Subaltern ecologies and embodied resistance: A comparative study of environmental justice and caste in Arundhati Roy’s the ministry of utmost happiness and Bama’s Sangati

Abstract

This study looks at the connections between environmental justice, caste oppression, and embodied resistance in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Bama's Sangati. This is an important but not well-studied area of modern Indian literature. People have studied both authors a lot for how they write about subaltern voices, but this study looks at their stories in a new way by putting them in the context of subaltern ecologies. It looks at how marginalised bodies interact with, live in, and take back ecological spaces that have been taken away, damaged, or excluded. The study looks at how caste and gender differences are not only written on bodies but also spread out across graveyards, slums, and rural landscapes, using ecofeminist theory, Dalit studies, and postcolonial ecocriticism. The characters' interactions with land, trash, and the environment show a politics of resistance that goes against the mainstream ideas of purity, appropriateness, and belonging. The essay says that Roy and Bama change natural areas into places of dignity, survival, and political assertion. This adds to the growing conversation on eco-social justice in Indian literature. The research gives us a new way to look at modern Indian literature by focussing on the connections between environmental instability and caste-gender discrimination. It also broadens the range of ecocritical and subaltern literary analysis.