Caste, forests and Dalit survival

Caste violence, historical exclusion and insurgent literary expression have long been the focus of Dalit Studies (Dangle, Reference Dangle1992). Only more recently have scholars pushed on the ecological stakes of caste – how it organises access to resources, landscapes and nonhuman life. Mukul Sharma (Reference Sharma2017) demonstrates how Indian environmentalism has been caste-blind, thereby creating a concomitant environmental blindness to caste in policy and scholarship. His long-term research also makes the case that “Dalits are largely invisible in the environmental history of India, and on the other, they have been mostly seen as cheerleaders of development and modernity, detached from environmental discourses” (Sharma, p. 2). Building on such insights, Indulata Prasad (Reference Prasad2022) observes that rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste, and asks for a Dalit ecologies paradigm that places caste-oppressed communities at the centre of environmental thought. Dalit writing thus is not simply an aesthetic experiment but an assertion on life and world-making; as emphasised by Arjun Dangle (Reference Dangle1992) in his foundational anthology, it is a literature that cannot be detached from the struggle for liberation. Together these strands make clear that any ecological reading that is attentive to South Asia must also be attentive to caste and that such readings are most credible when they heed the voices of Dalit authors and critics themselves.

The Sundarbans turns out to be a very important site for the intersection of caste and ecology. The mangrove forest is found in India and Bangladesh, and contributes importantly to buffering climate disasters and maintaining fragile coastal ecosystems. Its literary afterlife is as important. Although The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2004) presented the Sundarbans to the international Anglophone literature as a politico-ecologically charged zone of human-nonhuman imbalances, there is a parallel tradition of Bengali literature that is built around the realities of life in the delta itself. As Sayantan Dasgupta notes in the introduction: “there also exists side by side with this a tradition of writing from and about the Sundarbans in Bangla. Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, Utpalendu Mandal, Bimalendu Halder, Panchanan Das, and Niranjan Mandal are just a few of the many writers in this area.” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 12). Within this context, Pramanik’s fiction acquires a double urgency: it is both a testimony to the oppression of caste in the Sundarbans of West Bengal and an introspection on the ecological interconnections that characterise Dalit life in this liminal mangrove space. For the Dalits of the Sundarbans, this woven condition holds for the ecology of the mangrove itself. Indigenous peoples’ intimate relationship with the forest is inextricably linked to dispossession, poverty and institutionalised caste oppression.

Historically, forests in the discourses of colonial and nationalist discourse were constructed as wildernesses, either as sublime nature to be romanticised or as resources to be extracted and brought under control (Guha, Reference Guha1989). For example, the idea of pristine nature was demolished by William Cronon’s (Reference Cronon and Cronon1995) critique of the trouble with wilderness by highlighting how forests are always historically produced and socially populated. Eduardo Kohn’s (Reference Kohn2013) How Forests Think pushes this point even further by arguing that forests themselves have semiotic potential – that they “think” in terms of pattern, relations and signs outside of human cognition. This way of thinking corresponds to accounts of the Sundarbans, where ecologies of mangroves also take an active role in structuring the temporality of Dalit life. The vegetal concentration and tidal patterns determine when one is able to move, harvest, or hide, and the forest becomes a co-actor in survival and no longer a neutral setting. Anna Tsing’s (Reference Tsing2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World does something similar in redefining forests as assemblages of precarity and entanglement. For Tsing, the matsutake mushroom comes to symbolise the intersection between capitalist devastation and environmental endurance. The mangroves of Pramanik’s fiction operate similarly as they grow in brackish waters which are unstable and represent the precarious nature of marginalised experience. Like Tsing’s mushrooms and these mangroves, both of these geographies suggest that forests are not merely an extractive or protective landscape, but precarious partnerships between species, ecologies and histories.

Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold2000) regards forests more like dwelling spaces, as opposed to abstract landscapes which emphasise ways in which they organise lines of movement, labour and social life. Pramanik’s displaced characters occupy such inhabitation spaces where existence is controlled by rhythms of the mangrove ecology – from the threat of leaf collecting to seasonal hunger. Their “lines” of existence are delimited by tidal flows and root systems, which inscribe human life into vegetal patterns and highlight the interdependent intimacy between caste-oppressed lives and mangrove ecologies. Bruno Latour (Reference Latour2017) extends this relational ontology by characterising ecological entities as actants within relational networks. In the Sundarbans, human and nonhuman categories of mangroves, tigers, storms and human refugees do not fit neatly into fixed human/nonhuman classifications. In reading into this frame, Pramanik’s fiction highlights the inseparability of Dalit survival through the agency of mangrove roots, tidal floods and vegetal density – all of which wield force in configuring political, social and ecological life.

