Bodily and Psychic Territories in Bhargava's Riding the Tide
Abstract
The present article approaches Ashok Bhargava's poetry collection, Riding the tide (2017), from an ecocritical perspective. The paper traces the speaker's line of development from a desperate, sick person to a powerful entity. It argues this development occurs by way of nature. Being a cancer-ridden man, the speaker appears as a victim to the destruction man has done to nature, including his body. Delinking himself from society and its sweeping wave of technology, he aligns himself with nature, and finds not only comfort but also remedies to his weakened body in nature. This accentuates the role of nature in this collection. The paper reads the selected poems from Riding the tide in this line and investigates how the person charts and re-charts the territories of his environmental consciousness in addition to those of his body. It is shown how nature helps the speaker develop spiritually and change from a weak, impotent entity to an all powerful force in the universe.
Keywords
Nature, Bhargava, ecocriticism, environment
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References
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