Environmental well-being has been an important component of Oriental theology. Environmental consciousness gained ground in the West as a part of the Feminist movement in the early 1990s. Ecocriticism has proliferated from the study of Nature writers into a highly diverse and interdisciplinary field encompassing a wide variety of literary genres, cultural and literary theories, while drawing on the social and the natural sciences. Ecocriticism has at its foundation an awareness of ecological systems, and maintains a keen focus on the myriad ways in which systems of human making depend upon, intersect with, or exploit nature, and how humans are as much a part of nature as plants and other animals, i.e., how nature both produces and is produced through a myriad of systems. It focuses on how literature explores the vital relation of people to place and non-human life highlighting environmental ethics and sustainable energy.

Environmental consciousness and ecocriticism have been slow in catching up in India, particularly Odisha, in spite of the many natural disasters it has faced in the recent past. The need of the hour is to re-examine nature-oriented literature that redirects us from “ego-consciousness” to “eco-consciousness.” Glen Love has urged scholars to rethink pastoralism and to pay greater attention to nature-oriented literature.  Cheryll Glotfelty has advocated a manner of criticism, i.e., ecocriticism as a critical practice of analysing literature that would address the interconnections between human culture and the material world, involving both the the human and the non-human. She has advocated the adaptation of Elaine Showalter’s three developmental stages of feminist criticism as an analogous model for ecocriticism. Thus, sort of homology has been established between feminist criticism and eco-criticism.  The first stage in feminist criticism, the “images of women” stage, is concerned with representations, concentrating on how women are portrayed in literature. Analogous efforts in ecocriticism study how nature is represented in literature- virgin land, Eden, Arcadia, howling wilderness. The second stage, as Showalter distinguishes, is the women’s literary tradition stage which rediscovers, reissues and reconsiders literature by women. In ecocriticism, a similar endeavour is oriented to describing the genre of non-fiction nature writing, and examining ecologically oriented fiction, poetry and drama. Showalter’s third phase is the theoretical phase, which raises fundamental questions about symbolic and linguistic construction of gender and sexuality. Similar work in ecocriticism examines how literary discourse has constructed “nature.”

Western ideology has as its mainstay the binaries that separate men from women, mind from body, and humanity from nature. The conference will investigate the ways in which the interlaced natural and cultural systems influence, and are influenced by, literary works and criticism. It seeks to open to critique the conventional practices and representations in literature as well as grafting trajectories, making sense of the chaotic, or making chaotic that which seems ordered through new paradigms.