Introduction
Is there a possibility of something as intractable as a literary text becoming a mode of ecological apprenticeship? Is there a possibility where narrative can open up new avenues of looking at planetary dwelling? Is there a possibility of fiction pulling us out of our deep anthropocentric slumber, our state of epistemological ignorance? And is there a possibility that all these possibilities can lead us to a renewed conception of the forest not as resource-base to be managed and exploited but as pedagogue, as curriculum, as living intelligence? Our paper looks patiently for such possibilities, which can enable us to see the literary text with a difference. We are committed to unearthing the “other” possibilities of narrative pedagogy without denying its (quite natural) association with aesthetics, pleasure, representation and the autonomy of literary form.
Ecopedagogy, as Greg Misiaszek argues, widens Paulo Freire’s foundational literacy, his well-known formulation of “reading the word to read the world,” to encompass something more radical: the practice of reading Earth as part of the world, an ecopedagogical literacy that is “not anthropocentric” but planetarily situated, attuning the learner to the inseparability of social violence and environmental violence (Misiaszek, Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2297). Such a widening constitutes more than a methodological expansion. It signals an ontological re-orientation in which the human subject is de-centred without being erased, and in which learning itself ceases to be the imposition of an external schema and becomes, rather, a mode of ecological participation, a lived praxis of dwelling-with. When read through this ecopedagogical perspective, Mahasweta Devi’s The Book of the Hunter constitutes a pedagogical text whose representation of Indigenous life performs the education it imagines. The Shabars’ forest-dwelling cosmology, their rituals of reciprocity and restraint, their collective refusal of excess, are no mere ethnographic curiosities to be catalogued in the archive of world literature. They are living curricula through which planetary justice is learned, practiced and transmitted across generations. Misiaszek’s insistence that ecopedagogy must attend to the ways in which environmental pedagogies, without the reinvention of teaching for social and environmental justice, merely reproduce the ideological distancing between humans and Earth provides a critical warning against readings that would aestheticize the Shabars’ ecological worldview without attending to the structural violence that threatens it (Misiaszek, Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2299). The Shabars’ knowledge is a living practice whose survival depends on the material conditions from which it materialises and to which it returns: the forest, the water and the soil.
The concept of planetary justice, although it continues to develop as a comprehensive theoretical framework, gained prominence through a special issue of Earth System Governance (Reference Biermann and Kalfagianni2020). This collection systematically embeds planetary justice within the broader discourse on earth system transformation and governance and foregrounds the need for equitable frameworks to address global ecological and social challenges (Biermann et al., Reference Biermann, Dirth and Kalfagianni2020, p. 6). The discourse has intensified, reflecting a shift toward integrative frameworks that foreground multi-scalar inclusivity, social, ecological, spatial and temporal, within just transition paradigms (Stevis et al., Reference Stevis, Morena, Krause, Morena, Krause and Stevis2020). Rather than confining itself to normative abstractions, recent interventions foreground the imperative of redistributive and recognitional justice, particularly for structurally disadvantaged populations (Kashwan et al., Reference Kashwan, Biermann, Gupta and Okereke2020). The entanglement of environmental precarity, socio-economic marginality and epistemic inequality has positioned planetary justice as a critical site for rethinking the ethics of Earth system governance (Dirth et al., Reference Dirth, Biermann and Kalfagianni2020). The colonial residues of ecological extraction underscore the North-South divide, where the global North’s historic accumulation is inseparable from systemic dispossession elsewhere (Biermann & Kalfagianni, Reference Biermann and Kalfagianni2020). Addressing this requires a paradigmatic reconfiguration, one that displaces anthropocentric dualisms and reimagines planetary relationality beyond issue-contingent modalities (Biermann, Reference Biermann2021).
Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s abyssal line theory (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 250) makes this more prominent. According to Santos this is line “separating the civilized, metropolitan way of doing social relations and the violent, colonial way of doing social relations” (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 251). The very architecture of modern Western thought, he argues, produces a fundamental invisibility, an “abyssal” division between those whose knowledge counts and those whose knowledge is rendered non-existent. The Shabars, as a community historically classified under the Criminal Tribes Act and systematically dispossessed of their forest homeland, inhabit this zone of non-existence. Their ecological knowledge, which this article reads as a form of ecopedagogical praxis, does not merely lack recognition within dominant frameworks; it is ontologically excluded from the category of knowledge itself. Any engagement with planetary justice that fails to address this abyssal exclusion risks reproducing the very epistemic violence it claims to contest.Footnote 1
Yet planetary justice, as a concept, remains incomplete without the pedagogical question: how is such justice learned, internalized and enacted? It is here that this article proposes a synthesis of three complementary frameworks. Ecopedagogy (Gaard, Reference Gaard2008; Kahn, Reference Kahn2008; Misiaszek, Reference Misiaszek2022) provides the critical literacy tools for “reading Earth,” for understanding how language, narrative, and education either sustain or disrupt anthropocentric dominance. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw’s common-worlds pedagogies (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Kummen, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen2016, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013) reconceptualize learning as that which appears within the frictions of multispecies encounter, in contested, entangled, historically scarred environments. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “land as pedagogy” (Reference Simpson2014) insists that knowledge is Indigenous only when it comes through the land, staged in an Indigenous context by means of Indigenous processes. Undergirding all three is Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s theory of the abyssal line (Reference de Sousa Santos2017), which reveals how modern Western epistemology renders entire knowledge systems invisible, consigning them to what Santos calls the “colonial side” of the line where they are treated as non-existent.
