A Study on the Eco Criticism in the Writings of Ruskin Bond

1. INTRODUCTION

A pleasant calm quiet Himalayan town of Mussoorie for the recent decades is the onlooker of the artistic exercises. It is a charming home of long scholarly legend, the "Ruskin Bond". The big-hearted, veteran author is the 'Pride of India'. He was not enchanted towards Mussoorie as a town, but rather to the surroundings slopes, timberlands and streams, or might be to the people from the villages. In this mind boggling universe of vicious rivalry where we have no opportunity to stand and welcome, the natural beauty encasing us right now Ruskin Bond's fiction comes as a much needed refresher. It is as unadulterated as the globule of nectar falling on the pieces of turf, the petals of blooms, and the leaves of trees. His compositions are loaded with, honest charm that contacts the heart. He appears to surge out his spirit into his words. In the preamble to Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, he composes that it was an" immortal kind of a place" and that he felt a prompt piercing relationship to the natural landscape around the cottage. He was hypnotized with the nearness of maples, walnut and oak trees. Ruskin Bond, up to standing Indian author who squats in the Himalayan town of Mussoorie, is panegyrized as a writer, short story writer, poet, and writer for children, adolescents, and grown-ups. An examination of Bond's life and work bears bits of knowledge his finish as a writer as well as into his commitment to the increase of English literature in India and to the mounting assortment of diasporic and postcolonial literature. He is profoundly acclaimed for his commitment in composing six books or novellas, more than two hundred short stories, thirty five books for children, four volumes of autobiography, 300-400 daily paper articles, five accumulations of papers, and poetry accumulations. Notwithstanding this, he perseveres to contribute articles intermittently to the important daily paper and magazines in India and abroad. Bond started distributing his stories, in 1951, when he was only seventeen years old and at that point, Indian fiction in English had just started to learn a uniquely, started in the 1930's with the books of Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. Ruskin here and there went with his stepfather on hunting expeditions, for a few days, yet found no delight in it as there were no man eaters. The short story A Week in the Jungle is a cynical depiction of one such hunting trip. It was here he found a rack loaded with books in the troubling cottage, loaded with books by Dickens, P.G Wodehouse, the phantom stories of M.R James, Emily Bronte, and Shakespeare. The books were his sidekicks since when grown-ups went out for hunting he would sit and read books. In the Introduction to Ruskin Bond's Treasury of Stories for the children, he

Copperfield with whose heartrending childhood he recognized his own. At BCS, when he was thirteen he had officially made his first work out of fiction Nine Months in which he satirized certain teachers and depicted procedures at school amid the time of an academic year [1]. He stated: "My father trained me to compose. That was inheritance enough". Bond's short stories reverberate his childhood. Appropriate from the earliest starting point he is the colossal admirer of nature. In the story Rain in the Mountain, he expresses, "What else do I cherish and recall of the slopes scents again. The smell of the fallen pine needles, bovine excrement smoke, spring precipitation, wounded grass, the unadulterated chilly water of mountain streams, the profundity and blueness of the sky. Naturally Bond is enamored with the Indian air and his incredible love for India, her vegetation, her fauna and mountains is the angle that his writings most properly outline. His promise to the Indian sights and sounds is exhaustive and notwithstanding when he was in Europe his psyche and memory continually turn around Indian things. His short story The Window initially distributed in Illustrated Weekly in 1956 is an amazing case of how he functioned, his ordinary exercises and associates into his stories. The window theme, which he had first utilized as a part of The Room on the Roof symbolizes a vantage point in the story. The storyteller watches the fowls in the banyan tree; movement and people on the way alongside the building - merchants, children, postman, and the all-encompassing perspective of the city. Bond is an intense admirer of nature and this affection for nature is in his blood. Because of which he has composed more about the beauty and preservation of widely varied vegetation. He has composed the stories like The Cherry Tree, When You Can't Climb Tree Anymore, Dust on the Mountain, My Trees Still Grow in Dehra, Time Stops at Shamli and so forth featuring the beauty of nature. He has composed stories on different of topics and the settings of the stories are basic, fascinating without showing up so. A portion of his known stories are The Box Man, My First Love, Untouchable , The Kite Maker, Love is a Sad tune, A Love of Long Ago, Time Stops at Shamli, Miss Bun and others. Puma's Moon, Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright, Tigers' Forever and numerous other supernatural stories delineating insidious jinns, phantoms and devils who dwells in the trees particularly in the bumpy regions. Bond's stories are composed in a basic style in which his view of the Indian propensities and social organizations are insightfully delineated. His stories Ruskin Bond is as yet writing the stories and his stories are perused and valued by the people everywhere throughout the world. Prof. R.S. Sharma in his Introduction to Studies in Contemporary Literature additionally trusts Bond's one of the two unique commitments to Indian writing in English:

