Slow Violence, Indigenous Ecology and the Environmental Imagination in Temsula Ao’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines Temsula Ao’s short fiction collections These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) and Laburnum for My Head (2009) through the intersecting frameworks of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, with specific attention to Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” and Lawrence Buell’s theorisation of the environmental imagination. It argues that Ao’s fiction articulates a distinctive ecological consciousness rooted in Ao Naga indigenous knowledge systems, wherein landscape, community, and cosmology are co-constitutive. The paper contends that the militarisation of Nagaland’s hills during decades of insurgency and counterinsurgency constitutes a form of slow violence that is simultaneously ecological and cultural—an attritional degradation of both the physical environment and the indigenous epistemologies that sustained human-nature reciprocity. Through close analysis of selected stories, the paper demonstrates how Ao’s narratives function as acts of environmental witnessing that refuse to separate ecological destruction from political violence, and how they preserve indigenous ecological knowledge as a repository of alternative futures.