We are surrounded by plants. Vegetal life constitutes more than 99% of the earth's biomass (Mazzolai and Mancuso 1). To say that plants are integral to the survival of life on this planet would be an understatement. The spaces we inhabit are cohabited and contoured by plants. They are our allies, kins, and companions, though they are rarely deemed as such. For several thousand years, botanical life of all kinds has figured prominently in our corporeal lives, material social relations, and our varied forms of aesthetic expression. Human-Plant Studies - also known as Critical Plant Studies or Plant Studies- emerged in this context, as a "... broad framework for reevaluating plants, their representations, and human–plant interactions, much as human–animal studies developed in the 1990s in response to the animal ethics debates" (Gagliano et al. xvi). In recent years, the field has evolved as a distinct trajectory within the Environmental Humanities in the last decade owing to the collaborative efforts of diverse scholars with a shared interest in the vegetal world.

Botanical life, despite its perennial presence in literary narratives, continues to be treated as static backdrops, disposable beings bordering on thinghood and mere reflections of human desires. My research aims to bring the hitherto overlooked "plant-presences" into the arena of literary and cultural criticism and to develop an analytical framework in reading against the "...backgrounding of herbality" in literature (Houle 92).A major focus of this research will be to theorize the literary and cultural representation of botanical life in Indian "plant narratives”- select texts of Indian Writing in English (including translated works) spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I will examine how these texts construe botanical life as a part of their "extrinsic language" (Gagliano et al. xvii), or the diction used by writers and artists, among others, to articulate the peculiarities of plant being, and to represent vegetality in literature. I will also examine how the "anthropos'' in this human-plant equation is constituted in such representations and how literary representations mediate anxieties surrounding the ethical and ecological implications embedded in our relationships with plants. In this seminar, I will give an overview of my doctoral research, which is divided into three major sections- the first section focuses on how vegetal ecologies have been represented in Indian plantation narratives. The second section focuses on women's writing from India, with an emphasis on the trope of 'metamorphosis', or the textual instances when women transform into trees. The third and final section focuses on botanical aesthetics in children's environmental literature. This research will also examine how literary plant studies can converge with the larger concerns of ecocriticism and environmental humanities in the Anthropocene.

Keywords: Phytopoesis, Critical Plant Studies, Indian Writing in English, Plant-narratives

References:


Gagliano et al. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. University of Minnesota Press,2017.
Houle, Karen. "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming?" Symposium. Vol. 19. No. 2. 2015.
Mazzolai, Barbara, and Stefano Mancuso. "Smart solutions from the plant kingdom." Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 8.2 (2013): 020301.