Dwelling in Dispossession: Caste, Ecological Alienation, and Solastalgia in Perumal Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm and Pyre

Abstract

This study examines how Perumal Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm and Pyre represent the relationship between caste, ecology, and psychological suffering through the concept of solastalgia. While solastalgia is often understood in relation to environmental destruction or climate-related loss, this study argues that Murugan’s narratives expand its meaning by showing how ecological distress can also arise from caste-based exclusion, spatial control, and the denial of belonging within one’s own surroundings. In these narratives, rural landscapes are not neutral settings but socially organised environments shaped by labour, hierarchy, surveillance, and everyday forms of violence. Through the experiences of Shorty and Saroja, the study shows how nature functions as a space that both sustains life and regulates access to it. From Dalit psycho-ecological perspectives, the study argues that ecological suffering in Murugan’s narratives is inseparable from the caste structures. The study further suggests that environmental justice in the Indian context must account for caste as a central force shaping ecological experience. Ultimately, Murugan’s narratives highlight that ecological grief is also social grief and that questions of land, place, and belonging are deeply tied to the structures of power, calling for a more inclusive understanding of ecological thought that recognises these entangled realities.

1. Introduction

Environmental grief has increasingly become a central concern in contemporary ecocritical discourse, particularly in relation to climate change, ecological degradation, and the transformation of natural landscapes. Concepts such as ecological anxiety, environmental trauma, and solastalgia have generally emerged from discussions of droughts, floods, industrial pollution, and the destruction of ecosystems through modernisation. Albrecht (2005) defines solastalgia as the emotional distress experienced when one’s home environment changes while one continues to inhabit it physically. Although this formulation has significantly expanded understandings of environmental suffering, it assumes that individuals possess an unquestioned sense of home and belonging. Such an assumption becomes problematic in deeply stratified societies where access to home, land, and ecological belonging is unevenly distributed. The phrase ‘dwelling in dispossession’ is used in this study to describe the condition of remaining physically present in familiar landscapes while being denied emotional security, recognition, and a sense of belonging there. Within the Indian caste system, the experience of home cannot be understood merely as a physical location; it must also be examined as a socially regulated space in which belonging itself is determined by structures of power.

In India, caste not only governs social hierarchy, occupation, and economic opportunities but also shapes access to land, water, and ecological resources, thereby determining how individuals inhabit and experience their environments (Agarwal and Levien 2020; Sharma 2019). For marginalised communities, particularly Dalits, ecological spaces rarely function as sites of comfort, security, or emotional attachment. Instead, villages, fields, wells, grazing lands, and other rural landscapes become socially regulated spaces where caste dictates who may dwell with dignity and who must endure everyday life through labour surveillance, fear, and humiliation. Consequently, ecological exclusion extends beyond material deprivation to encompass the denial of meaningful relationships with place itself. The homes and landscapes inhabited by Dalit communities, therefore, carry the accumulated histories of exclusion, exploitation, humiliation, and intergenerational trauma rather than stable experiences of belonging (Bhimraj 2020; Dutta 2015). Understanding ecological distress within such contexts requires moving beyond environmental degradation alone to examine how caste itself produces ecological alienation.

Viewed through this perspective, solastalgia acquires a broader significance within caste societies. Ecological grief among Dalit communities emerges not only from environmental degradation but also from historically structured experiences of spatial exclusion and ecological dispossession (Albrecht 2005; Biswas 2024). Ecological alienation, therefore, is produced through socially constructed mechanisms of exclusion that force Dalit communities into both social and environmental exile (Fuchs 2020; Kabra 2020). This perspective enables the present study to examine how caste reshapes emotional relationships with place and belonging in Murugan’s narratives.

Perumal Murugan is widely recognised as one of the most significant contemporary Tamil writers, whose fiction consistently foregrounds the harsh lived realities of rural Tamil Nadu and the structural violence embedded within caste-based social relations. His narratives are distinct from conventional representations of the village as a harmonious cultural space by revealing it instead as a landscape shaped by unequal access to land, labour, mobility, and belonging. Through close attention to agrarian environments, everyday labour, and the intimate experiences of marginalised communities, Murugan depicts how ecological spaces are inseparable from social hierarchies and historical forms of exclusion. Within the broader tradition of Tamil literature, his works extend earlier engagements with caste and rural life by examining the reciprocal relationship between ecological environments and social oppression. Among his works, Seasons of the Palm (Murugan 2017) and Pyre (Murugan 2016) are especially significant and more poignant for their sustained engagement with caste, ecological belonging, and the psychological consequences of spatial exclusion. This convergence of caste, ecology, and emotional attachment to place makes Murugan’s narratives particularly well suited for examination through the lens of solastalgia, enabling a deeper understanding of ecological distress as an experience profoundly inflected by caste.

