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In the forests of southern Odisha, resistance often begins with a hill. That is certainly true of Sijimali, where Adivasi communities mounted sustained protests earlier this year against a proposed bauxite mining project that threatens to alter not merely a landscape, but also an entire ecological and social world. Villagers in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts organised demonstrations, challenged environmental clearances, alleged coercion during public hearings and faced police action, arrests and intimidation in return. The conflict has become one more entry in India’s long archive of struggles over forests, minerals and displacement. 

Yet the conflict over Sijimali does not stand alone: it belongs to a much larger story unfolding across the country, from the exhausted mining belts of Jharkhand to the degraded ecology of the Aravallis and the planned mega-projects of Greater Nicobar Island. These struggles no longer appear local or isolated. They feel instead like echoes carrying across decades, reminders that the arguments India believed it had settled through development were never truly resolved at all. Nearly 80 ago, Gopinath Mohanty had already grasped the intellectual and moral logic that underlies such conflicts.

The long prehistory of ecological critique

Long before climate discourse, environmental justice or indigenous rights became recognisable intellectual categories, the Odia novelist Gopinath Mohanty had already recognised the deeper structure of this crisis. Throughout his oeuvre, he was exploring the violent encounter between forests, tribal dispossession and extractivist ‘development.’

Mohanty’s great novels on tribal life appeared in the 1940s itself, in the twilight of colonial rule and before the Indian developmental state had fully announced its ambitions. Reading him today, one has the unsettling sense that he was writing not about a vanished past but about the country’s future.

Born in 1914 in Nagabali near Cuttack, Mohanty belonged to a generation shaped by colonialism and the cautious first decades of independence. Educated at Ravenshaw College and Patna University, he joined the Odisha Administrative Service in 1938 and spent much of his professional life in the tribal regions of undivided Koraput. Those years transformed his literary imagination. 

Unlike metropolitan writers who approached Adivasi life through anthropology, reformism or romantic distance, Mohanty wrote from prolonged administrative and social proximity to Kondh, Paraja, Gadaba and Saora communities. He learned their rhythms of speech, observed the fragility of their worlds and their interconnectedness with the forests that surrounded them, especially under ever-expanding state power.

Mohanty understood with remarkable clarity how this would transform indigenous communities and the landscape of what would later come to be known as ‘mining and infrastructure corridors.’

From forest worlds to developmental abstraction

His literary output was prolific. Mohanty wrote 24 novels, 10 collections of short stories, essays, biographies and linguistic studies on tribal languages. His first novel, Mana Gahirara Chasa (Farming the Depths of the Mind), appeared in 1940. Then came Dadi Budha (The Ancestor) in 1944, Paraja in 1945 and Amrutara Santana (The Children of Nectar) in 1947, a remarkable sequence of novels that transformed Indian writing on tribal life before independence had even settled into nationhood. Amrutara Santana later became the first work ever to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955.

In 1973, Mohanty received the Jnanpith Award for Matimatala (The Soaked Earth), a vast and........

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