Mother Trees and Memory Keepers: Botanical Life in Recent Indian Children’s Climate Fiction

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in literary narratives from South Asia that confront the imaginative and representational challenges posed by the contemporary climate crisis. Drawing on insights from the emerging field of Critical Plant Studies, this paper reads recent Indian climate fiction for children from a “phyto-centric” perspective, analysing its representation of plants, and examining the ways in which literary encounters with botanical life can foster a sense of ethical responsibility. In Bijal Vachharajani’s recent young adult novel, Savi and the Memory Keeper (2021), the narrative characterizes trees as “mother trees”, “memory keepers”, and as signposts of climate change. This paper will examine how the narrative makes use of botanical tropes in reimagining environmental crises and activism on a scale relevant to young readers. In doing so, we also probe the ways in which botanical life in children’s environmental narratives perform an ecopedagogical function as trumpeters of the climate crisis.