Land, Labour, and Loss: Ecocritical Perspectives in Mahasweta Devi's Subaltern Narratives

This paper offers an ecocritical reading of Mahasweta Devi's subaltern fiction, with sustained attention to her major works Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084), Aranyer Adhikar (The Rights of the Forest), Draupadi, and Bagh (Tiger), as translated into English. Drawing upon the theoretical intersections of ecocriticism, subaltern studies, and postcolonial environmental humanities, the paper argues that Devi's writing establishes an inseparable and mutually reinforcing relationship between the exploitation of the land and the exploitation of the labouring poor — particularly adivasi and tribal communities whose identities, livelihoods, and cultural memories are rooted in specific ecological territories. The paper contends that in Devi's narratives, the loss of land is never merely economic but always existential: when the forest is stolen, the community is unmade. When the earth is exhausted by bonded labour, the human being is simultaneously exhausted. Through close textual analysis, the paper traces how Devi constructs nature not as a passive backdrop but as an active witness and co-sufferer in the long history of colonial and postcolonial dispossession endured by India's most marginalised peoples. The study further draws on Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence and Ramachandra Guha's ecological history of India to situate Devi's fiction within the broader discourse of environmental justice and subaltern ecology. The paper concludes that Devi's subaltern narratives constitute an indispensable body of ecological literature — one that demands to be read not only as social protest but as a profound meditation on the interdependence of human and non-human life.