On the other hand, Marder’s (Reference Marder2013) theorisation of what he refers to as plant time is key to rethinking temporality outside of anthropocentric narratives. In Plant-Thinking, he points out that plants live by hetero-temporality, a time of repetition, cycles and recommencement instead of linear movement. For him, the plant’s “non-conscious affirmation of repetition prefigures the affirmative movement of the Nietzschean eternal return, with its acceptance of the perpetual recommencement of life” (Marder, Reference Marder2013, p. 113). This circular time has a resonance with Pramanik’s mangroves, a place where the tides and the regrowth of the mangroves organise Dalit refugee life. For communities living from a thin ecology, vegetal temporality is not a matter of abstract philosophy but a condition of survival – life organised in cycles of loss, regeneration and precarious resilience.

“Dalit botanics” borrows from Marder’s (Reference Marder2013) the idea of plant time, and transplants it within the midst of caste-determined struggles, wherein cyclical regeneration represents a process that occurs in the darkness of social death. In such contexts, time itself is casted: survival is not reckoned in terms of progress, but in terms of repetition, but also persistence, as well as the potencies of reviving life in the midst of recurrent dispossession. This logic of persistence echoes in Marder’s memorable characterisation of plants as “the weeds of metaphysics” (2013, p. 90). He says that Western philosophy has long marginalised plants as “unwanted in [its] carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the classical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human” (Marder, Reference Marder2013, p. 90). When read vis-a-vis Dalit life, this image gains new power. Just as weeds interfere with the cultivated order, Dalits have been historically marked “out of place” in the strongly stratified hierarchies of caste (Guru, Reference Guru and Guru2011). However, weeds and Dalits have continued to persist, adapt and re-shape unfriendly environments.

In her essay, “Dalit Plants,” Sumana Roy (Reference Roy2014) offers a tender rebuke of the way in which caste-based marginalisation is reflected in botanical language and practice. In attempting to elaborate how in certain cases some plants, particularly weeds come to represent the lives of oppressed humans in the caste-system, Roy (Reference Roy2014) extends this critique to linguistic forms, such as the Bangla word “aagachha” (weed), which is positioned in opposition to gachh (plant/tree), and consequently forms a hierarchy of plant life which reflects casteist exclusions. Her childhood memories of a migrant gardener, a Hindi speaker, who referred to weeds as lawaris poudhey (orphan plants) and aatankbaadi (terrorists), remind us of the entrenchment of caste-inflected attitudes in common vernaculars. And so Roy’s first act of looking after weeds in discarded containers becomes a quiet insurgency – a subversive gardening that celebrates what casteist horticulture repudiates. Taken together, these streams of scholarship exhibit several blind spots: foreclosure of Dalit ecological lifeworlds in forest and coastal ecologies, the lack of caste in mainstream theories of plants and forests, as well as a lack of comparative dialogue between Dalit ecologies and Indigenous or posthumanist philosophies.

Vegetal pedagogies and “Life in the forest”

Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, a modern Bengali author whose writings are evocative portrayals of Dalit existence in borderland and rural ecologies, writes widely on the topics of displacement, caste and survival in the Sundarbans. His fiction is frequently documentary and mythic at the same time, representing the way in which marginalised communities bargain with the oppression of humans and nonhumans. Pramanik’s (Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024) “Life in the Forest” depicts a community of Dalit refugees, resettled in Dandakaranya, facing a struggle to live on barren land and using the forest as their means of subsistence. The story juxtaposes their memories of fertile Bangladesh with the bleak present. A similar situation occurs when a cheetah is spotted near the village, and although it is unsafe, the villagers go back into the forest to collect kendu leaves. The chronic threat of loss is further illustrated by the tale of Madhab Mandal who has lost his son, Bimal, who goes missing, demonstrating the tragic reality of their precarious lives.

