Volume VI Special Issue II February 2026

Name of Author : Dr. Deepti Mandlik

Title of the paper : Land, Livelihood, and Literature: An Environmental Reading of Kota Neelimas Works

Abstract: Kota Neelima is one of the rare and confident voices in Indian writing in English that brings to the masses the pains and problems of Indian agriculture, shaped profoundly by environmental factors. Her literary works, novels mainly, foreground this relationship by exposing how ecological stress intensifies agrarian crises and human vulnerability. Writing in the globalised era, Neelima vocalises the unnoticed plight of Indian farmers and farm widows consistently. The novelist who writes to change, and not to blame, Neelima focuses on bringing the reality to readers and providing potential solutions to the agricultural distress. Neelimas novels delineate the impact of both the natural and the human environment on Indian agriculture. While the land and its increasing degradation, unpredictability of monsoon, climatic complexities the challenges by the natural environment make the lives of Indian farmers stressed, the human environment, manifested in her works in the form of vicious cycle of poverty, debts, private moneylending system, problems by the genetically modified seeds, and fertilisers, illiteracy and addictions among the cultivators, systemic negligence brings out the social perceptions and often unfair treatment given to farmers. This paper explores the interconnections among the land, the livelihood and their portrayal in the literature backgrounding the environment.

Keywords : Indian writing in English, Indian agriculture, ecological stress, agrarian crisis, genetically modified seeds.

DOI :

Page Number : 304-307