Notes. WORK IN PROGRESS Prelude to the Deluge; From the book Territorialisation
of Water, by Susan Visvanathan,
Professor of Sociology, CSSS, JNU NEW DELHI, INDIA. currently Visiting Fellow
at Central European University at BUDAPEST, HUNGARY, NADOR 14.
The question of borders and
boundaries, migration histories, varieties of art practice, (in its visual as
well as auditory preoccupations) the
orientation of methodologies that look at time and place as catalysts to our
understanding of colonialism (as implicated in our individual or collective
representations of the past,) comparative literatures as well as the variety of
mnemonics embedded in our many landscapes would be of immense significance to
the techniques of those who wish to integrate past and present, as entry
points in to the contemporary understanding of climate change. The relation between digital knowledges,
museumisation and archival resources would also provide an inroad into our
mutual concern with preserving planet earth for future generations. The
resources that we bring together from various subject positions of research
would help us understand the key ecological issues facing us of climate change,
denuded land, of disappearing
forests, drying rivers and rising sea
levels, encouraging us to provide maps, through theatre and narrative, for reuniting the earth as a common frame
where the human and animal world is in a sacred and rejuvenating space of
mutual recognition.
When we think of water, we
might sometimes begin with a chant, such as sung by the Tikopia,
The wind in the south is
fierce
The canoe is driven, carrying
My brothers who
Are wailing on the deck of
the vessel.
They run to weep together
towards the stern
They go to him (their father)
O!
O! There the bow their heads
into the hull
Floating birds who will be
cast up
Riele, riele
On the crest of the foam
They will stand.
Separate me a paddle
And set up the sail firm.
.(Firth175)
In this dirge, the Tikopia
weep for those who are lost. Firth is
essentially concerned with the fact that the song is a taunt to companions of
the voyage, who did not go to the help of those who were in trouble and who
sank to death. The fate of ordinary people is always in question, and
pastorialists, fishers, horticulturalists are besieged by climate change.
When we look at the Western
Ghats much has been written, particularly in terms of the loss of identity, and
the ways in which we think of post modern cultures, where tourism and
conspicuous consumption are essential ways of thinking about extinction of
flora and fauna, life styles and modes of perceiving the world.
As Industrialisation proceeds,
the world changes, and Development is thought to be the ultimate good. The
working class is absorbed into construction and manual labour, and for this,
networking with contractors is required, as well as the means and mobility, by
which urban livelihoods are achieved. This is dependent on minimum education,
for purposes of travel and banking. Privatising
education excludes vast populations from accessing clerical jobs. When
one looks at the working class, it draws from both kinship networks as well as
conjugal stability. Much of the debates around indentured labour, as Prof
Prabhu Mahapatra from Delhi University has shown us, centred around the way in
which workers would take their wives to the West Indies, but often women would
be murdered out of sexual jealousy. Amitav Ghosh’s novelistic works describe
how deeply entrenched workers were in the sense of their own loss and
abnegation. C.F Andrews and Willie Pearson communicated in the 20th
century, that until the British stopped the traffic in what were conditions of slavery, the world could not
accept Christianity to be anything other than an exploitative religion. The
political conditions of the working class in 21st century India has
always been tied up with the complexities of crossing over from one party to
another, as the fate and life chances of workers depends on the patronage of
these parties.
If caste is read back in terms of the dominant
communities merging through Hindutva, then their antipathy to Muslims,
Christians, Dalits and Tribal communities is a foregone conclusion. Tribal
people, who have not been assimilated to Hinduism would be seen as the most
degraded of people. Their way of life would be problematized as wanderers who
have no home. Their occupation such as bee keeping, as herbalists, as foragers,
gatherers, horticulturists, would be seen as ultimately out of the borders of
the modern.
Since tribal communities
cross over the borders of states, their identity is merged with those whom they
recognize as being similar to them. So there would be Malayali Kurumbas,
Kannadiga and Tamil Kurumbas, for instance.
As honey gatherers they move according to their work locations. Thus,
their identity also fuses with the other identities they collect on the way,
such as tea plantation and coffee plantation workers. When activists such as
Keystone Foundation members are involved with the support of workers, whether
in forests or reservations, their profile as members of tribal communities begins to have a positive
appeal, as they are emblems of significance in the health foods and tourism industry. Pure Honey becomes that product which is
essentially coveted and sold to tourists at the price that they can afford, and
is valuable for Ayurveda practitioners and organic food and healthy food
outlets. The profits from the sale are fed back into health care and medical
benefits for the “honey hunters”, as Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri, Tamil
Nadu, describes them. The Foundation has essentially tried to interlock the
needs of the local tribal communities in terms of their traditional patterns,
including supporting their horticultural activities, supporting the growing of ragi and other millets.
Intensive farming promotes a dietary balance, which allows them to cultivation
of their favoured crops simultaneously
along with vegetables.
Compared to this, a wandering
emaciated tribal youth, living alone and mentally disturbed, from Attappadi, Palakkad, gets killed,
because he is hungry, his mind is wandering, he cannot explain himself. He had
been found with a packet of chili powder and some small items of
groceries. In Malayalam literature, O.V
Vijayan created Killi, the unspoilt “village idiot”, who is so dramatically
different from Madhu, who died tragically in Attapaddi. In the undisputed
tyranny of the development rhetoric of the modern age, the non
assimilated tribal youth and the mentally deficient, are seen to be “useless
eaters”. The Attappadi case shows that by excluding them from development, they
have not only become alienated, but they see themselves as completely
marginalized. Integrating dalit and tribal communities into the Nation State is
a long drawn out process. We have enough evidence from Bastar that Maoism was a
route that foresters took to escape the disastrous consequences of the mining
and the timber mafia. In Kerala, settlers and communist workers, too, believed
that tribal people were inconsequential. What foresters want and revere is
their own way of life. Forced industrialization places on local people the
sense both of white collar mobility now being accessible, which
is a privilege, as well as the fear that their sense of the real, or that which
is valuable, will be taken away from them. White collar professionalism is an
aim, not a legacy for the working class. As a result it places on them a
terrible sense of urgency, as well as of defeat. This brings about a huge sense
of lapse, of moral insufficiency. There is also a gap between traditional
values, and the rights associated with freedom and mobility. The contradiction
between these leads to working class communities presenting hierarchies of
status as given, as ascribed. The rancor that arises from these, including
inaccessibility to food, water, medical health, education brings about class
based violence in many instances, which suppressed creates a huge reservoir of
mutual enmity.
The Border always comes with
a baggage. The British found it impossible to control the North East and the
North West territories, the Nagas holding out the longest. Essentially, we
understand that the memories of land and
territory were different for them. Much as we imagine that Terrorism is a
political term, we know that freedom and rights are essentially at risk for all
who occupy the Borders. The call to war is continuous, and the fear that
ordinary people face is, that the oligarchy, consisting of those who own the
most in terms of real estate, are the ones making the decisions.
For pacifists, the way
forward is to create dialogue, through music, literature, poetry and the arts
with people across borders, and within them. It is unfair to typecast all
people with the same qualities of venom, death, evil. Durkheim in the
conclusion of “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” asked, ‘When Does Evil
Become Good?”. He had lost his son, and most of his students in the trenches of
the First World War. Every time, War beckons, we know that the call to arms,
includes every one equally. However, with press button technology, individual
death is only part of the story where nuclear arsenals exist. The survival of
the forester is placed very sharply in terms of existence itself. As the
Attapadi murder showed, the settlers have very clear ideas of what is normal,
and why they would see tribal people as essentially outside the pale of their
existence. Assimilation thus becomes imposed, as “Be like us, or die.” Sadly,
malnutrition and lack of proximity to water makes tribal and lower caste
communities extremely vulnerable.
In the 1960s, the term
“standardization” was offered by Clark Kerr as an explanation of how
industrialization would bring about a common parameter of similarity.
Everything in industrialised societies would begin to look alike. Today, when
the intelligentsia leaves a carbon trail, much like computer executives did in
the last decade, we may ask, how does consumerism affect the architectural
experience of being a traveller in the skies? Each airport looks the same, and
with the appropriation by the working class too, into air travel, the symbols
of assimilation with the middle class becomes more than apparent. Masons too,
on the way to Sri Nagar,Kashmir, or Coimbatore,
Tamil Nadu, as construction labour in the Himalayas or in the Western
Ghats, whether coming from Malda, Bengal or Patna Bihar, sporting expensive
watches, buy decoction coffee and carry their worth to the company they
represent with great composure. The trickle-down effect of capitalism comes
into play, where the possibility of wearing branded clothing, or flashy
mobiles, defines the commonality of the acceptance of the branded logo, whether
Nike or Samsung.
