Portrayal Of Tribal Life In Indian Movie And Indian Novel: An Ecocritical Study

Abstract

This paper is devoted to understand how literature (as in novel) and cinema (as in movie) portray tribal communities as the people who live in synchronization with nature. Indian cinema and Indian literature has become a tool to showcase the tribal life to the outer world through their performances and words. This helps the world to understand the life of the tribes through the modern man’s choice of leisure like watching movie and reading books. The people of the urban society does not make an attempt to know and understand the lives of the tribal people. Movie and literature help in explaining the tribal lives in a reachable way and make the urban man aware of it. This paper discusses about the movie Jai Bhim and novel The Immortals of Meluha as instances.In the movie Jai Bhim, the basic life of Irula tribe is very well portrayed. Also, the movie shows how well the tribal community respect nature and all beings of nature. This movie is one good example to explain the tribal life through a visual mode to the audience. When talking about literature’s portrayal of tribal life, the novel The Immortals of Meluha is used to showcase the tribal life portrayal in words. In the novel, the key character ‘Shiva’ is presented as a tribal community man who can only live life with nature and finds it hard to adapt the changing modernity and so called upper class comfort.The paper takes an ecocritical view of both the works to bring out its tribal life touch presented in them and this paper explains how the tribes live their life in oneness with nature.