Title : A Comparative Critique of Eco-Philosophical Aspects in the Poetry of Mamang Dai and Rabindranath Tagore: A Theoretical Reflection
Author: Dr. Rakesh Lecturer in Dept of English University: : Rani Channamma university, Karnataka
ISSN :
Volume: 01 Issue: 01
Publication Year: June 2026
ABSTRACT
This research paper undertakes a comparative literary and ecocritical study of the poetry of Mamang Dai and Rabindranath Tagore by examining the eco-philosophical foundations that organize their poetic imagination. The study argues that Tagore and Dai are not merely nature poets in the decorative or romantic sense; both writers transform nature into a philosophical, cultural, and ethical category through which the human position in the universe is reimagined. Tagore's ecological vision emerges from the Upanishadic, Vedantic, and humanistic traditions of Bengal, where nature becomes the medium through which the individual self encounters the universal spirit. Dai's ecological imagination, by contrast, grows from the indigenous and animistic worldview of the Adi community of Arunachal Pradesh, where mountains, rivers, trees, animals, ancestors, and human beings share a living network of memory and reciprocity. The paper follows a purely literary research method based on close reading, comparative interpretation, and theoretical reflection. It employs ecocriticism, Deep Ecology, postcolonial environmentalism, and indigenous ecological thought as critical frames. Through selected poems and prose references, the study shows that both Tagore and Dai reject anthropocentric modernity and criticize the mechanistic exploitation of nature. Yet their eco-philosophies differ in tone and ground: Tagore's is cosmic, lyrical, pedagogical, and transcendental, whereas Dai's is local, tribal, historical, and resistant. The paper concludes that a comparative reading of Tagore and Dai broadens Indian ecocritical discourse by revealing how different cultural locations produce different but mutually illuminating modes of ecological consciousness.
Keywords: Mamang Dai, Rabindranath Tagore, eco-philosophy, ecocriticism, Deep Ecology, indigenous animism, Vedantic pantheism, Indian English poetry, tribal memory.
Introduction: Locating the Study in Literary Ecocriticism
In the age of climate crisis, environmental degradation, displacement, and ecological anxiety, literature has become one of the most significant spaces for rethinking the relation between human beings and the non-human world. Ecocriticism offers a theoretical vocabulary to examine this relation because it studies the interaction between literary imagination and physical environment. Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii). This definition is useful because it shifts literary criticism away from a purely human-centered model and asks how land, water, forests, animals, weather, seasons, and ecological memory shape literary meaning.
However, Indian eco-literature cannot be understood only through the dominant Western model of wilderness, pastoral retreat, or romantic solitude. Indian ecological consciousness has historically been formed through multiple sources: Vedic and Upanishadic ideas of cosmic unity, Buddhist and Jain ethics of compassion, Bhakti traditions of sacred intimacy, agrarian practices, river cultures, and the oral knowledge systems of indigenous communities. The ecological imagination in India is therefore plural and layered. It is at once spiritual, ethical, cultural, political, and regional. A comparative study of Rabindranath Tagore and Mamang Dai becomes important precisely because both writers belong to this broad Indian ecological tradition, yet they speak from strikingly different historical locations and philosophical foundations.
Rabindranath Tagore, writing from colonial Bengal and the intellectual atmosphere of the Bengal Renaissance, develops an ecological vision grounded in harmony, freedom, beauty, and spiritual unity. His poetry repeatedly presents nature not as dead matter but as a living companion of the human soul. His songs, poems, essays, and plays imagine a universe in which the human self expands through sympathy with the world. Mamang Dai, a contemporary poet from Arunachal Pradesh, writes from a postcolonial and indigenous location marked by tribal memory, oral tradition, ecological vulnerability, and the anxiety of cultural erasure. Her poems do not treat nature as an abstract symbol of universal harmony alone. For Dai, the mountain, the river, the forest, the tiger, and the ancestral world are living presences that sustain the identity of the Adi people.
