Abstract: Rajiv Khandelwal’s Dwelling with Denial explores the
relationship between human emotion, memory, domestic life, and the non-human
world. This paper examines “Mother’s Mothering” and “Reminiscence” as
complementary explorations of the tension that lies between organic
environments and technologically mediated modernity. The paper examines the
ancestral house, garden, kitchen, botanical imagery, insects, domestic
labour, and the “smart home” as interconnected sites of memory and emotional
experience. “Mother’s Mothering” connects human growth with botanical growth
through the image of the Gulmohar tree, while contrasting maternal care and
domestic labour with technological convenience. “Reminiscence” creates a
garden world filled with flowers, plants, and butterflies through which the
speaker returns to memories of the past. Taken together, these poems suggest
that ecological separation and emotional loneliness are closely knitted, as
both arise from a loss of connection with the places we inhabit and the
forms of care that give them meaning. Instead of presenting environmental
awareness as ecological separation and emotional isolation limited just
limited to policies or local concerns, Khandelwal connects ecological
thinking with memory, personal identity, and everyday life. His poems
therefore suggest that living meaningfully in the present does not simply
depend on technological convenience. It also requires us to reconnect with
our immediate surroundings and recognise the value of the human and
non-human relationships that sustain us.
Keywords:
Deep Ecology, Material Ecocriticism, Ecofeminism, Psychoanalytic
Criticism, Domestic Ecology, Topophilia, Culinary Memory
Rajiv Khandelwal
is a distinctive voice in contemporary Indian English poetry. His
collections often explore subjects closely connected to everyday life,
particularly the complexities of modern relationships and life in general.
He presents these experiences through picturesque imagery and simple,
minimalist structures, while irony and vivid images run through many of his
themes. Beneath this simplicity, his poems carry a raw and expressive
quality that can leave the reader with a sense of awe as they move through
his works.
Contemporary
Ecopoetics increasingly moves beyond the idea of untouched wilderness and
turns its attention to the ordinary spaces where human and non-human life
coincide. Homes, gardens, kitchens, and schoolyards can all be understood as
important ecological spaces. These everyday environments shape our memories
and emotions while bringing together plants, animals, materials, and
technologies in constantly changing ways. Such spaces are particularly
important in Rajiv Khandelwal’s Dwelling with Denial, where memory,
longing, and identity are repeatedly attached to specific domestic and
botanical environments.
The poems
“Mother’s Mothering” and “Reminiscence” are especially significant in this
context. “Mother’s Mothering” places the speaker between an ancestral
domestic environment and the technologically equipped present of the “smart
home.” “Reminiscence” by contrast, reconstructs a garden populated by
flowers, plants, butterflies, and caterpillars that carries the power to
transport the speaker mentally to his yearning memories of the past.
Across both works,
nature is more than a backdrop to human experience, where the plants and
animals actively shape the speakers’ psychological and emotional worlds.
Their presence also highlights the tension between organic ways of living
and the increasingly synthetic, technology-driven conditions of modern life
we are rushing towards. This contrast establishes a tension between organic
and synthetic forms of livelihood. Modern technology promises efficiency and
convenience, yet the speaker suggests that technological convenience cannot
replicate the sensory intimacy of older forms of domestic and ecological
experiences. The speaker’s longing is therefore not simply for a person or a
lost moment. It is also for the material conditions through which that
person and moment were experienced: the ancestral house, the garden, the
kitchen, the smell of spices, the movement of insects, and the physical
labour associated with care.
This paper argues
that Khandelwal’s poetry challenges the superficial and artificial
separation between ecological reality and human emotion. By bringing
together domestic labour, plant growth, animal movement, memory, and
technological alienation, the poems show how ecological separation and
emotional isolation can emerge from the same underlying sense of
disconnection. This paper examines how Khandelwal locates ecological
consciousness within ordinary, lived spaces.
