A Study of Male Characters in the Assamese Novel Through the Lens of Eco Masculinity

Abstract

This paper examines male characters in Nilakshi Chaliha Gogoi’s Assamese novel Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa (Oh, My Dibru-Saikhowa) through the lens of Eco Masculinity, drawing primarily on Hultman and Pulé’s tripartite typology of industrial, eco-modern, and ecological masculinities. The study reads the novel’s two principal male characters—Bakul Bora and Seuj—as contrasting masculine trajectories shaped, respectively, by socio-economic deprivation, displacement, patriarchal conditioning, and legal criminalization on the one hand, and by maternal ecological ethics, generational mentorship, and affective formation on the other. The analysis proceeds through three connected registers. First, it attends to the novel’s narrative form, arguing that its principal focalizing consciousness is Dr. Irina Baruah, a physician through whose perception the male characters are largely presented. Second, it develops the political ecology of the Dibru-Saikhowa region—its colonial and postcolonial conservation history, the institutional gap between the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the slow violence visited on the Mising villagers of Laika and Dadhiya. Third, it engages intersectional critiques of eco-masculinity and confronts the structural tension of applying a male-centered framework to a female-focalized novel. The paper argues that Eco Masculinity, applied with due attention to narrative form, historical specificity, and eco-feminine agency, offers a productive tool for South Asian ecocritical scholarship, and it suggests two modifications to the framework that follow from this application.

1. Introduction

“He did not come to the Seuj camp merely to drown in office files and papers or to count trees and tally wildlife statistics. Life’s experiences had made Seuj curious about the color green. They had inspired him to become a good forest officer. His friends’ objections and frustrations had given him the strength to accept challenges. Men enriched by experience—like elder brothers and fathers—had given him the drive to keep working in new ways. His mother’s loving, nature-adoring spirit had endowed him with an artistic sensibility. Seuj wants to bind human life and the forest with a single thread.”

—Nilakshi Chaliha Gogoi, Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa, p. 2881

The passage catalogues, with some precision, the constituents of a single masculine identity: friendships within a dissenting peer group, mentorship by older men, a mother whose relation to the natural world was affective before it was institutional. It arrives, finally, at the ethical conclusion that issues from these combined formations: a refusal to treat human life and forest life as separable categories. What is notable is the specificity of the formation described and the narratorial authority with which it is assembled. Read alongside the novel’s treatment of its other male characters, particularly Bakul Bora, whose trajectory inverts Seuj’s in almost every respect, the opening raises the question this paper takes as its principal concern. Under what conditions do different forms of masculine identity take shape? And what does a framework like Eco Masculinity offer to the literary study of those conditions?

Nilakshi Chaliha Gogoi’s Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa (Gogoi 2020; “Oh, My Dibru-Saikhowa”) belongs to a substantial tradition of Assamese ecological fiction that has long focused on the forest, the river, and the forest-fringe community—from the novels of Bhabendra Nath Saikia and Indira Goswami to the contemporary nature-writing of Saumyadwip Datta (Rajkhowa 2021) and the environmental reportage of Mubina Akhtar (Akhtar 2017). Gogoi’s novel extends this tradition to the Mising community of Assam’s north-eastern floodplains. Its setting is the Dibru-Saikhowa ecosystem at the confluence of the Brahmaputra and Lohit rivers, designated a biosphere reserve in 1997 and a national park in 1999. It is home to feral horses, river dolphins, tigers, and elephants, as well as a human population whose customary subsistence rights were progressively curtailed as the land’s conservation status was upgraded (Chamuah 2017).

The Dibru-Saikhowa region and the villages of Laika and Dadhiya on its periphery have, for decades, been held in a state of legal and material suspension: too ecologically sensitive to sustain permanent development, too inhabited to be managed as pure wilderness, and too politically marginal to attract consistent institutional attention (Rangarajan and Shahabuddin 2006; Kabra 2009). Bakul Bora, the novel’s principal Mising character, is born into this condition. His trajectory from impoverished, displaced child to hunter of the wildlife surrounding his homeland cannot be understood apart from the political economy of conservation in postcolonial India. Seuji, the forest officer whose formation the novel assembles in the epigraph, comes to this same landscape as an institutional outsider; his ethical commitment to its human and non-human life is inseparable from an unusual personal formation.

Eco Masculinity, as articulated by Hultman and Pulé (2018), offers a framework for analyzing such configurations—the relations among masculine identity, ecological behavior, and the social structures that produce both. Its application to South Asian literatures remains limited, particularly for the specific conjuncture of indigeneity, postcolonial conservation, and ecological vulnerability that defines parts of India’s north-east. Applying the framework responsibly requires attention to the critiques that have accompanied its development. Gaard’s (2014) observation that the framework has not always adequately registered the intersecting forces of race, class, caste, and indigenous identity is particularly important here.

One further observation frames the analysis that follows. Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is not, by the architecture of its narration, primarily a novel about men. Its central focalizing consciousness belongs to Dr. Irina Baruah, a physician who comes to work in the Laika community. Her perception organizes the greater part of the novel’s scenes. The male characters this paper analyzes—Bakul, the unnamed forest-officer employer who takes Bakul as a child laborer, Bakul’s father, and Seuj—are largely seen through Irina’s eyes. The paper’s object of analysis is therefore produced by a specific narrative technique: a female-focalized novel in which the masculine is observed, interpreted, and at times redeemed. An analysis that ignores the narrative voice through which masculine identity is given to us would fail the text.

