A.K. Ramanujan’s “A Flowering Tree” reports a popular folktale from the Kannada oral tradition where the female protagonist transforms into a tree and gradually achieves agency. This paper argues that the tale makes possible the acknowledgement of the life-force (“zoe”) present in all the non-human life-forms constituting ecology.
The essay explores whether, a text like Gun Island manifests a sense of revival of supressed cultural traditions as a reproach towards Eurocentric humanism.
If our posthuman train has already left the station, how do we recognize plural formations of posthuman flourishing that reciprocally impact our shared ecosystems?
While critically reading Gandhi’s perspectives, the paper will focus mainly on his perspectives on the untouchables, one of the most affected caste-classes of India in this epoch, to see how their past and contemporary existences themselves are one of the many ‘symbolic’ representations of the causes of the Anthropocene.