The selected narratives of Perumal Murugan thus provide a compelling literary space for examining these intersections between caste, ecology, and psychological belonging. Originally written in Tamil and now widely accessible through English translations, his works demonstrate that landscapes are never socially neutral but are structured by deeply embedded relations of power (Agarwal and Levien 2020; Sharma 2020). In both Seasons of the Palm (2017) and Pyre (2016), Murugan portrays ecology not as a passive backdrop but as an active social space through which caste regulates dwelling, mobility, intimacy, labour, and survival. While Season of the Palm follows the experiences of a bonded Dalit child whose life is defined by ecological confinement and exploitation, Pyre depicts how an inter-caste couple encounters hostility within a village landscape governed by caste surveillance and exclusion. Read together, these narratives reveal that ecological spaces become sites where social power determines who may belong and who must remain continuously dispossessed.

Existing scholarship on Perumal Murugan has largely focused on questions of caste oppression, marginality, and social violence within rural Tamil society. Studies on Seasons of the Palm (2017) have predominantly concentrated on bonded labour, untouchability, and the institutionalisation of caste-based exploitation within agrarian society (Rani 2021). Similarly, scholarship on Pyre (2016) frequently examines the persistence of caste prejudice, honour killing, and caste violence surrounding inter-caste marriage, highlighting the vulnerability of individuals who challenge social boundaries (Periyasamy 2019; Paswan 2024; Kavya 2024). Broader studies of Murugan’s narratives have further explored themes of marginality and subaltern identity across his novels, emphasising the experiences of social exclusion and structural oppression faced by marginalised communities (Bapurao 2021; Krishnan and Siva Priya 2023). Collectively, these studies establish Murugan as an important chronicler of caste violence and rural inequality in contemporary India.

Recent scholarship on Dalit ecologies and environmental justice has increasingly emphasised that environmental experiences cannot be separated from caste structures (Ghatak 2021; Kumar and Mishra 2022; Prasad 2022). Guha (2000) further demonstrates that environmental conflicts in India are fundamentally connected to questions of inequality, livelihood, and access to resources rather than abstract concerns of conservation. Collectively, these studies establish that ecologies and sympathy are shaped by social hierarchy. Yet Murugan’s narratives extend these debates by revealing how caste not only structures environmental access but also reshapes emotional relationships with place and belonging.

Despite these important contributions, existing scholarship has largely approached Murugan’s narratives through the frameworks of caste oppression, bonded labour, subalternity, caste violence, honour killing, and social exclusion. While these studies have generated important insights into the social dimensions of his works, ecology has frequently remained a passive backdrop rather than an active social space organised through caste relations. Consequently, limited attention has been devoted to how environmental spaces themselves participate in the production of exclusion, alienation, and psychological distress. The relationship between caste, disrupted dwelling, ecological alienation, and solastalgia therefore remains underexplored within current Murugan scholarship and Dalit ecocritical discourse.

Building upon existing studies of caste oppression and marginality in Murugan’s narratives, this study shifts attention towards the ecological dimensions of caste experience. It argues that Seasons of the Palm (2017) and Pyre (2016) significantly expand the conceptual reach of solastalgia by demonstrating that caste functions as a system of ecological dispossession. In Murugan’s narratives, caste first disrupts the possibility of dwelling, transforms psychological spaces into sites of exclusion and alienation, and ultimately produces experiences of solastalgic distress. The psychological suffering experienced by Shorty and Saroja is therefore not merely the result of social discrimination but of caste-regulated relationships to land, labour, mobility, and intimacy. By comparatively reading both narratives through the primary framework of solastalgia, supported by the concepts of graded inequality and affective landscape, this study demonstrates that ecological grief in Dalit contexts arises not only from environmental degradation but, more fundamentally, from the denial of the right to belong.

2. Theoretical Framework

Environmental change is often understood through its visible effects on landscapes, yet its emotional consequences are equally significant. Glenn Albrecht’s solastalgia offers a way of understanding these psychological dimensions by describing the distress experienced when people remain within their familiar environment but no longer experience it as a place of comfort, security, or belonging (Albrecht 2005). Unlike nostalgia, which emerges from separation from home, solastalgia captures the unsettling experience of feeling estranged while still inhabiting one’s own surroundings. Although Albrecht developed the concept in response to ecological degradation caused by mining, drought, and industrial expansion, its broader significance lies in recognising that people’s emotional well-being is deeply connected to their relationship with place. Landscapes are not merely physical settings; they are lived environments that shape memory, identity, and belonging. Solastalgia therefore provides an important framework for examining how disrupted relationships with place generate forms of emotional and psychological suffering.