The intelligentsia no longer
responds to the clamping down of workers in factories, because they too are
absorbed by the unity of this seemingly equalizing world. Fit bodies, smart
clothes, stylized hair cuts seem sufficient to suggest that there is mobility
among the working class. The real story of poverty, every day hunger, thus gets
sidelined. When there is drought, or famine, the contractors can marshall more
of the poor and hungry to come to work in the city. It does not matter which
political party controls the offices of the state, as the ideological machineries of capitalism are
impervious to these issues.
The question of water becomes paramount as
people have to subsist in situations where rainfall is not sufficient, and the
urban consumer has aggrandized water and electricity in such a way that they
become immensely dependent on civic supplies, or illegal routing of these.
Tourism is another way by which we understand both the getting away from the
city for the urban consumer, as well as the drought situations in which former
rural and pastoral localities are faced with. The traditional face of rural
societies attracts the well heeled urban consumer, but this countryside is
problematized by it’s own water shortages.
Land, Water and Agricultural
Practises In A Globalising World
This essay began as an
enquiry into how we think about land, water, and agricultural practices in a rapidly
changing world. We are often preoccupied with how we want to live, and the
choice we must make about our food and habitat orientations. Much of the work
by water conservationists and ecologists was essentially about preservation.
However, we are also besieged by the personal and political: the reasons why we
choose, as humans to live in one part of the world or the other. Lefbvre sees
this as a Durkheimian problem, extended by Marcel Mauss. There may be
communities who see the symbolic as that which allows their congregation,
constantly moving, they identify themselves by their totem. He writes that
“There are the social formations on a territorial bases…. those which
appropriated more or less strictly a piece of land, reserved it for their own
use, and considered it as their particular domain. That piece of land in a way
is their projection on the soil; it is even their form in the strict sense of
the word.” ( Febvre 1996:42) (Febvre (1924) 1996 Routledge Abdingdon and
Madison Avenue)
Febvre goes on to say,
“…these forms constitute the
true domain of social morphology. Here we have something precise. There remain
other social groups which have no special reserved domain, no territory of
their own or definite boundary. The human beings who form them live on a soil, in
a country, under a sky, common to all and the same for all. Resting on a
terrestrial soil, in a certain way they share in it: they bear the mark of it
Durkheim says, but their group, as a group, knows no form graphically
representable. There is no piece of land which property is the “territory of
the group.” (430)
Migration histories are
particularly relevant, as we engage with this question of space as lived in and
occupied by humans.
The idiom of water as free
flowing, ever present, providing us with our basic necessity is now open to
question. In this work, I am interested
in looking at two problems, one is the question of hinterlands, the other the
problem of rapid urbanization. Within this, I will communicate my interest in
what seems to be relic forms of tradition, specifically, organic farming and
territorialisation by natural morphological conditions of environmental
subsistence. This may include fishing, farming, forestry, foraging and market
gardening across the subcontinent. While the method may seem eclectic, it is
important to remember that the comparative collection of data over a span of
two decades has been accompanied by the general literature that contextualizes
each of these events or phenomena.
Wars make people flee, but so
does flood, drought or famine. The past becomes understood then in terms of
generational depth. How do we analyse the experience of those who have occupied
certain areas because their circumstances were such, that they had to leave
their original homes, travel vast distances, and then settle down in new
places? What did they bring to these new places in terms of language and food
and cultural practices? Since caste histories were important, these people
carried the legends of their ancestors forward through endogamy, exogamy and
commensality. The rules of behavior were clearly compounded, too, by their
religious persuasions. Co-existence was, in traditional India, foregrounded by
their ability to accept the rules of their host society. Not surprisingly,
territorial assignment of land and values were also packaged in terms of these
dominant motifs of whether one was an outsider, or an original inhabitant. The
idea of the ‘original inhabitant’ became a myth of increasing superfluity, as
the inhabitants and tribal people who had worked the land previously were
always seen by the dominant castes to be superfluous. Turning them into slaves
was the way in which they generally took care of the problem. Peasantry evolved
through the ability to survive these various invasions or incursions.
The survival mechanisms of those who tilled
was inbuilt in terms of definite processes involving the struggle with land,
predators, water and climate. Sundarbans is a case in point. They had their
stories to tell, how they coped with defeat
and heroism. We know that settler cultures, through colonialism, made this belt
active through intervention, but over several decades, the population increased
by migration, adaptation and a certain resilience towards intermittent cyclones
and flooding. That history is not relevant to the poor who till the land,
because for them survival is a daily business, involving sending out
individuals for work to other parts of the country for manual labour. As
sociologists, however, we can see why in a tenuous piece of extended land, the
contemporary historian is on call, to see how people occupy and farm the land,
which routinely and famously disappears
into the sea. Much has been written about it, and of course for tourists, this
constantly recreating history of coastal
boundaries is eminently important. The border line between Bangladesh and India
is made tenous too, as people migrate from across the border into India,
spending decades in another part of the newly adopted country, becoming
acclimatized to a new identity before they finally move to a terrain familiar
to them.
Similarly, we need to understand migration histories
which arise from land redistribution. When the State becomes reorganized for
purposes of political convenience, the old borders are defined not only in
terms of familiarity, geomorphology and human relationships, but in terms of
governmentality, from which a new vocabulary begins to emerge. There are
striations of previous histories, where the gazettes and legends inform us of
events which may have occurred hundreds of years ago.
It is in this respect, that
Madras Presidency becomes increasingly significant as a marker for
understanding the relation between agriculture, water and land use. Palakkad,
for instance, while being merged with Kerala, after independence, still had a
cultural similarity with Tamil Nadu. Enclaves of people who had settled in the
14th century, under the patronage of the Palakkad king, established
a mirror relation with Mailadaythura,
from where their ancestors had originally arrived.
Thus legends and local
histories give us a very important entry point for understanding how topography
and people are connected. Hockings for the Western Ghats describes how
immensely powerful these legends are as metaphor as well as descriptions of
topography for why people engage in specific occupations, or become associated
with land usage, even as nomads. (Hockings 2013) Nomadic groups often cross
over inter state borders, because that is their tradition. Where rivers are
sources of debate, because their point of origin, and their political
interpretations by federal authorities are different, there are many
communities who then becomes prisoners of their own histories.
Water as a symbol of
political action and governmentality provides us with clues of how people are
viewed as they live on different sides of the border. Radha D’Souza in her book
“Interstate Disputes over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism” writes,
“Interstate agreements in
colonial India were between the Indian States and, the presidencies or the
central government. The 1892 Agreement was the first interstate agreement on
water in the Indian subcontinent in the modern sense. Underlying the agreement
was the idea that two states could determine through a formal treaty making
process the extent of autonomy that the populations within the respective state
territories had in respect of water use. In pre-colonial times water use was
primarily considered a prerogative of agriculturists analogous to the way taxation
was the prerogative of the state. Under the legal system then in force, taxation
was on the total produce (crop); the village and not individual was the unit of
taxation; and regulation of land, water, and natural resources was left to the
village, tribal and caste panchayats (councils).” (D’Souza 2006:161)
D’Souza further argues that
what enforced this agreement was the idea that the colonial state had authority
over the ruling kings in principalities. Irschick’s work ‘’Dialogue and History” on sedenterisation of
agriculture in Tamil Nadu, further
proves that the British were indeed concerned with the stabilizing of local
populations, so that they would settle down in one place, rather than moving
rapidly either in search of water, or cultivable lands. Accompanying this, is
ofcourse, systems of taxation as well as British policy on temple and its
lands.
Farhat Naz shows us in
Gujarat, the idea that water could be privatized through tube well deployment
essentially leading to massive depletion in the water table. And of course, she
describes succinctly that the Green Revolution diverted water from its original
runways, to support the cause of farming communities, who were well versed with
state policy and monetary benefits and tax free services having to do with
electricity use and seed policy for farmers in that belt. Social revolutions
that followed, were essentially to demand the rights that farmers with small
landholdings had in traditional society before capitalist farming had become
rampant. A lot of the water debates thus zoned in on the large dams and small
dams debate, since it was here that community access to water for irrigation
purposes could be sharply focused.
Small dams were associated
with towns where agricultural and urban dwellers’ needs could be conjointly
served. These were then an aspect of the 20th century, where the dam
would be employed to provide irrigation for fields, and generate electricity
for small towns, while providing it with piped water as well. They would have
seasonal variations for instance, so that pre-monsoon, the level of water would
drop, and the town dwellers would be prioritized over the farmer. In Palakkad, water from the Mallapuzha dam,
just seven kms from the Ollavakode
railway station, would reach the farmer
every three days, causing grave distress, as people in the city were considered
to be of first importance. Built of
mortar and cement, the needs of the town would be adequately calculated for a
certain historical time. When the town expanded, due to new industries or
service facilities, such as hospitals or educational institutions, the question
of water would immediately be significant. How can we understand scarcity when
none existed before?
