Bond, Nature and the Postcolonial Identity: An Ecocritical Study of Selected Short Stories of Ruskin Bond

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the natural world and the making of postcolonial identity in four short stories by Ruskin Bond: The Cherry Tree, The Blue Umbrella, Dust on the Mountain and The Tiger in the Tunnel. Bond occupies an unusual position in Indian writing in English. He is an author of British descent who chose to remain in India after independence and who wrote almost entirely about the small towns, forests and hill communities of the lower Himalayas. His fiction therefore offers a valuable site for asking how the colonial inheritance of landscape writing is reworked once the writer belongs to the place he describes rather than surveying it from outside. Reading the four stories through the combined lenses of ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, the paper argues three points. First, Bond replaces the colonial construction of the Indian hills as sublime scenery or hunting ground with an ethic of ordinary, patient companionship between people and their environment. Second, ecological damage in his fiction is never separated from economic structure: the limestone quarries, the railway line and the market town are shown as continuations of an extractive order that outlived formal empire. Third, identity in these stories is formed relationally, through the care of a tree, the keeping of an umbrella, the endurance of dust or the guarding of a tunnel, so that selfhood and place become inseparable. The paper concludes that Bond practises a quiet form of postcolonial ecological writing whose political force lies precisely in its refusal of grandeur, and that his apparently simple prose for younger readers carries a sustained critique of development as it was inherited and continued by the postcolonial state.