Deep ecology
provides an important framework for understanding the poems’ challenge to
human-centred perspectives. Naess’s ecological philosophy emphasizes the
intrinsic value of non-human life and the interconnectedness of living
beings. To distance oneself from nature and the ‘natural’ is to distance
oneself from a part of that which is “I” is built up of. (Naess 164) Modern
ecologists almost unanimously emphasize the importance of togetherness and
cooperation in the plant and the animal world. (Naess 170)
“Mother’s
Mothering” begins with a striking ecological parallelism between human and
botanical growth: “Where both me and the Gulmohar / Were reared from sapling
stage/ With love and attention” (Khandelwal, lines 5-7). The word “sapling”
ordinarily belongs to the vocabulary of plant growth, yet the speaker
applies it to both himself and the Gulmohar tree. Both are presented as
forms of life that require time, attention, and utmost care, where the
speaker creates a shared vocabulary of growth and forms part of the
speaker’s developmental and psychological history.
If we expand ourselves to include
other people, species, and nature itself, altruism
becomes
unnecessary. The larger world becomes part of our own interest. (Naess 9)
This comparison resonates with deep ecological thinking, which challenges
rigid separations between human and non-human life and emphasizes the
interconnectedness of living beings.
The relationship
between human identity and the natural environment can therefore be
understood as an ecological self. The speaker’s identity is partly
constituted by the environment in which he grew, making the tree inseparable
from personal memory.
“Reminiscence”
extends this interconnectedness to animal life. The butterfly and
caterpillar are not simply decorative or picturesque elements. Their
movements and biological processes contribute to the poem’s structure and
emotional meaning. The speaker recognizes aspects of his own behaviour in
the butterfly, but the insect also retains an independent presence within
the garden. Structurally too, the specific line of the poem forms a concrete
shape like that of a movement of a butterfly. “While a butterfly fluttering/
Flitting/ Diving/ Settling” (Khandelwal, 5-8).
While the
dishwasher “whines” and the purifier “buzzes” (Khandelwal, 22-23), shows a
technological environment where these sounds stimulate sensory presence,
while contrasting with the organic sensory world of the ancestral home.
The poem
consequently constructs two material environments: one characterized by
direct bodily interaction with natural materials and another characterized
by technological mediation.
The poem becomes
particularly productive when read
through an ecofeminist framework underlining the Ecology of Care.
Ecofeminist criticism examines relationships between the domination of
nature and the devaluation of women’s labour. It replaces the ‘angel in the
house’ version of women by the ‘angel in the ecosystem’ version. (Plumwood
9)
In “Mother’s
Mothering,” care operates simultaneously at the human and ecological levels.
The mother tends the household, and similarly, the garden requires
comparable forms of attention and maintenance. The image of the mother’s
physical labour connects bodily effort with ecological maintenance. Her work
sustains both the domestic household and its surrounding environment.
The comparison
between gardening and domestic work is therefore significant. Weeding,
tending plants, cooking food, and maintaining a household all involve
repeated acts of love and attention. They are forms of care heavily
dependent upon bodily presence. The poem consequently draws attention to
labour that is often normalized and undervalued because it occurs within
everyday mundane routines.
The technological
present complicates this relationship. Modern appliances can reduce manual
labour, but the speaker’s longing for his mother suggests that convenience
does not necessarily result in emotional fulfilment, sensory familiarity, or
cultural memory. The poem thus distinguishes between efficiency and
intimacy.
Material
ecocriticism strengthens this reading by challenging the assumption that
physical matter is merely passive or secondary to human action. As Oppermann
argues, matter possesses its own agency, participating directly in
meaning-making through its expressive and narrative capacities (Oppermann,
21–36). In Khandelwal’s poetry, objects, tools, spices, plants, and spaces
cease to be static backdrops; instead, they operate as active participants
in the speaker’s emotional and psychological landscape.
The technological
objects of the contemporary kitchen are also materially present. The
dishwasher “whines,” while the water purifier “buzzes” where these verbs
give technological objects an active presence within the poem’s sensory
environment. The mechanical sounds contrast with the sensory world of the
ancestral kitchen, where spices evoke smell, gardening evokes touch, and the
Gulmohar tree provides visual and emotional memory.