The interlacing of small dams in relationship to large dams
brings us back to the questions of how water is diverted and for what purpose.
It is in this context that Idikki and the Mullaperiyar dams become linked in terms of not just the height of the dams, but
also in relation to the seasons, and the fragility of both rainfall patterns
understood in a normal frame, as well as the stability of the dam itself. This
debate is closely linked to landscape and demography and the idea that the
rivers cannot be understood in isolation. The second important problem is the
extinction of the river themselves, because of climate change, industrial
pollution, non weeding of grasses and hyacinth which clog the free flowing
rivers and cause mismanagement of
resources, including continual exploitation
of river beds by sand mining. Fortunately, with the steady rain which fell in
Kerala, in the Monsoon of 2017, although
it did not match the average rainfall requirement, particularly in the North of
Kerala, the river began to flow, and take with it the morass of water weeds,
and pollution brought by human waste.
In Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, the
farmers have been dependent on the rivulets from which they get their water supply,
but whose name they cannot remember, because it is referred to generally
as puzha, ‘that river’. One of the interesting things about post modern market economies, where there is a
blend of the traditional and the global is the total loss of linking or
connecting ideas between events or institutions. Segmentalisation is so total,
that people cannot provide information on anything, be it the name of the town
from where their raw material is brought, or where a finished agricultural
product goes. As a result, they live in the here and now, which is considered
to be sufficient. Because their children are keen to get professional
education, a new generation is even less conversant, although they do support
their parents, or help them in agricultural work. Coonoor town suffered extreme water shortage
for the last five years, and the Reilly dam dried out. Water became available
for sale to the wealthy, who would spend anything from five hundred a day, or a
thousand rupees every alternate day. Middle class and lower income group people
were dependent on the water that came from municipality in their taps at home.
The water would be collected in tanks, by the government, and fed into one
tank. From there it would be distributed through the town’s line, to every
house only every seventeen days. The idea of water tankers coming to every
street was discontinued, as there was too much water wastage, while collecting
individually in buckets. On the day , or rather, the night, that water comes
(from 9 p.m to 7 a.m) clothes are washed, syntex tanks filled, and that water
lasts them for 17 days! Coonoor residents have got used to this, and actually
manage with the water they store. As Manoj, a coffee and tea shop owner states,
“ We have become so used to this, that we now see it as a form of water
conservation. We believe that if we can be served water in our houses even
every ten days, now possible because the heavy rains have filled the dam, and
the wells and ponds, it would be fine.” Manoj however, buys water for his
teashop business. He says that climate change and drought have been hardest on
the women, who have to work twice as hard to collect water during night, and
also to conserve it, and use sparingly for their domestic purposes.
Nitin, who teaches labourer’s children as a hobby, and is an IT
professional says that the British gave
them railways, roads and horticultural spaces, including cultivation of cash
crops. For him, the real beauty of Coonoor lies in that the people have worked
hard to maintain this, as Coonoor is pollution free, and there are in fact no
skin doctors, as people do not have allergies. He feels that the greatest
problem is water. Muncipal water comes to them only every seventeenth day. The
wealthy are able to fill their tanks as they can afford to pay thousand or two
thousand rupees every couple of days. The poor find it hard, as there really is
no water in Coonoor. The heavy rainfall mid September 2017 came after twenty
five years! The frightening aspect is that Reilly Dam has anachronistic pipes
which cannot provide water to the city. Politicians promises, that they will
repair the pipe, is now postponed because the dam is filled with water, and in
the monsoon they cannot fix the pipes.
Worse, contractors are robbing the water and selling it in trucks.
Varghese, who makes
chocolates with his wife, on specific orders, during tourist season, or for visiting
family members says that the Reilly
dam, which was built for a population of
ten thousand now serves ten lakh. The problem is that the waste disposal in
Coonoor is so terrible, that everything is thrown into the canals, there is
never any water, and now with the rain,
the dam itself produces water for the town, which has been treated. Yet, the real question of how to treat waste
has not been solved. Waste bins have been moved, and people are throwing waste
everywhere. No collection happens, and the crows, pigs , cats and dogs have
taken over the city, as the waste accumulates. However, the real regret is that
a tourist town should have been so uncared for, as water and garbage continue
to be the main issues. They never drink the local water, or drink tea from way
side shops. Vijayan, a former employee with the State Bank of India, says that
the town has one drain into which all the garbage is just flung in. As for
traffic jams these are continual now, since the roads are too narrow to take
the present density of cars and buses and tracks. Road widening has meant that the
trees often have to be cut down.
With climate change, what has
happened is that the animals in Coonoor have been forced out of the forests,
and have started wandering into the town. A honeymooning couple were gored to
death, since they posed for selfies in the early morning with the Indian Gaur,
or kattu erumai, forest bison, which
they thought were peaceful bovines. This happened in Sim’s Park. Wild pigs
leave their hoof marks in residential areas, and the housewives wake up to find
their vegetable patch completely eroded. Bears have taken to the tea gardens as
a site for wandering, causing anxiety to local communities. Local farmers have
photographs of wild animals wandering into their gardens, and bison jumping
fences to feed on organic produce meant for the tourist market.
In Kotagiri, Anita Cheriyan,
the deputy director of the Stone Edge Trust says that ecologically speaking,
the most important issues relates to the interaction between forests and local
communities. While people are quick to close off the debate by accepting policy
reports as the final word, trained ecologists wish to swivel the argument in a
different direction. She was interested
in the interface between forest and people. She wanted to know how the actual
use of trees by local communities such as Irula and Kurumbas led to species
preservation in the forest. She believes that sealing off the forest from the
people is an error, because it is through human involvement that the forest
produce has value, and the trees are protected. She says that the local people
take great care, and they prohibit the take over of particular weeds like
lantana which can destroy the local ecology.
She feels that my question
about survival of local communities, development and museumisation are what she
is centrally involved with, and that this is where she has finally arrived,
after twenty five years of close involvement with tribal communities. However,
the relation between organic produce, tourism, marketing and interaction
between them as managers, and tribal communities is still an ongoing process.
Students from American universities come to spend a semester with the Stone
Edge Trust to learn about forest practice, and the methods of water
conservation. Biodiversity is the only possible way that local communities can
now survive, moving away from plantation culture to reforestation and seed
preservation for sustenance.
Michael Lewis writes that,
‘Some scientists within Germany,
Britain, and the U.S, however, were beginning to develop observational
practices that were based in natural history but attempted to apply more
rigorous standards of observation and explanation. One of the signature themes
in their approach was a focus upon the
interactions between plants, animals and their environments. An early figure
Ernest Haekel, named this type of study as ‘oecology” in the 1890s. German biologists were largely uninterested
in the term, though, and it was unused until after American scientists
transformed it to ‘ecology’ in the 1890s. Ecology did not necessarily break
down the botany-zoology divide. Botanists still studied plants; zoologists
still studied animals.’ (Lewis 2003:41).
