Rivers, Forests, and Mountains: Understanding Human Geography Through Postcolonial Ecospatial Reading of Ankush Saikia’s <i>The Forest Beneath the Mountains</i>

This article analyses Ankush Saikia’s novel The Forest Beneath the Mountains (2021) through the lens of postcolonial ecospatiality, integrating insights from geocriticism, literary cartography, and literary geography. It explores Saikia’s representation of Assam’s geography through its forests, rivers, and mountains, and their importance in shaping the lives and cultural identity of the Indigenous communities, particularly within the Bodo community. Further, it argues that the natural spaces of forests, rivers, and mountains have become contested ecospaces and are continually reshaped by ecological ruptures, i.e., deforestation, illegal extraction and settlements. By employing an integrated conceptual framework of postcolonial ecospatiality, this paper not only addresses environmental degradation in Assam but also examines the broader spatial crisis and its impact on Indigenous communities, mapping the shifting geographies of Assam through the lens of literary cartography.