Khandelwal
consequently constructs two material ecologies: one characterized by direct
interaction between human bodies and natural materials, and another
characterized by technological mediation. The speaker’s longing emerges from
the tension between these environments.
The repetition
creates a psychological loop in which the speaker remains suspended between
his remembered past and the inaccessible present moment. Nature does not
simply “heal” the speaker. Rather, the landscape provides the material
through which memory becomes possible.
The butterfly
occupies a central position in the poem. Its movement is described through
kinetic verbs such as “Flitting,” “Diving,” and “Settling”. These verbs give
the insect an active presence within the poem. The speaker associates the
butterfly’s unpredictable movement with his own earlier behaviour outside
the school gate, which becomes an analogue for human restlessness around
objects that he cannot fully possess. The comparison does not reduce the
butterfly to a conventional romantic symbol. The butterfly thus creates a
bridge between animal behaviour and human memory, while retaining its own
material and biological presence at the same time. The caterpillar
contributes to this ecological imagery differently. Its feeding behaviour
emphasizes biological continuity and transformation. The movement from
caterpillar to butterfly introduces a natural life cycle into the poem.
While the speaker remains emotionally attached to the past, the non-human
world continues through its own cycles.
This contrast
between biological movement and psychological fixation is central to the
poem. Nature continues to change, while memory repeatedly returns to the
same emotional point.
Taken together,
“Mother’s Mothering” and “Reminiscence” reveal a sustained tension between
organic experience of temporal displacement and technologically mediated
modern life. Both ask what happens when human beings become separated from
the places and practices through which emotional relationships were formed.
In “Mother’s
Mothering”, the emotional force of the poem becomes clearer when the speaker
contrasts this past with his contemporary surroundings: “Sitting in my smart
home / I hanker / For my mother’s / Mothering” (Khandelwal, 37-40). The
‘smart home’ represents technological comfort, yet the speaker experiences
that comfort as a form of emotional confinement. The efficiency of modern
domestic technology cannot recreate for the bodily and emotional dimensions
of maternal care; rather, it critiques its substitution. The verb “hanker”
suggests a desire deeper than ordinary nostalgia. It conveys a persistent
longing for human interaction that technological convenience cannot provide
at any cost.
In “Reminiscence”
the opposition is more temporal, where the speaker is though surrounded in
memory by a living garden of flowers and insects, his present reality is
defined by emotional distance and unfulfilled longing. The garden becomes
the material site through which the past remains emotionally present, while
it also mirrors certain cosmic values and environmental attitudes. (Tuan
138) The natural world becomes a material archive of emotional experience/.
Yi-Fu Tuan’s
concept of topophilia helps explain this attachment to place. Tuan
describes the affective relationship between people and place, arguing that
‘A man’s belongings are an extension of his personality; to be deprived of
them is to diminish, in his own estimation, his worth as a human being.
(Tuan, 99). Khandelwal’s poems demonstrate that places acquire emotional
significance because they contain accumulated experiences, as they have
become repositories of memory. Awareness of the past is an important element
in the love of space, where the speaker does not remember an abstract
childhood; he remembers it through a particular environment.
The ecofeminist
dimensions of “Mother’s Mothering” emerge from its treatment of care
and the
tendency to treat women’s domestic labour as endlessly available. Such
labour can become invisible precisely because it is normalized (Plumwood
110).
The mother’s work is simultaneously
domestic, bodily, and ecological. Gardening, cooking, cleaning, and
nurturing are forms of labour that sustain life but are frequently rendered
invisible because they occur within everyday routines (Plumwood 104).
The mother’s
physical condition intensifies this dimension. Her labour in the garden and
kitchen demonstrates the embodied nature of care. The comparison between
gardening and domestic work is particularly significant. Weeding, tending
plants, cooking food, and maintaining a household all involve repeated acts
of attention. They are forms of care dependent upon bodily presence.
The kitchen
provides an additional dimension by providing another connection between
ecology and memory. Ingredients such as cumin, cinnamon, asafoetida, and
onion connect the domestic space to agricultural and botanical systems
beyond the house. It establishes an olfactory trigger becomes a complete
figurative argument about the irreplaceability of maternal care. (Pathak
153).
