Authors:

Devarsh Patel

Abstract:

The poetry and fiction of Tishani Doshi should be understood as a transformative project of Blue Humanities in which the ocean is re-written as an agentic more than human being ultimately caught up in postcolonial ecologies, corporeal rhythms and ecologies of care. Doshi builds tidal imaginaries, disrupting land centric Ecocriticism, to make the sea an ethical archive registering climate anxiety, historical violence, and resilient fluidity, which are built around her Tamil Nadu coastal home. The proposal of a unique framework called Postcolonial Blue Ecocriticism is suggested in this paper to examine Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2016), A God at the Door (2021), and The Pleasure Seekers (2015). By using close readings of water motifs, including, the sea is never still. It also maintains its time of its own (Doshi, Girls 45) the dance added poetics of Doshi aligns the oceanic conscious with the vulnerability of the body, in which the body recalls what the mind loses (Girls 23). It is not based on Euro-Atlantic paradigms (Mentz; DeLoughrey), but her work considers the Indian Ocean histories of unequal ecological violence and blue feminist care, a gap she aims to fill in her scholarship on her intersections of embodiment, water, and colonial afterlives. Slow climate anxiety is revealed in littoral spaces in fiction: Cities lean towards the sea; mindful of the fact that sometime it will take they back (Pleasure 89). Doshi supports survival by being attentive and in fluid coexistence as opposed to domination by nature, globalizing Blue Humanities to views of the Global South. This work of ecopoetic shows that literature is a witness of the Anthropocene, which creates relational ontologies at the time of the increasing tide and environmental precocity. 

Keywords:

Blue Humanities, Tishani Doshi, oceanic consciousness, postcolonial ecocriticism, Indian Ocean studies, blue feminism, climate anxiety

Vol & Issue:

VOL.17, ISSUE No.4, December 2025