The interpretative value of solastalgia extends beyond environmental degradation alone. As the concept has developed, scholars have shown that ecological distress may also emerge from social and historical conditions that undermine people’s sense of belonging without necessarily transforming the physical landscape (Albrecht et al. 2007; Biswas 2024). This is why the understanding is particularly relevant in a caste society, in which the experience of place is mediated through deeply rooted social hierarchies. A village, a field, or a water source may remain geographically unchanged, yet it cannot be experienced equally by everyone. For communities subjected to caste discrimination, familiar environments often become spaces of surveillance, exclusion, and insecurity rather than refuge or comfort. Ecological grief in such contexts arises not simply because the environment has changed, but because the relationship between individuals and their environment is continually shaped by unequal structures of power. Solastalgia thus becomes a useful lens for understanding forms of ecological suffering produced as much by social exclusions as by environmental transformation.

Expanding the scope of solastalgia also invites closer attention to the idea of dwelling and ecological belonging. Dwelling extends beyond the occupation of a physical space; it involves the ability to experience one’s surroundings as familiar, secure, and emotionally meaningful. Through everyday interactions with the environment, people cultivate attachments that shape their memories, identity, and sense of belonging. When these relationships are disrupted, the resulting loss is not only material but also psychological, producing feelings of estrangement even in places that remain physically inhabited. Solastalgia derives its significance from precisely this erosion of attachment to place. Yet the capacity to dwell cannot be assumed to exist equally for everyone. In caste-based societies, access to land, shared spaces, mobility, and even personal safety is mediated by social hierarchy. Ecological belonging, therefore, becomes an uneven experience, making the concept of dwelling essential for understanding how emotional attachment to place is structured by caste.

If dwelling depends upon the possibility of belonging, caste frequently disrupts that possibility by regulating unequal relationships to ecological space. This uneven experience of public spaces may be understood through B. R. Ambedkar’s notion of graded inequality, which perceives caste not as a simple binary between the privileged and the oppressed but as a hierarchical system in which dignity, labour, mobility and access to resources are differentially distributed (Ambedkar 2014). Building upon Ambedkar’s formulation, Guru (2009) argues that caste hierarchies are sustained through the everyday denial of dignity and the unequal distribution of social recognition, making exclusion an enduring lived experience rather than an isolated act of discrimination. Such inequalities extend beyond ownership to shape the everyday experience of inhabiting rural landscapes. The environment is not encountered as a neutral or shared space but as one organised through practices of inclusion and exclusion. For historically marginalised communities, ecological spaces often become reminders of restriction rather than belonging, where movement, labour, and even ordinary interactions with the landscape are conditioned by caste. Ecological dispossession, therefore, refers not only to the loss of resources but also to the systematic denial of meaningful relationships with place. Read alongside solastalgia, graded inequality reveals that ecological distress in Dalit communities arises not only from environmental disruption but also from the structural denial of the right to inhabit familiar environments with dignity and security.

This understanding finds support in environmental justice and Dalit ecological scholarship, both of which emphasise that ecological inequalities are inseparable from broader questions of social justice (Dobson 1998; Martínez-Alier 2002). Within the Indian context, caste shapes who can claim, inhabit, and move through ecological spaces with dignity, making environmental exclusion an everyday social reality rather than an exceptional event (Bhimraj 2020; Kumar and Mishra 2022). Nixon’s concept of slow violence further illuminates how such exclusions accumulate gradually through everyday restrictions on labour, mobility, and access to shared environments, producing enduring forms of ecological alienation and psychological distress (Nixon 2011).

The relationship between caste and ecology may also be understood through the concept of affective landscape, which emphasises that landscapes are not merely physical settings but emotionally and culturally constituted spaces shaped by memory, attachment, fear, and lived experience (Wylie 2007; Tuan 1977). Emotional relationships with place are therefore produced by everyday encounters with the environment rather than by its characteristics alone. In caste-regulated societies, however, these affective relationships are profoundly mediated by histories of exclusion, surveillance, and unequal belonging, transforming familiar landscapes into sites of anxiety and vulnerability. Along with solastalgia, this concept highlights that ecological grief also emerges through the erosion of emotional security and belonging in places that remain physically inhabited. This perspective is particularly valuable for understanding Murugan’s narratives, in which ecological spaces repeatedly turn into sites where caste oppression is emotionally experienced and spatially reproduced.