From its opening sentence, the text establishes that the vegetal world cannot be reduced to background scenery but instead emerges as a protagonist – a social, ethical and pedagogical agent: “Where was that jungle now? … The jungle had been cleared and had given way to human settlements. But they had not been able to completely exterminate the jungle. After a few villages in these parts, the jungle reared its head again, deep, dense and dark, and continued over a stretch of 10 or 20 krosh” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 150). The forest’s return, which has been symbolised as rearing its head, establishes vegetal agency as a stoppage of human designs. Any efforts at enclosure, clearance and mastery are frustrated by the persistence of the forest. Michael Marder’s (Reference Marder2013) assertion that humans can only “brush upon the edges of their [plant] being” (p. 13) and must learn to “grow past the fictitious shells of our identity” (p. 13) is instrumental in Pramanik’s refusal of closure. The forest’s obstinate reappearance disempowers the teleology of human habitation, demanding that vegetal life is not a passive resource but a power that rearranges history itself.

This insistence is heightened in the story’s careful attention to seasonal cycles of mohua flowers and kendu leaves, the chief vegetal economies around which refugee villagers organise their survival. “When the hot summer wind blew, the delicate mohua flowers would drop off onto the ground. The village women would collect these mohua flowers and take them home. And the men and women would go out together and collect kendu leaves… This was how the jungle continued to fend for them. And they, too, helped to sustain the jungle” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 152). In these lines the plant serves not only as food and commodity but as mnemonic and memorial object, the carriers of histories of exile and displacement. Ryan (Reference Ryan2018) has demonstrated how poets, such as American writer Louise Glück, have long envisaged plants as repositories of memory: “With its coterie of flower-speakers endowed with memory, Glück’s The Wild Iris furthermore aligns with the tradition of sapient plants in English literature” (p. 151). Mimicking this tradition in her prose, Pramanik stages mohua and kendu as living archives. Their seasonal flowering and fruiting yields provide a caloric source while at the same time tethering uprooted villagers to temporal continuities disrupted by their displacement. When Madhab Mandal remembers “rivers everywhere” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 151) from his lost homeland, those memories of abundance are stitched up to current harvests; vegetal rhythms become places where ecological memory and refugee trauma are located. Ryan’s interest in neuro-botany underlines the appropriateness of this description: “there is evidence of the transmission of memories – especially stressful or traumatic ones – between generations of plants” (Ryan, Reference Ryan2018, p. 149). Just as plants pass along intergenerational memory of stress, mohua and kendu pass along the scars of displacement which accumulate across human generations and materialise grief and endurance in the vegetal vein.

Pramanik’s formal demotics is also illuminated by Ryan’s (Reference Ryan2018) account of phytopoetics. He makes the case that poetry itself can acquire vegetal modalities, that it becomes “the material exploration of potential in human and botanical subjects – and consequently highlights the instability of ontological delineations” (Ryan, Reference Ryan2018, p. 9). Pramanik’s (Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024) syntax tends to be rhizomatic: memories of rivers give way to recollections of hunger, love, death, which sprout out and then sink back into collective soil. His picture of roots gripping, as if “the sun was desperate to drink up every ounce of sap from every crevice of the earth” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 150), literalises the analogy between vegetal growth and narrative form and materialises the kinship between vegetal morphology and narrative form. Rhizomatically, meaning spreads, destabilising the human/nature binary. This prose is most apparent when it is read in parallel with Hall’s (Reference Hall2011) philosophical botany. Hall (Reference Hall2011) argues that plants represent a mode of being with moral significance and that we must “resituate the human being in a constructive relationship with the plants which surround them” (Hall, Reference Hall2011, p. 135). This ethical turn has particular resonance for Pramanik’s portrayal of a forest that governs possibilities of survival: when a tigress stalks nearby, “No one would go to collect kendu leaves or mohua flowers today” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 154). The forest has taboos and expectations, and dictates everyday behaviour. Nealon’s (Reference Nealon2015) political theory makes the stakes clear: vegetal life unsettles biopolitical structures by virtue of its essential yet often invisible role. Biopower has a tendency to place animal life as the standard of governance while excluding plants despite the fact that plants are materially sustaining life. Pramanik dramatises this paradox: the state is actively engaged when a tiger shows up: “The Forest Officer must be informed” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 154), but completely passive in dealing with the precarious labour of mohua and kendu collection. Vegetal economies are at the centre but politically invisible, marginalising Dalit and refugee livelihoods to the margins of governance. The forest thereby becomes a frontier between vegetal indispensability and institutional neglect.