This paper makes three contributions. First, it offers what we believe to be the first sustained Eco Masculinity reading of an Assamese novel, extending a framework developed in Global North contexts to a regional, indigenous, and postcolonial literary setting. Second, it suggests that the framework requires modification in such applications: under postcolonial conditions, Hultman and Pulé’s industrial, eco-modern, and ecological masculinities may combine within a single institutional position, and the formation of ecological masculinity may begin in childhood rather than only as a reformed second formation. Third, it confronts the structural tension involved in applying a male-centered framework to a female-focused novel, developing a reading that holds masculine and eco-feminine analyses together rather than apart.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 outlines the theoretical framework. Section 3 analyzes the novel’s narrative technique, focalization, and use of free indirect discourse. Section 4 develops the political ecology of the Dibru-Saikhowa region. Section 5 offers a character analysis of Bakul, the unnamed employer, and Seuj. Section 6 examines Irina Baruah’s eco-feminine perspective. Section 7 situates the argument within postcolonial ecocritical debate. Section 8 concludes.

2. Theoretical Framework

This paper works at the intersection of three bodies of theoretical work—Eco Masculinity, ecofeminism, and postcolonial ecocriticism—each contributing resources the others cannot provide on their own. The analysis in Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, Section 6 and Section 7 depends on their combination.

Eco Masculinity. The term refers to an orientation in which masculine identity is defined not by dominance, extraction, or subordination of the natural world but by care, responsibility, and an understanding of men as participants in, rather than masters of, ecological systems. The framework extends ecofeminism’s insight from women’s relationships with nature to men’s. If the patriarchal domination of women and of nature are structurally connected (Gaard 2014), then any serious account of ecological destruction must examine the masculine norms that drive it. Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) remains central: a claim less about individual men than about the culturally dominant pattern of practice that legitimizes male authority, and by extension human authority over the non-human world.

The most systematic statement of the framework is Hultman and Pulé’s (2018) Ecological Masculinities, whose tripartite typology this paper primarily draws on. “Industrial/breadwinner masculinity”—the dominant historical form—is characterized by economic growth, resource exploitation, and emotional distance from women and the natural world. “Eco-modern masculinity” offers a superficial accommodation with environmental concerns while leaving structures of dominance intact; it is the masculinity of the institutional reformer who manages nature more efficiently rather than repositioning himself within it. “Ecological masculinity” is a relational, care-centered form oriented toward the well-being of human and non-human communities, refusing the logic of extraction (Hultman and Pulé 2018, pp. 25, 38–39). The typology is heuristic rather than categorical; its modalities serve as analytical tools for describing the combinations and contradictions present in any masculine formation.

Gaard’s (2014) critique conditions how we use the framework. It does not, she observes, adequately attend to “the strong influences of race, class, sexuality, and culture in constructing masculinities.” Bakul Bora’s masculine identity is shaped not only by abstract patriarchal conditioning but by his Mising indigeneity, the dispossession experienced by forest-fringe communities in postcolonial India, class, and the experience of laboring under a man from the dominant social group. An Eco Masculinity reading attentive to these intersecting forces is what Aavik et al. (2025) and Bhat (2025) have recently called for: engagement with the Global South, with indigenous masculinities, and with the “(m)Anthropocene”—the specifically masculine imprint on planetary-scale ecological transformation.

Ecofeminism. The Eco Masculinity framework presupposes and builds on the analytical work of ecofeminism. The term was coined by d’Eaubonne (1974) in Le Féminisme ou la Mort. Its core claim is that the subordination of women and the subordination of nature are produced by structurally related operations of patriarchal authority. In India, the Chipko movement of the early 1970s became iconic as an ecofeminist convergence; Akhtar’s (2017) Green Reporting places Chipko in a lineage extending from Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt to Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. The ecofeminist resource is essential to this paper not because Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is an ecofeminist manifesto but because its principal focalizing consciousness is female, and its narrative structure brings the ecofeminist logic of domination into direct confrontation with the masculine formations it analyzes.

Postcolonial ecocriticism and place-based identity. A third resource is required. The political-economic conditions under which Gogoi’s novel operates—colonial and postcolonial forest administration, the institutional gap between the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the lived conditions of communities such as those of Laika-Dadhiya in national park core areas (Rangarajan and Shahabuddin 2006; Kabra 2009)—require an analytical idiom that Eco Masculinity and ecofeminism alone do not provide. Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence, the tradition of Indian environmental history represented by Guha (1989) and Rangarajan (2001), and the conservation-studies critique of “fortress conservation” (Brockington et al. 2008) are mobilized in Section 4. Dreese’s (2002) argument that landscape, sense of place, and identity are integral to human development provides the methodological anchor: lost identity can be a loss of environment, and the loss of one’s environment can be the loss of oneself. Every major character in Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is defined by their relationship to a specific landscape, and displacement consistently produces a crisis of identity. The analytical category we use is “spatial experience”—the specific, cumulative encounter of a character with the natural, social, economic, and political structures of a particular place. Bakul’s and Seuj’s spatial experiences are produced under very different historical conditions, generating correspondingly different masculine identities.

3. Narrative Technique and Focalization

Before turning to the novel’s male characters, we must first examine its narrative technique. This is not a detour. Any literary analysis that treats a novel as a transparent container of plot and theme, rather than as an organized structure of perception, risks mistaking the narrative’s account of its characters for the characters themselves. In a novel as concerned as Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa with the relationships among human beings, non-human beings, and the land that sustains them, the question of who sees, from where, and with what authority is part of what the novel does.

Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is narrated in the third person, but that voice is not evenly distributed. For most of the novel, events, landscapes, and other characters are perceived and morally registered through the consciousness of Dr. Irina Baruah. Irina is a physician. She is the daughter of a forest ranger who served in the Lekhapani Range of Tinsukia district. She is a young woman who comes to the flood-prone villages of Laika and Dadhiya to serve as a doctor among the Mising community.