Taken together, these ideas offer a coherent framework for understanding the relationship between caste, ecology, and psychological distress in Murugan’s narratives. While solastalgia provides the primary analytical framework through which ecological grief is interpreted, the supporting concepts of graded inequality, affective landscape, dwelling, ecological belonging, and ecological dispossession deepen the understanding of how caste structures unequal relationships to place and intensifies ecological distress. In Seasons of the Palm and Pyre, landscapes are not passive settings but social spaces where caste governs labour, mobility, intimacy, and everyday existence. The emotional distress experienced by Murugan’s characters therefore arises not only from their surroundings but also from the persistent denial of the right to inhabit those surroundings with dignity and security. Read in this way, solastalgia acquires a distinctly Dalit dimension, revealing how ecological grief is inseparable from caste-based experiences of exclusion and dispossession. This perspective also distinguishes the present study from existing readings of Murugan that have primarily focused on caste violence, bonded labour, and marginality by foregrounding the ecological and psychological dimensions of caste experience.

Viewed through this framework, Seasons of the Palm and Pyre reveal how caste first disrupts the possibility of dwelling, then produces ecological alienation, and ultimately gives rise to solastalgic experience. The following discussion examines these interconnected processes through a comparative reading of both narratives.

3. Analysis and Discussion

While previous studies have examined caste oppression and social marginalisation in Murugan’s narratives, the following discussion focuses specifically on how ecological spaces themselves become sites of exclusion, alienation, and disrupted belonging.

3.1. Caste and the Disruption of Dwelling

In Seasons of the Palm and Pyre, the violence of caste begins with the denial of dwelling (Sharma 2019). Rather than presenting home as a stable or comforting space, Perumal Murugan shows how the ability to inhabit a place with dignity is unevenly distributed within rural society. The villages, fields, and domestic spaces that shape everyday life are never neutral landscapes. They are organised by caste, determining who may experience familiarity, security, and acceptance, and who must live under conditions of dependence and exclusion (Agarwal and Levien 2020; Bhimraj 2020). Murugan establishes this through restrained descriptive narration that consistently presents rural landscapes not as passive settings but as socially organised spaces, allowing caste relations to emerge through the texture of everyday life rather than through overt authorial commentary. Although the two narratives depict different social worlds, bonded child labour in Seasons of the Palm and an inter-caste marriage in Pyre, both reveal that the first consequence of caste is the disruption of dwelling. Home is not lost through migration or environmental change alone; it is withheld by social structures that make emotional attachment to place impossible (Sharma 2020).

From its opening pages, Seasons of the Palm refuses to separate childhood from caste. The natural world appears full of familiar rural images, grazing fields, livestock, dusty paths, and seasonal rhythms, but these spaces never become sites of comfort for the Dalit children who inhabit them. Their lives are organised around labour rather than play, obedience rather than freedom. Even their identities reflect this condition. Instead of personal names, they are identified through bodily characteristics: Shorty, Belly, Tallfellow, Stonedeaf, and Stumpleg. Murugan’s naming strategy is itself a significant narrative device. By substituting personal names with bodily descriptors, the narration formally reduces the children to their physical utility within the agrarian caste order, mirroring the dehumanising logic that structures their everyday existence. Murugan writes, “Shorty waits. He has to, at least until high noon. Only then or even afterwards will the others come one by one, leading their sheep. Belly usually comes first. Once she is there, the world seems right” (Murugan 2017, pp. 4–5). These names do more than distinguish one child from another; they reduce individuality to physical usefulness within an agrarian order that values labour over personhood. Although the children grow up within this landscape, they never inhabit it as a place that recognises their humanity. The village becomes a space they occupy but cannot truly call home.

The denial of dwelling is reinforced through Murugan’s narrative perspective, which closely aligns the third-person narration with Shorty’s consciousness. Although the passage is narrated externally, the comparison, “Like a dog, he thinks much like a dog, anxious for its master’s voice. He waits until the Mistress calls out, ‘Dai! Bring your pot’” (Murugan 2017, p. 6) operates through free indirect discourse, allowing the readers access to Shorty’s internalised perception of himself as a dog waiting for morning food every day, without shifting into first-person narration. The force of this comparison lies in its quiet acceptance. Rather than presenting humiliation solely as an external social condition, the narrative reveals how caste gradually becomes internalised within Shorty’s own sense of self in the society. Caste governs not simply his labour but his relationship to the landscape that surrounds him. The fields he walks through each day, the animals he tends, and the routines that structure his life continually remind him that he belongs to the land only as a labourer. Dwelling, therefore, is denied long before any explicit act of violence occurs. Physical proximity to a place does not produce belonging when every encounter with that place is mediated through caste-based inequality.

