Ecological Gaze: An Exploration of Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride

Abstract

Bharathi Mukherjee is a diasporic writer. Most of her novels focus on assimilation as well as encounter with the East and the West. The Tree Bride also goes in the same line of thought through an amalgamation of historical portrayal which represents the East whereas the colonial narration highlights the West. A per contra account, the article departs from this wider theme and attempts to explore from the perspective of ecological narration. It depicts the picture of the exploitation of nature for the sake of the greed of human beings. To this end, the article attempts to spotlight on the anthropocentric attitude towards nature through a few aspects such as the advancement in science and technology–in the form of bombs–leads to self-destruction, the colonial attitude, and the climate change because of the onslaught on nature which leads to ecological degradation. These are the theoretical underpinnings to analyse the novel.