Published Online:June 2026
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES010626
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2026.21.2.5-17
Author Name:N Maria Preeti Jose and Arnab Chatterjee
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:5-17
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Malayalam novel Chemmeen (prawns) details the lives of coastal fishermen of Kerala. Though on the surface a love tale of “star-crossed lovers”, the narrative recounts the uneasy relationship between the bountiful nature and human activity to control and dominate her. This is also the leitmotif of Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea that depicts the man-nature symbiosis. The paper argues that both the texts, separated across timeframes and locales, can be interpreted with recourse to what is termed the “sociological naturalist” approach. This term seeks to demonstrate that the natural and the social worlds are governed by similar principles. The sea and the marlin in Hemingway’s novella are not merely natural forces, they also embody psychological aspects on an anthropocentric plane. Similarly, in Pillai’s narrative, the sea is both a bountiful mother (“Kadalamma”) and also a brute force which the people in the community have to negotiate with. She is both a provider of chemmeen, a bountiful source of food and a devourer of sin and negativity. Thus, this paper seeks to drive home the anthropocentric and sociological parameters in both the abovementioned works.
Sociological naturalism as a theory looks forward to conjoin both the natural world and anthropocentric parameters. In essence, it is a bridge, a negotiation between what happens both on the geocentric and the anthropocentric planes