Narrating Loss, Ecology, and Resistance: Refiguring Indigenous Voices in Odia Tribal Short Stories

This article undertakes a critical exploration of selected Odia tribal short stories—Abani Kumar Baral's “The Bamboo Queen,” Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi's “Jungli,” Durga Madhab Mishra's “Buda Kirisani,” Pranabandhu Kar's “The Vanquished” and “Two Friends,” Rajat Mohapatra's “The Daughter of Niyamagiri,” Bhubaneswar Behera's “The Flying Fringe,” and Gayatri Saraf's “The Burning Mountain.” These stories, while situated within the socio-geographical milieu of Odisha's tribal heartlands, transcend the realm of ethnographic reportage to emerge as aesthetic articulations of indigenous epistemologies, affective registers, and resistant subjectivities. This article interrogates the inadequacies of conventional historiographic and sociological discourses that often instrumentalize tribal existence as a static and legible category within the developmentalist grammar of the nation-state. In contrast, it posits literature—particularly fiction—as a counter-discursive site which articulates the ontological realities, emotional topographies, and political anxieties of tribal lifeworlds.