Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.17
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8812-9506The study proposes a discourse on the representations of the untamed in South Asian jungle narratives revolving around the construction, fortification and insurrection of anthropocentric taxonomies. The paper serves as the vessel displaying texts from varied historical periods and genres and contrasts how they classify animals across their respective ethnic communities. Seen from posthumanist and deconstructive lenses, the study attempts to analyse how Corbett's mid-twentieth-century colonial memoir Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) represents the tension between colonial representations and ecological recognition through utilitarian and reductionary terms like "man-eater," "game," "kill," "bait," and "companion". This homocentric taxonomy is then compared with the dialogic folk human-tiger encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial multimodal verse retelling Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021). The forest frontiers, the Sundarbans mangroves and the Himalayan foothills transcend the role of silent ambient conditions as they shape the imperial functional categories as well as the folk traditions oscillating between ethics and empathy. From Corbett's coalition of the Champawat Tigress with anthropocentric ambivalence to Ghosh's use of the legend of Ma Bon Bibi, the study proposes a conceptual heuristic of "ecological transcendence", reframing animals as autonomous coexistent beings, exposing the affixed human greed and empathy across indigenous cultures and time.
Basu, Adhiraj. “Deconstructing Colonial Taxonomies: Posthumanist Ethics and Environmental Transcendence in Jim Corbett and Amitav Ghosh.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 284-97, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.17.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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