Nature as Identity: Eco critical Perspectives in Northeastern Indian Novels

This paper examines the impact of eco-criticism on the relationship between nature and identity in Northeastern Indian novels. Authors like Mamang Dai, Easterine Kire, and Temsula Ao integrate nature—landscapes, rivers, forests, and mountains—not simply as backdrops but as pivotal forces that shape cultural memory, collective identity, and spiritual belonging. The study focuses on Dai’s The Legends of Pensam, Kire’s When the River Sleeps, and Ao’s These Hills Called Home, and seeks to demonstrate how ecological environments shape and embody ethnic traditions, resistance, and spiritual cosmologies. Employing eco-critical and postcolonial paradigms, the study contends that the nature-identity nexus in these texts is framed as an archive and as an active agent in identity formation in a region that is largely overlooked in Indian literary discussions. The study concludes that Northeastern literature defies exploitative paradigms of modernity, presenting instead a holistic ecological vision grounded in a relationship of reciprocity between the human and non-human domains.