Shorty’s experience is not merely an instance of individual suffering but reflects the wider caste order that governs unequal relationships to people and place. Ambedkar’s notion of graded inequality explains this condition as a hierarchical social structure in which dignity, labour, mobility, and access to natural resources are distributed unevenly across caste positions (Ambedkar 2014). As Guru (2009) further argues, caste hierarchy is sustained through the everyday normalisation of humiliation and the denial of equal recognition, allowing exclusion to become an ordinary condition of social life rather than an exceptional act of violence. Murugan’s portrayal of Shorty’s daily routines embodies this structural logic. His relationship with the fields, animals, and village landscape is defined not by belonging but by inherited obligations that reduce his presence to labour and service. Dwelling therefore becomes an unequal social experience. Read through this concept of graded inequality, Shorty’s solastalgic distress emerges not simply from ecological deprivation but from a caste order that systematically denies him the right to inhabit his own environment as a fully recognised human subject.

A similar disruption unfolds in Pyre, though it emerges through exclusion rather than inherited servitude. Saroja enters her husband’s village expecting marriage to offer a new beginning, yet she immediately encounters suspicion because of her caste identity. The village refuses to absorb her into its social world, making it clear that residence alone cannot create belonging. Her emotional condition is captured through one of the narrative’s most memorable images: “Saroja was beginning to feel that her life was like a plant that had been uprooted from where it had flourished and then abruptly displaced. Would its roots hold on to the earth in this unfamiliar place? Would the soil accept this new plant?” (Murugan 2016, p. 122). Murugan’s extended metaphor of the uprooted plant functions as more than a descriptive comparison; it shifts attention from physical relocation to emotional rootedness. Saroja’s uncertainty lies not in adapting to a new environment but in recognising that the environment itself refuses to receive her. The landscape remains materially unchanged, yet caste transforms it into a place where acceptance is permanently denied. Saroja’s exclusion likewise reflects the continuing operation of graded inequality, although here it manifests through caste surveillance and the policing of inter-caste marriage rather than bonded labour.

Read together, the two narratives reveal that the disruption of dwelling does not depend upon a single form of oppression. Although Murugan employs different narrative situations in each novel, both are structured through recurring images and narrative perspectives that gradually reveal belonging as something socially regulated rather than naturally given. Shorty is denied the possibility of a home through the inherited discipline of bonded labour, while Saroja loses the possibility of creating one because caste rejects her marriage and presence within the village. Their circumstances differ, yet both experience the same fundamental loss: the inability to inhabit familiar surroundings with security and dignity. The question running through Murugan’s narratives is therefore not who owns the land but who is permitted to belong within it. Dwelling becomes a social privilege rather than a universal human condition, exposing the intimate relationship between caste and place.

This denial of dwelling marks the beginning of a wider process of ecological estrangement (Kabra 2020). Once belonging is fractured, ordinary landscapes cease to function as spaces of comfort and instead become sites where exclusion is continually reinforced. The fields, pathways, homes, and village spaces that should sustain everyday life gradually acquire meanings shaped by discipline, surveillance, and unequal power. It is this transformation of lived environments into socially regulated spaces that prepares the ground for the forms of ecological alienation examined in the following section.

3.2. Ecological Alienation and Spatial Exclusion

If Seasons of the Palm and Pyre first expose how caste disrupts the possibility of dwelling, they subsequently reveal how it reorganises the very structure of ecological space (Dobson 1998; Martínez-Alier 2002). In both narratives, space is never neutral; it is lived but also regulated, inhabited but also policed. What appears as an ordinary rural landscape is, in fact, a system of spatial governance in which caste determines movement, access, visibility, and bodily security. Ecological alienation emerges here not as a distant consequence of environmental change but as an everyday condition produced through labour discipline and exclusion embedded within the environment itself (Nixon 2011).

In Seasons of the Palm, this alienation is first inscribed on the labouring body. The agrarian landscape does not simply surround Shorty; it produces him through exhaustion and repetition. His experience of the village is structured by continuous physical strain: “His body aches from working since dawn. He has been up a long time, since the cock’s first crow” (Murugan 2017, p. 11). The land is not experienced as sustaining or nurturing, but as something that extracts energy without restoration. Murugan constructs this experience through repetitive descriptions of bodily labour and the cyclical rhythms of rural life and exhaustion. Rather than isolating moments of spectacular suffering, the narration accumulates ordinary acts of labour until ecological alienation becomes inseparable from the texture of everyday existence.

