Subaltern Eco-Consciousness in the Poems of Mamang Dai: A Tribal Eco-Philosophical Perspective
Abstract
The 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 Tiger," "The Deification of Nature," "," 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, Man and Brother.
