond’s Short Stories
Shirsendu Mondal,
Assistant
Professor,
Departmentof
English,
Barasat College,
West Bengal, India.
Abstract: This paper explores the
inherent eco-critical consciousness in the short stories of Ruskin Bond,
arguing that his work transcends theoretical "eco-criticism" to
depict an inalienable, lived bond between humanity and the natural world. By situating Bond's
sensibilities alongside the creative principles of English Romantic poets, the
study examines how his prose counterpoints the "vigorous earth"
against the aggressive aggrandizement of post-industrial civilization.
This paper explores the inherent eco-critical
consciousness in the short stories of Ruskin Bond, arguing that his work
transcends theoretical "eco-criticism" to depict an inalienable,
lived bond between humanity and the natural world. By situating Bond's sensibilities alongside the creative
principles of English Romantic poets, the study examines how his prose
counterpoints the "vigorous earth" against the aggressive
aggrandizement of post-industrial civilization.
Keywords: Ruskin
Bond, Eco-criticism, Sustainability, Nature vs. Civilization, Romanticism,
Wildlife Conservation.
Long before eco-critical approaches reinvented nature and
sustainability, Ruskin Bond’s stories had been naturally drifting towards the
invariable bond between man and Nature. He did not ‘express’ his belief through
the instrument of literature, he dived into the inalienability of the
relationship as it unfolds in everyday human tales with unceremonious
certainty. Recognizing the primacy of Nature, which far surpasses the narrow
idea of doing good to nature, unites human nature with the external in the
naturalness of coexistence. For him, this was never a matter of deploying
theory, tacit moralization or the imperative of scientific-ecological knowledge
(Aggarwal 49). Instead of consciously designed allegories glorifying the
relationship, he narrates the anguish of desolation as it isfelt in the lived-
experiences of man orderly realized in the decentering of eventual rupture. For
representing the voice of Nature, his anthropomorphism meticulously avoids
imposition of a human value-system on the natural world. Bond stands firm with
the unrestricted right of the animals to live freely in their own habitat
with the reassertion that the nature is not born to serve mankind.
I have found the sensibility of English Romantic poets
relevant for discussing Ruskin Bond. Nature for the Romantic poets did not
simply mean external nature, it traversed the ideas of fundamental creative
principle and spontaneity in the naturalness of life’s becomingness (Blades 174-76).
The idea unavoidably relates to the classic opposition between Nature and Art.
WW’s doctrinaire, moralizing belief in Nature’s nourishment of human life and
Coleridge’ enraptured celebration of wild, magical could only have shaped in
the background of expanding mechanization, and rampant industrialization
(Wellek 23). Foregrounding Nature, therefore, became more than a philosophical
underpinning in their poetry. It came with the urgency of counterpointing the
vigorous earth and its elements against the aggrandizement of civilization
(Mason 27).
In one sense, Bond desperately clings to the continuity
of the bond which had started falling apart irreparably in the
post-industrialized scramble for development. The idea of civilization itself,
founded on the necessity of advancement/improvement from the bare, brutish
state of nature; distorts the primeval naturalness in more ways than our
enlightened hubris permits. ‘Sustainability’ should designate an uncompromising
arrangement, and no development for that matter-desired or undesirable, can
make good for the fundamental undoing civilization keeps unleashing on this
shared home called earth. Are we justified to talk of co-existence by
‘developing’ the human world and leaving the natural world in disrepair? And more
fundamentally, can we rid ourselves of the presumption of ‘thinking’ for them
who are unable to think or speak, at least not in our enlightened
language? The idea of sustainability in
our eco-critical sensitization has always been a compromised, strategic
sustainability. It must remain so, as long as human world would continue to
colonize natural world by surveilling it, administering it and isolating it
within protected areas-sanctuaries-national parks.
