Eco-Travel and Epistemic Resistance in Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches

This chapter analyses Janice Pariat’s 2022 novel Everything the Light Touches as a story of ecological and epistemic resistance set in Northeast India and in the larger context of South Asian environmental issues. Using an interdisciplinary ecocritical approach, it brings together Michael Cronin’s theory of eco-travel, Arne Naess’s deep ecology, and Val Plumwood’s ecofeminism with literary analysis. The analysis shows how Pariat’s novel uses four characters who travel through time to challenge colonial histories of knowledge and post-Enlightenment rationalism by using Indigenous ecological epistemologies and different ways of seeing. The novel is a work of resistance against both ecological exploitation and epistemic dominance. It puts the voices and landscapes of Northeast India at the centre of the story as important places of crisis and future. In the end, this discussion shows that Everything the Light Touches not only looks at past and present environmental crises but also imagines more inclusive and sustainable futures.