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Abstract
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E. M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, which was published in 1924, is recognized not only as a masterpiece of 20th-century modernism but also as a key text in the analysis of colonial discourses. Literary criticism over the past decades has predominantly examined the novel through the lens of Postcolonial Studies, focusing on racial politics, Orientalism, and the failure of connection between cultures. However, recent turns in literary theory towards Ecocriticism necessitate the re-reading of canonical texts with a focus on the relationship between humanity and the non-human world. Postcolonial Ecocriticism, as an interdisciplinary approach, argues that the exploitation of humans and the destruction of the environment are two sides of the same coin. By combining two major theoretical fields (Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism), this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between colonialism and the environment. This research seeks to achieve the following goals: to investigate how Indian nature (the sky, the soil, the caves) is represented in A Passage to India; to analyze the conflict between "colonial order-seeking" and the "ecological chaos/muddle" of nature; to explore the agency of non-human elements in disrupting power relations between the colonizer and the colonized; and to critique the anthropocentric viewpoint of the British characters towards the land of India.
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