Ruskin Bond refrains from arguing for such ‘unsustainable’
idealism. Looking back to a vitalistic past and fondly aspiring for its
revival, does not make him denounce civilization. Instead, here places precepts
with knowledge received from everyday practice of a dwindling present--
depleting nature is unsustainable because it devastates man and nature
immediately and in most tangible ways. To consider nature as the antagonistic
‘other’ which needs to be tamed, disciplined; would not simply work for a safe
and tranquil human existence. If this sounds selfish and appears to aim for
course-correction by prohibition, Bond supplements it with the positivity of
living with nature. His fictions repeatedly extol the virtue of embracing
nature, adopting nature in life not with Wordsworth’s austere contemplation but
with light, jocular playfulness (Kumar 17). The abstraction of sublime is
replaced with more comprehensive idea of usefulness of nature. The high
thoughts of ecological crisis and conservation become matters of homely reality
and positive domestic practice, often understood in terms of the warmth and
conviviality that living in family suggests for humans:
For it
is all about renewal—seasons and the weather, sunlight and darkness, the
urgency of growth, the fertility of the seed and the egg. Governments rise and
fall, machines rust away, great buildings crumble, but mountains still stand,
rivers still flow to the sea and the earth is clothed in grass and verdure (Bond,
Nature2)
Had the last line of “The Felling of the Banyan Tree”
been given a real-life referent, it would have become a Ruskin Bond story (Chitre).
Or the symbolic connections Mamang Dai weaves around man and Nature in her
poetry can perfectly be illustrated in Ruskin Bond’s matter-of-fact prose which
captures the unsayable in the said.
Who is the
trespasser?
The humans have never cared to understand the
constriction in relegating wildlife to a construction of habitat. The
animals have never claimed or defined their habitat. By limiting the wildlife
to a demarcated territory, the humans have sought to strengthen their expanding
living space.
Perhaps one of the most haunting images of the
catastrophic encounter of man and nature is found in “The Tiger in the Tunnel”.
The bleeding tiger, wounded by Baldeo whom it eventually killed, was trapped
inside the tunnel and was about to be consumed by the train entering the tunnel
with a “roar and shower of sparks.” Interpretation of the story often takes
recourse to a set of classic lies. Baldeo-the watchman and his son
Tembu-representing “the wretched of the earth”, are subjected to cruel destiny
by poverty. They are also seen as making heroic sacrifices for keeping the
dream of civilization \alive. But if tigers threaten civilization, they could
be preemptively eliminated before they get a chance to derail development in
this case, it is not thought an option, nor the presence of tigers in the
forest and their frequent attacks are considered unusual scenario worth
complaining about. The destiny of Baldeo then is to police the encroachment of
natural world by the mighty machines (locomotive) necessitated by growth. The
roaring tiger is subdued and decimated by the roaring train in a climactic
celebration of human engineering which is also ominously foreshadowed by the
cleaving of the forest with tunnels. Tiger is just the temporal, local
instrument of Baldeo’s death; he is ultimately sacrificed by civilization as is
the tiger.
Railways cannot be stopped entering the forests and
trains must run. Tembu knows that imperative, he emboldens himself with the
power of his inherited axe and the belief that forest gods are always aligned
to human interests rather than those of nature.
From blasting
mountains to verdant village farms
Tembu is forced to live at the turbulent juncture of the
conflict, but Bisnu in “Dust on the Mountain”, despite being overstretched,
decides to go back to farming and reunite with his family. Bisnu-the twelve-year-old
farmer’s son ardently looks for the arrival of monsoon rain for letting him sow
the seeds. A long, rainless summer left the mountains especially dry and
sapless. While vegetation all around gropes for life, a deadly forest fire was
“started carelessly by some woodcutters” and “thousands of Himalayan trees were
perishing in the flames”. As life of nature is in danger, so is the life of
man, for “it looked as though there would be no fresh fruit or vegetables” to
support them now and practically nothing for the ensuing winter.