Elamparithy, (2015) [2] Be that as it may, in this day and age, Nature is a standout amongst the most ordinarily talked word. Once the notable etymologist, Julia Kristeva, written a book entitled Language - The Unknown in which she has said that, "Dialect is all over the place however our comprehension of it is relatively beside nothing. In a similar vein, nature is additionally not in the least saw however we are in nature, some portion of nature and encompassed by it all around." Elamparithy, (2014) [3] Many of us don't realize that mother earth is in extraordinary peril. One of the notable researchers, James Lovelock who propounded ' Gaia ' hypothesis once said that, "human creatures are excessively inept, making it impossible to deal with the environmental issues that we are looked with today. In spite of the measures taken by the universal society, the circumstance keeps on being bleak, subsequently the Nature Writing appeared. Buell (2013) [4] seeing the mother earth in hazard it ended up important to mindful the basic masses for that Nature Writing appeared. Scott Slovic characterizes nature writing hence: "Scholarly true to life that offers logical investigation of the world, or reflects upon the political and philosophical ramifications of the connections among human creatures and the bigger planet." The Environmental Reports, calls attention to that, developing demands on regular capital, for example, forests water; soil, air, and biodiversity as of now surpass the world's ability to recharge these resources. Human creatures have dependably had nature as their setting, and it particularly relies on the lives of the people and their condition. Condition here can be called as 'Topography.‘ These two kinds of settings the social setting and the physical setting topography of the land. Bond's stories are the ideal case of this. The safeguarding of the nature relies on the culture of that place. Raymond Williams in his paper Nature in The Cultural Geography Reader says Oakes and Price, (2016) [5] surely a standout amongst the most powerful employments of nature, since the late eighteenth century, has been in this particular feeling of goodness and blamelessness. Nature has implied the countryside, the pristine spots, plants and animals other than man. The utilization is particularly present in contrasts amongst town and country: nature is the thing that man has not made, however in the event that he made it sufficiently long back a hedgerow or a desert it will for the most part be incorporated as common. Further, Raymond Williams, (2015) [6] says that nature is something that is there for man to appreciate, understanding and utilize yet he doesn't have the power to make nature. Its protection relies on the culture of the place. Or on the other hand, the culture of the place creates as per environment or the nature, as Darwin has proposed the hypothesis of the 'survival of the fittest'. The individuals who adjust well as indicated by nature can survive joyfully on this earth and Ruskin Bond's stories are the ideal case of this since his characters maneuvers as per the need of their condition. In this way, we can state that nature and culture are interrelated. In the antiquated circumstances it was trusted that by turning one has returned to nature one annihilates every one of the possibilities of comprehensive extension and spiritual growth. Every one of the parts of nature like water, fire, sun, trees, mountains and so forth have spiritual essentialness, it was done to shield condition. In the old circumstances people were god dreading and they had incredible confidence in their religion and its ceremonies and rituals. It is a result of these religious values nature was protected to certain degree. Many ancient civilizations edifies us that significantly, every one of the countries of the world have rich convention settled in the ethics of living in agreement with nature along these lines, moderating it. In the old circumstances people revered the components that constitute ecosystems, representing their necessities satisfied from normal resources and in the meantime securing the condition that supports them. As the time passed on, the social and economic changes have begun occurring in the society. Thus the people turned out to be increasingly avaricious and cash arranged and deliberately ignored towards the earth. Kutumbakam" which expresses that ''the entire world is nevertheless one family".

Eco criticism as a train lays exceptional accentuation on the authors who frontal area nature as a noteworthy piece of their topic and feature ecocentric estimations of reasonable improvement, aggregate moral obligation, and the cases of the world past ourselves, that is, the non-aware, the non-human world. The term is the youngest of the revisionist movements that picked up energy because of the unfurling environmental crisis, administers the cooperation‘s amongst humans and their natural condition. This endeavor has been forming the earth by being a delegate of nature.