Devi’s The Book of the Hunter exemplifies these principles by foregrounding the Shabar community’s intimate connection to the forest, which they revere as both sustainer and deity. Their ecological ethos, rooted in practices of sustainable living and reverence for all forms of life, challenges dominant anthropocentric paradigms and offers a poignant counter-narrative to the exploitative systems of development. Through Shabars’ worldview, the novel interrogates the historical and continuous marginalization of indigenous communities, whose sustainable practices clash with the imperatives of modern industrial expansion. In so doing, the novel decolonizes the very concept of justice, expanding it beyond human-centric concerns to include the legitimacy of non-human entities and ecosystems.
What makes the convergence of these frameworks particularly productive for reading Devi is their shared insistence on the situatedness of knowledge. Ecopedagogy refuses the abstraction of environmental education from the material conditions of ecological violence. Common-worlds learning insists that pedagogy surfaces from within the messy cohabitations of particular places. Land as pedagogy grounds all knowledge in the intelligence of specific territories. Together, they offer a reading practice that is simultaneously critical and embodied, theoretically rigorous and affectively engaged, not so holy a triad. The Shabars’ forest constitutes a storied and place-specific lifeworld irreducible to environmentalist abstractions of “nature” : Ararha, Bijuban, Abhayagadh. In this world every rivulet, every species, every seasonal rhythm carries some epistemological weight. Misiaszek’s crucial distinction between “Development” (with a capital D, signifying the hegemonic, growth-oriented paradigm) and “development” (as genuine human flourishing within ecological limits) finds a narrative embodiment in the tension between the town of Ararha’s expansion and the forest’s contraction, between a modernity that measures progress in bricks and boundaries and an Indigenous cosmology that measures it in the renewal of relation (Misiaszek, Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2301).
This paper argues that Devi’s forest-centred narrative orchestrates planetary justice through ecopedagogical praxis, a curriculum of limits in which planetary boundaries are experienced as moral and affective thresholds internal to life’s own rhythms. The article proceeds through five interconnected movements: first, it foregrounds planetary justice through the novel’s triadic intertextual structure, reading the encounter between Mukundaram and the Shabars as a common-worlds encounter; second, it examines the forest as a pedagogical space through Gaard’s ecopedagogical framework and Santos’s rights of nature; third, it reads Mukundaram’s epic as an ecopedagogical bridge between epistemologies; fourth, it analyses the novel’s crisis narrative through Santos’s abyssal line theory and the concept of epistemicide; and finally, it synthesizes all five theoretical strands into a vision of planetary praxis that positions Devi’s text as a curriculum for reading Earth.
Foregrounding planetary justice through Mahasweta Devi’s narrative
Mahasweta Devi’s novel, originally titled Byadhkhanda (Reference Devi1994) in Bengali and later translated into English as The Book of the Hunter (Reference Devi2002) by Sagaree and Mandira Sengupta, questions the ruptured connections between people, places and the historical trajectories of progress and development. The novel draws its narrative force from a triadic intertextual foundation. The primary source is Mukundaram Chakraborty’s Chandimangal, a seminal sixteenth-century text within the Bengali literary canon. To this, Devi adds layers drawn from her own prolonged engagement with the Shabar community, which infuses the novel with lived knowledge and ethnographic intimacy. The narrative further incorporates the Shabars’ self-articulations as documented in Bortika, Devi’s activist journal, thereby weaving together classical literary inheritance, experiential testimony and subaltern voice into a complex and polyphonic structure.
Such an interweaving engages deeply with planetary justice. It highlights the knotted fates of humans and non-human entities, challenges anthropocentric narratives and aligns itself with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of reimagining humanity’s relationship with the planet in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, Reference Chakrabarty2021). The dichotomy of anthropocentric confinement and ecological transcendence, the dichotomy of the human-centred (the cognitive) and the earth-centred (the material), the sovereign and the relational, becomes a structuring metaphor for the modern planetary condition. And, in this ambiguity, the Shabars’ cosmological position becomes very symptomatic of the most quintessentially contemporary anxieties: the utter lack of recognition, affective displacement and the impossibility of articulating ecological intelligence in a language that modernity recognizes as knowledge.
Reading through Simpson’s framework of “land as pedagogy,” the forest of Ararha functions as what Simpson describes as the generative ground of Indigenous intelligence, a pedagogical space where knowledge arises from sustained, consensual engagement with the land. Simpson argues that “like governance, leadership and every other aspect of reciprocated life, education comes from the roots up. It comes from being enveloped by land” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, p. 9). The Shabars’ ecological knowledge, Tejota’s herbal medicine, Kalya’s seasonal hunting ethics, Danko’s water conservation, constitutes this roots-up education. It is a theory generated from the ground itself rather than imposed upon it. This is what Simpson, drawing on Nishnaabeg thought, calls akinoomaage: learning from the land through attentive, reciprocal participation (Reference Simpson2014, p. 15). Hence, for the Shabars, the forest functions as curriculum, governance system and spiritual scaffold simultaneously.