Several passages illustrate this pattern. When the narrator describes the starving mother who boils bihlongoni leaves for her children (Gogoi 2020, p. 74), we register the scene through Irina’s professional and ethical apprehension. When the narrator reports the politician’s claim that floods “naturally cleanse” Laika-Dadhiya (Gogoi 2020, p. 135), Irina’s consciousness receives the obscenity of the formulation. When the narrator observes that animals “do not wear suits and do not tie neckties—and yet how civilized they are” (Gogoi 2020, p. 68), the thought is placed within Irina’s reflection. For most of the novel, the narrative voice and Irina’s interior perception are co-extensive. The male characters this paper analyzes are therefore given to us, for the most part, within the frame of Irina’s perception and judgment. The novel may be read, in the architecture of its narration, as a woman’s account of men.

The novel departs from this basic disposition at a small number of formally conspicuous moments. Those moments matter. The most important occurs when Bakul, having escaped his employer’s house, joined the hunter Jaharkai, and taken up a life of hunting, contemplates his own transformed self:

One day, his Mising jacket and heavy trousers drenched red with blood, Bakul had searched desperately for his father, his dearest father. But where? Nowhere remained for him. Even he—this man, this man inside—where had he gone? Where had Bakul’s true Bakul, the one deep within, gone? This clinging to life, this desperate gasp—is it really his? This smile spreading across his face, this gaze, this warm breath—are these really his? These leather clothes? These hunter’s boots? This pistol kept hidden? This house, this yard?

(Gogoi 2020, p. 206)

This is neither third-person reportage nor interior monologue. It may be read as free indirect discourse—a form in which the narrator’s voice and the character’s consciousness blur. The grammatical person of narration (third) coexists with the character’s interiority, as his thoughts are rendered. The questions in the passage—are these really his? these leather clothes? these hunter’s boots?—are Bakul’s own. But they arrive at the reader through a narratorial voice that also seems to ask them, to hold them, to judge them. The passage produces, within a single stretch of prose, both the immediacy of Bakul’s self-estrangement and the moral registration of that self-estrangement by a narrative voice that shares, without collapsing into, his consciousness. It knows something about Bakul that Bakul is only beginning to know about himself: that the person he has become is not the person he is. That knowledge is distributed between the character and the narrator. It is the form of the passage, not merely its content, that makes the distribution legible.

A plot-summary reading would gloss this passage as a moment of psychological crisis. That gloss is not wrong, but it is not what the novel is doing. The novel stages, through free indirect discourse, an encounter between the displaced self and the narrative voice that can see that displacement for what it is. The narrative voice in this scene is the same voice that, elsewhere in the novel, is co-extensive with Irina’s consciousness—and this continuity is not accidental. Even when the narrative temporarily enters Bakul’s mind, it does so from a standpoint morally prepared by hundreds of pages of Irina’s seeing. Bakul is never fully outside the frame of Irina’s apprehension, not even in the moment of his greatest interiority.

A parallel observation may be made about the introduction of Seuj. The epigraphic passage with which this paper opened is likewise not free-standing external description. Its cadence and sentence rhythm—the repeated attribution of Seuj’s formation to a series of named sources (friends, elders, the mother, the accumulated experience of life)—suggest a consciousness assembling Seuj’s character with evaluative care. In the novel’s structural logic, the mind doing this working-through is most plausibly the mother’s: Irina, who has raised Seuj alone, without revealing Bakul’s paternity, and whose moral authority over his formation carries the novel’s most sustained claim about the possibility of ecological masculine identity.

The unnamed forest-officer employer who takes Bakul as a child laborer presents the opposite formal case. He is never given a proper name. The novel designates him by function—“the employer,” “saar,” “the wealthy man”—not by name. This is a narratorial choice. The withholding of a name may be read as marking the character as a type rather than an individual, the embodiment of an institutional position rather than a singular person capable of being addressed or known. The novel grants Bakul, Seuj, and Irina the dignity of proper names. It denies that dignity to the man whose power, in the novel’s ethical economy, is exercised through the denial of others’ dignity.

Three observations follow and will organize the readings in Section 5 and Section 6. The first concerns the hierarchy of narrative authority. The novel may be read as structured as a hierarchy of seeing. The narratorial voice, co-extensive with Irina’s consciousness, occupies the highest position. Bakul’s interior voice, when we gain access to it through free indirect discourse, is registered within that higher frame. The unnamed employer is not granted interiority at all. This asymmetry is arguably not a flaw in the novel’s realism but rather its realism about power. Who sees whom, in this novel, maps onto a moral geography.

The second concerns the relationship between Eco Masculinity and eco-feminine focalization. An Eco Masculinity reading applied to a female-focalized novel might reproduce a familiar asymmetry, in which men occupy the space of the argument while women occupy the space of the argument’s conditions of possibility. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) identify this asymmetry, noting that accounts of masculine change frequently rely on the unequal emotional and moral labor of women. Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is, in certain senses, such an account. We engage with this directly in Section 6.

The third concerns the language of continuity between “the human” and “the landscape.” The novel’s narrative practice rejects this dualism. Irina perceives the forest as continuous with her ethical life. Bakul’s estrangement from himself is inseparable from his displacement from Laika. Seuj’s formation is narrated through a catalog of people, mentors, mothers, and landscapes whose combination makes him who he is. There is no point in the novel’s narration at which the human character stands on one side of a fence and the landscape on the other.

4. Political Ecology and State Power

Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa pays close attention to the political economy of the landscape it inhabits. It is not a sociological tract, but it does not mistake its landscape for a timeless natural given either. The Dibru-Saikhowa region, as the novel renders it, is produced by more than a century of colonial and postcolonial administrative history. Reading the novel as if the Mising dispossession at its heart were a misfortune rather than a produced condition would miss what the novel itself is at pains to show.

