https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.100
The Metabolism of Empire: Ecophobia and Nonhuman Agency in Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Hungry Stones”
RATAN MAHALI
Research Scholar, Department of English
Visva-Bharati University, West Bengal, India
Abstract: Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Hungry Stones” (1895) is often interpreted as a psychological ghost story or a postcolonial reflection on colonial anxiety. Scholars provide valuable insights by reading the story in various ways. Yet in most of these readings the palace at Barich appears mainly as a passive background for human experience. In this paper, I examine the palace not simply as a setting but as a material presence which has its own agency that interacts with the human subject. Drawing on Simon C. Estok’s concept of ecophobia, David Del Principe’s idea of the nonhuman Gothic body and Timothy Morton’s reflections on dark ecology, I argue that the palace acts as a predatory organism that physically and psychologically consumes the colonial subject. The narrator’s transition from a confident cotton collector to a man trapped by the building’s strange charm demonstrates a breakdown of colonial rationality. By repositioning the palace as a nonhuman Gothic body, this research moves beyond anthropocentric interpretations and shows how Tagore’s work anticipates contemporary ecological anxieties regarding the loss of human control. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the story’s power lies in its depiction of an inescapable entanglement between human history and the predatory vitality of the material world and it places the narrative within the emerging field of the South Asian Ecogothic.
Keywords: Ecogothic, Rabindranath Tagore, Nonhuman Agency, Ecophobia, “The Hungry Stones”
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