Material ecocriticism as espoused by Iovino and Oppermann (Reference Iovino and Oppermann2012) offers an additional language for Pramanik’s approach. They argue that, “landscape, the river and the sea are all made out of a material world, which is as much shaped by the stories as by physical forces” (Iovino & Oppermann, Reference Iovino and Oppermann2012, p. 82). In “Life in the Forest,” matter itself tells the story: the dry wells over which women fight, the mohua flowers collected at dawn, predator scars. These are not empty backdrops but storied material, archived displacement and resilience. When Manimala wistfully says, “In this wretched land, water is more precious than gold or diamonds” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 151), her irony turns into reality: water rationing structures gendered fights, social hierarchies and the rituals of distribution. The Dandakaranya soil is a text of exile, Partition and precarious survival. Memory of abundance – “a dream world… rice fields that stretched in all directions (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 152)” is kept in vegetal imagology, revealing how plants themselves tell a story of dispossession.

Yet Pramanik’s story does not end on a note of despair. Ryan’s (Reference Ryan2018) idea of vegetal hope reorients the temporal cycles of the Sundarbans. He claims that “as a resource for the Anthropocene, botanical hope embraces the idea of the plant as a bearer of hope for a more equitable future on earth for itself and us” (Ryan, Reference Ryan2018, p. 236). Pramanik’s forest is such a dialectic hope. It sits and, after clearance, goes on producing mohua and kendu, instead of being reduced to commodity. Beating in its regenerative rhythms, it holds out the potential for political solidarity and ecological survival even in the face of caste marginalisations and ecological precarity. This hope is dialectical rather than naive: what makes the forest grievous also makes possible refusal, ritual and continuity. The survival practices of the villagers – the watch, the harvest, the offerings – are tenuous but ceaseless acts of hope on the foundation of vegetal strength.

In the story, Madhab Mandal and his fellow Dalit refugees inhabit Dandakaranya – barren and dry land that has “been home to the jungle once upon a time, (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p.150)” where “the rows of sal, segun, mohua, and kendu stood tall, proudly declaring their victory. They seemed to be declaring, ‘O, mankind, do not render us extinct! You are our children, too, and we nurture you as well” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 150). This passage adumbrates the acute Kimmerian sensibility: the vegetal world can speak and instruct which reminds humanity of its kinship and dependence. The forest’s act of “declaring” reclaims an ontological voice for trees which completely transform them from background flora into active agents of pedagogy. Kimmerer describes such relational ethics as “a covenant of reciprocity, in which humans and land are co-creators of renewal” (Reference Kimmerer2013, p. 382). Likewise, the characters also acquire the philosophy of survival not through institutions or industrial production, but through the forest itself, which serves as a source of livelihood, labour and teaching. This relational vitality is the aesthetic foundation of “Dalit Vegetal Poetics” in which vegetal speech and human survival intersect in a form of ethics of coexistence based on mutual vulnerability.

The forest in this ecology of coexistence mediates the reconstitution of the community of the Dalit refugees after being cast out: “The jungle continued to fend for them. And they, too, helped to sustain the jungle” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 152). This interaction of reciprocity is an example of what Kimmerer refers to as “the grammar of animacy,” in which the world is made of subjects, rather than objects (Reference Kimmerer2013, p. 55). Economic extraction, the gathering of kendu leaves, is not really an economic activity: it is an element of the pedagogical act, a daily practice of humble and dependent lessons. Unlike the capitalist or Brahmanical paradigms, which perceive nature as property, this Dalit kinship towards the forest is an instance of a multispecies solidarity that is founded on mutual sustenance. It is not that they “live in constant fear of death; it’s no use being scared of it. Losing one’s life while fighting to survive is better than to die of hunger” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p.155). Through the beat of labour, the Dalit characters derive the ethics of resilience from the trees that survive drought and deforestation. This principle of reciprocity that labour and plant existence are merged in is the vital heart of “Dalit Vegetal Poetics” that is an expressive form that makes marginal life a symbiotic art of survival.

