Volume VI Special Issue VI September 2026

Name of Author : Rajguhan R, Dr. Gangadharan T

Title of the paper : Necropolitics of the Forest: Bonded Labour, Land Alienation, and Indigenous Precarity in Sheela Tomys Valli

Abstract: Necropolitics of the forest is an essential concept for understanding the uses of the forest, state power, and global capitalism. Sheela Tomys novel Valli Malayalam was translated into English in 2022. The novel is set in the Kalluvayal rainforest of Wayanad, among the indigenous Paniya Adivasi inhabitants of Wayanad, meaning workers or labourers it is rooted in Vallippani. The institutional marginalisation of Adivasi communities from their traditional lands due to colonial history, capitalist expansion and the bureaucracy. Alienation cuts off the close ecological ties that Indigenous peoples have with the traditional forest ecological knowledge, creating places of cultural memory and survival as places of exclusion and indigenous precarity. This research paper explores how Valli is an important text that reveals the necropolitics of environmental governance and calls for Indigenous ecological justice in present day India.

Keywords : Paniya Adivasi, Ecological knowledge, Indigenous, Ecological justice, Precarity.

DOI :

Page Number : 208-212