India has a rich, complex tradition of environmental writing in its many regional and interstate languages. While ecocriticism itself emerged in the Anglophone realm, its concerns are universal and have ancient pasts and long genealogies of "travelling." In this panel, we focus on India's vernacular language discourses and literatures where ecological issues feature in a significant way and in particular, we emphasize pioneering works whose influence within local and translocal circuits (via translation, adaptation, and intermediation) sheds light on a much-understudied history of India's autochthonous ecocritical tradition.

Alan Johnson's paper “Environmental Change in Indian Pilgrimage Narratives and Motifs” examines descriptions of natural environments—forests, mountains, waterways—in both pilgrimage narratives and fiction published in India between the late 1800s and today. This study of motifs of sacred landscapes in pilgrimage narratives as well as in modern fiction and autobiography traces the deleterious effects of modern pilgrimage on these landscapes. Alan addresses how popular images of pilgrimage, whether in advertisements, social media, or film, have intersected with literary depictions of pilgrimage to shape everyday understandings of sacred environments and how the changing understandings of these sacred landscapes, in turn, shaped group and individual self-perceptions in modern India.

In his paper titled "Knowledge and Politics in Conflict: Satyajit Ray’s Ganashatru and Ibsen’s Ecodrama," Suddhaseel Sen analyses Ibsen’s impact on Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray through an examination of the latter’s cinematic adaptation of An Enemy of the People, memorably described by Lawrence Buell as the “first canonical modern example” of ecodrama. Indeed, Suddhaseel argues that both Ibsen’s play and Ray’s film raise questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, public understanding of science, and the often-conflicted relationship between scientific and economic interests that are more relevant than ever before in the age of the Anthropocene.

Sarbani Banerjee's paper, titled "Vernacular and the Veritable Representation: Comparative Analysis in Tribal Belonging," examines the importance of the vernacular in articulating and situating the localized nature of a protest, whose roots are in land rights and the preservation of natural resources. She probes the critical role that vernacular plays in the alternative formation of history by the tribal people in the form of folklore, ballads, myths, and legends that are orally passed down the generations. An artwork such as Aranyer Adhikar offers challenges as it is authored by a non-tribal activist, which triggers questions related to the insider-outsider rhetoric and the possibility and authenticity of representation from the ‘other’ side of the threshold.

Together, the papers explore vital questions for a richer, more nuanced understanding of the body of writing that we might, in its fullness, call Indian vernacular ecocriticism. How do Indian languages, embedded as they are in distinct local spaces, shape people's understanding of their literary ecologies? Is there such a thing as a vernacular tradition within Indian ecocentric thought and literary writings? What taxonomies are marked by the use of such descriptors as autochthonous, indigenous, vernacular, and native vis-a-vis the Anglophone and postcolonial? Addressing these questions in a dialogic manner will involve the active participation of the audience and we hope that the panel will engage with individual texts, particular traditions, as well as the larger theoretical questions attendant upon any consideration of the rich, cross-pollinating field of Indian vernacular ecocritical literature.