The Lived Forest: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Eco-Agency in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest Of Enchantments

Abstract

This paper examines Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments (2019) through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and recent developments in eco-phenomenology. It argues that Divakaruni’s reimagining of the Ramayana foregrounds Sita’s embodied consciousness and constructs the forest as an agentive, coexistent world rather than a passive backdrop. The novel performs a narrative ecology where phenomenological perception, corporeal knowledge, and intersubjective encounters between human and nonhuman entities converge to articulate an ethics of relational attentiveness. Integrating ecofeminist theory with phenomenological ontology, this essay situates The Forest of Enchantments as a key text in contemporary eco-literature that resists anthropocentrism, reconfigures mythic temporality, and envisions the forest as a lived and perceiving subject.