Artificial Intelligence, ‘Dalit Phytohumanities’, and Indian Northeastern Literature: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework of Ecological Literary Analysis

Abstract

This article proposes Dalit Phytohumanities as an interdisciplinary critical framework that brings Dalit Studies, Environmental Humanities, Plant Humanities, and Artificial Intelligence-assisted literary analysis into dialogue with literary representations of marginalized communities in Northeastern India. While Dalit Ecologies, Plant Humanities, and computational approaches to literary studies have independently generated significant scholarly interventions, little attention has been devoted to examining how artificial intelligence may complement humanistic inquiry into the ecological, cultural, and ethical dimensions of vegetal life within caste- and indigeneity-inflected literary texts. Rather than replacing close reading, the study employs Artificial Intelligence as a supplementary analytical instrument capable of identifying thematic recurrences, semantic relationships, and ecological patterns across literary narratives, while interpretative authority remains grounded in established literary-critical methodologies. Through close textual analysis of selected works by Mamang Dai, Easterine Kire, and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, the article argues that plants, forests, rivers, and ecological landscapes function not merely as descriptive settings but as active repositories of cultural memory, resistance, environmental justice, and ethical coexistence. Drawing upon Michael Marder's philosophy of plant thinking, Rob Nixon's formulation of slow violence, Indulata Prasad's Dalit Ecologies, and recent developments in AI-assisted humanities research, the study demonstrates that vegetal imaginaries illuminate the interconnected histories of caste, ecological dispossession, indigeneity, and environmental marginalization. Artificial Intelligence is employed not as an interpretative substitute but as a methodological aid that strengthens interdisciplinary textual inquiry by facilitating systematic thematic mapping and conceptual synthesis. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop, the selected texts foreground reciprocal relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, thereby challenging anthropocentric and caste-centred modes of literary interpretation. The article concludes that Dalit Phytohumanities, supported by carefully integrated Artificial Intelligence methodologies, provides a productive critical vocabulary for understanding the convergence of ecological justice, Indigenous knowledge, and social marginalization in contemporary Indian literature while opening new directions for Environmental Humanities, Digital Humanities, and South Asian literary scholarship.