Аннотация
Mamang Dai, one of the most distinctive literary voices from Arunachal Pradesh, articulates an environmental consciousness deeply embedded in the indigenous cultural imagination of Northeast India. Her poetry and fiction portray nature not as a passive landscape or aesthetic background but as a living presence participating in the historical, spiritual, and cultural existence of indigenous communities. This paper examines environmental consciousness in selected writings of Dai, particularly her poetry and The Legends of Pensam, with reference also to The Black Hill. Drawing upon ecocritical perspectives, the study argues that Dai’s environmental imagination differs significantly from conventional anthropocentric representations of nature because it emerges from an indigenous worldview founded upon reciprocity, sacred geography, ancestral memory, and ecological kinship. Rivers, mountains, forests, rain, stones, birds, and plants in her writings possess cultural and spiritual significance and frequently function as repositories of communal memory. Dai’s ecological vision simultaneously registers anxiety concerning modernity, developmental intervention, cultural displacement, and the gradual weakening of traditional relationships between human communities and their environment. Her writings therefore connect ecological loss with cultural and epistemological loss. The paper further demonstrates how oral traditions, myths, legends, and indigenous cosmologies provide Dai with alternative modes of conceptualizing human relationships with the more-than-human world. Her environmental consciousness ultimately advocates an ethics of dwelling based upon humility, continuity, interconnectedness, and responsibility. Dai’s literary imagination thus makes an important contribution to Indian environmental literature by foregrounding an indigenous ecological philosophy capable of challenging exploitative and anthropocentric attitudes toward the natural world.