The making of a national park. Under the late colonial administration the Dibru-Saikhowa area was classified as Reserve Forest, a designation that restricted but did not abolish traditional use-rights of communities who had inhabited the floodplains for generations. After independence these designations were retained and intensified: in 1997 the landscape was recognized as a biosphere reserve under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme, and in 1999 its core area was notified as a national park under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 (Chamuah 2017). The 1972 Act restricts human presence within a national park, and its imposition on an inhabited landscape required reclassifying the people inhabiting it into a category the statute had no way of recognizing. The Mising villagers of Laika and Dadhiya did not move, and neither did the park, but the legal relation between them was, in the space of two administrative decades, fundamentally transformed. Inclusion within a notified core area has typically meant the suspension of permanent public infrastructure on grounds of ecological sensitivity (Rangarajan and Shahabuddin 2006; Kabra 2009). The villagers of Laika and Dadhiya have for decades lived under this condition: legally present and administratively invisible, eligible for neither the protections of a regularized settlement nor the compensation associated with formal displacement.

Fortress conservation and the 1972/2006 Acts. This pattern has a name in the conservation-studies literature: “fortress conservation”—a model in which biological diversity is best protected by creating “pristine” wilderness zones from which subsistence-dependent indigenous communities are excluded (Brockington et al. 2008). Its genealogy is colonial, developed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European imperial administrations and transplanted largely unchanged into postcolonial regimes (Guha 1989; Rangarajan 2001). What is distinctive about the postcolonial form is a new legitimacy structure: the state’s authority over indigenous and forest-fringe communities is claimed in the name of national development, biodiversity protection, and, increasingly since the 1990s, global environmental commitments. In this context, the unnamed forest-officer employer in Gogoi’s novel becomes legible as a political-economic type—the embodiment of an institutional position that produces profit and status for those who hold it while displacing those over whose lives it is exercised. Hultman and Pulé’s category of eco-modern masculinity—the man who occupies the apparatus of environmental protection while using it as a vehicle for accumulation and control (Hultman and Pulé 2018, p. 25)—describes this precisely. But the eco-modern masculinity of this character is not an individual vice. It is a social position.

The legal conflict framing the novel’s Mising characters has a specific statutory shape. On one side stands the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, which consolidated the state’s authority over protected areas and criminalized customary hunting, grazing, and unauthorized residence. On the other stands the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006, whose explicit purpose was to recognize rights earlier regimes had rendered legally invisible and to undo the “historical injustice” of a century of exclusionary conservation. The two Acts are not formally incompatible, but in practice they often operate in tension, particularly where the 2006 Act’s procedural requirements have not been effectively implemented. The Mising villagers of Laika and Dadhiya live in precisely this unresolved condition. Bakul’s turn to hunting can thus be read against two registers. Section 5.1 registers it as psychological formation; but the same act is also legally situated. He has become, in the statutory language of the Act, a poacher. The novel does not use that word—it withholds it, as it withholds the employer’s name—but the legal category hangs over his every movement.

Slow violence in the novel. The analytical language required to name what the novel shows is the language of slow violence. Nixon (2011) describes forms of violence “that occur gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Two passages give this violence literary form. The first is Irina’s observation of a family whose fate the administrative system has not registered:

Do you know about the people on the other side of the river, in the Laika region? They are very poor. Their lives are entirely dependent on the forest. I want to tell you about one such poor family. The family’s sole breadwinner had died of a stomach illness. The mother of three small children had gone without food for several days because, just days earlier, a devastating flood had badly submerged the village.

(Gogoi 2020, p. 74)

The deaths of the children that follow—from eating bihlongoni leaves boiled in the absence of any other food—may be read as the cumulative consequence of a structural relationship between the villagers of Laika and the institutional world that will not recognize them, rather than the result of a single failure. The situation, not the action within it, is what the novel asks us to register as violent.

The second passage is even more revealing of state rationality. Reporting the political response to repeated flooding, the narrator records

Even if it is a natural calamity, Laika-Dadhiya will be hit by floods anyway—the floodwater only washes away all the filth and leaves the place clean.

(Gogoi 2020, p. 135)

The rhetorical operation is precisely calibrated. The statement recasts recurring destruction as a sanitation metaphor, framing what happens to the human and non-human inhabitants of a floodplain landscape as hygienic improvement. Slow violence, in Nixon’s account, depends on precisely this kind of rhetorical normalization: violence that cannot be seen as violence because the language for seeing it has been reorganized. The narrator reports the statement, which condemns itself.

These two passages do not illustrate the political ecology we have sketched; they register it at the level of lived human meaning. Bakul’s trajectory from displaced child to hunter is not a private misfortune but one of the typical forms of life made possible by the structural relationship traced here. Reading Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa through Eco Masculinity without attending to this political-economic dimension would produce the decontextualized universalism that Gaard’s (2014) critique was meant to prevent.

5. Character Analysis (Masculinity)

Having established the theoretical framework (Section 2), the novel’s narrative organization (Section 3), and the political ecology of its landscape (Section 4), we now read the novel’s male characters through the combined resources of those three foundations. We take them in the order in which they become significant to the novel’s central ethical argument: Bakul Bora, the unnamed forest-officer employer, and Seuj.

5.1. Bakul Bora: Dispossession, Criminalization, and the Making of a Hunter

Bakul’s life is shaped from the beginning by a convergence of losses whose structure we can now name with some precision. His mother dies at his birth. The novel does not treat this death as a private misfortune alone. It may be read as the endpoint of a longer process. A young woman from a desperately poor family, malnourished since adolescence, is married into a household that expects labor her body is constitutionally unable to provide. She is reduced by the patriarch’s gaze to “a dry piece of wood” (Gogoi 2020).

The metaphor is deliberately ecological. In a novel so concerned with the life of the forest, the comparison of a woman’s body to dry wood is not a neutral figure of speech. It registers, at the level of descriptive language, the same hierarchy of worth that holds forest-fringe communities within the structural violence we described in Section 4. A woman whose body cannot perform the labor expected of it is, within her husband’s moral economy, a piece of the forest already dead. What patriarchy does to the wife in this household and what the state’s conservation apparatus does to the Mising community of Laika operate on the same logic of reducible worth. The novel’s argument requires us to see this continuity.