The forest remained a site of
undisturbed ecological preservation till colonial exploitation of natural
resources in order to further development and urbanism, and the migrations of
large numbers of people affected the local demographic pattern. Lewis goes on to show us that the question of animal
migrations for sustenance, when food and water become scarce, is an important
focus for those concerned with issues of natural habitat, and questions of
hybridization of species. What happens when foraging and pastoral communities
encroach into Parks, which have been set up for the specific purpose of keeping
humans and domesticated animals out? The debate has its highest interface with
regard to the Nilgiris, as the response to the Kasturi Rangan report has made
more than evident. Local communities, particularly settler communities which
have been domesticating the surrounding forests and turning them into
agricultural hinterlands for border towns, have been very vociferous. In the case of Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Lewis
has some fascinating data with regard to how cows, villagers, park sentinels
interacted, often with some conflagrationist issue dividing them. He describes
how much policy can be influenced by intellectual interests, scientific or
social. He writes, endorsing through
another example Anita Cheriyan’s view
that,
“Even had the exclusion of
humans and their livestock from the park been effective in maintaining the
park’s avian diversity, it further illustrates the divide between the
internationally connected and politically powerful ecologists and
conservationists – those who made and advocated the laws – and the relatively
powerless rural villagers surrounding the park. The exclusion of human
influence from Bharatpur was advocated by the Indian scientists of the BNHS,
was made possible by the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, and was enforced at the insistence of
the Indira Gandhi-led Indian Board for Wildlife. The Indian National Park
system corresponded to a U.S model, with the preference for large areas,
cleared of people, with no livestock and “natural management.” Its application
in India, though, was not due to an imposition of U.S will on an Indian
subject. Instead, the U.S national park model corresponded to the conservation
beliefs and values of an Indian urban conservation elite (including Indian
royalty who used similar types of management policies for their hunting
reserves, politicians such as Indira Gandhi, and scientists such as Ali.) They
then imposed this policy upon rural Indians living in and around declared
national parks and wildlife reserves. The irony of the futility of this
imposition in actually preserving avian biodiversity makes even worse the
reality of the violence done to rural Indians, and accepted, if not ordered by
Indian elites in the name of environmental preservation.” (Lewis 2003:312)
How to keep marauding forest
animals out of parks and domestic gardens or tea estates has been a puzzle for
residents in Coonoor, who routinely discuss the destruction waged by kattu
eruma (wild bison) and by wild pigs on what has been carefully domesticated for
more than a hundred years. Colonial policy with regard to the nature culture
debates have to be re-engaged with, with specific reference to water usage and forest
management, particularly where the memory of the forest is apparent only in the
habits of wild animals who traverse a given area in terms of their familiarity
and their need for water and food. Lewis suggests that carnivorus animals in
sanctuaries do not make a distinction between wild and domesticated cattle. The
bison in Sims’ Park, by fatally goring two honeymooners showed that the bison did not
notice fences and steps, or distinguish between forest and urban development.
Coonoor presents itself with
a startling sense of order and physical comfort. A hill side town, the relics
of British architecture and parks are still available for view. Tourists,
particularly honeymooners come from all parts of the country. Sims Park is a
valuable horticultural site, where the British planted trees from all over
India, and the world, especially for recreational purposes. The garden is laid
out in such a way that it has all the appearances of miniaturization. There are
landscaped lawns, shrubs and flowering plants. There is a green house, and also
a small pond for boating, as well as a children’s park. Tourists find the
display of flowers in spring and summer enjoyable for the color and
versatility. Many of them have travelled over long distances in transport buses
from Coimbatore and adjoining villages. Some even come from as far away as
Chennai, which is a night’s journey. The idea that these small towns provide
access to gardens and water is probably their greatest attraction. The local population provides homestays, as well
as a well advertised hotel network for residential tourist needs.
Interestingly, Karen Bakker
writes that the preoccupation with personal hygiene in the 19th
century was the reason that the regulation of water became a major
preoccupation, as the wash basin and toilet unknown to previous generations now
became common. To provide the water needed for domestic uses, both sewage
removal as well as water sourcing became of ultimate significance.
Consequently,
“In the West, the role of
water as a resource, and aesthetic and cultural views of its place in society
changed dramatically during the nineteenth century: water use practices became
a source of sensual pleasure, the object of new, water –intensive personal
hygiene routines, and a marker of civilization. In the twentieth century, dams
and reservoirs were symbolic of the twin projects of modernization and nation
building.” (Bakker 2011:14)
Following from this,
modernization was accompanied not only by the forms of water mobilization as a
problem of economic vantage points, but also
central to public health management and for purposes of evacuating large
volumes of effluents. (ibid 55)
Independent India turned toward large dams as the answer
to its problems relating to irrigation of fields and production of electricity
for industrialisaton. As a result, the disarray of displaced people which
followed each decade of dam building was analysed substantially, and with each
representative position there were further developments in the argument, both
historically and polemically. In Kerala, small dams were seen as essentially
contributing to agricultural stability of the farmer with small landholdings
and the provision of electricity to small towns. Settler culture and indigenous
communities faced each other in various respects, and conventionally, it eroded
into master slave relations. Wage labour was seen to be both the prerogative of
tribal and lower caste communities, while cash crop agriculture and rice
cultivation in North Malabar, was an aspect of how younger sons were settled to
continue family traditions in an appropriate surroundings. (Varghese,
Occassional paper CDS No 420)
Madhav Gadtil suggests that
business houses tend to patent biodiversity in ways which permit the complete
control of those products, including by patenting which will allow the corporatization
of nature. “The last would logically imply deliberate extermination of any
natural biological population harbouring a given element of biodiversity as
soon as that particular element has been brought under an enterprise’s own ex
situ control, or even more frighteningly appears likely to pass under some
other enterprise’s ex situ control.” He asks for the moderation of competition
so that communities can survive the annihilistic aspect of global capitalism.
Itu Chaudhury, in his blog Yellow Envelope,
suggests that the real question that faces consumers is whether to buy from the
Big Shops, or from Organic producers of
new age products, or from the local community anchored retail shops.
Analysis of a global cultural
surrealism is what James Clifford in “The Predicament of Culture” calls the
necessity of our times. He writes that,
‘Anthropological humanism and ethnographic
surrealism need not be seen as mutually exclusive; they are perhaps best
understood as antinomies set within a transient historical and cultural
predicament. To state the contrast schematically, anthropological humanism
begins with the different and renders it through naming; ethnographic
surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption
of otherness – the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose each other; both
are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings,
definitions of self and other. This process – a permanent ironic play of
similarity and difference, the familiar and the strange, the here and the
elsewhere – is I have argued, characteristic of global modernity. (Clifford
1988:145-146)
Collage is thus legitimized
by this method, as well as those elements which cannot be integrated within the
ethnographer’s own model. The relation between agricultural communities and
their use of technology or electricity is a case in point. Rural people have
members of the family who work ‘abroad’. As a result, they are familiar with
computers, and do use them with a certain finesse for purposes of networking.
They find the acceptance of revolutions in their work spaces even more
creditable when they can share them or discuss them. Social Media becomes a
catalytic space for their redefining their world. Skype allows them to interact
not only with their children, but it is also a way by which they make
statements about their submersion in new post-modern occupations, such as
tourism and facilities allowing their integration in these, such as orchid
cultivation or organic farming and bee keeping.
Clifford refers to the concept of affinities
which reorders time with regard to cultural representation. One can actually
put things which are remote from each other in terms of time, or evolution, and
then see the similarities between them, such as abstract art and primeval
representations of material culture in contemporary societies. Should one see
these as part of an evolutionary moment, inexorably drawing us to market and
consumer culture? Many of the debates around production of weaves, or objects
made as curios or metal objects would be drawn into this frame. (ibid 200) The
hinterland thus becomes integrated through trade and reciprocity with the urban
conglomerations which are of varying density and heterogeneity.
Bakker sees the problem of
water as central to urban studies, since the hinterland gives us an idea of how
water resources are brought into the aspect of commodity rather than natural
phenomenon. Following the work of James
Scott and of David Harvey she suggests that one should look at the city not
only in terms of residences and green spaces, but in terms of “the material
flows – such as excreta, water, wastes –that move through the city, and the
different governance processes, power relations, infrastructures, and subjectivities
via which these are mediated.” (Bakker
2011:9)
Privatisation of water, where
redistribution shifts from the state to individuals and multinational
corporations must define in the first place, practical matters such as labor
and environmental standards, politics, tariffs and taxes, but for her, what is
more significant, once this is done, is to map the ideological debate over
which water supply takes places through private agencies. Government, state
policies and people’s dependence on legal and illegal arrangements thus become
indexes of how we think of water management which occupies the fate and
fortunes of millions of people. At the start of the twentieth century global
water usage totalled 580 kms, and by the end of that century, it was 4,000 kms
a year. (ibid 57) Thinking about water as a scarce resource thus occupied
administrators, politicians, intellectuals and local communities equally.
One of the interesting
problems of rural water management can be understood with reference to Ladakh.
Where water is scarce, as in the cold deserts of the Himalayas, the people have
devised ways of rationing water with a strict management provided by the
households themselves. Families take turns to utilize the water ways which draw
from a common source, and the members of the families responsible for each
night’s sharing of the resource, be it pond or tank or river, spend the night on the location, while the water is being
diverted to fields.(Harjit Singh, Tashi Lundup 2017) In the case of cities, the
problem is managed through political parties and dominant families, since
during elections, the water is diverted to slums where votes are to be got, and
memories are manipulated for specific reasons. The tension between agricultural
use, hydroelectricity, waste disposal and water for consumption is acute. It
would be further complicated by the fact that in Haryana, where caste politics is rampant, the dominant
caste might use the politics of crowd mobilization to refuse channelizing of
water from their river sources to the city, until their request for educational
privileges and reservations of seats in universities is attended to
India Today reports on 20th
January 2016 on its digital site (accessed 6th Nov 2017) that the Delhi Government Moves Supreme Court as Water Crisis Looms Large.