The epistemological demands of the contemporary planetary crisis compel a reconceptualization of agency, subjectivity and governance through an outlook attuned to ontological entanglement and posthuman interrelationality. As Haraway asserts, “companion species play string games where who is/are to be in/of the world is constituted in intra- and inter-consequent upon worldly subject- and object-shaping entanglements” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p. 13) and foregrounds a non-binary co-emergence of beings within distributed fields of becoming. In consonance with Latour’s Reference Latour(2004) actor-network theory, Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) agential realism and Bennett’s (Reference Bennett2010) vital materialism, such an approach necessitates a transversal ethics that incorporates the performative force of non-human agencies as constitutive rather than incidental to ecological assemblages. Pacini-Ketchabaw’s concept of “common worlds” provides another crucial complement here: against romanticized or sentimentalized conceptions of “nature,” common-worlds pedagogies attend to the frictions, tensions and contaminated collaborations through which human and more-than-human beings co-constitute shared environments. The encounter between Mukundaram, a Brahmin farmer-poet displaced from his ancestral village and the Shabar community in the forest of Ararha exemplifies what Anna Tsing (via Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013) terms “friction”: the productive, unpredictable encounter between heterogeneous worldviews that generates new forms of knowledge. Mukundaram does not simply observe the Shabars; he is epistemically transformed by his encounter with them, in the process moving from outsider to participant in a common world he did not previously know existed.
Moreover, Devi also focuses on how non-human forces mediate between nature and humanity to achieve ecological balance, which highlights the contrast between these natural solutions and the often ineffective governmental policies that fail to address sustainability due to the relentless forward march of development (Escobar, Reference Escobar2018; Kothari et al., Reference Kothari, Demaria and Acosta2019). Recognizing that narratives must transcend speculation on futurity and sustenance (Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2016), The Book of the Hunter grounds sustainability in lived Indigenous cosmologies, where non-human forces actively shape justice and survival through relational ethics and ecological balance. Such an ecopedagogical grounding transforms the novel from a representation of Indigenous life into a pedagogical site where readers themselves undergo a process of conscientização about planetary interdependence.
Forest as sustainer, deity and pedagogical space
The Shabars, traditionally associated with the hunt, are custodians of a particular ecological ethos that is fundamentally characterized by a profound respect for the interconnectedness of all living beings. This ecocratic vision advocates for the equitable recognition of both human and non-human entities. As Dryzek and Pickering argue, the achievement of justice in this era requires a transcendence of national boundaries, an extension of considerations across generations and the incorporation of equitable frameworks for non-human entities (Dryzek & Pickering, Reference Dryzek and Pickering2019). Milja Kurki further argues that within a relational and posthumanist framework, she prefers to “refract planetary justice as ‘response-ability in planetary relations’” (Kurki, Reference Kurki2024). By according primacy to the collective well-being of ecosystems over individual profit, the Shabars exemplify a model of sustainability deeply rooted in a harmony with the forest that recalls what Gadamer (Reference Gadamer1967) would call Gleichgewicht, a balance that stabilizes itself through a continuous process.
The concept of response-ability, as it operates in Devi’s narrative, exceeds the liberal notion of “responsibility” as individual moral obligation. For the Shabars, response-ability is a collective, inherited and ritually reinforced practice of attentiveness, one that arises from generations of dwelling within a particular ecosystem and learning its rhythms, limits and needs. When Danko Shabar reforms the dowry system within the community, insisting that marriage gifts must not exceed the forest’s capacity to provide them, he pioneers a form of governance that is ecological before it is political (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 92). This governance flows from what Simpson would call the land’s own intelligence, a set of relational protocols that the forest teaches through the consequences of excess and the rewards of restraint.
The Shabar panchayat (community council) deliberates not only on human disputes but also on the forest’s well-being, determining when to burn deadwood, which paths to use during certain seasons and how to redistribute resources after monsoon damage. These practices constitute what Pacini-Ketchabaw, following Anna Tsing, describes as frictional forest pedagogies: forms of learning and governance that emanate from the friction between human plans and more-than-human agencies (Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013, p. 356). The panchayat’s deliberations, in this sense, are pedagogical acts, moments where the body of the community learns from the body of the forest.
