Abstract

            The history of the Santali literature, as considered in this paper, was put into the framework of a multi-layered, phase-specific model of expressive culture, which relates oral culture, script evolution, and contemporary literary production. Santali is a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family, spoken in the Eastern regions of India and has had a strong oral tradition of creation stories, ritual songs, farm songs, and moral tales for several centuries. They were not occasional performances but rather structured archives of knowledge of the surrounding world, where the relations between community, geography, and cosmology are beyond the comprehension into the category of folklore. According to ethnoscience and cultural ecological studies, the study analyzes the Santali literature as an indigenous classification system, which is applied to the land, forest, water, and wildlife to form a moral universe. Through this, four historical stages are marked: initial cosmological and oral tradition phase, the colonial documentation phase, the transformative script reform phase following the production of the Ol Chiki script by Raghunath Murmu in 1925 and the current phase of political mobilization and environmental criticism. Through qualitative textual analysis and reconstruction of history, we come to understand that the new Santali literature is a reworking of old ecological symbols to oppose industrial extraction, land alienation and displacement. Santali literature, therefore, seems to be an epistemic archive of indigenous knowledge and also a critical discourse that depicts the environmental realities of the modern world.