Bakul is raised after his mother’s death by an aging, ill, and embittered father who vents his patriarchal resentment against the memory of the dead woman in his son’s hearing. The only model of masculinity available to the young boy is one of bitterness, complaint, and emotional unavailability. The father’s masculinity is arguably not what Hultman and Pulé would call industrial. He has no ecological power, no institutional authority, no access to accumulation. What he has is the residual dignity of patriarchal status within a household that has nothing else. His masculinity may be characterized as a depleted patriarchy—exercised within the space of his own deprivation, imposed on the only two people weaker than himself: his dying wife and his surviving son. Bakul’s father is not the villain of Bakul’s early life. He may be read as a particular human form produced by the same structural conditions that will produce Bakul himself—the Mising man whose patriarchal authority has survived into a condition where its only available objects are his wife and his son.

Bakul’s subsequent displacement marks the moment when the broader political economy enters his life directly. Sent by his father as a child laborer to the house of a wealthy forest officer in town, Bakul is separated from his Mising village, from his father’s uneasy shelter, and from the green world of Laika. In Dreese’s (2002) terms, this constitutes a catastrophic loss of place. In the employer’s house, his desire to read and learn is systematically frustrated. His body is subjected to physical discipline. His inner world is compressed into the narrow space of compliance and survival. We analyzed the p. 206 free-indirect-discourse passage in Section 3 for its narrative technique. What this section adds is the political-economic register of the same passage. The displacement whose inner dimension the passage registers is not abstract. It is a specific historical form of indigenous dispossession, accomplished through the institution of child labor in a forest-officer household, made possible by the class and ethnic asymmetry between the Mising forest-fringe community and the dominant social group that controls the region’s administrative apparatus.

Bakul’s loss of a name is another dimension of this. The novel never records the Mising surname that Bakul’s father would have passed to him. The narrative tells us that the father never thought it necessary to tell the boy what their family name was. Placed in the employer’s household, the Mising child adopts the dominant-community surname “Bora.” This may be read not as a neutral adaptation but as the inscription of the child’s erasure from his own community onto the surface of his public identity. When the novel calls him “Bakul Bora,” it calls him by the name his dispossession gave him.

The moment Bakul escapes his employer’s house and returns to Laika is when the novel makes its most precise political-economic observation. His father has died. His home village has been repeatedly flooded and effectively abandoned—the same Laika whose slow violence we closely examine in Section 4. There is no home to return to in any material sense. In this state of complete belonging-lessness, Bakul meets Jaharkai, the older hunter who offers him what he has been denied for most of his life: recognition, shelter, and companionship.

Bakul becomes a hunter not because he is inherently destructive, but because he is starved of love, deprived of belonging, and offered, for the first time, a form of masculine community that accepts him. The novel is careful about this. It does not present Jaharkai as a villain. His solitude and his extension of paternal care to a son not his own are rendered with tenderness. The form of masculine community Jaharkai offers is genuine. But it is a masculine community organized around an act that the state has rendered criminal, in a landscape the state has rendered ambiguously habitable, by people whose customary rights to both the landscape and the act have been imperfectly recognized.

An Eco Masculinity reading must hold two registers. At the level of individual formation, Bakul’s trajectory may be said to exhibit what Hultman and Pulé’s typology recognizes as industrial/breadwinner masculinity in a deprived form—a masculine identity organized around extraction from the non-human world. At the level of structural description, Bakul’s becoming-hunter is the becoming-criminal described in Section 4: a legal identity conferred on him by the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and never adequately countermanded by the Forest Rights Act 2006. The novel refuses to separate these registers. Bakul is at once a young man making specific choices and a young man whose available choices have been narrowed by a structural arrangement he did not design. The framework, applied in a register attentive to Gaard’s (2014) intersectional critique, asks us neither to condemn him nor to excuse him. It asks us to trace the conditions that produced him and to ask what would need to change for a different masculine identity to become possible. In Bakul’s case, the partial replacement will be mediated through his encounter with Irina—the subject of Section 6.

5.2. The Unnamed Employer: Eco-Modern Masculinity as Institutional Violence

The unnamed forest-officer employer is the novel’s most concentrated single figure. We have approached him from three directions already. In Section 3, he appeared as a character to whom the narrative refuses both a proper name and interiority. In Section 4, he appeared as the personification of the postcolonial conservation regime’s combination of extractive and regulatory authority. In the analysis of Bakul above, he appeared as the adult man under whose authority Bakul’s child labor is performed.

The employer is described primarily through what Bakul observes of him and what the narrative voice intuits about him. His household is organized by a logic of control. He holds a whip. He keeps a pistol hidden in a cabinet (Gogoi 2020). He has a wife and family whom he has effectively exiled from the domestic space Bakul inhabits, so that the household Bakul knows is an empty theater of the employer’s authority. His professional life as a senior forest official is organized by the same logic at the institutional scale. The Dibru-Saikhowa landscape over which he exercises authority is the source of his wealth. The novel does not explicitly accuse him of corruption. It does not need to. The structural relationship between his institutional position and his personal accumulation is legible without accusation.

Hultman and Pulé’s category of eco-modern masculinity describes this figure precisely. But, as Section 4 showed, the category acquires specifically postcolonial force when applied to such a figure. The employer may be read not merely as a man who happens to profit from an institutional position. He is, on this reading, the social type through which the postcolonial conservation regime reproduces itself—the forest-officer class whose authority over the landscape is both ecological and economic, and whose legal power derives from a statute (the 1972 Act) that criminalizes the customary practices of the communities over whom that power is held. The violence done to Bakul inside this man’s household is not unrelated to the violence done to the Mising of Laika at the regional scale. They may be read as the same violence, operating at different scales.