Through the ecopedagogical framework developed by Greta Gaard, the forest in Devi’s narrative can also be understood as a site that simultaneously coordinates teaching about, in and through the environment, the three modalities Gaard identifies as essential to transformative ecological education (Gaard, Reference Gaard2008, p. 333). Elsewhere, Gaard’s ecopedagogical framework also condenses into three interlinked critical questions that probe identity, justice and agency within environmental narratives: “how does the text address the ontological question, ‘who am I?’,” (Reference Gaard2008, p. 15) asking whether the self is constituted in relation to or in opposition to the more-than-human world; “how does the narrative define the ecojustice problem?,” and whether it offers responses that move beyond hierarchy toward “community and participatory democracy”; Reference Gaard(2008, p. 16) and finally, “what kind of agency does the text recognize in nature?,” (Reference Gaard2008, p. 18) interrogating whether nature remains a passive object or comes forth as a subject endowed with its own force and presence. Teaching about the environment occurs through Tejota’s transmission of medicinal knowledge: she knows the remedy for high fever, cold and scorpion sting; she provides the royal doctor with medicinal plants (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 37). When the king’s elephant became almost mad, it was only Tejota who could identify the reason and cure the wound (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 47). Teaching in the environment is performed through the Shabars’ daily immersion in the forest ecosystem: their learning is inseparable from it, embedded in the very body of the experience. And teaching through the environment manifests in how the forest itself operates as a moral instructor, enforcing ethical boundaries through its own agency. In Gaard’s terms, the forest functions as a pedagogical site where the boundary conditions of ecojustice, that is, praxis, participatory ethics, urgency and the connections of sustainability, are rather implemented in the daily drama of the lived body. Hence, the novel figures the self as relationally constituted within the forest, frames ecojustice as the tension between Shabar ecological reciprocity and extractive modernity demanding collective, non-hierarchical response and affirms the forest itself as an active agent which shapes ecojustice.
When Mukundaram asks Tejota about Abhayachandi, she reverently explains: “‘Ma! Abhaychandi?’ ‘Some call her Abhaychandi, and others call her a desolate forest. The forest itself is our mother, what d’you say?’ Tejota touched her folded palms to her forehead in reverence for the goddess. ‘She gives us fruits, flowers, tubers, leaves, wood, honey, raisin, medicine, herbs, barks, leaves, and roots, even animals to hunt. She gives us everything, keeps us alive – doesn’t that make her our mother?’” (Devi, Reference Devi2002, p. 73). This passage jells into what Santos theorizes under “post-abyssal topics” (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 256) as the rights of nature, a concept he develops through the Ecuadorian constitutional recognition of Pacha Mama (Mother Earth) as a rights-bearing entity, where “Article 71 of the Ecuadorian Constitution lays down the rights of Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), the idea being that nature has rights,” grounded in the understanding that “for the indigenous peoples, Mother Earth is a living entity that does not belong to us; rather, we belong to it” (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 257). Abhayachandi worship constitutes an Indian instantiation of the same ontological principle: nature is a sovereign presence demanding ethical reciprocity and the forest, here, inhabits the registers of personhood, kinship, divinity and legal-moral authority. Santos argues that an ecology of knowledges must recognize such non-Western juridical ontologies as epistemically valid rather than as pre-modern survivals awaiting modern replacement (Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 258). The Shabars’ reverence for Abhayachandi produces this ecology in which the forest possesses intrinsic rights that supersede human desire.
This principle permeates throughout the novel. Despite significant hardships, the Shabars live contentedly within the limits of their environment. Kalya reflects this philosophy: “They don’t know what money is, nor do they see much of it … We don’t understand money” (Devi, Reference Devi2002, p. 117). This detachment from material affluence underpins their ecological ethos, which foregrounds sustainability and symbiosis over greed. As Arne Naess, a prominent exponent of the Deep Ecology movement, argues, diversity enriches the potential for survival by nurturing new ways of life. He reinterprets the “struggle for life” as the ability to coexist and cooperate within complex relationships (Naess, Reference Naess1973, p. 96). The Shabars’ worldview reflects these foundational tenets, and their practices align with planetary justice by expanding the “subjects of justice” to include non-human entities.
The Shabar community exemplifies justice on a planetary scale by expanding Kalfagianni and Biermann’s (Reference Biermann and Kalfagianni2020) term the “subjects of justice” to include non-human entities. This is evident in practices like Kalya’s refusal to hunt deer during their mating season. Though offered substantial payment by the messenger of the king of Dhalbhum, he refused: “It is the time of marriage among the deer, if one kills deer now, Ma Abhayachandi will put a curse on him” (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 76). Devi ingeniously places two belief systems in contrast: the Shabars’ prohibition on hunting during the mating season, observed with utmost respect, against the King of Dhalbhum’s casual order for hundreds of deer skins to furnish a grand ritual. The Shabars believe that Abhayachandi treats all beings, human and non-human, as equal (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 46). Here, Abhayachandi is the forest and the forest is the manifestation of Abhayachandi (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 60), i.e. the goddess they worship is the interconnected collective organism called the forest, with all its inhabitants possessing equal rights. The forest as sustainer and the forest as deity: the two conceptions do not exist in a state of binary. Their existence is together-with existence; together and yet different from each other.
The forest as both sustainer and deity aligns with Vandana Shiva’s concept of a “living economy,” where natural resources are intrinsic to survival rather than commodities for exploitation (Shiva, Reference Shiva2005, p. 37). In the context of Pacini-Ketchabaw’s “common worlds in settler colonial spaces” (Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013), the Shabar forest constitutes a commons in the deepest sense: an ontological ground in which human and more-than-human beings are mutually constituted. The response-ability that the Shabars practice, their seasonal taboos, their regulated hunting, their equal distribution of water among species, materializes what Haraway and Kurki describe as a sustained, disciplined attentiveness to the more-than-human world as the generative ground of ethical being.
