Anjali Daimari

First published in her collection of science-fiction stories titled, Once Upon A Blue Moon in 2006, Sukanya Datta's "Modern Neelkanths" is a peculiar case of environmental dystopia. Conveyed in the style of hard science-fiction with precise scientific details, the story chronicles a strike carried out by incensed trees on a global scale against humans. The narrative enlists an apocalyptic imagination-which is a core part of the environmental imagination at large-with the model of a revengeful Gaia, as it simultaneously works like an oblique vituperative against anthropocentric and aggressive forms of rationalism. This paper is an attempt to study these interrelated aspects in the light of key ecocritical concepts. Ecocriticism has emerged as a literary theory in its own right and is interdisciplinary in nature and political in orientation. This paper shows how Datta's story readily lends itself to an ecocritical reading. It is a critique of rationalism-along the lines of the arguments presented by the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood. The story also aptly gives a literary and imaginative demonstration of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis-another central ecological-ecocritical concept.