“The Arvind Kejriwal led- AAP
government sought a direction to the Centre to intervene and ensure water
supply to the national capital from Munak Canal in neighbouring Haryana which
has been affected by the stir…The supply sources of water feeding 7 water
treatment plants in Delhi completely dried up and the plants had to be shut
down after protesters broke gates of Munak canal in Haryana. West Delhi,
North-West, Central, South and North Delhi were severely affected .” On the fourth day of the protest, 33 army
units were deployed, and India Today reported on 21st January 2016
that 80 people had been admitted to hospital and several people were killed in
police firing. The Jats were pushing for reservations, and Delhi was severely
affected so much so that schools were closed for a day. There was arson and
violence affecting roadways and railway. Y.P Singhal, the DGP for Haryana said
their top priority was opening the water links to Delhi.
The present condition of
water famines striking most urban areas is also the lack of fit between
colonial towns and present day needs. Shimla or Alappuzha still manage with the
facilities that these towns had in the 1930s. As a result, the dependence on wells
increases, as tourism is endemic. Karen Bakker says,
“Problems with water access,
pollution, and control have existed throughout recorded history. But as
environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has explained, the collective
consciousness of environmental threats on a global scale – to water and a host
of other resources – is historically unprecedented. Indeed, the urgency of this
debate is often framed in terms of the global water crisis, in which a
significant proportion of people in developing countries (over 1 billion
people, according to most estimates) are without access to sufficient amounts
of clean, safe water on a daily basis. Framed in this way, the urban
water-supply crisis raises the questions about the limits – philosophical and
political, discursive and economic, cognitive and material – of our models of
resource exploitation and our instrumentalist approach to nature of which
privatisation is only one element.” (Bakker, 2011:217)
In Ramanasramam,
Tiruvannamalai, the drought extended from January to August 2017, when
unexpectedly the rains came, on 13th August 2017, though it was not the
season for rain then. Till August 13th, Ramanasramam, which has a
floating population of a couple of thousand people visiting and passing through
daily, the problem was acute. Visitors were requested not to come to stay, as
there was no water in the Ashram. The Ashram procured anything from one to six
trucks of five thousand litres at 800 to 1500 rupees a day. This covered the
use of personal hygiene and watering gardens. For drinking water, they received
water from the municipality, which they filtered by using carbon, earth and
pebbles. This maintained the normal requirement of calcium, magnesium and
potassium. For those individuals who objected that filtering was not done
through RO plastics, the Asramam asked them to buy water for their personal
drinking purposes. However, it must be remembered that the seven months of
buying water was accompanied by not just a financial relationship with
contractors, but also anxiety over dependence on them. One could never be very
sure as to where the water came from, though a specific source had been named.
Further, there were often politics among procurers who had their own specific
relationship to the field from which the aquifiers supplied water. How was one to
know about the origin of the water, even though the representatives of the
Asramam would have checked out the site at the beginning when the arrangement
for delivering water was arranged? Tiruvannamalai was supplied with water from
the local Salter Dam, from the 90s.
Earlier, although the dam was around since the 1960s, and was supposed
to supply Tindivanam and Tiruvannamalai, yet since the latter was politically
weak, it did not receive the quantam of water it should have. From the 1990s
Tiruvannamalai began an active water management drive, starting with Arunachala
Reforestation (AR) which brought in
townspeople and local communities, as well as spiritualists and educationists.
This improved rainfall patterns, and the canal from the Salter Dam also provided much needed water. However, with the drought
of 2016-2017, the Dam also dried up, forcing Asramam to buy water. They were
able to do so, because Asramam is financially sound, due to the support of the
devotees. While Puthucherry and other Asramams have a lot of land, Ramanasramam
manages its finances from the contributions visitors make. For those who sell
water, and for those who buy it, water becomes a commodity like any other. (personal communication Rajamani, head of
stores, Ramanasramam 11th November 2017)
When thinking of water, we
know that major world religions define waterless places (marabhumi) as a way of
thinking about death or hell. J.Jayaraman, the Librarian at Ramanasramam,
asserts that language itself is a ritual and the compartmentalisations which
contribute to divisiveness comes into the way of it. Rituals form natural
comparisons with the natural world. According to him, the watercycle is
eminently a part of the cycles that rituals harness. It represents the
inseparability of the individual from the whole. We are the River, the Ocean is
the whole. The River thinks it is separate.
“That is the language we are familiar with. It can become bondage. Carrying the
boat to the other shore becomes the language of excesses or unfulfilled
longings. It is our inherent tendencies to carry on one’s individuality.
Movement reflects choice. That choice is also ritual, which is disseminated
through time. This is ego - History, Ritual, Time. Out of choice emerges
result. Out of intentions, there are consequences. There are other forces such
as Samudra, Aditya, Marutha… each concept is a limitation.” (personal
communication, 26th June 2018)
Jayaraman is essentially arguing that, even if
the river, or the individual being is scorched, or flows into another river,
and identity is lost, the ocean remains. Even without rivers, the oceans
remain.
Taken at a material level,
twenty percent of Chennai gets its drinking water recycled from the sea.(youtube
Chennai Seawater Desalination Plant, Minjur accessed 13th July 2018)
Many of the ways we think
about harnessing water for agricultural or urban use, is entrenched in the
debates about dams. Whether these are colonial, post independence, large,
medium or small. Whether these have to do with the past or the present, whether
they interconnect states or are defined by
small landholdings or large acreage. One of the most interesting works
on this subject is by Daniel Klingensmith (2007) in One Valley and A Thousand: Dams, Nationalism and Development where
he discusses the history of the Damodar valley, and interrogates the materials
pertaining to the dreams of industrialization and the well known scientist,
Meghnad Saha. Following the work of Shiv Visvanathan, who had argued in Organising
for Science (1985) that Saha, as one of the great planners of modern India, had
used electricity consumption and production as the statistical index for
development, Klingensmith asks about the
fate of the tribals who were displaced. He writes,
“As for the peasant
cultivators who live in the basin, Adivasi and Bengali, Saha is completely
silent. He has nothing to say on relocation policy (though the abbreviated
project ultimately built officially displaced more than 93,000 people) or about
how far the dams, with the necessary effects on both the river and the
watershed, will affect the lives and livelihood of the valley’s inhabitants.
The assumption presumably, is that they will benefit, but his project is framed
in terms of its contributions to the nation as a whole; the actual people
living along the river and its tributaries are invisible.” (Klingensmith
2007:128)
That the Damodar project had
its nucleus in the motivation provided by Tenessee Valley project is something
that Klingensmith is keen to prove (ibid 124) yet, we must remember that the
colonial dam exists previously in terms of how urbanism and agricultural
hinterlands are interlocked. In this context, the largeness of the dam becomes
a relative issue, as much as the question of maintenance of colonial dams which
are built with mortar and cement. The life of the dam is also dependent on
silting, and as I have argued in Sacred
Rivers and Energy Resources, it
is to be understood in term of the lives of riverine populations who are
dependent on the free flow of water for fishing, agriculture, domestic and
ritual purposes (Visvanathan 2013). A lot of the questions raised in the past
about the need for electricity for urban conglomerations, and for
industrialization is pertinent today too, when the World Bank has a role to
play in how we think about water management.
Colonialism did not come
without its antagonists, and the appearance of oligarchies of timber, mining
mafia and state bureaucracies defending
these have been the subject of much discussion. Peter Sahlins shows us that in the 18th century,
mountaineers of the Ariege departments in France had a separate identity. While
having a relationship with the villages of the plains with whom they exchanged
food, cattle and people, for they ‘represented a separate and complementary
economy, social structure and culture. (‘Sheep go up, women go down’ was a well-known
proverb of the region, perhaps referring atleast since the 19th
century, to the tendency of women to migrate to the plain to work as wet nurses
and servants.) But the peasant communities that revolted in 1829 were those
which shared a mode of production and way of life, combining agriculture and
stock raising, centred around and in the forests. (Sahlins, Forest Rites: The war of the Demoiselles in
Nineteenth Century France Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussets 1994
pg 9)
All mountainous communities,
or equally forester communities, have to understand the encroaching nature of
the agricultural impulse. Whether local trees are chopped to give way to
commercial trees, or grasslands burnt down, diminishing the rights of
pastoralists, the relationship between pastoralists and farmers remained
symbiotic. Sahlins writes,
“For without the forests, as
many were to note during the war of the Demoisselles, stock raising would be
impossible, and without livestock manure and income generated from raising
cattle, the mountain peasantry would have been sooner forced to emigrate to the
plain, as eventually was to happen after 1850. (Sahlins 1994: 12)
The idea of the commons drew
from charters dealing with ‘use-rights’ of the peasantry or (‘droits d’usage)
as opposed to property rights, but for the peasantry, these were too complex to
absorb, and they freely wandered across boundaries. One of the significant
court cases being fought by a retired engineer, M.Bala Subramanium, in Coonoor
is to do with the landrights held traditionally by the Badagas, a migrant
peasant community from Karnataka in the 17th century or earlier, and
the obstacles that the Army has created in withholding their right to pastoral
and agricultural movements they previously held traditionally. Vikram is a contractor. He has
built some of the best known houses in Coonoor, and his phone is always
ringing. He seems to be able to give his clients what they want. Vikram
believes that the Badagas came over the hills, escaping Tippu Sultan. Others
believe that they came in the 11th or 13th centuries.