This is why the novel’s decision to withhold a proper name may be said to carry significance on more than one level. It is an ethical choice: the novel denies the employer the dignity of a singular identity because the employer has denied that dignity to others. It is also an analytical choice. A named individual can be accused of personal vice; a named type can be read as a structural position. On this account, the problem is not an individual but a social arrangement.

We make one further observation. The contradictions of the postcolonial state’s environmentalism may be rehearsed, in miniature, within this man’s household. He is an institutional conservator—his position exists to protect the forest. He is also a man whose accumulation depends on the extractive possibilities that position affords him. Bakul, as a Mising child held within that household, occupies a position structurally analogous to the Mising community of Laika as a whole.

5.3. Seuj: Ecological Masculinity in Practice

Seuj—the son of Irina and Bakul, raised by his mother alone and never told his father’s identity—is the figure in whom the novel invests its most sustained ecological hope. We return first to the epigraphic passage with which this paper opened, analyzed in Section 3 for its formal construction, and now read for the content of Seuj’s formation.

Five elements are assembled. First, an affective relation to the natural world, expressed as curiosity about “the color green”—not a political commitment, not an ethical imperative, but a pre-theoretical orientation of the senses toward the forest. Second, a professional vocation in forest work, grounded in this prior affective relation rather than in institutional appointment. Third, a masculine peer group whose productive function is dissent—friends whose “objections and frustrations” sharpen him against them rather than confirm him in existing dispositions. Fourth, a masculine mentorship that is generational and ethical—“elder brothers and fathers,” not institutional superiors. Fifth, a maternal formation that provides not ethical content as such but “an artistic sensibility”—a mode of attention to the world, grounded in love for it.

Seuj is not a character who merely announces the novel’s ecological commitments. The novel renders his formation in some detail, so that the ecological commitments he later articulates can be understood as the product of specific conditions rather than as a spontaneous ethical property. The novel’s argument may be stated: masculine identity is produced by specific conditions, and a masculinity oriented toward care, relation, and reciprocity with the non-human world is itself the product of specific conditions of care, relation, and reciprocity at the level of the person’s own formation. Seuj is not a morally exceptional individual. He is a particular social form—a young man raised by a mother whose ecological formation has been thorough, whose extended masculine world has been organized by mentorship rather than authority, and whose peer group has cultivated the productive role of dissent. The novel’s claim may be read as that this form is possible, not that it is common.

Seuj’s professional practice aligns with his formation. We see him listening to the Laika community’s grievances, learning from older forest workers, and engaging with the moral complexity of conservation in a landscape where human need and wildlife protection are in genuine tension. His authority is neither authoritarian, as that of the employer, nor performative, as that of eco-modern masculinity. Most significantly, he articulates a vision of his work that refuses to separate human justice from ecological justice:

During my tenure, let a bill be introduced in the assembly to secure the land rights of the homeless, helpless Laika villagers. Let their protection be established. Along with the protection of wildlife, let a healthy environment be created so that these birds and animals, these trees and forests, and our simple, ordinary people can develop a kinship.

(Gogoi 2020, p. 270)

This may be read as a statement of relational ecology in nearly its full form. Seuj’s proposal for a bill that secures the land rights of the Laika villagers, read against the 1972/2006 statutory tension of Section 4, is a proposal for the practical implementation of the Forest Rights Act’s intention. In Hultman and Pulé’s terms, this is ecological masculinity as it is meant to function: a masculinity oriented toward the well-being of the “glocal commons” (Hultman and Pulé 2018, p. 240), refusing the logic of extraction and holding itself responsible to human and non-human communities alike. But the passage is more specific than the framework’s general formulation. Seuj’s commitment is articulated in the idiom of kinship—a relation among birds, animals, trees, forests, and “our simple, ordinary people.” This is arguably not the generic ecological holism of much Global North environmental writing. It is a specifically Assamese, specifically postcolonial articulation of ecological responsibility, in which the community to be held in kinship with the forest is named and placed.

A further element deserves comment. Seuj is the son of a single mother. He has been raised without knowledge of his biological father. His masculine identity has been formed, in the near absence of any father figure he has been taught to recognize as such, by his mother’s sensibility, by mentors she has provided, and by his own accumulated experience. The significance of this for an Eco Masculinity reading is considerable. Much of the literature on ecological masculinity, including the work of Hultman and Pulé, is concerned with how masculine identity might be reconstituted in conditions where the dominant form is industrial/breadwinner. The implicit assumption is that ecological masculinity must be learned, often in adulthood, through deliberate ethical work against prior masculine formation. Seuj may be read as representing a different case. His masculine identity has been ecological from the beginning, because the conditions of his formation have been ecological from the beginning. He is not a reformed industrial masculinity. He is what ecological masculinity looks like when it is a person’s first form rather than a hard-won second form.

The novel does not romanticize this. Seuj is not presented as whole, and Laika remains, in the novel’s final pages, unresolved. No single forest officer can repair the structural conditions we described in Section 4. What the novel offers, through Seuj, may be described not as a solution but as a demonstration: that the masculine identity the Eco Masculinity framework hopes for is, under specific conditions, possible to produce.

6. Irina and Ecofeminine Perspective

The Eco Masculinity analysis of Section 3, Section 4 and Section 5 has been sustained at every point by a female character whose ecological subjectivity we have deferred rather than ignored. This section is hers. We take it up now, rather than earlier, for two reasons. First, we cannot evaluate what an Eco Masculinity reading of Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa can and cannot do without first developing the male-centered reading that the framework authorizes. Only with that reading in place can we see what it has left out. Second, Irina Baruah is arguably not a device for illuminating men. She is the novel’s principal perceiving consciousness and a character with her own formation, ecological commitments, and encounter with the structural violence described in Section 4.