This regulation intensifies through direct coercion, where discipline is embedded in everyday spatial routines. Violence is not an interruption of this ecological order but one of its sustaining mechanisms: “He had been beaten! Whipped on the sole of his foot! Close to tears, but helpless, Shorty got ready for work. This happened a few times. Gradually, Shorty learned to wake up at the Mistress’s first call” (Murugan 2017, pp. 9–10). The significance of this moment lies in its transformation of violence into habit. The body is trained into obedience until coercion becomes routine. The landscape, therefore, functions as a disciplinary field in which labour is not merely performed but enforced through the internalisation of fear and submission.

Spatial exclusion also operates through caste-coded systems of purity that govern interaction within the environment. The ecological world is structured by ideas of contamination that determine who may enter shared spaces and under what conditions: “Aiy! You touched that low-born child? Have you washed?” (Murugan 2017, p. 105). Here, caste is not an abstract ideology but a spatial practice. It governs proximity, touch, and bodily presence, turning the environment into a morally stratified terrain. Even when Dalit bodies occupy the same physical landscape as others, they remain excluded from its social and ecological intimacy.

In Pyre, spatial exclusion manifests less through labour and more through surveillance and emotional isolation. Saroja’s experience of the village is marked by a constant sense of being watched, judged, and socially positioned outside belonging. Yet within this hostile environment, brief moments of refuge emerge in non-domesticated spaces (Cháirez-Garza 2022). She experiences a fragile sense of safety away from human structures: “Nowadays, there were moments when she felt safer among these wild bushes than trapped inside the hut on the rock” (Murugan 2016, p. 183). The significance of this moment lies in its inversion of spatial expectation. The domestic space, which should offer protection, becomes confining, while the wild landscape briefly opens up as a site of emotional relief. However, this relief is unstable because it exists only outside the social order rather than transforming it.

Murugan’s representation of these landscapes may also be understood through the concept of the affective landscape, which emphasises that places are experienced not merely as physical environments but as emotional worlds shaped by memory, power, and social relationships (Tuan 1977; Wylie 2007). In both narratives, the village, fields, and domestic spaces acquire emotional meanings through repeated experiences of caste regulation, labour, surveillance, and exclusion. These landscapes are therefore affective not because they possess inherent emotional qualities, but because they continually mediate characters’ relationship to belonging and exclusion. Murugan’s descriptive attention to ordinary rural spaces reveals how ecological alienation emerges through the emotional texture of everyday environments rather than through dramatic environmental transformation alone.

This instability is reinforced by the broader condition of spatial abandonment that defines Saroja’s life in the village. The landscape does not actively expel her; instead, it withdraws from her, producing isolation through absence itself: “No one came to the rock these days. Earlier, even if the visitors only said rude things, at least the side of their faces provided some relief from the punishing monotony of life here” (Murugan 2016, p. 170). Here, exclusion is not loud or dramatic. It is quiet, cumulative, and affective. The environment becomes oppressive not through action but through the withdrawal of relational presence, leaving Saroja suspended in a space where recognition is no longer available (Alankar 2013).

Across both narratives, Murugan develops this ecological alienation through recurring landscape descriptions, spatial imagery, and carefully sustained narrative attention to ordinary environments, enabling caste oppression to emerge gradually from the formal structure of everyday life rather than from isolated acts of violence. Labour, discipline, caste purity, surveillance, and isolation are not separate mechanisms but interconnected processes that structure how space is lived and experienced. The landscape becomes inseparable from the power relations that organise it, turning ecological space into a system of regulated inequality (Kabra 2020; Bhimraj 2020). Once dwelling is disrupted, space ceases to function as a site of belonging, and it becomes an instrument of control and exclusion. It is within this transformed ecological field that the deeper psychological condition of solastalgia begins to take shape, where alienation is no longer only spatial but also emotional and experiential.

3.3. Solastalgia and the Search for Belonging

If Seasons of the Palm and Pyre first dismantle the idea of dwelling and then reorganise ecological space as the site of exclusion, they finally arrive at a more intimate register of suffering: the emotional experience of living within environments that refuse to become home. This is where solastalgia becomes more legible, not as a distant environmental condition, but as a lived psychological reality shaped by caste, labour, and inherited forms of spatial injustice (Albrecht 2005). In Murugan’s fictional worlds, grief is not triggered by environmental loss in the conventional sense. Instead, it emerges from the persistent inability to experience belonging within one’s own ecological surroundings (Albrecht et al. 2007).