Hocking has an interesting graph documenting the varying years of arrival as
presented by Badagas in mission literature. The cosmopolitan
new age farmers whom I met in
Coonoor, who grow oranges for the market as well as a vegetable called kushkush, for Ayurvedic
establishments in Kerala, says that they are refugees from the Rampur War. They
are Muslim traders, Kutchi Memons, who are now engaged in organic farming. The
two legends are not in themselves unusual, because usually people do not know
of their origins, but some amount of legendary histories are acceptable as ways
by which the family establishes its presence. Whether it is Seema in her
replica English country home, with rose gardens and hibiscus surrounding it, or
Seth in his village residence, which was bulit a hundred years ago, they are
irate by the wild pigs which run in and out of their lands, destroying whatever
they have grown. And ofcourse, in Seth’s gardens, the bison also roam, in what
was their territory previously, eating everything in sight. Tea gardens are now
being carved up in order to provide opportunities for housing for an elite,
which comes in for short periods during the summer or winter holidays. Badagas
have migrated to UK, Gulf and USA for work, and find professional opportunities
in keeping with lifestyle choices which include the construction of mansions in
tea gardens.
Badagas who are able to
define their existence very specifically with regard to market gardening, have
a different story. They essentially see farming opportunities as part of a long tradition, occupationally, as
cultivating castes. Their origins are as Okalligas, and they are able to endure
the cold, as well as seasons of bright sunlight. The crops they produce are
beans, tomatoes, carrots, cauliflowers, broccoli and potatos. The truck comes
every evening and collects the produce, and takes it to Mettapalayam, where it
is auctioned off. As peasant communities, they see the fragmentation of land as
something which is normal and natural. Consanguinity works in their favour, in
terms of providing opportunities for shared labour. They help each other with
gathering vegetables, and packing them for the market. Since agnatically, they
live in close proximity, with out even boundaries between their fields, they
look after each other’s children too. This closeness between relatives allows
them to share a mutual code about residence, occupation and life chances. M. Bala
Subramanium suggests that since they are exogamic, it is very important to know
their gotra. They cannot break this rule of exogamy, and are in fact
interlocked in traditional systems of knowledge about their origins and their
migration histories.
The Badagas are a dominant
caste, who have made their homes in all parts of India. Those who have stayed back, represent
themselves in terms of a four hundred year old history of surviving various
colonial authorities, and melding with them in terms of bureaucracy, tea
plantations and manners.
One of the major problems
they face today is asserting their identity in relation to the problems of
modernity or rather post modernity. They value their agrarian past, and they
look to the questions of education and professionalization as something that
they do feel deeply about. Upper middle class Badagas have been professional
for three generations now. Their interest in the circumstances defining their
culture is in the preservation of their customary rules, which distinguishes
them from other communities. What is specifically unique about this region is
their focused interest in preserving religious syncretism. Traditionally, all
the gods are significant, and equally worthy of respect. They therefore,
acknowledge Basavannana as being of
utmost interest to them. However, Vaishnavism is a predominant aspect of
religious life, and Ramanujam someone who is revered in the hills. Iyengar
culture is overarching and subsumes within it certain ways of thinking about
religious symbols as well as belief and practice. Badagas, specially wealthy
and influential ones say that they respect and worship all the Gods, Christian,
Hindu and Muslim. The town itself has temples from the 11th century
onwards, with Sanskritic rituals and assertion of mighty feminine principles,
as well as the attendant repertoire of Gods and goddesses. It also has several
churches, which redefine Christianity within the ambit of it’s theological
interpretations. In this peaceful town, what one believes is one’s own
business.
Similarly, the case of
Palakkad provide us with interesting insights into settler culture, where land
bought cheaply in the 50s is divided when sons grow up, and have to disperse.
Kottayam saw the diffusion of Syrian Christian values northwards to Palakkad.
Cherupallashery is an area which has dominant Syrian Christian families which
moved to this area and started farming, bringing their family values, and hard
work, associated with clan and church. The case of Swapna James who has
received encouragement from the Church and the parishes, as well as secular and
political parties as a woman farmer is particularly interesting. (personal
communication, 20th September 2017)
When the peasant becomes a forester, then new
indexes are available for us to see how agricultural practices contribute to
the domestication of forest land. Both in Wayand as well as in Palakkad, the forest was reclaimed for
political reasons. The adivasis were marginalized, and both the Communist state
as well as the Christian settlers communicated that development was a necessary
anvil for modernism.
The Star of Organic Farming
in Palakkad: Family Labour and Work as Livelihood and Passion
Swapna James is an award
winning farmer from a village twenty kilometres from Pallakad town. The bus to
Cherpaullasherry from Olavakode junction, goes near her village,
Kulakattikurusi, four kilometres on a country road, from the mainroad at Kadampazhipuram Hospital
Junction. Journalists and government officials know her well, and her name goes
out to the committees which look to honouring farmers for the work they do. Her
husband, James, is a successful rubber plantation owner and latex dealer, who
says that “Swapna looks after the krishi” which includes organic rice
cultivation, along with vegetables and fruits, coffee and spices. Since 2000, they have worked extremely hard,
beginning their day at 5 am and winding up their duties at 12 midnight. They
say that their profits actually come from the work they do as a couple, and
that if they were to delegate, not only would the costs be high, but also the
efficiency would be lower. They constantly reiterate that hard labour, and
ownership management allows them to do what they do: grow vegetables for the
table, distribute organic vegetables to clan members., and sell the excess to a
neighbouring school, bringing in a steady income. Swapna has been recognized by the State and church multiple times,
because her output of fruit and vegetables is substantial. She has been able to
generate an income of ten to twelve thousand rupees a month, has no expenses
for fruit, vegetables, turmeric, ginger, spices, coffee, honey, tapioca and rice. She harvests honey with the help of
workers, who are able to squeeze it from the hives because it is work they are
familiar with. There is a new interest in Kerala in orchids and ornamental
plants, so, she has been able to expand her garden in this direction. She buys
the ornamental plants from nurseries, and then multiplies them by growing them
in optimum conditions using pebbles, tiles and coir for the base, then
transplanting them on to tree trunks. School children, doing projects in
Botany, often come to see her garden for their projects, assiduously taking
down notes.
Organic farming as an idea is an offspring of the Kerala
Scientists, who wanted to wean the population from chemically infused
vegetables, fruits and horticulture.
(Visvanathan 2015) It’s success has depended on the housewives and retired
people of these small towns and its
adjoining villages. Swapna and James are representative of the interest that
the rubber plantation owners have in negotiating with traditional Jaiva Krishi
or natural farming methods, while growing cash crops and spices. They believe
that coffee, for instance, can be interspersed with rubber trees, which is
quite revolutionary, with nitrogen provided from runner beans, which are not
used for the table.
Swapna is deeply integrated
in social media platforms, and says that her exposure to ideas from other
farmers comes from the posts they put up in their facebook pages. The couple
also travels widely over the state, visiting farms, and nurseries, attending
courses on organic farming, and also reading the vast literature that is being
generated by the government employees who are committed to this programme. One
of the innovations they have put together on the farm is a tube well, without
motor. The well is six hundred feet deep, and it requires no electricity. The valve used here is a “foot valve”, similar to that one
used in a motor device, where water once it comes up, shuts, and water does not
go back. Much of these simple innovations have appeared after much thought on
their part, of simple and inexpensive ways of accessing water or good soil.
Swapna says that the
earthworm count has gone down considerably because of pesticide use, and what
one should strive for is a natural return to a soil which harbours earthworms.
