Narrating within Planetary Boundaries: The Forest as Pedagogue and the Question of Planetary Justice in Mahasweta Devi’s The Book of the Hunter

Abstract Can a literary text teach us how to dwell within planetary limits? This article rereads Mahasweta Devi’s The Book of the Hunter as a decolonial, multispecies pedagogy that reimagines planetary justice through ecopedagogy, common-worlds learning and land-based education. Drawing on Greg Misiaszek’s expansion of Freirean literacy as “reading Earth with the world,” the study frames learning as non-anthropocentric and relational. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw’s common-worlds approach and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s notion of land as pedagogy further ground the argument that the forest itself becomes a site of knowledge production. The article argues that Devi’s forest operates as a living curriculum where dwelling, narrating and knowing converge. Through Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of the abyssal line, the Shabars’ epistemology is shown to be rendered invisible by colonial-modern systems, even as the narrative reactivates it. Its temporal structure enacts “shifting temporal frames,” opposing forest time to developmental modernity. Situated within histories of extraction and ecological precarity, the novel foregrounds Indigenous ethics of reciprocity and restraint as viable alternatives. Ultimately, the text transforms reading into an ecopedagogical practice, positioning literature as a mode of planetary education grounded in relational, participatory knowing.