No Longer at Home: Tropes of Solastalgia in Contemporary South Asian Literary Narratives

In response to Cheryl Glotfelty's view of adopting "interdisciplinary approaches" (1996, p.xxii) towards environmental thinking, my proposed thesis seeks to explore the narrativization of Solastalgia in contemporary South Asian Literature. The concept of Solastalgia, which denotes distress caused due to

environmental changes and a "sense of isolation connected to the present state of one's home and territory" (Albrecht 2005, 5) can be situated in the interdisciplinary field of Affective Ecocriticism that tries to discern the manifold emotional engagements humans have with the natural world. As opposed to

nostalgia, which evocates both positive and negative emotions associated with a place, Solastalgia has been conceptualized as an undesirable emotion resulting from a homesickness one feels at home (Albrecht 2005, 48). Keeping in view of the emerging scholarships on Solastalgia, (Galway et al 2019; Phillips and Murphy 2021, Kumar et al 2021) my thesis aims to understand the representation of this

emotion in post-2000 South Asian literary narratives. The period signifies the steady growth of writings that increasingly reflect the massive environmental transitions that are occurring in the South Asian region. By appraising the affect-environment confluence in the chosen primary texts, I intend to explore

the routes these literary works offer to adequately navigate the affective terrain of environmental breakdown. Insofar, the study also tasks itself with evaluating how South Asian literature serves as a laboratory for articulating and dealing with negative emotion of Solastalgia arising out of ecological

alterations. I propose to build my thesis on the ideas of place as "centre of felt value" (Tuan 1977, 4) and the biophilia hypothesis that humans have an innate tendency to seek connections with nature (Wilson 1984), and subsequently explore the affective turn in ecocriticism (Bladow and Ladino 2018) through the

concepts of Slow Violence (Nixon 2011) and Mourning Nature (Cunsolo and Landman 2017). By researching an eclectic mix of literary works that offer profound meditation on ecological changes, such as novels, poems, graphic narratives, travelogues, and memoirs, the research would put forth a strong argument for Solastalgia to be taken into account in order to evaluate the intangible, yet far-reaching

consequences of environmental catastrophes. Some of the key primary texts I would research are The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, Wild and Wilful by Neha Sinha, and selected poems of Temsula Ao.Though these writings have attracted emerging bodies of scholarship, they are yet to be studied comprehensively from an affective ecocritical perspective.

With climate change and ecological crises entering common parlance and a generation calling for stronger actions against environmental degradation, there is a pressing need to enhance studies on affective ecocriticism. I believe a study incorporating an evolving interdisciplinary field in the backdrop of

South Asian Literature is relevant as research on affective ecocritical studies has so far been primarily Euro-American-centric. At a stage when ecocritical and affect studies are expanding to include a range of overlooked yet important works, I argue that the outcomes of my research will facilitate a new

understanding of Solastalgia.