1Assistant Professor, J.S. (P.G.) College, Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, India.
2 Assistant Professor, Govt. College for Women, Karnal, Haryana, India.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v3n1/v3n101
[Article History: Received: 12 April 2026. Accepted: 12 August 2026. Published: 02 September 2026]
Abstract
In indigenous literary production in India, the land figure more often than not as a site of kinship, memory, labour, ritual, and ecological knowledge, not as an external property. This article explores how that relation gets disturbed when extractive development and environmental degradation, coupled with colonial intrusion, are at work in some of the major works of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao, and Easterine Kire. The study adopts a text-centred close reading approach to respond to the common perception of such writing as evidence of a pre-determined theory. It considers diction, repetition, voice, lineation, sensory imagery, and the interruption of the narrative in Shekhar’s short story “The Adivasi Will Not Dance,” Dai’s poem “Small Towns and the River,” Ao’s poems “The Old Story-Teller” and “Lament for an Earth,” and Kire’s historical novel Sky Is My Father. The analysis reveals four types of literary expressions of displacement: extractive contamination, anticipatory ecological grief, linguistic alienation of more-than-human kin, and colonial disruption of the village time and ritual authority. These texts are not merely lamentations about a lost territory. They reveal the ways in which bodies, speech, ceremony, gender relations, and collective memory are damaged, and they allow for refusal and storytelling to be possible. The argument is that the narrative of literature cannot be used to stand in place of ethnographic or policy evidence, but that it can capture aspects of the loss that are often reduced to administrative categories. Together, these texts provide a nuanced description of the nature of belonging to an ecosystem and provide insight into why the place-naming, oral memory, ritual calendar, sensory environment, and community interpretation of place should all be taken into account in culturally based impact assessment.
Keywords: Adivasi literature; Indigenous ecocriticism; displacement; environmental memory; oral tradition; extractivism
