Literature serves as a reflective medium that captures human experience while inspiring socio-cultural transformation. However, traditional literary analysis often operates within a reductive anthropocentrism that marginalizes non-human entities and obscures human-animal kinship. This paper presents an eco-critical inquiry into the Panchatantra, an ancient Sanskrit text traditionally read as a collection of moral fables for children. By critically examining the literary technique of anthropomorphism, the study investigates how assigning human traits to animal characters creates a rigid "human-self" versus "animal-other" binary opposition, reducing animals to symbolic instruments of human virtue and vice. Through a detailed analysis of selected fables including The Gold-Giving Serpent and The Mongoose and the Brahmin’s Wife alongside Vedic environmental philosophy and modern Critical Animal Studies, this paper deconstructs speciesist hierarchies and anthropocentric bias. Ultimately, the study advocates for a paradigm shift from ego-awareness to eco-consciousness, promoting a worldview rooted in biodiversity, intrinsic animal agency, and the classical Indian ideal of universal coexistence (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam).

KEYWORDS: Panchatantra, Eco-criticism, Animal Rights, Environmental Philosophy, Human–Animal Relationship, Sanskrit Literature.