‘The flower faded but the pain remained’: Reflections on Nature in Literature -- Plenary Talk by Nibir K. Ghosh at International Conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change” RGNUL Punjab, 7-8 April 2022

 

International Conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change” RGNUL Punjab, 7-8 April 2022

‘The flower faded but the pain remained’: Reflections on Nature in Literature

by

Nibir K. Ghosh

I will begin with a poem The Miller of the Dee attributed to Charles Mackay

 

There dwelt a miller, hale and bold,
Beside the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night -
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
"I envy nobody - no, not I -
And nobody envies me!"

"Thou'rt wrong, my friend," said good King Hal,
"As wrong as wrong can be;
For could my heart be light as thine,
I'd gladly change with thee.
And tell me now, what makes thee sing,
With voice so loud and free,
While I am sad, though I am king,
Beside the river Dee?"

The miller smiled and doffed his cap,
"I earn my bread," quoth he;
"I love my wife, I love my friend,
I love my children three;
I owe no penny I can not pay,
I thank the river Dee,
That turns the mill that grinds the corn
That feeds my babes and me."

"Good friend," said Hall, and sighed the while,
"Farewell, and happy be;
But say no more, if thou'dst be true,
That no one envies thee;
Thy mealy cap is worth my crown,
Thy mill my kingdom's fee;
Such men as thou are England's boast,
O miller of the Dee!

From this simple melodious poem celebrating the life of an ordinary Miller, let me take you to a monumental work that amplifies the theme of this conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change.”

Way back in 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau initiated a serious discourse on the relationship between man and nature in his monumental book titled The Social Contract. In the insightful opening lines of his powerful treatise he stated emphatically, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Implying that the freedom which man had originally experienced in the “state of nature” was forsaken by his enslavement to his own increasing material needs, Rousseau acknowledged that people can never be as entirely free in modern society as they are in the state of nature. Consequently, at the end of The Social Contract, Rousseau advocates a “return to nature.” Inspired by Rousseau’s philosophy, William Wordsworth voiced his concern over man’s limitless greed in his popular poem, “The World is Too Much with Us” wherein he laments: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

It is perhaps providential that two-and-a-half centuries after the publication of  The Social Contract the city of Paris, from where Rousseau launched his prophetic work, became the nerve centre of the International Summit on Climate Change. As inhabitants of an extremely endangered Earth, heads of nations representing the environmental anxiety and dread of their respective citizens from every corner of the globe assembled in Paris at the end of 2015 to adopt the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate deal. The global ecological crisis that we are now confronting is unprecedented in human history. The terrifying scale of this crisis and our increasing awareness that it has emerged out of deliberate human policies to interfere with Nature itself has virtually compelled us to realize and understand that we can no longer take Nature for granted. John May in The Greenpeace Story rightly says: “When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can’t eat money.”

To make you aware of the magnitude of the calamitous problem of environmental crisis created by our anthropocentric attitude and behaviour, let me share a recent happening in Canada’s British Columbia. In the emergency department of Kootenay Lake Hospital, Dr. Kyle Merritt, the head, saw a patient enter literally gasping for breath. After carefully examining the patient, Dr. Merritt announced his diagnosis: "climate change." When asked why he chose to make the unusual diagnosis, Dr. Merritt stated: “If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind.”

The question now is how do we use literature to confront and control the ever-worsening situation.

                                        Reflections on Nature in Literature:

The following lines from William Wordsworth's poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798" reveal among other things what is paramount about the relationship between Nature and Man/woman. 

 

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, …

I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love.

Likewise, in a poem, “I Plucked you Flower” (The Gardener, Poem No. LVII),  Rabindranath Tagore shows the impact of human aggression on Nature:

I plucked your flower, O world!

I pressed it to my heart and the thorn pricked.
When the day waned and it darkened, I found that
the flower had faded, but the pain remained. (1-4)

But here I wish to emphasize that merely reading or writing poems and stories of Nature, planting saplings on World Environment Day, or sharing selfies at beautiful natural resorts on Facebook or Instagram, or writing profoundly scholarly papers for Climate Change conferences will not take us closer to comprehending the problem or determining what role we can play to mitigate the crisis. We really need to explore in literature elements that can sensitize us and others to human misery, poverty, malnutrition, debilitating diseases, discrimination and oppression of man by man.

W. H. Auden in “Refugee Blues” says: this city has ten million souls,/ Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes. These lines took me this morning to doing a bit of research on ground reality of the human condition.

In the process, I googled ‘Dharavi Slums.’ I am sharing details: The slum, like many others, lacks provisions for sanitation, drains, safe drinking water, roads or other basic services. The film industry has played a key role in bringing this slum to prominence. It was featured in films like the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and the more recent Gully Boy. The sprawling Dharavi became the favourite tourist experience of 2019 in India and even beat the Taj Mahal, says  travel site TripAdvisor’s Travellers.’ I was shocked at the available data: in less than 535 Acres of land, live close to 12 Lakh people which means 17 sq ft per (4x4 sq ft per person) inhabitant. In contrast I was amused to learn that a single family whose affluence and popularity is common knowledge live in a tiny house that is built on 4,00,000 sq. ft. which leaves only 40000 sq ft per person. If by studying and teaching literature we continue to turn our heads away from the continued misery of our own human kind, does it really matter what we talk and write about?

To contribute our share to resolving the dreadful environmental crisis, let me take you back to Rousseau who defined the principles of the Social Contract where  “All citizens should participate - and should be committed to the general good - even if it means acting against their private or personal interests.”

What we need is passionate involvement and dedicated commitment to leave the world better than we found it in. If we can become courageous like Gaura Devi, a woman who became a widow at the age of 22, and who, with just 27 illiterate women, hugged the trees to prevent them from being felled way back on March 26, 1974 to initiate what is now recognised globally as the Chipko movement, there is still hope.

I, therefore, exhort the young participants in this international conference and the students of RGNUL to explore in their own little way how they can substantiate their ideas and resolutions with concrete action to justify their commitment to environment conservation even at the cost of their personal materialistic priorities and pursuits. I strongly affirm that it is incumbent upon us all to join hands together to feel the innate joy of seeing the flower in bloom rather than find ourselves plucking them and living with the “pain” as Tagore had warned.  

Thank You!