For this, they have devised various compost heaps, which are state sponsored in
design, which allows them to place a base of cowdung manure, and layer it with
leaves, rotting materials, including dead
farm animals, and everything is
organically broken down into
fresh earth, fit for growing things in a matter of weeks. In these compost
heaps, wooden frames like chicken coops are constructed with lattices that
allow the compost to be aerated. They also use solar traps to catch
beetles which arrive at night to destroy
fruit, flowers and vegetables.
In his spare time, as members
of the Arts and Sports Club of Kadampazhipuram, they look after those villagers
who are dying of cancer, and provide palliative care for people who are old,
sick and incapable of looking after themselves. They are now collecting money
from friends and relatives for a hospice for those who are in the last stages
of their life, and live alone without children or attendants, a common problem
for Malayalees, generally, whose family work abroad or in other cities in
India.
The Encroachment into
Forest Land: Wayanad and Land Use
As Sahlins clearly showed for
the 18th and 19th century in the French and Spanish
territories which were essentially mountainous, the encroachment of the forest
for growing crops was essential. Simon Schama, reading the materials for
Lithuania, shows how the idea of Poland was constantly being rearranged to fit
in with the political ambitions of Russia and the Baltic, and the bison became
the symbol of the valour of the hunter, as well as the taking over of forest
land.
In Wayanad, Kerala, the
question of forest vs settlers is captured in the problem of how development is
viewed. For the M.S. Swaminathan Research station, at Kalpetta, Wayanad, the
focus is on integrating sustainable agricultural practice with the needs of the
settlers, where the wild remains outside the purview of the scientists. The
tribal people have been drawn out from the forests as their lands have now been
given to agriculturists. They are now the unskilled labour of the construction
companies. Rubber is the major cash cop in the dry zone of Wayanad. Of course
the term dry zone is relatively speaking, as there is more rain in the region,
closer to Idikki. Workers from Kerala have settled in the dry zone, and by Kerala, the Scientist means Travancore,
which is referred to as Naad. The Western Ghats, and particularly the forests
and remote regions away from the towns are still seen as outposts. There is a
direct bus from Meppad to Kottayam. The
Communists have tried to absorb the tribals according to a scientist working at
the Institute. They see NGOs as a parallel government, and they try to create
spaces were tribals who are drawn to NGO work, are pushed into communist party
activity. NGO members see Communists as essentially focusing on working class
activities rather than promoting literacy and professionalization. For the
tribals, education has become the primary motive. They essentially believe that
through education, they can be freed from bonded labour. In Wayanad there was a
market historically for sale of slaves, in the 8th century, when Jains
and Chettis, from Karnataka were at the
forefront of the slave trade.
M.S Swaminathan Centre in
Wayanad got 3.5 lakh for each house from Central Government and made proper
houses. Ten such houses were built. But on the day the keys were to be
delivered the CPM in the locality held a study class and everyone went there
instead. The manner of water conservation traditionally has been clay bunds,
stone bunds, water trenches, and kennis. Water harvesting means that once the
water is used or evaporates, there is no available water. The real concern is
with replenishing ground water. If one replenished groundwater, then it is
possible that the future is assured. (personal communication Joseph, soil
conservation officer, 23rd May,2015 Swaminathan Centre)
S.S . Chandrika is a novelist
and left activist who was associated with tribal upliftment for a long time,
and is now at the Swaminathan Centre. She says to A.R Anupama and me, that while they are on the side of
development, they are essentially concerned with integrating children through
education. However, since tribals have been drawn into construction labour, the
problems remain severe. The men are paid for their work not in money, but in
alcohol, by the contractors. So their addiction is severe. They are very
violent at home, and they have no understanding of how education can benefit
their children. They are displaced, live in areas there they do not have water
so they can neither grow things, nor can they forage or fish. As hunting is
prohibited they do not have access to their customary proteins. Many of the
ways in which development takes place is through socialization and education.
(personal communication, 23rdth May, 2018) Joseph says that in
earlier times, tribals would be able to interact with one another, but their
nomadism has been replaced with the idea of reserves, where they are blocked
off.
According to the bureaucrats
at the Soil Conservation Department with whom we spoke, the agrarian base of
the district is cash crops. Mr Shaji, Mr
Bhanu and Mr Das told us that (Personal
communication, 24TH May 2018) at the end of the 19th
century, massive deforestation occurred because of the British desire for the development of plantations of spices, tea and coffee. This also included
crops such as rice, as well as arecanuts and bananas, for the heart of Wayanad is a high altitude
valley that drains to the West East. Hot
winds blowing into Wayanad play a crucial role. The average rainfall is 2246
mm. In the South West corner, Vythiri gets heavy rain upto 4000 m.m rain. Two
hundred years ago there were dense forests and innumerable streams. With
deforestation came plantation culture. Tea, coffee, cardamom were the staple
crops. There was no water shortage. When the migrants from Travancore started
growing areca nut and bananas, they used channels which drained the water. The
viscosity of the soil, and the level of the water table dropped.
Traditionally, there had been
no water shortages in Wayanad. For drinking purposes, there were 65,000 open
wells. Kennis were found though now only
50 still exist. These were palm or jackfruit hollowed trunks inserted into the
soil, from which the crystal clean water oozed upwards. They were protected by
the tribals as sacred water sources. Out of the carbonated soil, water would be
harvested.
However, panchayats are
recently facing a new problem, as villagers are asking for piped water. There
is severe drought in Pupally, where 50,000 acres are facing water shortage. Annual
rainfall has decreased, and this is classified as the dry zone. Trees have
decreased, canopy has decreased. Teak plantations absorb a lot of water, and
the leaves also do so, increasing the heat levels.
According to P.U Das, the soil
conservation officer in Kalpetta, first
level involved the shift from forest to planation. The second level from paddy
to bananas. The wetlands were transformed by the needs of the settlers. Lemon grass on the hillocks was substituted
by tapioca for sustenance. Coffee was grown for trade and when pepper became
profitable coffee trees were cut. Pepper dos not need shade so they cut the
trees, and biodiversity disappeared. Earth
is a natural absorber of water. Water resources can only be replaced through
biodiversity. Borewells can deplete the water table. 76 percent of Wayanad is
served by Kabbini’s tributaries, including the Bharatapuzha. Dams cannot be
constructed in the hillocks. Wells dug upto 25 metres remain empty. Cultural
degradation leads to ecological degradation. Drainage density is excessive.
Check dams helping retaining the water, developing natural spring and flora and
faun, creating reservoirs through bunds, and exercising water budgeting. The staccato
nature of this information is supported by the greening practices, the organic
farming, and the self supported inroad into market gardening, which are the
daily route of the soil conservation and agricultural officers in Wayanad. The
farmers have small landholdings, but are able to innovate with regard to how
they organize their gardens, growing vegetables, fruit and spices for larger
markets.
P.J Chackochan of the Vanmoolika.org, Indian Organic Farmers
Producer Company says that organic pepper, teas and coffee, as well as ginger,
honey, and coconut and other herbal oils from Wayanad, do very well in the
European markets. There are 435 farmers allied with his group. They sell
organic produce which is certified as 100 percent genuine. Each product
consignment must be certified by the Coffee, Spices, Coconut and Tea Boards.
Why there is a gap between purchase price from the farmer and sale price to the
International consumer is because the costs of packaging and certifying as well
as transporting consignments are substantial. If they book
one container for transporting
goods out of Wayanad to Europe, they have to pay one lakh rupees. While the
tribal communities of Wayanad have submitted to modern machinery and
cosmopolitisation of work spaces, they have suffered.
Conclusion
Local communities have for
long believed that they own the right to life and occupation. When land is sold
at cheap prices by the government, people often relocate, because where they
are born, may not provide them with optimum chances of survival. It is because
of this, that whole villages in Palakkad and Wayanad emerge as fully formed
entities, with the same layout of streets, shops and residences as the hamlets
the people originally come from. The
settlers represent a new aristocracy, bringing with them the cultural ensemble
of their previous homes and villages. They reduplicate the churches, temples,
mosques and the gardens as well as bakeries and restaurants that they are
familiar with.
As their gardens flourish,
and their stakes in cash crop farming increases, they become more affluent.
They are able to participate in life endorsing green activities which involve
curtailment of desires, including accepting of veganism, organic farming or
rearing of free range chickens for the table. Between hobby, passion and
occupation there is a thin line. As they succeed, they are able to encourage
tourism in these small towns, based on their activities such as bottling
passion fruit juice, or growing organic red rice. Tourists descending in
Wayanad or Palakkad thus provide impetus to new occupations such as kayaking
festivals, tours into the higher ranges of the Western Ghats and enjoying the
company of the local population. Bed and breakfast places mushroom, providing
clean beds and toiletries to overnight guests who arrive in their SUVs and Land
Rovers from neighbouring states, or are
most often, Malayalis working in the Gulf. These individuals derive tremendous
comfort from home cooked meals and visits to the local sights such as rock
temples and scientific institutions with allied gardens. The landlords of these
rest houses have to have licenses, and if in the radius of a highway can sell
liquor to tourists. Safety is provided by the security officers of private
companies and local police, and the good manners of a new class of professional
hosts.
