ecocritical study of kiran desai’s hullabaloo in the

Ecocritical study of Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Kavitharaj K

Ph.D. Research Scholar

Dr. V Uma Devi

Assistant Professor

Government Arts College

Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

India

ABSTRACT

Nature is omnipotent and man being a part of nature is dependent on it for everything. As

literature is the reflection of life, the literary writers reflect man and his life in the background of

nature where the writers provide description of nature, the characters love and attitude towards

nature in their works. This portrayal of nature is employed in the novel Hullabaloo in the Guava

Orchard written by Kiran Desai where Sampath, the protagonist, is fed up with the hectic town life

and leaves the place to be alone feeling oneness with nature. Thus the paper is based on the Eco

critical study of the novel.

Introduction

Indian English writing has been acknowledged and renowned all over the world. The Indian

writers have created their new paths and got rewards for their works in English as the Indo-English

fiction has undergone a complete transformation from its traditional norms which involved itself

with the history of India. Later the exposure to western thinking led to the East-West comparisons

which contrasted the traditional Indian norms. As a result there were eminent writers projecting

their creative talents both during the Pre Independence and Post Independence period. In the late

Volume II, Issue VI, October 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065

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twentieth century writers like Arunthathi Roy, Salman Rushdie and writers of Indian origin are

recognized globally who compete the native writers and have received the prestigious awards for

Literature. The one who had also enlisted her name in this list is Kiran Desai.

Kiran Desai is a promising Indian writer in English born in 1971 in India and most of all

Kiran Desai is the daughter of the renowned Indian English novelist, Anita Desai. Kiran was

educated in India, England and the United States. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,

was written in the year 1998 and it was remarked by Salman Rushdie as lush and intensely

imagined. The Times has also commented that Kiran Desai is the most appealing voice of the new

generation and also her book is fresh, funny and delicious which defies comparison with that of

any other novelist. The novel has won the 1998 Betty Trask Prize, serialized in The New Yorker

and included in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing. Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance

of Loss, won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize

for Fiction in 2007. Thus Kiran Desai is a well-recognized novelist all over the world. The paper

signifies the importance of nature and how it has undergone an ill change and hence it deals with

the ecocritical study of the novel Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard.

Introduction to Ecocriticism

Literature is the most comprehensive study of man which evokes response from experts

who create, appreciate and evaluate it. Literary criticism is the interpreting art where a critics

analyze and evaluate a work of art as it is defined by M P Sinha that literary criticism is a body of

principles that define literature and function as guidelines for the analysis and evaluation of literary

text. One of the prominent principles which was highlighted in the end of the twentieth century is

the ecocriticism which is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of

view where all sciences come together to analyze the brainstorm possible solution for the

correction of the contemporary environmental situation.

Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works both

published in the mid-1990s. They are the Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryl Glotfelty and

Harold Fromm, and Environmental Imagination by Lawrence Buell. Camino Gomides has defined

ecocriticism as the field of enquiry that analyses and promotes works of art which raise moral



questions about human interactions with nature while also motivating audience to live within a

limit that will be binding over generations.

Ecocriticism is also known as ecopoetics, green studies and environmental literary

criticism. Ecocritics investigate the underlying ecological values and examine human perception

of wilderness and how it has changed throughout history. It highlights whether current

environmental issues are accurately represented or at least mentioned in popular culture and

modern literature.

William Rueckert was the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert

published an essay titled Literature and Ecology; an experiment in Ecocriticism. He focused on

“the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature” {Reprinted on the

Ecocriticism Reader on p 107}. Meanwhile ecologically minded individuals and scholars

published progressive works of ecotheory and criticism which were concerned on moral struggle

rather than mere biological survival.

As Glotfelty noted in the Ecocriticism Reader “one indication of the disunity of the early

efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work: they didn’t know that it existed… Each

was a single voice howling in the wilderness”. Nevertheless, Ecocriticism failed to emerge into a

coherent movement in the late 1970s and indeed it happened in the USA only during the 1990s. In

the mid-1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily

through the work of Western Literary Association in which nature writing was revaluated. In 1990,

at the University of Niveda, Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position

as a professor of Literature and the Environment. It served as the intellectual home of Ecocriticism.

In the USA Ecocriticism is often associated with Association for the Study of Literature and

Environment, an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s,

new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea,

Australia, New Zealand, India (OSLE), Canada and Europe. In this paper the novel, Hullabaloo in

the Guava Orchard, is read in the ecocritical ground.



Sampath’s craving for another world

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the story of Sampath Chawla who was a failure at home and

also at work. He was lazy and lethargic bothering about nothing and wished to live his life with

his own whims and fancies. Though he was tormented at his home and also at his work place,

Sampath had enjoyed his time alone with his devices which made him completely forget his work

at the post office and his sleepless nights at home.

Sampath was disturbed and was quite unlike others as he was fed up with his routine way

of living. To him his life was “a never-ending flow of misery” (43) since he was able to fill only

little as he wished. So he always wished to explore things of his own interest. For instance in his

chief’s daughter’s wedding Sampath was allotted the duty to fill in the serbet glasses. But he felt

very boring to do the work. So he wished to look around the house where he came into a room

piled with wedding finery. On seeing the fineries Sampath’s heart grew light with the fragrance of

rose water, scent of musk, of moth balls, marigolds and baby powder. He held the fabrics close to

his cheek and swathed lengths of pink, green and yellow around himself. He examined the jeweler

box of a cousin sister and wore a nose ring. As the room was dark, Sampath lit a candle to view

him in his fineries and he metamorphed himself into a glorious bird where he felt far away lifted

to another plane. Within this frame Sampath felt a sudden sharp longing for an imagined world

which was deep within himself and at last Sampath ventured out of his room in his fineries.

