Thoreauvian Imagination in Dhruba Hazarika’s The Shoot

Abstract

Ecocriticism has emerged as an important medium through which environmental concerns can be examined and negotiated. Often regarded as one of the foundational texts of ecocritical scholarship, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995) uses Henry David Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone to explore ecological ideas in literature. Drawing on Thoreau's close observations of nature and his affinity for everything wild, Buell composes a framework that has largely been applied to Western literary traditions. This paper explores the applicability of Buell's concept of an environmental text to an analysis of Dhruba Hazarika’s representation of the environment in his collection The Shoot (2025). Despite coming from different geographical and cultural contexts, Hazarika and Thoreau share several convergences, particularly in their attentiveness to the natural world and their ability to find the extraordinary within seemingly mundane experiences. Through a qualitative analysis of selected short stories from the collection, the study examines themes such as kinship, human-animal encounters, animal abuse, and the sense of wonder and awe that emerges from encounters with and within nature. The paper argues that several of the environmental values presented through the analysis of Thoreau’s work by Buell can also be seen in the writings of Hazarika, thus confirming the general applicability of Buell’s approach,and the universality of ecological thought.