Prospect of job and earning in Musoorie exposes Bisnu to
the expanding conquest of trade and commerce over mother-nature. The way to the
big city engulfs him with the fierceness of commercialization which has turned
the green mountains into a vast treeless desert. The Deodars were consumed by
the growth-machine requiring more furniture and housing, pines were bled dry
for resins and the oaks were used up for fodder. Only the wilderness, beyond
the reach of roads, could save itself from the greed of civilization. The
Romantic love for the wild, primeval nature is rediscovered for its protective
role and also made problematic by its being antagonistic to development. For
the poverty of the people represented by Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, in spite
of its being borne with dignity; demanded eradication in the atmosphere of
enlightenment. Ruskin Bond’s young protagonist is thrown into this bewildering
paradox in the background of a burning mountain and a burning belly. The sick,
old fellow traveler, looking to get treated in the hospital of the city; offers
him the insight:
The road helps you and me to get about but it also makes
it easier for others to do mischief. Rich men from the cities come here and buy
up what they want-land, trees people (Bond, Omnibus 100).
The lime-stone quarry where Bisnu finally lands up for
job is the symbol of modern Industrial malaise. Beneath a permanent cloud of
smothering white dust, the landscape reminds of a post-apocalyptic waste-land.
Continuous dynamite blasts and excavation of rich mineral resource has denuded
the area of traces of life except those in the crawling skeletons of human
laborers. Closer to the mines, the dust is physically intolerable. Bond’s
description sketches a death alley unsupportive of life, because barring a few
dead trees, “almost everything else had gone--grass, flowers, shrubs, birds,
butterflies, grasshoppers, ladybirds…” Bisnu watches in terror and fascination
the massacre of nature (Aggarwal 57) as each dynamite charge churns out the
entrails of the green mountain:
… not so much the sight of the rocks bursting asunder, as
the trees being flung aside and destroyed. He thought of the trees at home-the
walnut, the chestnuts, the pines—and wondered if one day they would suffer the
same fate, and whether the mountains would all become a desert like this. No
trees, no grass, no water—only the choking dust of mines and quarries (Bond, Omnibus110).
Bisnu, Bali, Chhitru, the truck-driver Pritam and
countless others are dreaming about life and money in this zone of devastation.
Not many would be able to go back to their green homes, ignoring the lure of
income opportunities in the quarries. And even if they do return, many more
migrants would eventually fill their places to keep the growth-machine running.
Ruskin Bond knows that; he does not have any magic solution to poverty and
aspiration for money. But he at least needs one last ‘miracle’ to remind the
oblivious, marauding civilization that trees can still be useful, not in the distant
geological-biological way but as an instant barrier between life and death.
Pritam Singh’s truck in which Bisnu is appointed cleaner, bounces off the road,
trips over the edge and rolls down the mountain before “coming to rest against
the trunk of a scraggy old oak tree”. The old, useless tree saves the truck
from plunging deep down to the bottom of the gorge. Pritam Singh’s lesson is
reiteration of protective role of nature, “It was that tree that saved me.
Remember that, boy”. Bisnu’s journey from innocence to experience has already
made him internalize the lesson. He trudges back to his village home deep in
warm snow. Bond has one more instrument up in his sleeve. The homecoming
becomes poignant in the convergence of mother’s love, sister’s joy, dog licking
his arms and of course the protectionism the late snow and rain provides to
life.
The last tiger in a
besieged territory
If only the mountain could ‘speak’ and claim its
authority as the tiger does in “The Tiger Tiger Burning Bright”? The tiger here
speaks in the sense that it foregrounds itself as the powerful mouthpiece of
nature in spite of its steadily receding authority and fugitive presence.
Blakes’ tiger is a miracle of divine engineering; it is mysterious, elusive and
suggestive of unmitigated power. The tiger in our story is a mere shadow of the
terrible beauty of a prelapsarian past. It is old, vulnerable and forever on
the run to avoid the clutches of the scheming human. Except, that this last
lone, majestic opponent of the human world has survived poacher’s bullets,
villagers’ fury, loss of habitat and a bleak solitude with proverbial
regenerative capacity. Yet its mythical
endurance is no immunity against the rapidly advancing human world which must
gradually devour the last patch of forest. The depredation of human
civilization has achieved for itself a complete supremacy over nature and the
wild life. The tiger must now live under the abject subjection of its human
lords and slide down the path of extinction. Human dominance over the wilderness
is rampant and unrestricted.
