Fifty-one years ago, in April 2023, the first Chipko protest saw Adivasis, or indigenous Indian women, embracing trees to prevent the logging of the green Himalayan forests. The Chipko Movement got its name from the Hindi word ‘chipko’ meaning ‘to hug’ or ‘to cling to’ when the indigenous communities of India exhibited their close ties of existence with nature. This grassroots environmental non-violent movement supports the preservation of human rights enumerated in the UDHR (1948) like the rights to freedom, social justice, economic equity, and access to social and international order, as well as the right to a clean and sustainable environment as in the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 48/13 (October 2021). Social worker Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016) lived with these Adivasi communities and documented their oral narratives. This paper unravels the call for the human right to eco-justice in her stories and novellas and show how Devi creates an imaginative community that can embrace characters, authors, and readers in their quest for the human right to a sustainable environment. Devi’s experiences with the Indigenous folks speaks to the dire need to reframe environmental justice. This paper explores how her fiction is not just an ethno-historical-fictional account but is one propelled by the narrative sleight of hand of a postcolonial social worker, writer, and human rights activist. In colonial times, these communities were perceived as ‘uncivilized’ with the colonial masters striving to bring ‘order’ over ‘chaos’. Their existence remains precarious with the present-day postcolonial government implementing dam-building projects in the name of greater common good. This paper considers how Devi’s eco-critical writing underscored the need to reframe environmental justice in postcolonial times by referring to David Schlosberg’s paradigm ‘distribution, recognition, and participation’, where all stakeholders should partake in the distribution of environmental harm, recognize and annihilate injury to voiceless actors who depend on the produce of the Earth for their daily sustenance, and participate in preserving and cherishing the Earth.
