Sunday, September 30, 2018

Urban Rehabilitation Transcends Town and Country


 As cities get flooded because of climate change, and  the unusual circumstances following from this, people live in daily dread. They have no idea from where they will get their water and electricity  or food in the days to come. Two weeks of heavy rain are again expected (weather.com  Warmer conditions expected across India, with heavy rains in South, 30th September 2018).

The intense gravity of the situation is represented by the idea that Iddiki dam will flood over again. Planet Earth does its own thing, and by controlling nature, we imagine that we have won the battle. The real question is, how will people survive the waiting period, whether in relief camps  or at home? One of the ways in which people cope with the ‘new normal’ is to transcend it’s pathological aspect and derive comfort from the lowest common denominator aspect of it, that is, they are still alive.

The desperation that survivors feel is evident in terms of the records that they leave behind for us, which includes the written word, or other forms of documentation. Lewis Mumford in “The Highway and The City” (1958), one of the most lucid books that Sociologists have the pleasure to read, wrote about planning for rebuilding cities after World War 11. He was the  disciple of Patrick Geddes, who had written useful texts on urban planning in the third world.  Urban planners are necessary, in order to visualise  how India thinks about rehabilitation. The losses are so huge, that building again for people who may face the same grievous losses time and time again, requires some consideration and imagination.

When Laurie Baker was called in to construct buildings for Latur, after the earthquake in 1993, he took along his expertise with building in Kerala, for decades, with local materials and artisans. However, while the community endorsed Baker’s plan for neighbourhood resettlement, and his ideas were lauded, Atul Deulgaonkar writes that  Sharad Pawar and the NGOs were too quick to define rehabilitation as a speedy time bound process, and ignored Baker’s advice.(www, frontline,in/static/html/fl2020 Latur  Revisited). Baker’s beautiful drawings and terse but dynamic vision can be seen in the report ‘Earthquake’,  which is a composition written for the government, with regard to rehabilitation in Chamoli and Uttarkashi (htps.//archive. org/details Earthquake – Laurie Baker- English). Here, he suggests to the government, the need for salvaging raw materials, and for reusing them, and the employment of local masons.. The extensive use of photography is necessary for the purposes of record keeping and recompense. As traditional houses, which used local materials, provide for greater safe keeping of inhabitants,  Laurie Baker suggested that rebuilding should use traditional wisdom rather than extravagant and quick fix solution for rehabilitation purposes.

In Kerala, it is famously noticed that the distinction between town and country is not very visible. This is because rural economies in ancient times were dependent on market towns. Weber wrote in ‘The City’ about the medieval peasant being linked to the town, for purposes of sale and purchase of goods. The autonomous city, which developed in the West, is not to be found in Kerala. The occidental medieval city, depended on the appearance of ‘free’ men, those who had migrated from previous settlements, in search of burghers who would apprentice them, or the rentier class who protected them as landholders, by the rights of citizenship.

 Kerala’s modernity has depended on the right to ‘return home’, which Malayalees guard jealously, Affectual ties are maintained by annual visits home, or through skype and mobile phone calls. People see the world as essentially interconnected, but will risk their lives to see their ancient parents one more time, living with kin, or friends, till they can  make their journey to the homestead/farm, which has been devastated by flood.

The extra terrestrial nature of communication  in the globalized world, means that Malayalees strategically place themselves in the present. If they accept that their bodies are their home, which is  conventional advaitin practice, they tend to resolve the crises of physical discomfort for their families. This is a cultural tradition, which had made Malayalees believe in the dignity of labour where ever they find themselves. Unlike the Tsunami of 2004, where religious organisations were accused of  favouritising their communities, in the present crises, the Malayalees have stood together, regardless of party  or religious association. Katherine Hankins and Deborah Martin in an essay  in the book Urban Politics, (2014) have suggested that the way in which communities which have faced immense suffering can be helped, is through strategic neighbouring. This means, that people  who personally  have the vocation, come to live as neighbours,  with those who have experienced great loss, and help them with daily challenges, such as visiting banks, helping out with children, seeking to revitalize the environment by planting or replanting gardens.  Ofcourse, the capitalization of loss by  professional agencies who profit from philanthrophy would be safeguarded against. To believe in the here and now, and to believe in tomorrow, and to trust others is the need of the hour.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Work in Progress. Prelude to the Deluge, Kerala 2018


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

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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.