The story traces the rapid destruction of the
forest-cover and wildlife by the burgeoning human interest in land and timber.
Once the habitat of a sizeable tiger population, this area of the Himalayan
foothills has been emptied off tigers by poachers and hunters in search of
trophies. Although the coexistence of man and nature is posited as a
possibility in the relationship with villagers, the harmony is contingent upon
the tiger’s conformity to discipline. Practically there is no “dualism in the
relationship between animals and humans”. because the relationship is
unilateral and the animals are invariably acted upon. Animals are not
“antagonists of humans”, it is just the opposite, because the “humans have
upset the ecological balance by intrusion into the animal world” and made their
survival difficult(Fatma54).The tiger in its own habitat is practically
imprisoned to the rules of territorial governance imposed by man. It must stay
away from the buffaloes, avoid straying into human settlements, remain awake to
hunters’ bullets, cede ground to the advancing human world and flee to the
safety of still-unoccupied parts of the jungle.
It has known the ways of men; it has stopped going to the river-front
for a drink. Instead, it visits the small waterbody deep inside the forest, but
every time approaching it with extreme caution as it is aware:
…that it was at that place that men sometimes
sat up for him with guns for they coveted his beauty---his stripes and the gold
of his body, his fine teeth, his whiskers and his noble head. They would have
liked to hang his skin on a wall, with his head stuffed and mounted, and pieces
of glass replacing his fierce eyes; then they would have boasted of their
triumph over the king of the jungle (Bond, Big Book).
The tiger has learnt the rules in hard ways. Once in his
youthful bravado, upon killing a village buffalo, the villagers pursued and
attacked him night and day with bow and arrow and firearms. But this rule
should at most hold true as long as the natural food-chain of the forest
remains undisturbed. Just the cover of trees is never enough for the tiger, the
forest has to provide a steady flow of the natural diet meant for its survival.
The tiger, meanwhile, has spared the buffalos not out of his feeling for the
villagers but for the fact that buffalos are difficult to handle and their
flesh is coarse when compared to that of the deer. Soon the situations roll up
to a point of crisis which was about to come in one form or the other, for the
jungle has been in jeopardy since long. And the eco-system of the jungle,
cradled in the lap of untrammelled nature since antiquity, faces an imminent
threat of destruction. As a consequence, the tiger is driven to the extreme
choice of hunting village cattle to avoid death by starvation.
Bond presents organic biological knowledge thorough the
practices of life’s interlinked dependencies and constraints in nature. Along
with the tiger, other creatures, including the humans are dependent for food on
the self-sustaining resources of the jungle. The large family of the jungle rat
needs to be fed with the clutch of eggs in the hen’s nest. In the hen’s
absence, as soon as the rat starts rolling the egg to its hole, a pair of
mongooses, seeing the opportunity; scare the rat away and confiscate the egg.
Ramu-the village boy too has been in the scene in search of eggs. Unable to
find the hen’s nest, he climbs up a Mahua tree to gather some flowers when, to
his surprise, he discovers a baby bear stretching across from a tree top to get
a plum. The implied food-chain however, cannot function without water. The
large water-body inside the forest is visited by all living beings of the
forest and around. The Jheel, truly a symbol of life, functions as the nerve-centre
of the sylvan retreat. The perfect organic equilibrium of the jungle,
therefore, dissolves the dry knowledge of ecology into compulsive, recurrent
patterns of lived life. Answering the blunt question, what does it matter if
there is no tiger, has a far greater objective than the conservation of tiger.
Yet again, does the absence of tiger really make any serious difference to
humans?
