Title : Subaltern Eco-Consciousness in the Poems of Mamang Dai: A Tribal Eco-Philosophical Perspective
Author: Dr. Rakesh Lecturer in Dept of English University: : Rani Channamma university, Karnataka
ISSN :
Volume: 01 Issue: 02
Publication Year: JULY 2026
ABSTRACT
This paper examines Mamang Dai's poetry as a major literary articulation of subaltern eco-consciousness grounded in the tribal eco-philosophical imagination of Arunachal Pradesh. The study argues that Dai's poems do not treat nature as a passive background for human emotions; rather, they present land, rivers, mountains, trees, animals, ancestors, and spirits as co-existing presences within a living moral order. From a literary research perspective, the paper reads selected poems such as "Small Towns and the River," "Other Lives," "Man and Brother," "The Face of the Tiger," "The Deification of Nature," "Be careful how you cut that tree," and "The Sorrow of Women" as poetic sites where ecological thought, indigenous memory, gendered suffering, oral tradition, and resistance to exploitative modernity meet. The central claim is that Dai's eco-consciousness is subaltern not merely because it comes from a historically marginalized region and community, but because it challenges the dominant anthropocentric, developmentalist, and colonial ways of reading nature. Her poetry creates a counter-discourse in which tribal knowledge becomes philosophy, landscape becomes archive, and ecological grief becomes ethical warning. The paper therefore situates Dai within Indian English literature, ecocriticism, subaltern studies, and indigenous literary aesthetics, while retaining the primacy of close textual analysis.
Keywords: Mamang Dai, subaltern eco-consciousness, tribal eco-philosophy, ecocriticism, Adi worldview, Arunachal Pradesh, Indian English poetry, indigenous literature.
Introduction
Mamang Dai occupies a significant place in contemporary Indian English literature because her writing brings the cultural, ecological, and philosophical world of Arunachal Pradesh into the field of modern literary consciousness. She writes from the North-East, a region often placed at the edge of the Indian national imagination, but her poems do not speak from a marginal aesthetic position. They speak with quiet authority. Her poetry turns rivers, mountains, forests, birds, insects, myths, rituals, and ancestors into active participants in a moral universe. In this sense, Dai is not only a poet of landscape but also a poet of ecological relationship. Her work compels readers to rethink the word "nature" itself. Nature in her poems is not scenery. It is kinship, memory, warning, nourishment, and spiritual inheritance. The title of this paper brings together three interrelated terms: subaltern, eco-consciousness, and tribal eco-philosophy. The term "subaltern" has entered literary and cultural criticism through the study of groups whose voices are excluded from dominant histories and official narratives. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous question, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" continues to mark the difficulty of recovering marginalized voices when the systems of representation are controlled by dominant institutions (Spivak 271). In Dai's poetry, however, the subaltern does not simply speak as a political victim. The subaltern speaks through landscape, ritual, myth, animal presence, and ecological memory. The voice is not always loud, argumentative, or manifesto-like. It is often quiet, lyrical, and indirect, but it is powerful because it refuses the modern separation between human beings and the more-than-human world. Eco-consciousness in Dai's poetry means an awakened awareness of the interdependence between human life and the physical environment. Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment (Glotfelty and Fromm xviii). Dai's poetry belongs to this field, but it also stretches it. Her work suggests that the ecological question is never only about trees, rivers, or animals in isolation. It is equally about language, culture, memory, myth, gender, history, and justice. Lawrence Buell's idea of environmental imagination is useful here because Dai repeatedly shows that a poem can register the physical world as an ethical presence rather than as a decorative setting (Buell 2). The ecological imagination in her poetry is therefore not imported from abstract theory; it is shaped by indigenous experiences of living with land. Tribal eco-philosophy, as used in this paper, refers to a worldview in which the human community is understood as part of a larger order of living relations. In the context of Dai's poetry, this worldview is associated with the Adi cultural imagination, oral narratives, belief in the sacredness of natural forces, and the perception of reciprocity between human and non-human beings. Dai's poems repeatedly suggest that land, water, birds, animals, and forests possess life, agency, and memory. The result is a poetic philosophy that opposes the modern idea of nature as raw material. Her poems argue, through image and rhythm rather than through direct theoretical declaration, that the earth cannot be reduced to property, resource, or developmental obstacle.
