This paper analyzes Deepa Anappara’s novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020) from a decolonial ecoGothic perspective to show how the novel exposes the human and ecological crises in an urban slum known as a “basti” in an unnamed part of present-day India. The paper argues that Anappara uses the child narrator Jai and the gothic tropes of “Bhoot,” “Djinn,” and “smog” to convey the violent and traumatic experiences of marginalized communities residing in the slum. The novel uncovers child kidnappings, murders, and toxic waste dumps. This paper explores how Anappara employs the imagery of South Asian Gothic tropes as devices to create a postcolonial urban ecoGothic highlighting the ecological and climatic crises that arise out of the gentrification of the city and the growing divide between the slum dwellers and the privileged inhabitants of high-rise gated communities. Finally, the paper posits that Anappara’s decolonial ecoGothic creates a vision of the city as a site of trauma, violence, corruption, and environmental degradation within a neocolonial capitalist regime.
This paper explores contemporary Sri Lankan fiction as expressions and experiments in postcolonial EcoGothic writing by highlighting an intense relationship between ecology and place. By examining the novels of three contemporary Sri Lankan writers – Roma Tearne’s Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, and Patricia Weerakoon’s Empire’s Children, the article examines how certain landscape tropes such as the sea, the forest, ruins, caves, and tea plantations are shaped by the writers as gothic spaces to share their ecological concerns. The eerie plantations in Empire’s Children and the fecund forest, groves and the sea in Mosquito, and the caves and mass graves in Anil’s Ghosts allude to traumas related to postcoloniality, war, and military territorialization. Building upon theories of landscape, ecocriticism, and more specifically, the EcoGothic, the article draws upon works by Sharae Deckard and others to suggest how in these novels, the landscape is not just a setting for the stories but palimpsests of multiple histories of violence on both the people and the environment. The article examines how the novel enacts violence and spatial disorientation, closely connected with the gothic genre, suggesting Anglophone contemporary Sri Lankan fiction writers’ recurrent exploration of gothic and ecology in their works.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.