Tejota describes Bijuban, where Ma Abhayachandi resides: though five rivulets flow out of the forest, humans have access to only one stream; the rest is for the animals and the trees (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 56). This is an expression of what Simpson calls “consensual engagement,” (Reference Simpson2014, p. 15) a relational ethic in which the land’s own needs are honoured before human claims. When the king of Ararha decides to raise a brick-wall border around the town, Bemo Shabar warns of the repercussions of making Ma Bosumati, the earth, suffer the extreme heat of baking bricks. The king gives no heed. One late autumn morning, intoxicated with the fragrance of ripened rice crops, a herd of wild elephants demolishes the brick wall, and thus Ma Bosumati receives justice (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 87). This incident echoes Winter and Schlosberg’s (Reference Winter and Schlosberg2023) conception of planetary justice as demanding a reworking of our relation with the Earth’s matter; they fascinatingly offer a thought provoking exercise in “making matter matter” by reconsidering our inorganic relationality with a toaster and conclude that it is “only from this materially defined MSJ (matters of justice) that a broad planetary justice can emerge” (Reference Winter and Schlosberg2023, p. 1220). The boundary between human will and more-than-human resistance is but a threshold, and the crossing of that threshold has consequences.
Mukundaram’s epic: An ecopedagogical bridge between worlds
Both Devi’s invocation of Mukundaram Chakraborty’s Abhayamangal and the novel’s broader narrative structure serve as a bridge between pre-modern ecological consciousness and contemporary critiques of environmental degradation. By weaving Mukundaram’s epic into her text, Devi creates a temporal dialogue that illustrates the enduring relevance of indigenous knowledge systems in confronting planetary crises. However, such an inclusive narrative strategy renders unstable the historicist presumption of temporal autonomy and disrupts what Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2000) theorizes as the dominance of “History 1” over heterogeneous, lived “History 2s.” Devi’s audacious insertion of the historical Mukundaram into the fictional narrative matrix invokes history as séance, as spectral encounter, where the protocols of empirical temporality are haunted by what Chakrabarty terms the subaltern past, a past that “resists historicization” (Reference Chakrabarty1998, p. 21).
This spectral temporality resonates with what Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen (Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen2016) theorize as “shifting temporal frames” (Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen2016, p. 432) in common-worlds pedagogies. Against the linear, developmental time of colonial modernity, what they call “clock time,” the Shabars inhabit a cyclical, seasonal temporality structured by forest rhythms: the mating season of deer, the flowering of Sal and Mohul, the monsoon cycles that determine migration patterns and thereby, “coordinating pedagogies with a complexity of temporal awareness – with multiple forest times, with the rhythms of crows and rust and moss and deer” (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Kummen, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen2016, 439). Mukundaram’s epic effectuates this temporality by performing shomoy-granthi, from shomoy (time) and granthi (joint, knot), a non-synchronic, recursive temporality in which past, present and future are knotted together in the lived body of the forest. Such a temporal tapestry can also be compared to the kind of mnemonic interludes we find in the relationship between lived past and lived present: the process of recalling the past is at the same time a process of animating what is potentially sterile and inert, the dead enlivened only in memory, and yet that memory is the very condition of possibility for the present.
Simpson’s account of the Kwezens’ maple sugar story offers another illuminating parallel to the knowledge transmission displayed in Devi’s novel. In Simpson’s retelling, Kwezens, a young Nishnaabeg girl, learns the process of making maple sugar through patient observation, seasonal attentiveness and responsive engagement with the maple tree itself (Reference Simpson2014, p. 9–12). The tree teaches her; the land teaches her; the practice of return across seasons teaches her. This is the pedagogical model that structures Tejota’s knowledge of the forest: her medicinal expertise is the product of generations of attentive dwelling, where each season reveals new properties of familiar plants and each monsoon redistributes the forest’s pharmaceutical cartography. When Tejota teaches Kalya the names and uses of forest herbs, she initiates him into a practice of akinoomaage: “which is formed from two roots: aki: noomaage.‘Aki’ means earth and ‘noomaage’ means to point towards and take direction from”(Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, p. 14), the practice of learning from the land through watching, listening and respectful engagement. Devi’s narrative, by placing this intergenerational transmission of land-based knowledge at the centre of the text, enlivens Simpson’s theory: the forest itself is the primary pedagogue, and human teachers like Tejota are intermediaries who facilitate the learner’s relationship with the land rather than a substitute for it.
“Historians will grant the supernatural a place in somebody’s belief system or ritual practices,” Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2000) reminds us, “but to ascribe to it any real agency in historical events will go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past” (Reference Chakrabarty2000, p. 104). Devi, however, rewrites the historian as shaman: Mukundaram documents from within, and in so doing becomes a devotee himself. But Devi very well understands that “the capacity (of the modern person) to historicize actually depends on his or her ability to participate in nonmodern relationships to the past” (Chakrabarty, Reference Chakrabarty2000, p. 101), and so her fiction becomes the space where temporalities interrupt and knot.