In Season of the Palm, this condition is grounded in both material and affective deprivation. The labouring body is not only exhausted but continuously denied even minimal sustenance, producing a sense of slow, internal erosion: “The mistress never gives him more than two balls” (Murugan 2017, p. 20). Hunger here is not incidental; it is structurally embedded within the agrarian order. The environment does not sustain life equally but regulates it through scarcity, reinforcing dependence and submission. Murugan conveys this gradual erosion through restrained narrative detail rather than dramatic confrontation. Repeated descriptions of hunger, bodily fatigue, and everyday labour accumulate across the narrative, allowing ecological grief to emerge through ordinary experience instead of some moment of crisis. The landscape, therefore, is not simply worked upon; it actively participates in shaping bodily vulnerability.

This vulnerability extends into the broader economic structure of rural life, where labour is decoupled from security and reduced to cyclical survival: “For their troubles, the labourers are paid at the end of the year… the grain is never enough… Yet, the untouchables compete with each other for work on the Master’s farm” (Murugan 2017, p. 36). What appears here is not just economic exploitation but an ecological system of controlled deprivation. The land produces value, yet that value circulates upward, leaving those who work it in permanent precarity. Solastalgia, in this sense, begins to take shape through the contradiction between proximity to land and exclusion from its benefits.

In Pyre, solastalgia emerges through a different emotional configuration: displacement within belonging. Saroja does not belong to bonded labour like Shorty; instead, she enters a marital home that should generally offer settlement. Yet the village refuses to stabilise her presence, and memory itself becomes the only fragile anchor to belonging. At moments, she attempts to connect her present environment to earlier spaces of familiarity: “She did not know why this town reminded her of Tholur… it felt like a small part of Tholur. She imagined that if she were to live here… She might suddenly find herself in Tholur” (Murugan 2016, p. 155). Memory here functions not as a recovery but as a compensation. Murugan’s representation of memory also reveals the affective dimensions of landscape. The emotional significance of place does not arise from its physical characteristics alone but from the social relationships and memories attached to it (Tuan 1977; Wylie 2007). Saroja’s attempt to recognise Tholur within an unfamiliar environment demonstrates how landscapes become emotionally inhabited through remembered belonging rather than geographical continuity. The present cannot sustain belonging, so the past is reimagined as a possible extension of the present. Yet this imagined continuity remains unstable, as caste continually interrupts any possibility of rootedness.

Even the experience of refuge is fractured. The landscape briefly appears to offer emotional shelter, but the shelter is provisional and fragile, dependent on the absence of human hostility rather than the presence of acceptance. The psychological condition that emerges is therefore not one of comfort in nature, but of intermittent relief within a persistently unwelcoming world. Solastalgia becomes visible in this oscillation between fleeting safety and enduring estrangement.

At their deepest level, both narratives reveal that ecological suffering in a caste society does not depend on environmental destruction. The landscapes of Seasons of the Palm and Pyre are not devastated in the conventional ecological sense; rather, they are socially structured, producing emotional alienation. The pain experienced by Shorty and Saroja arises from inhabiting environments that are materially present but socially and emotionally inaccessible. They remain within their native or familiar landscapes, yet those landscapes do not recognise them as legitimate participants in their own ecology.

This is where solastalgia acquires a distinctly caste-inflected meaning. It is no longer simply the grief of environmental change but the grief of denied belonging. The distress is produced by living in spaces that continuously neglect intimacy, recognition, and safety. In both narratives, Murugan achieves this effect through formal repetition of recurring spatial images of fields, wells, mud paths, and huts, transforming familiar ecological spaces into narrative expressions of emotional exclusion. The environment does not change suddenly; it becomes unbearable through repetition (Chang 2022).

Solastalgia, in this reading, becomes a way of naming this condition of suspended attachment. It describes not simply environmental grief but a deeper experience of inhabiting a world that does not recognise one’s right to feel at home. Murugan’s narratives thus extend the concept beyond its original ecological framing, revealing how environmental distress can be produced through social systems of exclusion rather than ecological change alone. Ultimately, the search for belonging in both narratives remains unresolved. What persists is not a resolution but continuity of estrangement, an ongoing awareness that the environment one inhabits does not fully return one’s presence with recognition. It is in this gap between inhabitation and belonging that solastalgia finds its most precise expression.

4. Materials and Methods

This study adopts a qualitative comparative textual analysis to examine how caste shapes ecological experience and psychological belonging in Perumal Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm (2017) and Pyre (2016). These two narratives were selected because they represent distinct manifestations of caste-based ecological exclusion: bonded labour in Seasons of the Palm and inter-caste exclusion in Pyre. Rather than treating the narratives as separate case studies, the analysis reads them in conversation with one another to explore how caste structures relationships with land, labour, and rural space. A comparative approach enables the study to identify recurring patterns of ecological exclusion while also highlighting the distinct ways in which each narrative represents the denial of belonging within caste-regulated environments.