The darkness
within: man besieged by man
The peaceful (unilaterally forced upon) coexistence of
the tiger and the villagers is brought to a final decimating encounter when
reckless human settlers carelessly light fire and set the forest ablaze. Bond’s
ingenuity of plot construction makes the situation mirror reality. Forests
accidentally catch fire from human habitation or human agents deliberately
setting them on fire, as part of a diabolic plan for reclaiming more lands;
have been classic ways of destroying wildlife, especially in developing
countries. Anyway, the forest fire in this case is a direct contribution of the
proximity of civilization and the result was instantly catastrophic. In a day
the rich vegetation and the throbbing wildlife are burnt to ashes, leaving the
old tiger groping for means of survival in a land of utter devastation. Facing
extinction, the tiger is forced by circumstances to kill a village buffalo only
to invite an incredibly fierce attack of the villagers, hell-bent to finish it
off once and for all. It suffers fatal bullet wounds, plunges into the river to
avoid capture and is washed away to safety and life to a different forest on
the other side of the river.
The absence of the threat of a prowling tiger, however,
exposes the villagers to a more formidable enemy which had so far been thwarted
in its attempt to occupy the sanctuary of the rural, under-privileged people.
During the long period co-habitation, the danger to the wildlife principally
came from external forces beyond the control of the poor villagers. Forests and
unexplored territories of ‘wild’ India stood for an object of hedonist
exoticism to the urban-affluent-suave India. The dark, remote wildlife had been
the site of frequent incursions of power, exercised by privileged natives of an
‘other’ India of light. The urban game-hunters would romp about on jeeps,
brandish formidable guns, bring in foreign friends and offer lavish money to
the villagers for making necessary arrangements for hunting tigers. Our last
tiger had managed to survive one such onslaught, but others, presumably, had
not been so fortunate to defeat the wiles of man. As this new breed of people
made their inroads into the poor, migrant Gujjar community; the latter proved
susceptible to the lure of easy money. But more importantly, the tiger
prevented the aggressive forward expansion of the profiteer-intruders, timber
merchants, mercenary contractors and a whole syndicate of land-grabbers whose
primary target was eviction of the indigenous forest-dwellers. The urban had
literally been invading the rural and was scheming to dispossess the native
population.
The tiger has been guardian angel of the forest and the
adjoining hinterland. A mythically undying tiger in the depth of an
impenetrable forest had so far contributed to the fear of the wild unknown. If
there were anything like Tembu’s forest gods, it is to be identified with a
ferocious vigilant spirit represented by the interfusion of the tiger and the
forest. The relationship of co-existence, changing into that of hunter and
hunted, undergoes further change. In the new equation, both the tiger and the
marginal people are pitted against the larger, impersonal forces of
neo-colonial occupation of money and influence. The moralistic campaign of
saving wildlife adopts an unprecedented urgency:
…but
as long as the tiger had been there and the villagers had heard it roar at
night, they had known that they were still secure from the intruders and
newcomers who came to fell the trees and eat up the land and let the flood
waters into the village. But now that the tiger had gone, it was as though a
protector had gone, leaving the forest open and vulnerable, easily destroyable.
And once the forest was destroyed, they too would be in danger (Bond, Big
Book).
The tiger, by dying into life, brings man closer not to
their liberated life but death. A living forest with its diverse wildlife not
only ensures food-security but also shield them from neo-colonial depredation.
The greatest threat to man is not the forest tiger but the man of the world.
Epilogue
Our tiger refuses to die. Ruskin Bond prepares it for a
miraculous rebirth by making it plunge into the water which heals and
regenerates. On the other side of the river, it also finds life in the form of
long-lost companionship. Its roar is answered by a reciprocal growl of a
tigress nearby. Bond knows it for
certain that few tigers can withstand such sustained hostility of a massively
powerful adversary. Either they die or sacrifice freedom of movement in the
human-administered sanctuaries. The ‘forced’ conclusion of the tiger’s ultimate
triumph must be seen as the author’s politics of hope, deliberately planted
before the unstoppable march of development.
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