Through Santos’s “ecology of knowledges,” (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 258), where “epistemological diversity” is prioritized (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 258) Mukundaram’s epic functions as a bridge between Brahminical and Shabar epistemologies, a textual space where abyssal thinking is momentarily suspended. Santos argues that modern Western epistemology operates through an “abyssal line” that divides reality into two realms: the metropolitan side, where knowledge is recognized, debated and validated, and the colonial side, where knowledge is rendered non-existent (Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 251). Mukundaram’s transformation from external observer to devotee of Abhayachandi represents nothing less than a crossing of this abyssal line, a movement from the metropolitan epistemology of Brahminical literary culture to the “colonial” epistemology of Shabar forest cosmology. This crossing constitutes what Misiaszek would recognize as genuine ecopedagogical learning: a Freirean “reading of the world” that undergoes a fundamental re-orientation of the self in relation to Earth (Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2297). Mukundaram’s Abhayamangal becomes, in this reading, an ecopedagogical text avant la lettre. Like the ill body in phenomenological understanding, which in its very dis-ability enables a new mode of perception, Mukundaram’s displacement from his Brahminical world to the Shabar forest constitutes a productive breakdown: the dissolution of one epistemological frame becomes the condition for another, a “reading or rereading of reality as it is being transformed,” (Freire, 1978/Reference Freire2000, p. 160) in which the world is apprehended anew as “part of Earth” (Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2303). The novel’s portrayal of the relationships between Mukundaram and the Shabar couple, Kalya and Phuli, provides a nuanced depiction of people who fiercely defended their customs against the pressures of hegemonic Brahminical practices. This resistance is contrasted with Mukundaram’s own journey of transformation into a poet, and such a contrast creates a rich narrative interplay. Mahasweta Devi takes up the cause of the Shabars, declared “crime-prone” by the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871.Footnote 2 According to her, Mukundaram, of Brahminical descent, lightened the burden of mainstream society’s sin by writing Byadhkhanda. The narrative thus creates a dialogic space where two worlds, Indigenous traditions and modern perspectives, intersect and foregrounds the resilience of marginalized voices as an alternative to exploitative developmental paradigms. In our reading of Mukundaram’s transformation, we find that the effort to locate the zone of indistinction between the poetics of the forest and the forest of poetics can be exhaustive but not unfruitful.
What is particularly interesting about Mukundaram’s transformation is how it models the kind of learning that Misiaszek identifies as central to ecological literacy i.e. the transformation of the learner’s own relationship to Earth: “for using/reinventing language for world-Earth de-distancing and recognizing environmental violence’s global within planetary effects” (Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2306) Mukundaram does not leave the forest with a catalogue of Shabar customs; he leaves as a poet whose language has been irrevocably altered by the encounter. His Chandimangal registers this transformation at the level of form, incorporating Shabar dialect, forest imagery and seasonal rhythms into the Sanskrit-inflected conventions of the mangalkavya tradition. Such a formal disruption constitutes itself in the “middle of muddled frictions” (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013, p. 363) that generates new aesthetic and epistemological possibilities. The Brahminical poetic tradition is transformed by the knowledge system of the Shabars, producing a hybrid zone that belongs fully to neither world. The making of literature through the forest and the unmaking of literature’s inherited categories, the making of a new poetics through the rupture of the conventional one: Devi’s narrative makes explicit what Mukundaram’s epic performs implicitly, that genuine learning across epistemological difference requires not the mastery of the other’s knowledge but the willingness to be unmade by it.
Planetary crisis, abyssal exclusion and the loss of marginalized voices
While the novel foregrounds Indigenous ecological ethics and critiques anthropocentric paradigms, it also raises critical questions about the adequacy of these frameworks in addressing systemic inequalities and human suffering. Kalya’s death is portrayed as justice given by Nature itself, a direct consequence of his violation of the unwritten laws governing Abhaya’s forest. In spite of the warnings of Danko Shabar, he chases the elderly elephant into Abhayagadh, the sacred section of the forest where the hunt is not permitted (Devi, Reference Devi1994, p. 108). As a consequence, he is killed by the same elephant he wished to kill. Kalya’s transgression represents a violation of “principled and respectful consensual reciprocity” (Reference Simpson2014, p. 18) with the land, a rupture in the reciprocal relationship that structures the forest’s pedagogical order. When one part of the system breaks from the harmony, the system attempts to re-regulate itself. Kalya’s death shows this re-regulation. But, crucially, an ecopedagogical reading demands that we interrogate the systemic forces that drove his transgression. Kalya’s actions are shaped by the pressures of marginalization and the allure of recognition within a system that historically devalues his existence. Justice framed as ecological balance alone risks overlooking the structural inequities that drive such transgressions.
The ecopedagogical implications of Kalya’s death extend beyond individual moral failure. Kalya does not violate the forest’s laws out of greed alone. He is driven by the desire for status within a system that measures worth in economic rather than ecological terms. The king’s bounty for elephant ivory operates as a mechanism of “colonial sociability,” (Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 253) a reward structure that incentivizes the very ecological violations that the Shabar cosmology prohibits. Kalya’s death, situated at the intersection of the forest’s pedagogical order and the market logic of the expanding town, discloses the colonial-modern economic order’s unsustainable erosion of Indigenous ecological relations (Gaard, Reference Gaard2008, p. 21).