The primary method employed is close reading, with particular attention to narrative descriptions, ecological imagery, spatial representations, and the characters’ bodily experiences. These textual elements are examined to understand how Murugan transforms the rural landscape from a neutral setting into a socially contested space where caste determines who may inhabit, access, and identify with the environment. By focusing on the characters’ everyday experiences, the study demonstrates that ecological alienation in the narratives is produced through ordinary practices of labour, surveillance, exclusion, and restricted mobility rather than by sudden environmental disasters.

The analysis is principally drawn from Glenn Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia (Albrecht 2005), which provides the central interpretive framework for understanding ecological grief and the emotional consequences of disrupted relationships with place. This perspective is further enriched by supporting concepts of graded inequality and affective landscape, allowing the study to examine how ecological experiences are shaped by socio-spatial inequalities rather than environmental change alone. Bringing these perspectives together, the study argues that Murugan reimagines solastalgia within the context of caste-based ecological dispossession, in which the denial of dwelling and belonging becomes a sustained form of psychological and environmental suffering.

5. Conclusions

Perumal Murugan’s Season for the Palm and Pyre does not merely recount stories of caste violence; they quietly show how caste lives inside the everyday landscape itself, inside fields, mud paths, wells, dust, and routines of rural life. The environment in these narratives is never just background. It becomes something lived through, worked upon, and often endured. For both Shorty and Saroja, the spaces they inhabit are not emotionally safe or nurturing. Instead, these are affective landscapes that observe them, restrict them, and continually remind them of where they stand in a hierarchy that is already written into the land.

What emerges with this reading is a form of ecological suffering that cannot be separated from a caste experience. The characters’ pain is not only social or economic: it is deeply ecological; it grows from being physically present in the place while denied any real sense of belonging to it. This study, through the framework of solastalgia, along with the supporting concepts of graded inequality and affective landscape, has shown that Murugan’s narratives push readers to rethink what it means to feel ‘at home’ in one’s own environment. Solastalgia here is not simply the grief of environmental change, but the more persistent condition of living in landscapes that never fully accept one as part of them.

In this sense, Murugan’s narratives extend environmental rethinking beyond climate-focused discussions. By analysing not only thematic representations of caste but also Murugan’s narrative strategies, recurring spatial imagery, and representation of landscape, this study demonstrates how ecological alienation and solastalgia are formally embedded in the novels themselves. They make it clear that ecological distress can also arise from social systems that structure land, labour, and movement. The fields and villages in these novels are shaped as much by caste as by nature. As a result, ecological grief becomes inseparable from social grief. What the narratives ultimately reveal is that nature is never experienced neutrally; it is always mediated through power, access, and exclusion. The question of who feels at home in the environment becomes inseparable from the question of who is allowed to feel at home in society itself.

The study also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Perumal Murugan by shifting attention from caste oppression as a purely social phenomenon to its ecological and psychological dimensions. While previous studies have examined themes such as bonded labour, untouchability, honour killing, caste violence, and marginality in Seasons of the Palm and Pyre, this reading demonstrates that caste in Murugan’s narratives also operates through relationships to land, space, labour, and belonging. The idea of ‘dwelling in dispossession’ proposed in this study offers an understanding of how ecological suffering can emerge even in landscapes that remain physically familiar but socially inaccessible.

At the same time, this study has its limits. It focuses only on two narratives by Perumal Murugan and therefore cannot represent the wide and varied experiences of Dalit ecological life across different regions, languages, and literary traditions. Reading through English translations also brings certain constraints, as some cultural and linguistic nuances inevitably shift in translation. Future research can expand this conversation by including regional literatures, such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Marathi Dalit writings, which may offer different ecological imaginations and lived experiences. There is also scope for more intersectional approaches that explore how caste-based ecological exclusion interacts with gender, disability, and sexuality in both rural and urban spaces.

Finally, these insights connect meaningfully with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The caste-based ecological exclusion highlighted in Murugan’s narratives directly relates to SDG10: Reduced Inequalities, as it exposes how access to land, resources, and dignity is unevenly distributed along caste lines. It also connects with SDG15: Life on Land, reminding readers that environmental sustainability cannot be separated from questions of justice, access, and belonging. These goals emphasise that protecting the environment also means protecting the people who live within it, especially those whose relationship with land has been historically shaped by exclusion.

Ultimately, Murugan’s narratives leave readers with a simple but unsettling reminder: ecological justice is never only about preserving nature. It is also about asking who gets to belong within it, who gets to feel safe within it, and who is still struggling to claim a place in it as their own.