Subalternity, Region, and the Ecological Voice
A literary discussion of Mamang Dai must first recognize the significance of location. Arunachal Pradesh, like much of North-East India, has often been represented through external categories such as remoteness, borderland, insurgency, ethnicity, and exotic landscape. Such categories flatten the region into an object of administrative or touristic knowledge. Dai's poetry resists this flattening by producing an inside view of place. She does not present the land as a picturesque frontier to be consumed by the outside gaze. Instead, she writes the land as a living presence with its own memory, sorrow, and authority. The ecological voice in her poetry is therefore also a subaltern voice because it interrupts the language of the center.
Ranajit Guha's intervention in subaltern studies is useful because he shows that elite histories often silence the initiative and consciousness of marginalized communities (Guha 1). Dai's poems perform an alternative kind of history. They do not narrate political events in a conventional historical sequence. They preserve forms of cultural memory embedded in rituals, myths, rivers, oral stories, and everyday rural life. The poem becomes a site where the submerged memory of a community survives. This is particularly important because tribal communities are often misread as people without history, as if written archives alone determine historical existence. Dai's poetry quietly refutes this assumption. It shows that the land itself can be an archive, and that oral ecological memory is also a form of knowledge.
The subaltern dimension of Dai's eco-consciousness is not limited to human marginality. It extends to non-human beings that modern systems also silence. Animals, trees, rivers, stones, and mountains do not have access to institutional speech. Yet Dai's poems allow them to appear as meaningful presences. This is where subaltern studies and ecocriticism meet. The voiceless are not only oppressed human communities but also the damaged environments that sustain those communities. Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" helps us understand this aspect of Dai's work because ecological damage often unfolds gradually, invisibly, and unevenly across marginalized landscapes (Nixon 2). Dai's poems register this slow violence through anxious rivers, threatened animals, broken memory, and the fear of cultural erosion.
Tribal Eco-Philosophy and the Living Land
The most striking feature of Dai's poetry is her refusal to place human beings above the rest of existence. In "Other Lives," the land is described as a being with whom human beings share food, rice, water, salt, and weather (Dai, "Other Lives" 44). This statement is central to Dai's eco-philosophical imagination. The land is not a dead surface under human feet. It is a participant in life. The sharing of food, water, salt, and weather makes ecology intimate. It is not an abstract global crisis alone; it is the everyday grammar of survival. Such a vision overturns the modern developmental view that sees land primarily in terms of ownership, extraction, and profit.
This living-land philosophy is deeply connected with tribal cosmology. Dai's poetic world suggests that the human community is surrounded by visible and invisible presences. Spirits, ancestors, animals, rivers, and forests shape the moral life of the people. Such a worldview is often dismissed by modern rationalism as superstition, but Dai transforms it into poetic knowledge. In literary terms, her animistic imagination is not a primitive residue; it is an alternative philosophy of interdependence. The poem becomes a place where the world is not divided into subject and object. Human beings do not stand outside nature as observers. They exist within a web of reciprocal relation.
Arne Naess's deep ecology argues for the intrinsic value of all beings and rejects narrow human-centered thinking (Naess 95). Dai's poems reach a similar ethical position from a different cultural route. She does not need to formulate deep ecology as Western environmental philosophy. The poem itself shows that human life is meaningful only when it recognizes the life of rivers, trees, animals, and mountains. In "The Deification of Nature," the speaker asks what it means to believe that rocks and trees have life, and then links this belief to the impossibility of crushing mountains or tearing off green covering in the name of development (Dai, "Deification" 53). The poem is not merely nostalgic. It is a critique of a violent modernity that destroys sacred landscapes while calling that destruction progress.