Phuli’s suicide deepens the narrative’s exploration of justice. It reveals the profound costs of ecological violations on the body and being of the individual. Her decision to end her life suggests a profound internalization of guilt, not only for her husband’s actions but for the disruption caused to the forest’s balance. Her silence and withdrawal become forms of protest, compelling a decolonial and ecological re-evaluation of what it means to live justly on an interconnected Earth. Phuli’s death, unlike Kalya’s, is a form of self-imposed exile from a world whose relational fabric has been torn. Her suicide mounts the catastrophic failure of the learning relationship between community and forest, the moment when the curriculum of reciprocity collapses under the weight of transgression. Devi refuses to sentimentalize this death, presenting it instead as what follows when ecological violation becomes inseparable from social dissolution. The Shabar community’s mourning for Phuli is simultaneously a mourning for the relational order she embodied, in which women’s knowledge, particularly Tejota’s medicinal and spiritual expertise, served as the primary conduit for intergenerational transmission of forest wisdom.
The gendered dimensions of this epistemic loss deserve particular attention. Simpson says that Indigenous women occupy a central role in land-based education because their knowledge practices, that is, gathering, healing, storying and ceremony, constitute the relational infrastructure through which land-based intelligence is maintained and transmitted. Tejota’s gradual recognition that the forest is vanishing is simultaneously a recognition that the pedagogical system she embodies, her knowledge of medicinal plants, her spiritual authority as interpreter of Abhayachandi’s will, her role as the community’s living archive, has no future in a deforested world.
As the town of Ararha encroaches upon the forest, Devi vividly narrates how this expansion transforms the forest from a sacred space into a commodified resource. Tejota sensed this transformation: “The forest where the Shabars has lived like majestic, deeply rooted trees, were vanishing, and the Shabars were moving off” (Reference Devi2002, p. 132). Her growing fear crystallizes the abyssal logic: “There was no stopping the times from changing. A Shabar understood that the more others encroached the more his existence would be threatened. Then, that was it. He’d pick up camp, sticks and all and calling ‘Ma, Ma!’ go off into the shelter of some virgin forest” (Devi, Reference Devi2002, p. 122). What Santos identifies as epistemicide finds its narrative embodiment in this forced dispersal. The Shabars lose an entire episteme, a knowledge system that deforestation and displacement render non-existent.
Santos identifies seven threats to the “post-abyssal” future, and among them are “destroying nature” and “recolonizing difference” (Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos2017, pp. 241–248). Both threats converge in the Shabars’ displacement: the destruction of the forest eliminates the material basis of their knowledge system, while the imposition of urban modernity recolonizes their difference and converts their forest-based autonomy into a marker of backwardness and criminality. The allure of urban luxuries further deepens this crisis, as some Shabars, tempted by urban life, settle in the town. This parallels Amitav Ghosh’s stark prognostication in The Nutmeg’s Curse of how external forces disrupt the ecological and spiritual harmony of indigenous communities: “Of all commodities, none are better suited to being treated as ‘resources’ than those compacted remains of primordial forests that we call fossil fuels” (Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2021, p. 99).
The temporal dimension of this displacement is crucial for understanding its ecopedagogical implications. The displacement from Ararha exposes the temporal violence that shomoy-granthi cannot survive – a dislocation from forest time to market time, from seasonal rhythms to wage labour. When a Shabar family moves to the town, they undergo a temporal dislocation as well, from forest time to market time, from the seasonal rhythms of Abhayachandi’s world to the clock-governed routines of wage labour. This temporal violence, invisible to conventional analyses of displacement, equally constitutes a form of epistemic violence by the destruction of the temporal infrastructure through which an entire knowledge system reproduces itself. Devi’s narrative registers this and the reader who follows her temporal shifts is compelled to experience what Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2021) describes as the “deep time” of the Anthropocene, in which geological, biological and historical timescales collapse into each other and reveals the planetary consequences of what might appear, in linear time, as merely local or regional transformations.
Conclusion
Planetary justice serves as a decolonial framework by centring Indigenous epistemologies in the socio-politico-judicial milieu of our contemporary ecological crisis, redefining justice through relational ethics. Planetary justice not only can be imagined as a decolonial framework; it addresses the critiques of decolonial theories. Claudia Jahnel (Reference Jahnel2023) calls upon decolonial critique to “take seriously the fundamental ecological and posthuman challenges posed” (p. 3) by the Anthropocene. Decolonial praxis, according to Walter Mignolo, necessitates a delinking from Western-centric systems, be they economic, political or epistemic. The unlearning of dominant knowledge entails the unlearning of colonial and anthropocentric epistemologies, a task that Misiaszek’s “world-Earth de-distancing” (Reference Misiaszek2022, p. 2299) seeks to address. Planetary justice embraces these processes and curates a way for a “shift from decolonial to a decolonial-posthumancentric epistemology” (Jahnel, Reference Jahnel2023, p. 13).