Read through the lens of “Dalit Botanics,” these passages do more than evoke beauty or loss – they theorise a kind of ecological pedagogy with caste and survival as its pillars. The jungle educates through perseverance; the mohua and kendu turn into pedagogues, and give seasonal lessons about scarcity, work and reciprocity. In this reading, trees are not the objects of existence but the partners of existence, or the agents that constitute practice and gauge value and impose ethical responsiveness. Under this broader botanic framework, “Dalit Vegetal Poetics” refers to the expressive and affective category, in terms of which such relations are mediated; the idiom of image, rhythm, emotion, rendering vegetal life sentient and pedagogical. These are all part of a subaltern ecological epistemology where the forest educates through persistence, the tree is a moral interlocutor, and vegetal life itself is the living archive of Dalit resistance, adaptation and hope.

Dalit Vegetal Poetics and “In Dakshin Rai’s Land”

In “In Dakshin Rai’s Land” (2024), Shyamal Kumar Pramanik extends the vegetal imagination of his earlier “Life in the Forest” into a darker, more precarious landscape where the mangrove forest becomes both a sentient pedagogue and a witness to caste and ecological violence. The story revolves around the Sundarbans which is not only a space but a breathing landscape that teaches its people through death, destruction and birth. It is the landscape of “Dalit Vegetal Poetics,” a form of affective and ethical interaction between the human and the vegetal world that occurs most strongly here. Within the encompassing framework of Dalit Botanic, this poetics is not ornamental but rather epistemological: it reveals how the vegetal world teaches, disciplines and shelters the dispossessed.

The story opens with a disquieting vision: “Ghoshal babu generally slept till late morning. The morning sleep was very precious to him. But the nightmare ruined everything that morning” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, 78). The nightmare is a prophecy – a break-in of the ecological agency on the human psyche. Nature is demanding its psychic presence before the characters enter the forest; fear is not foisted upon the characters but it develops from within. By entering the jungle, the villagers enter into a living world, where its logic, industry for survival, dominates over the sense of wills of human beings. Pramanik (Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024) writes, “This was a place where life and death played hide and seek with each other every day. How many had died of snakebite here! How many had ended up inside the crocodile’s stomach! How many had been devoured by tigers!” (82). This line captures the Dalit notion of life as perpetual negotiation with death which cannot be guaranteed through divine goodness or social advantage, but rather only through being carefully mindful of the moods of the forest. The jungle in this situation, much like the forests in “Life in the forest,” takes the shape of an ethical teacher, teaching both by way of generosity as well as terror.

The Dalit characters’ relation to the forest is one of reverence born from precarity. Their lives are structured around the forest’s rhythms: “Many people from Gobindapur village depended for their livelihoods on the streams and forests of the Sundarbans… the crops that the land produced would last them a few months, and the jungle would provide them with help to sustain themselves the rest of the year” (Pramanik, Reference Pramanik and Dasguptaa2024, p. 81). The vegetal-fluvial economy, honey, timber, leaves, is not supplemental but existential. Labour here is a form of learning: the villagers, by picking, absorb the morals of dependence and moderation. The honey they gather is more than just food, but a favour of the forest, and requires a ritual recognition. Every time one goes back to the jungle, it is a form of ecological reciprocity – a form of pedagogical repetition in which knowledge is reborn in risk. As Ryan (Reference Ryan2018) observes, “plants mediate human experience of the world, and also are capable of corporeal perception” (75). In Pramanik’s narrative, this perception goes both ways: the villagers interpret vegetal signs, while the forest in turn reacts to their gestures of reverence or exploitation.

Within this complex dynamic of things the trees and plants become pedagogical agents. The hetal and sundari, their roots gripping the brackish soil, are models of endurance; their seasonal shedding and renewal become lessons in resilience for the Dalit labourers whose livelihoods depend on cyclical repetition. Patience is taught by the temporality of the forest; it takes time before it gives, and the regularity of its floods expresses the tempo of a world that can be mastered. In this regard, “Dalit Vegetal Poetics” is an aesthetic and an epistemic form. It conveys, in image and beat, the morality of a people who have come to think like trees. This vegetal pedagogy, based in patience, humility and reciprocity constitutes an ethical kernel of “Dalit Botanics,” which gathers such poetics into a coherent subaltern ecological framework.