This paper therefore examines the eco-philosophical aspects in the poetry of Mamang Dai and Rabindranath Tagore through a comparative literary method. The word "eco-philosophical" is used here to indicate more than environmental description. It refers to a system of values, beliefs, perceptions, and ethical insights through which a poet imagines the meaning of nature and the place of the human being within it. The central argument of this paper is that Tagore and Dai both resist the anthropocentric division between man and nature, but they do so through different cultural grammars. Tagore moves toward a universal spiritual ecology; Dai moves toward an indigenous ecology of memory, kinship, and territorial belonging.
Theoretical Framework: Ecocriticism, Deep Ecology, and Indigenous Thought
The theoretical structure of this paper is based on four related but distinct critical frameworks: ecocriticism, Deep Ecology, postcolonial environmentalism, and indigenous ecological thought. Lawrence Buell argues that an environmentally oriented literary work must suggest that "human history is implicated in natural history" (7). This principle is central to both Tagore and Dai. In Tagore, human history is placed inside the larger rhythm of cosmic life; in Dai, the history of the tribe is inseparable from the history of the land. In both cases, nature is not a passive setting. It participates in the formation of selfhood, culture, and memory.
Arne Naess's concept of Deep Ecology is also useful for this study. Deep Ecology rejects the view that nature has value only because it serves human needs. Instead, it insists on the intrinsic value of all beings and encourages a radical expansion of the self beyond narrow human ego (Naess 95). Tagore's poetry often anticipates such an idea through its vision of the shared stream of life. Dai's poetry embodies it through animistic kinship and the recognition that rivers, mountains, and animals possess agency and dignity. The difference is that Tagore's Deep Ecology is spiritual and universal, while Dai's is tribal, embodied, and place-specific.
Indigenous ecological thought is especially necessary for reading Mamang Dai. Joni Adamson observes that Native and indigenous literatures often represent the land as a storied space where ecology, memory, and identity are deeply interwoven (14). Dai's poetry is a powerful Indian example of such a tradition. Her Arunachal landscape is not scenery; it is a living archive. The hills store the memory of ancestors, the rivers carry the voices of the dead, and the forests contain the myths that organize community life. Val Plumwood's critique of the human/nature dualism is also helpful because Dai's poetry refuses to treat nature as a mute object; it imagines the non-human world as a speaking subject (Plumwood 17).
Vedantic Pantheism in Tagore's Eco-Philosophy
Tagore's ecological imagination is rooted in a philosophical vision that may be described as Vedantic, pantheistic, and humanistic. In Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, Tagore repeatedly argues that the highest purpose of human life is not domination over the world but union with it through sympathy. He writes that the human being realizes the self by an "expansion of sympathy" into the surrounding universe (Tagore, Sadhana 5). This idea is fundamental to Tagore's eco-philosophy. Nature is not an external object to be measured, owned, or consumed. It is the larger field of life within which the self becomes complete.
Tagore's concept of nature grows from the Upanishadic belief that the same spiritual essence pervades all existence. In this view, the difference between the human and the non-human is not absolute. The trees, river, wind, birds, stars, and human beings are different manifestations of the same universal life. This explains why Tagore's poetry rarely treats nature as mere background. Nature often acts as teacher, messenger, companion, mother, beloved, and divine presence. The sunrise, the monsoon, the boat, the flower, and the river become poetic signs through which the human soul encounters the infinite.
In Gitanjali, Tagore gives one of the most powerful literary expressions of this ecological unity. He writes:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. (Tagore, Gitanjali 53)
This passage shows that Tagore's ecological consciousness is based on shared life. The same energy moves through the human body and the natural world. The "stream of life" does not privilege the human vein over the grass or flowers. It produces a non-hierarchical vision of existence in which human life becomes one movement in a vast cosmic rhythm. This is why Tagore's poems can be read as early literary articulations of Deep Ecology. They do not merely praise nature; they dissolve the hard boundary between human and non-human life.
Indigenous Animism and Tribal Eco-Consciousness in Mamang Dai
Mamang Dai's eco-philosophy emerges from a very different source. While Tagore's ecological imagination is shaped by Vedantic unity and universal humanism, Dai's is formed by the animistic and oral traditions of the Adi community of Arunachal Pradesh. Her poetry belongs to a world in which rivers, mountains, forests, stones, animals, and ancestral spirits are active presences. Nature is not a symbol pointing beyond itself; it is itself a living, sacred, and historical reality.
