Ecological Awareness and Sustainability in Folktales from South Asia

This book examines how traditional narratives from South Asia articulate ecological knowledge and imagine relationships among humans, animals, plants, landscapes, and other forms of life. The volume argues that folktales are more than repositories of cultural memory: they are important sites of ecological thought, carrying culturally rooted understandings of reciprocity, restraint, interdependence, responsibility, and coexistence. Drawing on ecocriticism, ecofeminism, posthumanism, and related interdisciplinary approaches, the contributors explore how folktales question human-centred understandings of the natural world and envision more-than-human communities in which human well-being remains inseparable from ecological relationships. Rather than romanticizing traditional knowledge as inherently sustainable, the volume attends to its complexities, contradictions, and culturally specific forms. By bringing South Asian folklore into contemporary debates on sustainability, the book demonstrates how traditional storytelling can expand environmental thinking beyond predominantly technological and policy-centred approaches. It ultimately argues that recovering and critically engaging with these ecological imaginaries can help reimagine human relationships with the more-than-human world and offer valuable ways of confronting the escalating ecological crises of the Anthropocene.