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Paper short abstract

The paper explores Hitopadeśa by Narayana, a ninth–tenth century CE Sanskrit text, as eco-critical narrative that interweaves niti (pragmatic wisdom) with environment. It explores forest as a sacred space and metaphor for physical, psychological, and cultural journeys in Hitopadesa.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores Hitopadeśa by Narayana, a ninth–tenth century CE Sanskrit text, as eco-critical narrative that interweaves niti (pragmatic wisdom) with environment. While focusing on folk literary traditions, the text employs fables, frame narratives, and symbolism to elucidate the interdependence of nature and society. The Hitopadesa emerges as a profound folk-literary work offering reflection on the complexity of the forest and the natural world within human life and imagination. The study examines how the Hitopadesa portrays the forest as a sacred space and metaphor - physical, psychological, and cultural - for wisdom, and inner journeys. Through anthropomorphized animals, symbolic rivers, trees, and the earth itself, the narrative renders the natural world as ethical and active existence, echoing the pattern from mythology and oral traditions. The eco-critical theory and narrative aesthetics examines the text (select tales) that frames landscapes as storehouse of ecological wisdom and righteousness. It will examine the forest as both a narrative and visual apparatus-comparable to sequential art-juxtaposing panoramic ‘panels’ of ecosystems with intimate sketching of human and non-human connections. In dialogue with Felix Guattari’s notion of “three ecologies,” the select folktales that articulate ecology, circulating the orality of nature narratives as sacred spaces will be discussed.