abstract

Contemporary Indian literature increasingly engages with the ecological pressures produced by development, urban expansion, infrastructural intervention, and changing patterns of human settlement. These concerns acquire particular significance in the Himalayan region, where environmental vulnerability is closely connected with cultural memory, livelihood, mobility, and place-based identity. This paper examines how selected writings by Ruskin Bond, Namita Gokhale, Pankaj Bisht, and Stephen Alter represent ecological anxiety through altered landscapes, spatial disruption, emotional unease, and changing human–environment relations.

The study employs qualitative close reading within the interdisciplinary frameworks of ecocriticism and environmental humanities. It focuses on narrative form, landscape imagery, cultural memory, spatial organisation, and the representation of development. Rather than treating the Himalayas as a picturesque setting, the paper reads them as an active literary space in which ecological transformation becomes socially and emotionally legible. The analysis suggests that environmental crisis in these texts is rarely communicated through direct environmental argument alone. It often emerges through atmosphere, silence, loss, displacement, disrupted seasonal rhythms, and the gradual transformation of familiar places.

The paper also identifies a critical gap in the treatment of Himalayan writing within Indian literary studies. Although regional identity and landscape aesthetics have received attention, the relationship between ecological anxiety, developmental change, and cultural memory requires more sustained examination. By bringing environmental humanities into dialogue with Himalayan literary studies, this paper argues that literary narratives can function as interpretive ecological archives. They preserve experiences of environmental change that may remain invisible within dominant narratives of progress. The study consequently positions Himalayan literary imagination as an important site for examining the cultural, ethical, and affective dimensions of ecological modernity in contemporary India.