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Though the written tribal literature of central-eastern India has its origin in the late nineteenth century, it is popularly believed that the tribal writings came to the limelight as protest markers post-1990, mostly due to the resistance that the tribals demonstrated against illegal land occupations and exploitations during that period. We now see tribal literature emerge as a distinctive genre. Ignatius Soreng’s Flame of the Forest, the first collection of Adivasi poetry in English coming from Sundargarh, Odisha, is an example of the new trend in Indian literature. This paper indicates that by shifting from the "literary silence" of oral tradition to a written text, Flame of the Forest functions as a deliberate act of resistance against the "archival erasure" of Adivasi life, and that Soreng utilises the poetic medium to reclaim the tribal subject from the static domain of anthropological "obituaries," positioning tribal experience as a dynamic, contesting presence that forces the "elitist literate civilisations" to acknowledge Adivasi life and literature as legitimate rather than mere folklore.
Dr. Ajit Kumar Kullu. “Tribal Life and Culture in Poetry: A Reading of Flame of the Forest by Ignatius Soreng.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 191-208. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.14.
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