Dai's tribal eco-consciousness is deeply connected with the idea that land and identity cannot be separated. The land does not merely support the community materially; it holds the memory of origin, ritual, grief, and survival. In this sense, her poetry gives literary form to what indigenous ecocriticism calls a storied landscape. The landscape speaks because it has been inhabited, named, feared, loved, and remembered through generations. Dai's ecological images are therefore also cultural images. A mountain is not only a mountain; it is an ancestor, a witness, a keeper of memory. A river is not only water; it is a god, a spirit, a wound, and a path of continuity.
In "The Voice of the Mountain," Dai allows the mountain itself to speak. The mountain says, "I am the place where memory escapes / the myth of time, / I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain" (Dai, River Poems 12). These lines are central to Dai's eco-philosophy because they reverse the ordinary human-centered gaze. The human poet does not simply observe the mountain; the mountain becomes the speaking subject. It possesses memory and mind. This personification is not merely a poetic ornament. It grows out of an animistic worldview in which the non-human world is spiritually alive.
Dai's poems also reveal an ecological ethics of kinship. In the Adi worldview, human beings are not masters of nature but relatives within a larger web of life. Her poems on rivers, forests, animals, and tribal myths repeatedly show that the well-being of the people depends on the well-being of the environment. This is especially visible in the way Dai writes about animals. The tiger is not only a dangerous creature; it is a brother, a member of the moral community. Such a worldview challenges the modern habit of reducing animals to resources, threats, or spectacles. It restores an older ethical relation based on reciprocity and caution.
Thus Dai's eco-philosophy is more terrestrial than transcendental. She does not dissolve the world into a universal spiritual abstraction. She keeps the reader close to the physical land: the steep hills, heavy rain, turbulent rivers, deep forests, and fragile towns. Her poems insist that ecological destruction is not only environmental loss but cultural loss. To lose the forest is to lose stories; to damage the river is to damage memory; to silence the land is to silence the tribe.
The Forest: Tagore's Tapovan and Dai's Sacred Archive
The forest is one of the most important spaces in the eco-philosophical imagination of both Tagore and Dai. Yet the meaning of the forest differs sharply in their works. For Tagore, the forest is associated with the ancient Indian idea of Tapovan, the forest hermitage where learning, contemplation, and spiritual harmony unfold. He contrasts this forest civilization with the modern city, which often produces alienation, greed, and mechanical living. In Tagore's thought, the forest is not wild chaos. It is a space of spiritual discipline and aesthetic education.
Tagore's experiment at Santiniketan gives practical form to this idea. Education under the open sky, beneath trees, and in touch with seasonal change was not merely an institutional choice; it was an enactment of his eco-philosophy. He believed that a child separated from nature would become spiritually impoverished. The forest and the open landscape teach humility, wonder, rhythm, and freedom. Thus the Tagorean forest is pedagogical. It trains the human mind to feel its relation with the universe.
In his poetry, this forest consciousness produces an atmosphere of lyric communion. Trees, birds, flowers, and wind participate in the speaker's inner life. They are not inert objects but companions in the journey of self-realization. Tagore's forest is therefore a spiritual classroom. It is a place where the human being learns to overcome ego and to enter the rhythm of cosmic life.
Dai's forest, however, is not primarily pedagogical in this Tagorean sense. It is a sacred archive of tribal memory. It holds myths of origin, burial memories, ancestral presences, animal kinship, and the signs through which the community reads the world. The forest is not a calm retreat for the cultivated mind but a rugged, unpredictable, and living presence. It can protect, punish, feed, frighten, and remember.
The River: Cosmic Flow and Tribal Lifeblood
The river is another central motif through which Tagore and Dai develop their eco-philosophical visions. In Tagore, the river is usually connected with time, movement, music, memory, and the soul's journey toward the infinite. His experience of the Padma in Bengal shaped his poetic imagination in profound ways. In Glimpses of Bengal, he repeatedly observes the river as a living companion that opens the mind toward vastness. The river is wide, reflective, and philosophical. It carries boats, songs, clouds, human longing, and the sense of transience.
