Narrating the Sacred Landscape: Indian Knowledge System (IKS) and Ecological Consciousness in Tribal Literature

Abstract

Indian tribal, or Adivasi, communities have long intimately related to land, forest, and river not as inert resources but as kin, ancestor, and deity — a relational ontology that recent policy discourse has begun to name, institutionally, as part of “Indian Knowledge System” (IKS). This article examines how literature about and by India’s tribal communities narrates this sacred landscape, and argues that such narration constitutes a form of ecological knowledge-production in its own right rather than merely a literary theme. Drawing on the ethnographic record established by Verrier Elwin, the environmental history of Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, and the theoretical vocabulary of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) developed by Fikret Berkes, the article reads sacred-grove cosmology, totemic kinship, and animist land-relation as structuring devices in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha (1987), Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015), and Jacinta Kerketta’s poetry. It further situates G. N. Devy’s anthological and institutional labour — Painted Words and the Adivasi Academy — as an act of epistemic recovery that positions tribal orality itself as an Indian knowledge system. The article concludes that tribal literature functions as a counter-archive to developmental modernity, encoding ecological consciousness not as a borrowed Western category but as an indigenous, place-based epistemology under active erasure and equally active reassertion.