This pedagogy is also shown in the ritual scenes of the story. The sacrifice to Dakshin Rai, the tiger-god, demonstrates the role of vegetal matter, leaves, honey, flowers, in the connection of human and god. Foregrounding this, the very idea of ritual becomes not only superstition but ecological diplomacy: that man exists under the goodwill of vegetal and animal powers. As Iovino and Oppermann (Reference Iovino and Oppermann2012) argue, matter is “storied” – it “embodies its own narratives in the minds of human agents and in the very structure of its own self-constructive forces (83).” Pramanik’s mangrove thus forms the nexus of such storied matter: remembering the deaths, concealing the secrets, producing the meaning in decay and rebirth. The forest hides Bhola not as punishment but as inscription; the human body becomes absorbed in vegetal memory, as indication of the reciprocity between human mortality and ecological continuity.

Towards the end of the story, the forest becomes the repository and educator. It is its pedagogical centrality that is testified by the deaths it holds, the rituals it gives life to, the livelihoods it supports. The seasonal coming back to the jungle by the villagers is a reflection of the tide of the mangrove – a kind of repetition that produces memory, not a matter of routine. Every harvesting is an act of remembering, every ritual an ethical rebirth. As Iovino and Oppermann (Reference Iovino and Oppermann2012) suggest, landscapes “act” and are “inscribed in myths and legends” (80); the Sundarbans act in precisely this way by preserving the forgotten histories of caste, migration and ecological precarity within their vegetal depths. The legend of Mother Vishalakshi, who had seized a honey-collector, is not mythic ornament but ecological jurisprudence – a tale which controls behaviour by terror and piety. Storytelling in this sense, in turn, is yet another continuation of vegetal pedagogy: narrative recreates the didactic form of the forest.

“In Dakshin Rai’s Land” thus performs the core ideas of “Dalit Botanics”: it reimagines vegetal life as both archive and pedagogue, moral subject and political agent. By imbuing the forest as a thinking landscape, the story by Pramanik creates a vast ecological thinking beyond the human, suggesting that the vegetal world is not a passive matter, but is instead a stakeholder in the construction of subaltern knowledge. The Dalit forest-dweller’s survival, conditioned by fear, labour, and reverence, becomes a model for ecological ethics. The trees, roots and rivers are no metaphors but moral interlocutors. The life of Dalits learns its endurance in their shade, renewal in their decay. “Dalit Botanics” finally compiles these lessons of the vegetable in a critical model which places caste, ecology and pedagogy on the same scale of life. “Dalit Vegetal Poetics” provides the narrative idiom; “Dalit Botanics” supplies the epistemological ground. Together, they articulate a theory of knowledge that grows from the soil of suffering and reciprocity – a theory where all leaves are archives, all roots are pedagogues, all survive a forest ecology text composed in the grammar of the forest.

Towards “Dalit Botanics”

The framework of “Dalit Botanics” outlines an ecological interconnectedness of caste and pedagogy and vegetal life. When popular ecological thinking tends to idealise nature as a place of escape, “Dalit Botanics” insists on perceiving it as a location of collective precarity and radical pedagogy. The forest is not metaphor but way: a pedagogue of patience, meekness and interchangeability. It adheres to the statements of Robin Wall Kimmerer (Reference Kimmerer2013), who said “the land is the real teacher. All you need as a student is a pair of ears willing to listen” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 8), “Dalit Botanics” surpasses her multispecies pedagogy to the caste and dispossession social lands. The trees and plants here are pedagogical agents, teachers of both mohua generosity and cruelty – of the mollification as much as the indifference of the mangrove. In this context, the vegetal is epistemic: it generates not contemplation but contact. The forest worlds by Pramanik teach that learning is inseparable from danger. It bases the ethical on the ecological, demonstrating how the sentience of the forest, as the ability to nurture, resist and teach, organises Dalit subjectivity in the circumstances of systemic vulnerability.

The vegetal has been traditionally on the border of thought: marginal in philosophy, neglected in politics, and underestimated in aesthetics. However, in the fiction of Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, forests, rivers and plants reject marginality. They arise as co-authors to survival, negotiators of memory and the producers of ethical demand. At stake is not merely a greening of Dalit or refugee histories or an expansion of posthumanist interest in nonhuman life. Instead, a new interpretative orientation emerges: “Dalit Botanics,” is formed. “Dalit Botanics” suggests that plants are not the symbolic or resourceful but are the active agent in the caste-marked ecologies of South Asia.”Dalit Botanics” formulates a series of five provocations that re-think the problem of caste-ecology entanglement. First, it imagines plant life as caste-marked, with Dalit forests, rivers and crops becoming not metaphors but socialised ecologies, enrolling ecological agency and caste-marked survival. Second, it positions plants as co-ethical agents, by acknowledging vegetal sentience and demonstrating that Dalit practises of offering, giving and reciprocating are not superstitious or primitivist, but survival technologies. Third, it places plants in biopolitical invisibility to reveal the structural similarity between the erasure of plants in politics and the invisibility of Dalit and refugee labour in national economies. Fourth, it interprets plants as narrative form, as Pramanik’s fiction demonstrates, Dalit stories unfold in vegetal temporality, cyclic, bifurcated, regenerative, in a phytopoetic mode. Lastly, it suggests plants as dialectical hope, where regeneration after storms, blossoms after scarcity, and mangroves after submersion are signs of not utopian transcendence, but of constitutive tenacity, a form of survival based on repetition instead of progress.