Irina’s formation and her ecological ethics. Irina is the daughter of a forest ranger who served in the Lekhapani Range of Tinsukia district. She grew up listening to her father’s accounts of the forest. She accompanied him into the landscape of his professional responsibility. She absorbed an ethic of attentive relation to the non-human world, an ethic that her subsequent medical training did not displace. Two passages indicate what this ethic consists in. The first is her reflection, offered early in her service at Laika:

Nature is actually more patient and safer than human beings. It is not only the plants and trees; the animals of the forest are so as well. Human beings have much to learn from animals.

(Gogoi 2020, p. 66)

The passage does not say that nature is more beautiful, pure, or innocent. It says that nature is more patient and safer. The categories may be described as relational and ethical rather than aesthetic. Patience is a virtue of sustained attention over time. Safety, in the idiom of a physician who has seen what people do to each other, is a claim about trust. Irina’s ecological ethic, on the evidence of this passage, may be read as an ethic of reliability and duration. What nature offers, in her formulation, is not redemption from human society but a standard by which human society might be measured.

A second passage shows how keenly Irina holds the comparison in view. Reflecting in exasperation on the self-regarding performance of human social life, she thinks “Animals do not wear suits and do not tie neckties—and yet how civilized they are” (Gogoi 2020, p. 68). The observation may be read as diagnostic. On this reading, the civilizational markers that human beings use to place themselves above the non-human world—the suit, the necktie—are compensatory. Animals require no such compensation. For animals, the behaviors human beings perform as civilized are simply what they do.

From these passages, Irina’s ecological subjectivity may be described as a working ethic. It is the ethic of a practitioner whose professional life is spent attending to the suffering of specific human bodies within a specific ecological community, and whose ecological ethic is inseparable from her medical ethic. The patience and safety she attributes to the forest are qualities she asks of her own work. Irina’s practice may be said to be continuous with Seuji’s, which is one reason the novel makes Seuj her son. What Seuj articulates on p. 270, Irina has been practicing throughout the novel.

Irina within the ecofeminist tradition. Irina’s ecological subjectivity is legible within the ecofeminist tradition introduced in Section 2, yet it is not reducible to it. She is not a political organizer. The novel does not offer us an Assamese Wangari Maathai or a Chipko moment in Laika. What it offers is the quieter, longer-arc figure whose ecological ethic is expressed through sustained professional presence in a marginalized landscape. Her form of practice is closer to the forms of ecological labor that Akhtar (2017) identifies as most characteristic of women’s environmental engagement in its less visible registers—the daily, uncompensated, accumulative work of holding a human and ecological community together in the absence of the institutional support it should by right receive.

Irina’s two central passages. Two further passages reveal Irina’s subjectivity under particular pressure. The first is her critique of the Assamese social order’s apprehension of female dignity:

Is a woman’s dignity confined to household work and the observance of custom and rule? A woman can be talented in many ways. She can be great by expressing her own virtues. Perhaps, among the people of the riverbanks and the forests, among those bound by the rhythms of the natural world, such a way of thinking will take root only over many decades. Let nature itself teach these simple, straightforward people.

(Gogoi 2020, p. 115)

The formulation may be described as precise. The rhetorical question rejects reducing female worth to reproductive and ritual labor. The affirmative sentence rejects the dichotomy between domestic virtue and public accomplishment. The closing hope—”let nature itself teach these simple, straightforward people”—pairs the critique of patriarchal reduction with a pedagogical faith in the non-human world as a source of ethical instruction. Nature, in Irina’s formulation, is not a passive backdrop to human moral improvement but, on this reading, an active teacher of values her community has not yet learned.

The second passage is formally more complex. Pregnant with Seuj and abandoned by Bakul, Irina reflects on a species whose presence is central to the Dibru-Saikhowa river system’s ecological identity:

The word “dolphin” comes from Delphis, meaning “having a womb.” Like the dolphin, I too have a womb. I am a woman. I am pregnant, the abandoned lover of a young Mising man, Bakul. Like the dolphin, those humans hunt at will, I too struggle with the pain of separation. As humans do not attend to a dying dolphin, Bakul has not attempted to understand the heart of the pregnant Irina.

(Gogoi 2020)

The central trope equates the abandoned female human body with the hunted non-human body through the shared physiological fact of the womb. The etymology is not decorative. Delphis, the Greek root, literally means “having a womb”—a fact of classical zoological nomenclature that Irina puts to striking ecological-political use. The dolphin and the woman are linked in the passage by the structural vulnerability that reproductive capacity produces under patriarchal conditions: both are hunted, both are abandoned, both are unattended to in their suffering. The ecofeminist logic of domination (Garrard 2012) may be said to be given here not as a theoretical proposition but as lived grief.

The structural tension the framework cannot fully resolve. The dolphin passage may be said to confirm, from within Irina’s own consciousness, what the novel’s architecture has implied throughout—that Bakul’s partial masculine transformation under Irina’s influence, analyzed in Section 5.1, has been incomplete in a way that has specifically cost Irina. Her pregnancy is a condition he has not met. Her loneliness is a condition he has not relieved. The relational ecology Seuj will later articulate on p. 270 is one whose possibility Irina has paid the cost of producing.

This is the question Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) identify when they note that accounts of masculine change frequently rely on the unequal emotional and moral labor of women. On this reading, Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is such an account. Bakul’s partial transformation is mediated through Irina. Seuj’s entire ecological formation is the work of Irina’s single motherhood. The asymmetry is not covert. It is named explicitly by the novel itself. The dolphin passage is arguably not an interpretation we impose. It is the novel’s own registration of the cost at which male transformation has been produced. This places the question of asymmetry within the text’s ethical field rather than outside it. The tension is real. The novel knows it is real. The reading we offer attempts to hold it rather than resolve it.