Encouraged by the atmosphere he felt floating in some groundless state. He waded into the fountain

spraying and splashing water on the ladies. As a result there was a whole lot of confusion amidst

the crowd and Sampath started disrobing his clothes mistaking the cries of the audience for

admiration. Thereby he returned home jobless for his ill behavior. But Sampath did not want his

job and the desperate way of living anymore. He wanted an open space and to be left alone.

Sampath’s oneness with nature

Inspired by his thought to get freedom, Sampath made his way out of his town. He climbed

up a guava tree in an orchard where he could feel the freshness of greenery and the air thin around

him. Sampath felt that silence had held between its branches and the moment he settled among the

trees, the spirits that had carried him so far and so high had melted into nothing and he was amazed



that the orchard matched the imagination all his life. It filled his whole mind and he wondered if

he could get enough of it. Sampath thought:

This was the way of riches and this was a king’s life, he thought…and he ached to swallow

it whole, in one glorious mouthful that could become part of him forever. Oh, if he could

exchange his life for this luxury of stillness, to be able to stay with his face held towards

the afternoon like a sun flower and to learn all there was to know in the orchard: each small

insect crawling by: the smell of the earth thick beneath the grass; the bristling of leaves;

his way easy through the foliage; his tongue around every name. (51)

So at last Sampath believed that he was in the right place. Here Sampath love for nature is revealed

in an exotic way.

Sampath’s new lovable world

Unexpectedly Sampath on the guava tree became the hermit on his tree top hermitage. He

was respected for his austerity and simple life and his words, nature and the atmosphere in the

orchard made him the Babe. But Sampath’s father, Mr.Chawla, was commercializing his son’s

popularity making his family’s fortune. The reputation of Sampath grew until the monkeys arrived

to the orchard. When they arrived first, Sanpath turned their dirty games back to them: hooting,

howling and rolling his eyes and this made the monkeys get impressed identifying Sampath “as

the nucleus if this bountiful community they had come upon”(124). But things went upside down

when the monkeys developed an unquenchable interest for liquor which made them resurface their

old bazaar habits. As a result there arose a serious law and order problem in Shahkot of the

religious degree where there were two groups. One suggested that the monkeys should be removed

to save the Monkey Baba and the holy atmosphere of the place, the other group wished to save the

sacred animal. Whereas Sampath thought that all the fun, teasing and game would disappear in his

life if the monkeys were removed from the orchard. But a day was set to catch the monkeys and

send them to a far off place where it would not return and could not obtain any liquor.



Sampath’s empathy for his degrading environment

Sampath realized that his life in the orchard was in danger and the atmosphere in the orchard had

disintegrated as there were no more gentle evenings. He found no help from anybody and he had

thought of that how much had changed since he first arrived to the orchard. The orchard had

become more and more like the place he had left; noisy, messy and untidy. Ugly advertisements

defaced the neighbouring trees and smelly garbage spilled down the hillside grew larger every

week. Also the cry and buzz of angry voices made him remember his town life which was creeping

up upon him again.

Sampath considered himself, his mother and the monkeys were a band together and he was

not ready to let the company break. The narrator describes:

And now they were getting rid of his favorite company in the orchard. Didn’t they know

how fond he was of the monkeys? And didn’t they know how little he cared for all of them?

Why didn’t they take their advertising, their noise and dirt, their cars and buses and trucks,

why didn’t they take their little minds and leave him to his peace and quiet, to his beloved

monkeys, to his beautiful landscape that was being so dirtily and shoddily defaced? (181,

182)

Thus Sampath reflects the degradation of nature from its glorious path. He who once felt happy

for his environment in the orchard, later regretted for its absurd transformation.

On the day set to trap the monkeys, Sampath was asked to climb down the tree. But he

realized that if he climbs down once, it would not happen to climb up again. Ultimately Sampath

realized that he was trapped and he wanted to escape. Earlier Sampath left his home for the orchard

in search of peace and to be alone where he found oneness with nature, but he was followed by his

family and later the crowd. Now he was unprepared to get down the tree and was not sure that he

could find a better place than the orchard when he first arrived which inspired and suited all his

imagination. So Sampath was found dead in his mother’s cooking pot.



Conclusion

It is obvious that in the novel, Kiran Desai voices out the environmental issues through her

protagonist Sampath, who express his love for nature, his oneness with nature and towards the end

his empathy for the degradation of nature in the orchard. The novel also highlights the

irresponsibility of man towards nature who does not know the value of nature which has to be

preserved and treasured. It reflects that each species have an important role to play in maintaining

our ecosystem. It is a known fact that human activity is causing massive extinctions, inspire of the

increased efforts on conservation, it has not been enough. The climatic change in the Arctic region

is an evident of the rapid change in our environment which is threatening and quite dangerous to

all the species. The Ganges pollution is another instance for the irresponsibility towards our

responsibility in preserving our nature. Thus the ecocritical study of any work of art reflects the

need of the hour and implies the necessity to take essential steps to preserve the nature in order to

ensure the beings survival and betterment.



References

1. Barry, Peter. The Beginning of theories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

2. Desai, Kiran. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.

3. Iyengar, K.R. Srinivas. Indian writing in English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1972.

4. Srinivasan, K.S. The Ethos of Indian Literature: A Study of its Romantic Tradition.

Newdelhi: Chanakya Publications, 1985.

5. Verghesam, C.Paul. Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: N.V. Publications,

1975.



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