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 critiqueLong 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 abstractionHis 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 meditative novel whose title evokes not simply “fertile soil” but a condition of being shaped and sustained by earth itself. Satya Prakash Mohanty of Cornell University once described him as perhaps “the most important Indian novelist in the second half of the twentieth century.”Yet despite his stature, Mohanty remains strangely absent from mainstream national literary conversation. That neglect is revealing: his novels are difficult to assimilate into the triumphant story India prefers to tell about itself, the story in which development arrives as inevitable progress and forests exist primarily as resources awaiting productive exploitation. His fiction quietly unsettles that narrative. A makeshift tent of watchdogs at the Sijimali hill entrance point near Sagabari village, Photo: Ganesh Gaigouria.But this is also why Mohanty feels startlingly contemporary today. India is living through some of its hottest summers on record. Cities across the country are already brushing against infernal temperatures in April itself, with Prayagraj and Agra hovering around 44°C, Lucknow crossing 43°C and Delhi repeatedly pushing past 44°C. Yet public discussion still treats this as a seasonal inconvenience to be managed through air-conditioning, advisories and private adaptation. But this heat is not an aberration. It is a consequence of decades of myopic policy.For decades, forests in India have been steadily reduced to administrative abstractions. Their living ecological complexity has been flattened into percentages, canopy counts and compensatory figures. A natural forest and a plantation increasingly appear interchangeable within bureaucratic language, as though a monoculture of commercial trees could replicate the hydrological intelligence and climatic memory of a naturally evolved ecosystem. Even as warnings mounted about accelerating deforestation caused by dams, highways, mines and industrial expansion, the state increasingly chose statistical accommodation over ecological honesty. As a result, between 2001 and 2024, India lost more than 2.3 million hectares of tree cover. Between 2015 and 2020 alone, the country recorded one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. In 2024, roughly 150,000 hectares of natural forest vanished in a single year. Much of this destruction has been concentrated in ecologically fragile regions, especially in the Northeast, where logging, mining and infrastructure expansion continue to erode forest systems that evolved over centuries.Also read: Why Tribes in Odisha’s Sijimali Are Protesting Against a Vedanta-Owned Bauxite MineAnd yet, as irony would have it, official discourse continues to insist on a greening India. Plantations, scattered urban trees and degraded patches are folded into aggregate forest statistics, producing the comforting fiction of ecological recovery while dense biodiverse forests quietly disappear. The habit of administrative self-deception reached a new stage in recent years when protections were diluted even for so-called “deemed forests”, landscapes that functioned ecologically as forests but lacked neat bureaucratic classification. Many of these regions had survived precisely because of Adivasi stewardship and customary systems of inhabitation. Their legal weakening has effectively cleared pathways for even more mining and ever more infrastructure projects.The sequence is almost elegant in its cynicism. Forests are first redefined until little remains of their ecological meaning. Legal protections are then narrowed, and what would once have been recognised as destruction is, over time, rendered perfectly lawful.Sijimali as a contested landscapeThis larger context is essential to understanding Sijimali. The proposed mining project there, awarded to Vedanta in 2023, spans over 1,500 hectares in the Eastern Ghats region of Odisha, including hundreds of hectares of forest land. The area contains significant bauxite reserves and therefore appears within developmental discourse primarily as an economic asset awaiting extraction. But for the Dongria Kondh and other local communities resisting the project, Sijimali is not merely a hill with mineral deposits beneath: it is tied to streams, cultivation systems, sacred geography, memory and ancestral continuity. Indigenous communities clash with the police in Sijimali, Odisha, Photo: X/MahuaMoitra.There is something profoundly moving in the fact that the language of these struggles has barely changed since Mohanty’s time. The anxieties he captured in the 1940s continue to haunt India nearly eighty years later. The names of corporations may have changed and the vocabulary of governance may now include sustainability, strategic infrastructure and inclusive growth. But the underlying pattern remains painfully recognisable: forests are marked for acquisition, hills become mineral blocks, communities are informed that displacement is inevitable and resistance irrational, and ‘modernity’ arrives, again and again, carrying maps, surveys, contracts and police protection.Mohanty’s ecological ontology and the meaning of landThis is precisely the world Mohanty spent his life documenting. His early masterpiece Dadi Budha, translated into English as The Ancestor, offered one of the first major literary portraits of tribal life in the mountainous forest regions of Odisha. But what makes Dadi Budha remarkable is not simply