Paper Title
Ecological Imagination in Tripuri Oral Traditions: Reading Kherengbar and Khumpui

Abstract
The paper focuses on the Tripuri oral traditions of the Tripuri community of Tripura, in the north-eastern states of India and particularly on the modes of the oral Kokborok tales Kherengbar and Khumpui as modes of environmental perception, human–nature interaction and cultural ecology. It suggests that Tripuri oral narratives serve as an ecological knowledge system in which stories represent the relationships between human activity and environmental impact. The paper does not just examine these stories as symbolic, but as culturally produced accounts of ecological balance and transformation, as well as of moral connections to the natural world. The paper demonstrates the oral tradition of the Tripuri Community and how they translate the active, responsive, and moral nature of creation using the theories of oral theory (Walter Ong), cultural memory (Jan Assmann), and ecological literary studies. Keywords - Ecology, Tripuri Oral Narratives, Culture, Memory, Tradition