“Dalit Botanics” points towards a pedagogy that is not only interpretative but insurgent, one that asks students to unlearn the hierarchies that are built into the way we encounter the vegetal world. A course based on “Dalit Botanics” would weave between text and terrain: reading Pramanik in the shade of a local tree, writing reflection pieces by a polluted canal or drawing the life of a particular plant: its threats, its neighbours, its vulnerabilities, as an ecological biography. A “Dalit Botanic” pedagogy could ask students to investigate “agacha” (weeds) not as biological excess, but as caste marked life, investigating how weeds exist in the face of hostility, removal and neglect. Such practices would make environmental education a pedagogy of accountability instead of admiration: a pedagogy in which students would begin catching up with mangroves, river embankments, undergrowth or weeds by the roadside as archives of labour, displacement and unequal flourishing. To teach “Dalit Botanics,” then, is to cultivate an ethics of attention that grows in the gap between classroom and field – an embodied practice where plants are not simply seen but listened to, not categorised but encountered as fellow-strugglers in a world shaped by precarity and resistance. Through such radical modes of involvement, environmental education becomes a place where the vegetal world teaches its own lessons in survival, reciprocity and caste-aware ecological responsibility.

In this sense, the insurgent pedagogical imagination of “Dalit Botanics” is also consistent with research in environmental education that foregrounds learning as an embodied, relational and more-than-human encounter. Rautio (Reference Rautio2013) for example, demonstrates how children acquire ecological understanding in terms of shared material encounters with plants, minerals and multispecies presences – a methodological insight that reverberates with the caste-situated ecological learning embodied by Pramanik’s characters. Likewise, Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw’s (Reference Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw2015) common worlds pedagogy argues that environmental learning needs to consider unequal multispecies entanglements, a framework that adumbrates directly with “Dalit Botanics” insistence that caste, labour and vegetal agency are inseparable. Environmental-education scholars have also called for the need to counter romantic pedagogies which efface structural oppression; Bang et al. (Reference Bang, Warren, Rosebery and Medin2014) have called for a “decolonising” approach which centres marginalised epistemologies, which makes a strong argument that “Dalit Botanics” is a caste aware pedagogy of ecological accountability. Further, Payne’s (Reference Payne2019) work on the affective politics of place reminds us that environmental learning is always conditioned on histories of precarity and environmental injustice, reinforcing the claim that the Sundarbans in Pramanik’s fiction operates as pedagogical terrains which are affected by multispecies danger, reciprocity and survival.

The development of these propositions does not simply involve “Dalit Botanics” applying plant theory to South Asian texts. It re-orients the field. Where ontological wonder has dominated much Euro-American plant philosophy, or ecological re-enchantment has been the cry, “Dalit Botanics” declares that vegetal agency should be conceived in histories of caste oppression, refugee dispossession and ecological precarity. Plants in this context are neither metaphysical puzzles, nor sources of aesthetic pleasure: they are joint cataloguers of trauma, joint workers of survival and joint imagers of unstable futures. In a period where the Anthropocene is frequently told as an all-encompassing precarity, “Dalit Botanics” provides a different perspective: to Dalit and refugee communities, precarity has not been a new frontier – it has long been the foundation of making ends meet. But once plants are recognised as fellow workers in that struggle the ethical sting of the field goes deeper. As Hall (Reference Hall2011) struggles to remind us, our relations are not neutral: “Each choice paves the way for different modes of relating with the world – leading to very different ends” (p. 158). It is this change that “Dalit Botanics” is pursuing: where the vegetal becomes not a resource, but rather a co-equal agent of moral, archival and narrative sustainability.