Dai's tribal eco-philosophy also differs from romantic nature worship. Romantic poetry often idealizes nature as refuge from society. Dai's poems are more complex. Her landscape is beautiful, but it is not innocent or untouched. The land contains death, struggle, flood, hunger, fear, and memory. Human and non-human beings may compete for survival, yet they remain kin. This complexity gives Dai's ecological poetry its literary strength. She does not sentimentalize tribal life. Instead, she reveals an ethical order in which conflict does not cancel kinship. The ecological world is both brutal and compassionate, a world where survival must be governed by restraint and mutual regard.
River, Memory, and Ritual Permanence
The river is one of Dai's most important poetic figures. In "Small Towns and the River," the river is not merely a geographical feature but a philosophical presence. The poem's movement between life, death, ritual, and memory presents the river as both witness and participant. The line "Life and death, life and death, / only the rituals are permanent" captures the poem's understanding of impermanence and continuity (Dai, "Small Towns" 29). Human life passes, but ritual and river continue. This does not mean that human existence is insignificant. Rather, it means that individual life must be understood within larger cycles.
In Dai's poetic imagination, rivers carry more than water. They carry stories, ancestors, anxiety, and the pressure of change. The small town grows with anxiety for the future because the river is linked to both sustenance and uncertainty. The river nourishes, but it also floods. It connects, but it also separates. It is sacred, but it is vulnerable. Such ambivalence makes Dai's river poetry philosophically rich. The river becomes a figure for ecological interdependence and historical transition. It reminds the community that life is not secure when the rhythms of nature are disturbed.
From a subaltern perspective, the river also functions as a counter-archive. Official histories may ignore small towns, tribal communities, and local rituals, but the river remembers. The continuity of ritual gives the community a way of surviving historical erasure. Amitav Ghosh has argued that modern culture often fails to imagine the non-human forces that shape human history (Ghosh 9). Dai's poetry avoids this failure. Her poems place rivers, storms, animals, and mountains at the center of human destiny. In doing so, she reorders literary attention. The human story cannot be separated from the river's story.
The river in Dai's poetry also resists ownership. It cannot be fully controlled by political boundaries or economic plans. Its movement disrupts the arrogance of human mastery. This is significant in a tribal eco-philosophical reading because many indigenous worldviews understand rivers as sacred presences rather than as units of resource management. Dai's poetry brings this insight into English literary expression. The English language, often associated with colonial and administrative power, is reshaped to carry a tribal ecological sensibility. This linguistic transformation itself is a form of literary resistance.
Animal Kinship and the Ethics of Non-Human Life
Dai's treatment of animals is central to her subaltern eco-consciousness. In "Man and Brother," the relation between man and tiger is framed through kinship rather than domination. The tiger's cry, "Brother: Man, brother!" transforms the hunter's relationship to the prey (Dai, "Man and Brother" 49). The poem draws on the belief that man and tiger were born brothers, and this belief challenges the human habit of placing animals below human beings. The tiger is not simply a dangerous animal or a trophy of masculine bravery. It is a relative, a participant in a shared moral order.
This animal kinship is not a decorative myth. It creates an ethic. If the tiger is brother, killing the tiger becomes a moral crisis. The hunter cannot remain a detached master of the forest. He is forced to recognize that violence against the animal is also violence against kinship and community. Dai's poem therefore unsettles the anthropocentric hierarchy that places human desire above animal life. Cary Wolfe's work on animal studies is relevant here because he asks us to rethink the boundary through which humanism excludes non-human beings from ethical consideration (Wolfe xxiii). Dai's poetry achieves this rethinking through tribal narrative rather than academic theory.