The ingenuity of Mahasweta Devi lies in imagining an eco-sustainable, interconnected, multispecies coexistent way of life through the Shabar community that practices a more-than-human approach infused with “response-ability in planetary relations” (Kurki, Reference Kurki2024). Such a vision can answer Braidotti’s well-formulated question: “How to combine the decline of anthropocentrism with issues of social justice?” Simpson’s vision of “rebellious transformation” (Reference Simpson2014, p. 1) through land-based resurgence offers a parallel to Shabar resilience: the Shabars’ ecological governance, rooted in kinship with land, shared authority and gender reciprocity, constitutes an insurgent theory of political life, one that displaces extractivist and statist paradigms through embodied, place-based ethics. The ecopedagogical implications of the Shabar’s somatic refusal (inscribed in the body’s daily gestures of restraint, reciprocity and reverence) to accept the ontological premises of colonial modernity, besides reminding us of the “decolonial option” (Mignolo, Reference Mignolo2011), extend beyond the narrative’s immediate context. For the Shabars, no such de-distancing is necessary: the gap has never opened. Their cosmology inheres in the interconnections of gathering, hunting, healing and worship, practices through which the nature–culture divide becomes unintelligible. The pedagogical challenge that Devi’s text poses to its readers, then, is not to learn about the Shabars’ ecological worldview but to be thrown into a friction with the ideological apparatus that makes such a worldview appear as primitive or pre-modern. In Freirean terms, the text demands that its readers undergo a process of de-socialization, a critical unlearning of the anthropocentric assumptions that structure modern subjectivity. This unlearning is both affective and embodied: Devi’s prose, with its immersive descriptions of forest soundscapes, seasonal transformations and ritual practices, invites the readers into a mode of attention that is itself ecopedagogical, a slow, patient, receptive attunement to the more-than-human world. In the staging of the Shabars’ lifeworlds and the narration of their coerced displacement from Ararha, Devi offers what Santos calls “ruin seeds” (Reference de Sousa Santos2017, p. 255). The Shabars’ dispersal from Ararha reads as the scattering of alternative knowledge systems that carry within them the potential for post-abyssal futures. As Devi notes, “A tree creates new trees through its seeds and lives on through them. The same way, you lived on through your progeny” (Devi, Reference Devi2002, p. 131). This image, of propagation through scattering, of survival through dispersal, becomes the novel’s final ecopedagogical lesson. The Shabars, like seeds, carry within them an entire curriculum: a way of knowing the forest, a way of living within planetary limits, a way of practising justice that does not require the apparatus of the modern state. The simplicity of the image belies its force. Life is but dispersal in disguise. And the seed is but the forest in disguise. The ruin seeds metaphor also illuminates the novel’s relationship to its own readership. As a literary text that circulates across languages, disciplines and continents, The Book of the Hunter itself functions as a seed, disseminating the Shabars’ ecopedagogical knowledge to readers who may never encounter the forests of Bengal but who inhabit the same planetary system. In this sense, Devi’s narrative evinces what Freire called the “generative theme,” (1978/Reference Freire2000, p. 160–161) a cultural artefact that contains within it the contradictions and possibilities of an entire historical situation, and that, when critically engaged, produces new forms of consciousness.
As a decolonial reading practice, planetary justice demands that we read for ontologies rather than for themes, for worlding logics rather than for mimetic content. The convergence of the aforementioned concepts in our study reveals that these are not separate theoretical positions applied externally to a literary text rather dimensions of a single practice, the practice of learning to live within planetary boundaries, a practice that the Shabars have always already followed and that Devi’s narrative makes legible to readers situated within the anthropocentric epistemologies of modernity and these constitute a planetary hermeneutics, a mode of reading that attends simultaneously to epistemology, ecology, temporality, justice and the politics of knowledge production. What Devi ultimately gestures toward, therefore, is a future anterior of justice: the right to opacity. The right to planetarity. The right to untranslatability. The right not to be known, but to be lived with.
Acknowledgements
This article owes its existence to acts of generosity. We are deeply grateful to Prof. Peta White who welcomed the project despite our missing the abstract deadline and later extended patience and understanding during a period of unexpected global disruption. Her kindness allowed the article the time it needed to become what it is. We are equally grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally generous feedback, which greatly improved the clarity of the manuscript. Any remaining shortcomings are entirely our own.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Ethical standard
Nothing to note.
Author Biographies
Dipra Sarkhel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His research interests include Planetary Humanities, Ecophenomenology, Deleuze studies and other interrelated fields of inquiry. His research has been published/accepted in journals like, Critical Inquiry, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, Current Writing, Environmental Politics and Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. He is a co-editor of Deleuze, Decoloniality and Planetarity, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
Ananya Roy Pratihar is an Associate Professor, Business Communication at the Institute of Management and Information Science, Bhubaneswar, India. She has edited Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of the Global Pandemic: Revolutionary Praxis and Neoliberal Crisis (Bloomsbury Publishing 2023), and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Post- neoliberalism (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024). She has published in journals like, Philosophy in Review, French Studies, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal (University of Warwick), Current Writing, and Environmental Politics.
Dibyendu Sahana is an Assistant Professor of English at Dr B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur and a Senior Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His research interests include Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Disability Studies Graphic Narratives, and other interrelated fields of inquiry. He has published in journals like Africa Spectrum, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Journal for Cultural Research and Assonance. He is a co-editor of Deleuze, Decoloniality and Planetarity, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
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