Silenced Mothers, Speaking Texts: Reclaiming Tribal Maternal Voices in Contemporary Indian Literature

In Indian literary and cultural narratives, motherhood and maternity has often been idealised through the portrayal of moral excellence, virtuousness, sacrifice, and nurture. However, these depictions frequently sideline the experiences of females from indigenous or tribal backgrounds and are majorly derived from dominant social narratives. In spotlight literary discourses, the lived experiences of tribal Adivasi mothers—sculpted by penury, dislocation, ecological fragility, and socio-political marginalisation—remain majorly under-represented, disenfranchised, and marginalised. "Silenced Mothers, Speaking Texts: Reclaiming Tribal Maternal Voices in Contemporary Indian Literature" is the theme of this paper, which tries to explore how literary discourse challenge traditional portrayal of motherhood and all the feminine energies related to life creation in Indian literature and highlight the voices and challenges of tribal mothers. This paper studies and focuses on how tribal maternity is placed at the intersection of gender, race, culture and class, capitalising feminist theory and subaltern studies, chiefly on the structural frameworks put forward by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Can the Subaltern Speak? It makes it evident that tribal motherhood and the identity surrounding it, moves way beyond household responsibilities and is intimately related to the preservation of ecological links, cultural memory, and community traditions and customs. Through the close and intensive readings of literary works like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar's The Adivasi Will Not Dance, Mahasweta Devi's Breast Stories and Rudali, and Alice Ekka's descriptions in Alice Ekka ki Kahaniyaan, the paper explores how contemporary literature emphasises the routine struggles of tribal women, such as cultural marginalisation, geographical migration, and economic exploitation. These narratives showcase how motherhood and maternal silence often turns into a prominent and important platform for utterance and defiance. These works not only portray but also challenge winning depictions that often romanticise motherhood and maternity while paralysing its systemic discrimination by portraying the emotional and social realities of tribal mothers. At the end, the paper also reclaims the lost or often suppressed tribal mothers' voices in literary narratives while broadening the preview of Indian feminist and postcolonial studies, letting for a more inclusive concept of motherhood that acknowledges indigenous understanding, adaptability, and the persistence of marginalised maternal identities.