Indigenous sustainability ethics, founded on the principles of stewardship, are relational and responsible towards land, community, and nature in a continuous process, rather than on ownership and exploitation. But the rapid pace of urban modernity in modern India has increasingly supplanted these models of stewardship with ownership-driven models grounded in profit and legality. This paper will explore this ethical transition in Aravind Adiga’s urban fiction, particularly in his novel Last Man in Tower, with brief contextual references to The White Tiger and Selection Day. Aravind Adiga’s fiction highlights Indian cities as spaces where land is converted into a commodity and housing becomes a tool of capital, thereby indicating the decline of sustainability ethics founded on collective responsibility. This paper contends that despite the near-absence of indigenous practices as a representation, the ethical paradigm of indigenous practices serves as a critical foil to the unsustainable paradigm of urban development that is represented in these texts. By conducting a close reading of these texts through the lens of sustainability studies and indigenous ecological thought, this paper will show how Adiga’s urban fiction reveals the implications of a paradigm shift from stewardship to ownership.
Remana et al. (Mon,) studied this question.