Indigenous cultures and the ecology of protest: moral economy and “knowing subalternity” in Dalit and Tribal writing from India

Through a reading of two Dalit texts, Bama’s testimonio entitled Karukku and Baby Kamble’s life writing The Prisons We Broke, and tribal eco-activist C. K. Janu’s unfinished autobiography Mother Forest, this article examines the ecology of protest in postcolonial India. It argues that the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies of these texts propose what E. P. Thompson terms a “moral economy” that constitutes, in these cases, a critique of existing socio-economic conditions (which amount to an immoral economy). These strategies also construct a model of the subaltern as a “knowing subaltern”: one who demonstrates historical consciousness, political awareness, advocacy and self-reflexivity. The article analyses the principal rhetorics in this discourse of eco-protest in writings from marginalized communities: those of suffering, fear and loss, labour and community.