The same ethical tension appears in "The Face of the Tiger." The poem stages a conflict between villagers and tiger, but it does not simplify the issue. The villagers see the tiger as a threat to cultivation and livestock, yet the poem asks why the tiger is moving into human territory and implicitly points toward habitat loss and dwindling prey (Dai, "Face" 48). The question shifts blame away from the animal and toward ecological disturbance caused by human expansion. The tiger becomes a sign of a damaged balance. The so-called wild animal enters the human field because human activity has entered and reduced the animal's world.
This is a crucial aspect of Dai's literary ecology. She recognizes that environmental conflict is often produced by the collapse of older systems of restraint. When forests shrink, animals and humans are forced into confrontation. Modern narratives usually present such conflict as an animal problem. Dai's poem presents it as an ethical and ecological problem. The tiger's face becomes the face of a violated environment. In this way, her poetry gives literary form to environmental justice for non-human beings. The animal is not voiceless in the poem; its presence itself becomes speech.
Tree, Forest, and the Critique of Development
In "Be careful how you cut that tree," Dai offers one of her clearest ecological warnings. The title itself is an instruction, a caution, and an ethical command. The poem imagines trees as more than timber. They are priestly and ancestral presences, guardians of a pre-human age. The act of cutting a tree is therefore not a neutral economic act. It disturbs cosmic and ecological balance. The poem suggests that even a single act of careless cutting can alter the path of sun, wind, and weather (Dai, "Be careful" 64). The exaggeration is poetic, but the philosophy is serious: the world is relational, and damage in one part of the web affects the whole.
This poetic warning directly challenges developmentalism. Developmentalism is not development itself, but the ideology that treats all landscapes as obstacles to economic growth. Dai's poetry does not reject change in a simplistic way. Rather, it questions a model of change that destroys the spiritual and ecological foundations of community life. Huggan and Tiffin argue that postcolonial ecocriticism must examine how environmental exploitation is linked with histories of imperialism, inequality, and cultural domination (Huggan and Tiffin 6). Dai's poetry fits this concern because it shows how the destruction of land is also the destruction of memory, ritual, language, and identity.
The forest in Dai's poetry is not empty wilderness. It is inhabited by stories, spirits, birds, animals, ancestors, and the unrecorded knowledge of generations. When the forest is damaged, more than biodiversity is lost. A way of seeing the world is also wounded. This is why Dai's ecological consciousness is subaltern: it defends forms of knowledge that modern institutions often ignore. The poem does not present the tribal community as voiceless or backward. It presents the community as possessing an ecological wisdom that the modern world urgently needs.
The critique of development in Dai's poetry is also a critique of language. Words such as progress, growth, modernization, and resource often hide violence. Dai's poems expose this concealment by restoring life to what such language objectifies. A tree becomes priest; land becomes being; tiger becomes brother; river becomes memory. These metaphors are not ornamental. They are acts of revaluation. They force the reader to see that modern language has reduced living presences into usable things. Dai's poetry restores the dignity of the more-than-human world.
Women, Survival, and Eco-Subaltern Experience
The subaltern eco-consciousness in Dai's poetry also includes the experience of women. "The Sorrow of Women" is important because it connects ecological hardship, social vulnerability, and the urgency of survival. The poem does not separate women's suffering from the conditions of land and community. Women carry memory, labor, hunger, displacement, and the burden of keeping life continuous under difficult conditions. The poem's reference to "urgency for survival" suggests that ecological crisis is lived most sharply by those whose daily lives depend directly on land, water, forest, and community stability (Dai, "Sorrow" 82).
Ecofeminist criticism is useful here, but Dai's poetry should not be forced into a ready-made theoretical formula. Vandana Shiva argues that women in many traditional societies possess ecological knowledge through their practical involvement in sustaining life (Shiva 38). Dai's women are not abstract symbols of nature. They are historical and cultural beings who endure hardship within a changing world. Their sorrow is not weakness. It is a form of witness. Through them, Dai registers how ecological destruction and social marginalization intersect.
