Volume VI Issue I January-March 2026

Name of Author : Dr. Santhosh P C

Title of the paper : Between Spectacle and Sovereignty Representation of Tribal Communities in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian English Fiction

Abstract: This paper examines the representation of tribal communities in Indian English fiction from the colonial era to the present, tracing a complex arc from ethnographic spectacle and colonial othering to postcolonial recuperation, critical self representation, and ongoing contestation. Drawing on postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, decolonial criticism, and the emerging field of tribal literary studies, the paper analyses select texts spanning Rudyard Kiplings The Jungle Book 1894, Verrier Elwins Leaves from the Jungle 1936, Bhabani Bhattacharyas So Many Hungers 1947, Mahasweta Devis Chotti Munda and His Arrow 1980, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhars The Adivasi Will Not Dance 2015, and Temsula Aos These Hills Called Home 2006. Through close textual reading, the paper argues that the representation of tribal communities in Indian English fiction is never innocent it is always already implicated in structures of power, knowledge, and discourse that determine who is authorised to represent whom, for what audience, and with what political consequences. The paper further contends that the emergence of fiction by tribal authors writing in English since the late twentieth century constitutes a fundamental challenge to the representational regimes established during colonialism and reproduced, in altered forms, in much postcolonial fiction by non tribal authors.

Keywords : Tribal representation, Adivasi literature, Indian English fiction, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, decolonial criticism, ethnographic fiction, Mahasweta Devi, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

DOI :

Page No. : 50-59