Volume 11, Issue – 1, March 2026

 Himalayan Ecologies under Colonial strains: Reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain with  Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods

Abstract: Indigenous practices have always been dismissed as irrational or wasteful by colonial powers in order to legitimize acts of expropriation under the guise of modernization and development. Colonial forestry and state-led development strategies have altered mountains and forests into contested political terrains, both socially and ecologically. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of these pressures on Himalayan ecologies by reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: a Fable for Our Times (2022) alongside Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas (1989). By juxtaposing Ghosh’s fictional allegory with Guha’s real-world accounts, the paper illuminates the devastating impacts of colonial policies on the environment and indigenous resilient ways of adapting to the altered landscapes. Applying the frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism and eco-orientalism- the tendency of belittling and exoticizing non-western landscapes in order to depoliticize environmental degradation, the paper explores the lingering yet often ignored impacts of colonialism on vulnerable ecosystem. The study traces the roots of environmental degradation and indigenous resilience back to the colonial development of Himalayan territories, their strategic significance, and the disastrous impact of British resource extraction and urban planning on indigenous populations. In doing so, the study calls for a decolonial rethinking of climate narratives, that transcends the eco-orientalist discussions of mountain ecologies by elevating indigenous knowledge, countering extractivism, promoting epistemic disobedience, and fostering sustainable collective living.

Keywords: Himalayan ecologies, colonial strains, postcolonial ecocriticism, indigenous resilience, eco-orientalism.

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