ABSTRACT
In Indian thought, the earth has been accorded a divine status and is revered as a goddess. Given the reverence shown to earth in Indian culture, the unsustainable extraction of resources from the land is a contradiction. In this chapter, an exploration of the perspective of a feminine earth is unpacked to reveal narrative attitudes that determine ethical praxis towards nature. A discourse about the earth as a goddess who is divine and therefore indestructible often masks exploitation and neglect towards the corporeal earth. Along with this, forms of extracting resources from the earth are justified by narratives that can be traced to the historical conceptualization of the earth and woman, both as mother and wife in Vedic and Puranic thought. In this chapter, I posit that an earth-centred ethics that can be conceptually derived from an idea of reverence needs to exclude this subtle imbalance by distinguishing between inauthentic reverence to a mother goddess and authentic care towards the earth as subject to temporal changes in her corporeal form as nature.