its realism. Recent scholarship on the novel has pointed out that Mohanty portrays forests not as external environment but as living continuities linking ancestors, land and community. The dead remain embedded within landscape itself. Hills, stones, forests and croplands are not resources but presences. Nature is not separate from, but constitutive of, society. Reading the novel today, one realises how impoverished modern environmental discourse often is. We speak of “resources,” “ecosystem services” and “forest cover,” while Mohanty was writing about belonging, memory and reciprocal existence.That difference becomes even sharper in Paraja. The novel follows the gradual destruction of a tribal community’s relationship with land through debt, exploitation and administrative power. At one point, the protagonist Sukru Jani reflects that the land is not merely earth but part of his own body. This is not metaphor in the decorative literary sense. It is ontology, where the distinction between landscape and self dissolves: ancestral ashes nourish the soil, the soil nourishes future generations and forests become repositories of memory and identity.Only later would writers elsewhere in the postcolonial world begin to explore similar anxieties with comparable force. One is reminded of Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart chronicled the collapse of Igbo society under colonial intrusion, or of Latin American writers such as José María Arguedas and Miguel Ángel Asturias, who wrote about indigenous worlds being consumed by extraction, plantation economies and state violence. Later still, novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude would evoke landscapes transformed beyond recognition by modernity’s advance, particularly through a depiction of the 1928 Banana Massacre in Colombia. Gopinath Mohanty belongs within that global literary tradition whose genius lay in recognising that modern systems of extraction first require a conceptual transformation of land itself.Also read: The Sijimali Conflict: Extractivism Versus Rights of Nature In India’s Sacred MountainsA hill must cease to be sacred geography before it can become a mining block. A forest must cease to be a lived world before it can become a compensatory afforestation statistic. Once this conceptual conversion occurs, dispossession becomes administratively manageable.That process is visible not only in Sijimali but across India’s extractive frontiers. Jharkhand offers perhaps the clearest example. Rich in coal, iron ore and uranium, Jharkhand has for decades functioned as a resource hinterland feeding industrial growth elsewhere. Yet mining and industrialisation have also produced repeated displacement, polluted rivers, damaged forests and precarious labour systems. Regions richest in natural wealth become zones of concentrated ecological sacrifice.A file image of the protests at Sijimali, Photo: By arrangement.The same logic appears in the Aravalli Range, though in urban form. The Aravallis once acted as ecological shields regulating groundwater, heat and desertification across northwestern India. Yet metropolitan expansion, quarrying and luxury real estate have steadily fragmented the range. Ecological collapse here proceeds slowly enough to appear ordinary.And then there is Great Nicobar Island, perhaps the most consequential case of all because it combines ecological fragility, indigenous vulnerability and geopolitical ambition. The proposed mega-project there involving ports, airports, roads and strategic infrastructure is routinely justified through the language of national security and maritime competition. Yet strategic maps possess a dangerous tendency to flatten inhabited worlds into empty space awaiting national purpose.Great Nicobar is not terra nullius. It contains rainforest ecosystems of immense ecological significance and the homeland of the Shompen people, one of India’s most vulnerable indigenous communities. The contradiction is profound. Mega-infrastructure depends upon roads, demographic expansion and administrative penetration. But Shompen existence historically depends upon ecological autonomy and forest continuity. The conflict is therefore not merely environmental. It is civilisational.Mohanty understood these contradictions early, refusing to romanticise Adivasi life. His novels show hardship, aspiration and conflict while rejecting the developmental fantasy that economic change can occur without ecological and cultural loss. It feels prophetic as India’s heat crisis reveals the ecological cost of developmentalism, where deforestation, mining and infrastructure expansion drive climate impacts and link urban heat to distant forest destruction. Sijimali raises the question of who defines land: corporations see mineral value, while communities see water systems, cultivation, sacred geography and memory as competing realities. Mohanty’s fiction remains powerful because it recognises the sorrow involved when one reality acquires institutional dominance over another. At a moment when forests across India are steadily translated into strategic assets, mining corridors and infrastructure zones, he reminds us of something the modern state persistently forgets: landscapes are never merely empty waiting rooms for ‘development.’ They are already, unto themselves, developed, living and breathing life-worlds.Sahasranshu Dash is a research associate at the International Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs (ICAEPA), an independent research organisation based in Sheffield, the United Kingdom.