Rain came early in 2018, in April, instead of June, and raged, without
appeasement, by August. Karkaddam is referred to as “pattini massam” (the
hunger months) as fishing is prohibited,
because of dangerous waters, and for the protection of spawning fish. What
vegetables are available, come through the Coimbatore Pass, loaded with
chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Of course, tourists still arrive, as guest
houses describe it as “non-season” and lower their prices.
Children continue to go to
school, offices are open, housewives are at their wits end as to how to dry
clothes and make houses free of that sepulchral damp which enters all homes in
monsoon season in India. When the rain does not stop for days on end, the dams
fill and go beyond their safety point. Panic rises, and administrators and
politicians take time to think about what the best policy before sending people
into rehabilitation camps. Usually poor people, or first-generation settlers
tend to live near the dams. Tribal communities are the first to be isolated and
at risk, since their dwelling of tin roof and cloth curtain cannot possibly
withstand the velocity of continuous rain.
When the sluice gates of
smaller dams are first opened the effect is immediate. When Mallapuram and
Iddikki follow, the settlers lose crops and property. In a larger context, the
possibilities of famine follow, as the rice, bananas, sugar, ginger, pepper,
tea, coffee, cinnamon, vanilla, rubber, grown in the ghats and its hinterland,
are part of a larger economy.
Those who are able to get
away do so in time, but for the rest, everything is left to chance. We don’t
have a solution for natural disasters, but climatologists and planet watchers
and naturalists do give us advice. One of these is to keep river beds clear of
construction, the other is to clean the beds of long rooted grasses, and windblown
seeds which produce trees over time in the river. When artificial islands form
as a result of sand mining, and water hyacinths proliferate, thereby creating stagnant pools, the river is
already showing signs of dying. When the dams are opened, the quantity of water
dispersed per second is so voluminous that it clears out everything in its
path. The larger the dam, the greater the damage to people and property.
Animals like humans feel fear and die unwillingly. Every life lost is a
calamity which money can never recompense. There are 48 rivers in Kerala, many
of them lethal dumping grounds.
The border between Kerala and
Tamil Nadu has always been osmotic. People crossed over, as did ideas,
languages, crafts, food, currency, labour. The Mullaperiyar has always been a
contested territory between the two states for several decades.
On 1st August
2018, taxi drivers in Kochi were anxious about the Cheruthoni dam shutters
releasing water. Since the rain had lessened a little, the dam did not release
water on the 2nd August as
planned, and life went on normally, with
heavy rain at night, drizzles during the day, and the sky lightening up at
evening. Malayalis knew that they were up against the wall, but did not expect
catastrophe. They could imagine it, but there were other pressing matters to be
attended to, which included sending children to school, enjoying the company of
those who had returned home for their holidays from abroad, and ofcourse the
care of old people, who run the farms and residences while their sons and
daughters are away at work.
In Kerala, the Mullaperiyar, with its source
in the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which was once called Madras
Presidency, faced many public battles regarding not just the use of the water,
but the age and viability of the dam. The Malayalis have seen apocalypse in the
eroding dam and have led processions and marches till they received assurance
that the 19th century Mulla Periyar would be repaired, and a new dam built
further downstream by their own state government. The Iddiki dam when opened on
11th August, did result in 23 deaths, and rendered 54 lakh people
homeless. But when the Mullaperiyar dam was opened by Tamil Nadu Government on
15th August 2018, the death toll rose to 445, and one million people
are now in camps waiting to return home.
While Kerala and Tamil Nadu
are back in court, the Tamil farmers, on social media, have communicated that
they were deprived of water, while Kerala was flooded. The understanding that
Kerala has had with Tamil Nadu is based on an 1866 contract when the Maharajah
of Travancore and Secretary of State for India agreed to share waters in Madras
Presidency. Now, the real terms of this colonial agreement is not acceptable
anymore to the Kerala Government as it disturbs the equilibrium of people and
properties in the zone where the dam was built.
Anand Pandian writes of a
colonial engineer called Major John Pennycuick who built the dam, and to whom a
Tamil ode has been written, extolling his virtues in changing the dry lands of
Madurai into a silken quilt of green, where women, who were previously used to
famines, now bedeck themselves and dance like peacocks and swans. Major
Pennycuick, who invested his own money in the building of the dam, and
requisitioned finances from local people is also thought to have thrown his
second wife, pregnant with child into a crack, to seal the dam. There is a
famous tantric tradition of human sacrifice to stabilise the new building,
which the colonist, later almost deified,
seems to be implicated in, by which he becomes the cultic embodiment of
the artificially created fertility of a once dry area. Is this to say that no
sacrifice is sufficient in the building of a dam? Anand Pandian writes in an
“Ode to a River”, in Amita Baviskar’s Riverlines
(1993),
“The severe famine of 1876-’78 temporarily
suspended any administrative attention to the project, but the Famine
Commission constituted in its wake specifically recommended the plan to help
secure grain production in the hard –hit plains of Madurai. Major John
Pennycuick was ordered to assume full responsibility to the proposed project in
1882, and in the same year he submitted a detailed plan that was ultimately
sanctioned. The plan called for a thick rubble masonry dam that would
eventually rise 176 feet above the riverbed to impound its waters in a large
reservoir - water held here would be
led through a tributary stream-bed to a mile-long tunnel blasted through the
granite mass of the Western Ghats, emerging east to tumble down to the plains
of Madurai. An agreement was signed with the Government of Travancore to lease
the necessary lands in 1886, and work on the dam commenced in1887. The first
waters passed out of the tunnel in 1895” (Pandian in Baviskar 2003:14)
Interestingly, this is very close to the time the Vice-Regal Lodge in Shimla
was electrified after much debate, since the question of coal and gas was being
discussed and electricity was seen to be an urgent substitute, as I have
described it in my essay “Summer Hill:
the Building of Vice Regal Lodge” in Studies in Humanities and Social
Sciences, 2010.
Anand Pandian uses A.T.
Mackenzie’s History of the Periyar
Project (1899) to describe the making of the Mulla Periyar dam. There were tropical forests, wild
animals and leeches, half the year was monsoon, and malaria and cholera killed
off thousands of workers, who found working at 3000 feet, tiring enough.
“Hundreds of these labourers perished due to accidents, contagious diseases and
climatic exposure – camp hospital registers tell only part of this story as
many sick workers went back to their native villages never to appear again at
the construction site.” (ibid 14-15) Pandian comments that the British
commemorated their own dead with grave stones, but the Indian workers graveyard
remains unmarked and overgrown with scrub. Ecologically, it is significant that
many lower caste communities buried their dead in the land without cementing
grave sites and allowing for the earth to rejuvenate.
The present floods in Kerala
bring back the old debate about rights of communities to live in reservations
and parks, and the cordoning off of forest resources, banning mining and construction, in specific ecological zones.
Susan Visvanathan teaches
sociology in JNU, and is the author of Sacred Rivers and
Energy Resources.
WORK IN PROGRESS.
\BIBLIOGRAPHY YET TO BE COMPILED, FOOT NOTES AND COMPARITIVE LITERATURE TO BE
INSERTED IN THREE MONTHS, AT CEU, BUDAPEST, AS VISITING FELLOW ON RESEARCH
EXCELLENCE AWARD SEPTEMBER 14TH TO 11TH DECEMBER 2018
citizenmattersin/canalpy-project
canal restoration allappuzha-kerala-neeri kila iit Bombay 7074
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June 2018.Accessed on 24th September 2018
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Farming Revolution Building in Kerala, www.the newsminute.com August 8th
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2018.
Misra, Tanvi, The Kerala Floods: A
Disastrous Consequence of Unchecked Urbanisation 31st August 2018www, citylab.com
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dispute between Kerala and Tamil Nadu
goes back decades huffingtonpost.com 24th August 2018.Accessed
on 23rd September 2018.
Kallungal, Dinesh, Kerala Floods:
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Kerala Floods: A million in
camps and thousands stranded www.bbc news 22nd
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Acknowledgements CSSS JNU,
CEU,Budapest. Grateful thanks to friends and family for supporting work in
progress, and all those farmers intellectuals, bureaucrats, social scientists
and agricultural scientists who have helped me collect data.
