RIVER, FOREST, AND VILLAGE AS CULTURAL MEMORY IN INDIAN ENGLISH NOVELS

Indian English fiction persistently returns to three foundational spatial motifs river, forest, and village not merely as descriptive backdrops but as dynamic repositories of collective memory.These landscapes operate as cultural archives where mythology, oral tradition, caste hierarchies, colonial encounters, ecological transformations, and community identities intersect and evolve. Far from functioning as passive settings, rivers carry ritual and historical continuity, forests preserve indigenous cosmologies and resistance narratives, and villages embody the social structures that organize lived experience. In the context of Indias colonial disruption and postcolonial transformation, such landscapes become mnemonic frameworks through which writers negotiate questions of belonging, loss, survival, and identity. They hold sedimented layers of time, allowing fiction to reconstruct histories that are often marginalized or erased by official records.This study examines how selected Indian English novels Raja Raos Kanthapura, R.K. Narayans The Guide, Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable, Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghoshs The Glass Palace, and translated forest narratives of Mahasweta Devi reimagine natural and rural spaces as sites of cultural memory. Through close textual analysis, the paper demonstrates how these writers encode nationalist awakening caste oppression, ecological trauma,diasporic displacement,and subaltern resistance within specific landscapes.