Cooking transforms
materials derived from the earth into nourishment through human knowledge
and labour. Grinding, tempering, cooking, and serving become forms of
interaction between humans and the material environment.
In Richards’s
term, the three smells are not selected arbitrarily: the asafoetida’s
pungency is associated with cooking under pressure, the cumin’s warmth with
the familiar and everyday, the cinnamon’s sweetness with festivity and care.
Their convergence in a single remembered kitchen is a complete sensory
biography of maternal devotion. (Pathak 154), when he cannot remember his
mother exclusively as an abstract emotional figure. He remembers her through
the environment she inhabited and through food associated with her care. The
kitchen thus becomes an archive of embodied memory.
The kitchen thus
becomes an indoor ecological space where natural materials, cultural
practices, human labour, and memory intersect. Culinary practice becomes a
form of cultural and ecological continuity.
The poems’
treatment of memory can also be examined through psychoanalytic theory.
Freud’s essay in 1899 on Screen Memory, defined a Screen Memory as a
childhood memory that is striking for its triviality, serving to conceal a
more emotionally significant or repressed adult or adolescent conflict.
(Freud 299-322). It is useful for understanding how apparently ordinary or
idealized memories can carry deeper emotional significance.
In “Mother’s
Mothering,” the ancestral house, garden, kitchen, and maternal care provide
an idealized emotional environment against which the speaker experiences his
present condition. The longing for “mother’s mothering” suggests a return
toward a state associated with childhood security.
The “smart home”
is consequently psychologically significant. Although it represents comfort
and technological advancement, it cannot recreate the emotional security
associated with the maternal environment. The word “addict’s” is precisely
chosen: it implies a longing constitutionally incapable of rational
satisfaction, a hunger that the present genuine comfort cannot address
because it is specifically for what the present cannot provide. (Pathak 155)
The speaker’s “addict’s craving” expresses the intensity of this desire to
return to an earlier form of attachment.
“Reminiscence”
produces a comparable psychological structure. The garden becomes the
material setting through which the speaker encounters an earlier romantic
attachment. Its beauty does not erase the pain of loss; instead, it provides
the sensory material through which the loss is repeatedly remembered, like a
trigger.
Lacan’s ‘Theory of
Lack’ offers another way of understanding this persistent longing. Desire is
structured around an absence that cannot be filled or resolved. Desire, a
function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing
nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every
variety of animation. (Lacan 223) The butterfly and the memory of the
beloved function as unattainable objects of desire. The speaker chases an
idealized image from the past, trapped in an endless loop of anticipation
and simulation where the real object is forever lost in time.
In “Reminiscence”
the repeated hope for an “elusive glimpse” illustrates this structure’s
anticipation and incompletion. The repetition of “Hoping” creates an
anticipatory cycle in which desire remains active precisely because
fulfilment is uncertain, can be seen in the lines: “Hoping/ hoping for an
elusive glimpse”.(Khandelwal, 20-21) The turquoise bench, school gate,
grass, plants, flowers, and insects collectively establish a geography of
memory and material framework for the speaker’s recollection.
In “Mother’s
Mothering,” the object
of desire is maternal care,
where the desired object is located in a past that is inaccessible in its
original form.
Rajiv Khandelwal’s
“Mother’s Mothering” and “Reminiscence” bring together ecological imagery, domestic experience,
memory, and psychological longing to examine the consequences of
disconnection in contemporary life. Although the poems differ in setting and
emphasis, both demonstrate that human identity is materially embedded in
particular places.
Central to both
works is the recognition that environment and identity are inextricably
linked. The poems carry ecological weight not because they depict nature in
isolation, but because they refuse to treat human emotional life as separate
from its material surroundings. Rather than staging a crude rejection of
modern technology, Khandelwal complicates the boundary between organic
existence and synthetic reality. Rather, Khandelwal questions the assumption
that technological convenience equals human fulfilment. The “smart home” may
reduce physical labour, yet the speaker continues to experience absence. The
garden may preserve beauty, yet it cannot restore the past. In both cases,
the poems expose the limits of substitution.
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