In the entirety of their varieties, these components frame the world we as a whole inhabit. They play off each other in an endless move of harmony. However, human effects have progressively overturned this natural adjust. Today, equipoise among the components is crumbling, and if these ecological difficulties are not individuals and untamed life will keep on suffering. India has turned into the arranging ground for a trial in human survival Ruskin Bond builds nature by utilizing joining legends, experience, fantasies and history to uncover human cooperation with the non-human world. It likewise makes an endeavor to discover his cognizant commitment with consideration regarding approaching cataclysm of the global condition. Ecocritical approaches make investigation into the associations amongst nature and human culture and it additionally sees at what moment the creators speak to its belongings. The entire of the ecosphere where energy, matter and thoughts go to cooperation is the premise of ecocriticism in the social world. Ecological imbalance impacts human wellbeing in various ways, both emphatically and adversely. It is the worry of each nation to renew the decreasing variables of each other and their condition, which debilitates human creatures the most. At the beginning of the new thousand years, the entire globe is confronting genuine ecological crisis. The most earnest issues like global warming, perpetual asset lack, rain woods annihilation, and species The End of Nature, that global warming has brought the likelihood of this unadulterated state changing the weather, we make each spot on earth man-made and artificial.

His short stories demonstrate his voracious love for nature, trees, the mountains and the verdure of the Himalayas. Closeness with the Himalayas has favored him with divine knowledge. Each question is a strand in the web of life, and every last one of them is as critical as the other. The sustenance of the entire is subject to the common co-activity among the parts of the entirety. Compassion must be the withstanding guideline of life. Need to perceive the inborn estimation of every single living being. Partnership, diversity, adaptability. Every individual must feel a feeling of having a place, of connectedness, to the universe all in all, with the goal that ecological mindfulness winds up profound in its most profound substance. What one must go for is the foundation of a corporate society in which the happiness, not of the individual, but rather of the general public all in all, is more imperative. This will go far in saving the web of life unblemished. His short stories manage diverse parts of locale from natural excellence to late environmental corruption. Ecological imbalance and environmental corruption has turned into a subject of extraordinary worry in today and the need of great importance is that humans ought comprehend as well as discover an answer for this considerable global ecological crisis. H.J. McCloskey in his book Ecological Ethics and Politics a crisis that undermines not just the personal satisfaction to be delighted in by human creatures yet the plain survival of the human race; that ecology uncovers that Homo sapiens are, or are in risk of turning into, an imperiled species; and itself and for its individuals, including humanity. Love of nature and worry for ecological imbalance in the slopes influences Ruskin to bond dismal as he sees the felling of trees and the quick deforestation going on surrounding him. Deforestation is nearly trailed by quick urbanization making harm the earth and making ecological essentialness of trees to keep up ecological adjust and annihilate the absence of comprehension towards nature.

Bond's short stories, characterized by its straightforward language, elegant origination and significant importance, are generally welcomed by readers. Be that as it may, customary readers and pundits just notice that his stories reflect a specific relationship between human beings and nature, however they neglect to determine what relationship time, it is reasonably noteworthy to break down Frost's ecological consciousness, as he is still generally read even today. ‗Copperfield in the Jungle', 'No room for a Leopard', and 'Residue on the Mountain' are about the considerable chain of being which ties man and nature, as in the chain of biological community, indicating interdependence and comprehensiveness which underlines on the ecofriendly, and harmonious relationship between man and nature. In the present time, we are troubled disregarding all material progression in light of the fact that "the world is excessively with us" and the objects of nature don't contact our heart. Nature ought to be acknowledged as a guide and teacher since, "One motivation from vernal wood, can show you a greater amount of man.

Ruskin Bond is a lover of nature; nature is one of the prevailing topics in his work. Bond through these stories asks our investment not just to discover how human and non-human interdependence acts, yet in addition to discover that shielding nature is fundamental from an ethical point of view for better future. Bond's noteworthy motion to assume the role of an eco-faultfinder is unmistakably noticeable through the perusing of these stories.

1. Ruskin, John. Landscape Mimesi (2015). The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. ed. Lawrence Coupe. London: Routledge, 2015. Print. 2. Elamparithy, S. (2015). ―From Waste Land to Wonder Land: The Psychology of Ecodegradation and the Way Out". Contemporary Contemplations on Ecoliterature. Ed. Frederick , Suresh . New Delhi: Authors Press. 132. Print 3. The Blue Umbrella. New Delhi: Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2013. Print The Complete Stories & Novels. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd. 4. Oakes and Price (2016). Wordsworth Literary Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Print. 5. Raymond Williams, (2015). The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Swami Vivekakanad University, Sagar