Tagore's river often moves between the personal and the cosmic. It reflects the rhythm of life and death, separation and union, departure and return. Even when it is destructive in the monsoon, its violence is often absorbed into a larger metaphysical pattern of creation and dissolution. The river becomes a metaphor for the movement of the soul and for the continuity of existence. It does not simply belong to geography; it belongs to cosmic rhythm.
Dai's river, by contrast, is far more immediate, local, bodily, and dangerous. The rivers of Arunachal Pradesh are not merely meditative symbols; they are living forces that decide the material fate of communities. In her poetry, the river is associated with blood, fear, death, fertility, ancestral passage, and survival. In one of her sharp images, she writes, "In the summer / the river is a rush of blood" (Dai, River Poems 16). The metaphor is not gentle or romantic. It is somatic and forceful. The river is alive like a body, and its life can be violent.
In "Small Towns and the River," Dai writes that "the river has a soul" (Dai, River Poems 15). The line must be understood through an animistic literary logic. It does not merely personify the river for poetic beauty. It affirms a worldview in which the river is a subject, a spiritual entity, and a keeper of time. The river knows birth and death; it receives the dead; it carries memory beyond human speech. In this sense, Dai's river is a historian. It bears the traces of tribal life and the grief of ecological change.
The comparison reveals a major distinction. Tagore's river is cosmic flow; Dai's river is tribal lifeblood. Tagore's river teaches the human soul to recognize eternity; Dai's river teaches the community to remember mortality, territory, and interdependence. Both rivers are spiritual, but their spiritualities are different. Tagore's is expansive and universal; Dai's is embodied and local.
Deep Ecology and the Rejection of Anthropocentrism
Both Tagore and Dai reject anthropocentrism, though they do so through different poetic strategies. Anthropocentrism assumes that human beings are the central measure of value and that the non-human world exists primarily for human use. Both poets challenge this assumption by imagining human beings as participants in a wider ecological order.
Tagore's rejection of anthropocentrism is grounded in the idea of shared life. In Gitanjali, the same life-force flows through the human body and the natural world. This idea expands the self beyond ego. The self is not isolated; it is continuous with leaves, flowers, dust, light, and the cosmic rhythm. Such a vision does not permit the exploitation of nature because to injure nature is to injure the larger life in which the self participates. Tagore's ecological ethics is therefore based on reverence, sympathy, and spiritual identification.
Dai's rejection of anthropocentrism is based on kinship and reciprocity. The non-human world in her poetry is not subordinated to human desire. Mountains speak, rivers remember, tigers call human beings brothers, and forests hold ancestral knowledge. The human being is one life among many. This view is close to Deep Ecology, but it is not an abstract philosophy imported from outside. It is embedded in tribal cosmology and oral memory. Dai's poetry demonstrates that indigenous traditions have long contained forms of ecological wisdom that modern theory later names and systematizes.
Thus, while Tagore asks human beings to recognize the divine life in nature, Dai asks them to recognize the personhood and memory of the non-human world. Tagore's ecological ethics is based on universal sympathy; Dai's is based on ancestral obligation. Both reject domination, but their foundations are different.
Eco-Anxiety and the Critique of Mechanistic Modernity
A strong critique of modernity runs through both Tagore and Dai. Tagore was deeply aware that modern industrial civilization could produce spiritual emptiness and ecological violence. His criticism is not anti-modern in a simplistic sense; he does not reject all change or all technology. Rather, he rejects a mechanical civilization that separates human beings from nature, reduces life to utility, and treats the earth as a storehouse of profit. In Red Oleanders, Tagore dramatizes the dehumanizing force of greed, machinery, and extractive power (Tagore, Red Oleanders 42). The underground world of mining becomes a symbolic space where both nature and human freedom are imprisoned.