The importance of women in Dai's poetry also lies in their connection to oral memory. Tribal cultures often preserve history through storytelling, songs, rituals, and embodied practices. Women participate in this preservation. In a literary sense, Dai's poems become an extension of such oral memory. They carry not only individual emotion but also collective remembrance. This is why the lyric voice in her work often feels personal and communal at the same time. The "I" of the poem is rarely isolated. It is inhabited by ancestors, landscapes, and shared histories.
This eco-subaltern experience complicates conventional ideas of political resistance. Dai's poetry does not always resist through direct protest. It resists through remembrance, tenderness, mourning, and attention. To remember a river, a tree, a tiger, or a woman burdened by survival is to resist the systems that erase them. The poem becomes an ethical archive. It preserves what power tries to make invisible. In this way, Dai's literary method is quiet but radical.
Myth, Oral Tradition, and Literary Form
Dai's poetry draws strength from myth and oral tradition. This does not mean that her poems merely reproduce folklore. Rather, they transform oral cultural material into modern English poetic form. The result is a distinctive literary voice that is both local and contemporary. Myths of origin, animal kinship, sacred landscape, and ancestral presence give her poems philosophical depth. They allow Dai to imagine ecological relations not as recent environmental concerns but as part of an older cultural knowledge.
The use of myth is central to the tribal eco-philosophical perspective because myth organizes the relationship between human beings and the cosmos. In many modern readings, myth is treated as fiction or fantasy. Dai's poetry asks us to read myth differently: as ecological memory, ethical instruction, and symbolic knowledge. The belief that man and tiger are brothers may not be a scientific statement, but it produces an ecological ethic more powerful than many scientific warnings. It teaches restraint, kinship, and humility. Literature is able to preserve this wisdom because poetic truth does not depend only on factual explanation.
Formally, Dai's poetry often uses quiet diction, sparse imagery, and meditative rhythm. Her poems do not usually announce their political meanings loudly. They create atmosphere, then allow meaning to rise from image and silence. This style suits her ecological philosophy. The world of the poem is not a place to be mastered quickly. It must be listened to. Silence, pause, and understatement become part of the ethical form. The reader is trained to slow down, to observe, and to recognize presences that a hurried modern mind might miss.
This formal quietness should not be mistaken for lack of resistance. In fact, Dai's restraint increases the force of her poetry. The poem resists the noise of modern extraction by cultivating attention. It resists colonial and metropolitan stereotypes by refusing spectacle. It resists environmental violence by making the reader feel the life of what is threatened. Dai's literary achievement lies in this fusion of form and philosophy. Tribal eco-consciousness is not only the theme of the poem; it shapes the way the poem speaks.
Conclusion
Mamang Dai's poems articulate a profound subaltern eco-consciousness rooted in tribal eco-philosophy. Her poetry reveals that ecological awareness is not merely a modern academic concept but a lived cultural inheritance among indigenous communities. Through rivers, mountains, trees, animals, women, rituals, and myths, Dai constructs a poetic world in which all beings are connected. The human is not the ruler of nature but a participant in a larger web of life. This worldview challenges anthropocentrism, developmental arrogance, and the erasure of tribal knowledge.
The study has shown that Dai's poetry is subaltern in multiple senses. It emerges from a marginalized region and community; it voices ecological and cultural experiences often absent from mainstream literary narratives; and it extends ethical attention to non-human beings that modern systems silence. Her poems transform the land into archive, animals into kin, trees into sacred witnesses, women into bearers of survival, and myth into ecological philosophy. This transformation is achieved not through theoretical exposition but through the resources of poetry: image, silence, rhythm, memory, and metaphor.
Dai's literary importance lies precisely in this fusion of ecological and cultural consciousness. She does not write nature poetry in a decorative sense. She writes ecological poetry as a form of ethical remembrance. Her work teaches that environmental crisis is also a crisis of imagination, language, and relation. To read Dai is to enter a poetic world where the river remembers, the tiger speaks as brother, the tree commands caution, and the land lives as a being. Such poetry matters today because it offers not only ecological warning but also an alternative way of knowing the earth.
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