7. Postcolonial Context

Our reading of Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa has made a specific demand on the Eco Masculinity framework: that it be used in a register attentive to narrative form, the political economy of the landscape, and Gaard’s (2014) intersectional critique. This final analytical section consolidates what may follow for the broader ecocritical conversation. Aavik et al. (2025) have called for sustained engagement with the “(m)Anthropocene” in Global South, indigenous, and non-metropolitan manifestations; Bhat (2025) has called for regional translation rather than universal export of the ethics of care. Two observations consolidate what this paper offers.

The first concerns place-based identity in contexts of indigenous dispossession. Dreese’s (2002) formulation, developed from American Indian literary and environmental contexts, takes on a parallel yet distinct structure when applied to a Mising community whose relationship with the Dibru-Saikhowa floodplains has been shaped by colonial forest administration, postcolonial conservation law, and the institutional gap between the 1972 and 2006 Acts. Place is not a neutral environmental given but a condition produced by specific histories of dispossession. The Dreesean methodology is portable; the history is not. Eco Masculinity scholarship that imports the framework into Global South applications without accompanying historical work risks producing the abstraction the framework cannot afford.

The second concerns the interaction between Hultman and Pulé’s tripartite typology and postcolonial institutional structures. Section 5.2 argued that the unnamed forest-officer employer condenses, into a single figure, the combination of industrial/breadwinner and eco-modern masculinities that characterizes the postcolonial conservation regime—extractive on the revenue-generating side, regulatory on the conservation side, producing wealth from the same landscape whose protection is used to dispossess the communities that inhabit it. This double character is not a regional peculiarity but the structural form taken by conservation politics across much of the Global South. The typology’s heuristic value is preserved; its categorical separation of masculine forms requires modification in postcolonial applications.

A mode of scholarship that imports Global North theorization into Global South applications without literary-critical and historical labor will confirm the theory without developing it. A mode that reads the particular literature carefully, and lets the framework be complicated by what the literature discloses, extends it. This second mode is the one this paper has attempted. Assamese literature—from Bhabendra Nath Saikia and Indira Goswami through Saumyadwip Datta (Rajkhowa 2021), Chamuah (2017), and Akhtar (2017)—is particularly well positioned to contribute further readings in this register.

8. Conclusions

Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa does not offer easy resolutions. Its ecological crisis—the threatened biodiversity of Dibru-Saikhowa, the flooded villages, the dispossessed Mising communities, the wildlife hunted for survival—is not resolved by the appearance of one ecologically conscious forest officer, however admirable his commitments. Seuj’s proposal on p. 270 for a legislative bill securing the land rights of the Laika villagers alongside the protection of wildlife is a proposal; it is not enacted. The reader leaves with Seuj’s aspiration rather than its fulfillment. What the novel offers is a sustained literary exploration of the conditions that produce different forms of masculine identity in relation to the natural world, and of the possibilities—limited, partial, mediated, but real—for transformation.

Eco Masculinity, applied in the register this paper has established, has allowed us to read those conditions with analytical precision. The contrast between Bakul and Seuj is not, finally, a contrast between a bad man and a good one. It may be read as a contrast between two differently produced masculine formations, legible at once at the level of psychological biography, narrative form, and political-economic structure. Bakul’s trajectory—from dispossessed Mising child to criminalized hunter to partially reformed lover of Irina—is made possible by patriarchal deprivation, indigenous dispossession, legal criminalization, and care deprivation traced across Section 4 and Section 5. Seuj’s trajectory—from the son of a single mother to a forest officer whose practice integrates the rights of the forest-fringe community with the protection of wildlife—is made possible by maternal ecological ethics, generational mentorship, peer-group dissent, and a formation in which affection for the non-human world precedes institutional vocation. Neither trajectory is spontaneous. Both are produced.

Three qualifications follow. First, applying a Western theoretical framework to Assamese literature requires sustained attention to the specific histories of colonial and postcolonial conservation that the framework alone does not supply. Second, Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa is, in the architecture of its focalization, a female-focalized novel in which the masculine is observed, interpreted, and at moments redeemed from within a feminine perceiving intelligence; any reading of its masculine characters that ignores this architecture misdescribes its object. Third, the partial masculine transformations the novel makes possible are produced by the disproportionate emotional, ethical, and reproductive labor of Irina Baruah. Her abandonment at the point of her pregnancy, and her solitary raising of the novel’s most ethically developed male character, are the specific costs at which the novel’s ecological hope has been purchased. The framework can register these costs. It cannot abolish them.

The paper’s contribution is threefold. It offers what we believe to be the first sustained Eco Masculinity reading of an Assamese novel, extending the framework into a regional, indigenous, and postcolonial setting. It argues that the framework may require two modifications in such applications: that industrial and eco-modern masculinities may combine within a single institutional position under postcolonial conditions, and that ecological masculinity may be formed in childhood rather than only as a reformed second formation. And it suggests that applying a male-centered framework to a female-focalized novel requires—and permits—a reading that holds masculine and eco-feminine analyses together.

We close with the passage with which we opened. The construction of Seuj on p. 288 is the formal catalogue of a specific masculine formation: affection for the forest, peer-group dissent, generational mentorship, maternal art. The aspiration with which the passage closes—to bind human life and the forest with a single thread—is the aspiration of Eco Masculinity itself. Not a conquest of nature. Not a technical management of resources. Not a performance of ecological responsibility from within institutions whose real function is accumulation. It is, rather, a relation: patient, reciprocal, sustained by care, held together across generations by the specific labor of specific people. The novel does not pretend that such a relation is easily achieved. It insists, however, that it is achievable, and that the conditions under which it may be achieved are those a society committed to ecological and social justice may recognize as owing to its members.