Dai's eco-anxiety is more directly connected with the historical experience of Northeast India. Her poetry emerges from a landscape vulnerable to deforestation, road expansion, militarization, dams, migration, and the pressure of development. In her poems, modernity often appears not as a grand philosophical machine but as a slow erasure of old names, old paths, old songs, and old ecological relations. The anxiety is cultural as well as environmental. When the land changes too rapidly, the community loses its memory. Ramachandra Guha's notion of the "environmentalism of the poor" is helpful here because it reminds us that for many marginalized communities environmental protection is not a matter of leisure or aesthetic taste but a struggle for livelihood, identity, and survival (21). Dai's ecological consciousness belongs to this tradition. Her poems do not romanticize poverty or tribal life; they reveal the pressure placed on communities whose worlds are tied to fragile ecological systems. For such communities, the destruction of a forest or river is not an isolated environmental event. It is a crisis of culture, economy, spirituality, and memory. This is another major point of comparison. Tagore critiques modernity as a spiritual and civilizational problem. Dai critiques it as a localized postcolonial and indigenous crisis. Tagore warns that mechanistic civilization will damage the human soul; Dai shows how development can damage the living body of a tribal world.
Comparative Synthesis: Convergence and Divergence
The comparison between Tagore and Dai reveals several important convergences. First, both poets reject the idea that nature is merely an object for human use. Second, both writers treat the non-human world as living and meaningful. Third, both criticize forms of modernity that reduce life to utility, profit, and mechanical control. Fourth, both use poetry as a means of ecological re-education. Their poems train the reader to see the world differently: not as dead matter, but as life, relation, and value.
Yet the differences are equally important. Tagore's eco-philosophy is universalist and transcendental. It grows from the Vedantic intuition of unity and from a humanistic faith in harmony. He sees nature as a path toward the infinite and as a teacher of freedom. Dai's eco-philosophy is indigenous and animistic. It grows from tribal memory, oral tradition, and the lived reality of the Eastern Himalayas. She sees nature as kin, archive, and territory.
Tagore's ecological imagination is often luminous, musical, and expansive. Dai's is often rugged, haunted, and resistant. Tagore's river flows toward eternity; Dai's river rushes like blood. Tagore's forest teaches the soul; Dai's forest remembers the ancestors. Tagore's ecological crisis is the crisis of mechanistic civilization; Dai's ecological crisis is the crisis of indigenous survival. These differences do not weaken the comparison; they deepen it. They show that ecological consciousness is not a single universal formula but a set of culturally situated ways of knowing and valuing the earth.
From a literary perspective, both poets extend the function of poetry. Poetry is not merely emotional expression; it becomes a form of ecological philosophy. Tagore uses lyricism to reveal cosmic unity. Dai uses image, myth, and voice to preserve indigenous relationality. Both offer alternatives to the modern alienation of human beings from the natural world. Their poems ask readers to recover humility, attention, gratitude, and responsibility.
Conclusion
This comparative critique has attempted to show that the eco-philosophical aspects in the poetry of Mamang Dai and Rabindranath Tagore are both deeply connected and profoundly different. Both writers dismantle the anthropocentric assumption that human beings stand above the rest of creation. Both imagine nature as alive, meaningful, and ethically significant. Both offer literary resistance to the violence of mechanistic modernity and the exploitation of the non-human world.
At the same time, the philosophical grounds of their ecological visions differ. Tagore's eco-philosophy is shaped by Vedantic pantheism, Upanishadic non-dualism, and a universal humanist search for harmony. In his poetry, nature becomes a spiritual companion, a cosmic teacher, and the visible form of the infinite. His ecological imagination expands the self toward the world and teaches that freedom lies in sympathetic union with life.
Mamang Dai's eco-philosophy is rooted in indigenous animism, tribal memory, and the lived geography of Arunachal Pradesh. In her poetry, nature is not simply a path to transcendence; it is a living presence in itself. The river has a soul, the mountain has memory, the forest preserves the ancestors, and animals belong to the moral universe of kinship. Dai's ecological consciousness is therefore a form of cultural resistance. It protects the stories, beliefs, and relationships that sustain a tribal world threatened by modern erasure.
The significance of reading Tagore and Dai together lies in the expansion of Indian ecocriticism. Their works prove that Indian ecological thought is not monolithic. It contains the cosmic and the local, the Vedantic and the animistic, the universal and the indigenous, the philosophical and the historical. Tagore offers an eco-philosophy of divine harmony; Dai offers an eco-philosophy of ancestral survival. Together, they provide a powerful literary framework for reimagining the human place in the fragile web of planetary life.
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