Ecocriticism in the Novels of Gopinath Mohanty: Indigenous Worldviews and Environmental Consciousness

Abstract

Gopinath Mohanty (1914–1991), one of India’s most significant novelists of the twentieth century and a Janpith awardee, produced a substantial body of work documenting the lives, cultures, and ecological relationships of Odisha's tribal communities. This paper examines Mohanty's novels—particularly Paraja (1945), The Ancestor (1944), and Amrutara Santana (1947)—through an ecocritical lens, exploring how his literary corpus voices indigenous environmental worldviews and critiques the ecological destruction wrought by colonial and postcolonial modernity. Drawing on foundational ecocritical concepts such as bioregionalism, topophilia, and ecofear, this analysis demonstrates that Mohanty's novels function as what ecocritic Lawrence Buell terms “environmental texts”—works that represent the nonhuman environment as an active presence rather than mere backdrop. Mohanty's fiction illuminates the symbiotic relationship between tribal communities and their natural surroundings, the epistemological foundations of indigenous ecological knowledge, and the devastating consequences of development paradigms that sever these primordial connections. This paper argues that Mohanty's novels constitute a prescient ecological critique that anticipates contemporary environmental humanities discourses while offering valuable insights for understanding indigenous environmental justice in the twenty-first century.