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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Manipuri and Naga folktales use metaphor and sensory imagery—milk rivers, wrinkled skin, rain maidens—to naturalize ecological knowledge and moral feeling. These vivid narratives position the environment as a co-creator of cultural “common sense.”

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how traditional folktales from Manipur and Nagaland embed ecological sensibilities through visceral metaphor and shared sensory perception. Drawing on And That Is Why… Manipuri Myths Retold (L. Somi Roy) and Easterine Kire’s Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man, the analysis highlights how figurative speech in these stories—rivers of milk, rain as a divine agent of renewal, the wrinkling of skin as a curse borne from disobedience—preserves a deep sensory grammar of environmental attunement. The stories naturalise knowledge through bodily metaphor: the cat’s burial of excreta, the stoop of the old man, the hibernating deer—all render ecological habits as moral fables, fusing everyday observation with cosmological meaning. These metaphors do not merely describe nature, but co-create it, establishing the environment as a co-producer of “common sense.”

The paper engages with Kant’s sensus communis and Veronica Strang’s work on water cognition to interrogate how natural imagery shapes affective bonds between people and place. Through close reading of visual and oral storytelling elements, it investigates how these tales model an ethics of interrelation rooted in felt experience—where rain, earth, animals, and humans participate in mutual meaning-making.

Far from being static cultural artefacts, these folktales act as dynamic epistemological tools: the metaphors they employ remain sharp, alive, and formative. They invite us to reconsider how the poetic traditions of Northeast India hold open a space for interspecies feeling, resisting closure and asserting the senses as sites of moral and ecological knowing.