Session 68 summary
Deepa shares the case study on the forest people and the biodiversity in the Attapadi Reserve of Kerala. Deepa had used hatched and seed approach, she had to do a lot of hatcheting – the critiques on the development, and critiques on the development structure which leaves adivasis very marginalised then she gradually got introduced to the community through their lifeworks, through the empirical basis of her study how the indigenous cultures and their scientific knowledge/technological knowledge preserve their knowledge of biota.
The Attapadi hills are on the strip of hills on the Western Ghats from Silent Valley to Mudhubani range to a contiguous key chain which starts in Tamil Nadu and ends in Kerala. So, this is the stretch that connects the todas, the irulas and the kurumbas. It is home to the irulas who are on the periphery of the forest and the kurmbas who dwell in the high ranges of the Attapadi Hills and the focus is not the silent valley.
Deepa initially started her research with a set of questionnaires and interviews, it also involved significant amount of ethnography. When she stayed in the forest and lived in the periphery and travelled to the interior forest, it also involved looking at the working plans of the forest and the cultural tradition. Her thesis is feminist political ecology which then again about the centralization of agro-pastorals. There are four rajas who are now arguing for a special category called agro-pastoralist who have to be considered as a category called agro-pastoralist in the Western Ghats of Kerala. So, Deepa has followed Tom Robbins’ hatchet and seed in looking at the main narratives and what can be the alternatives to look at those histories. So, political ecology is the life experiences of these communities who have recently transitioned to fixed boon cultivation. This is not something new because it is known that it is a dominant narrative that marginalises the communities because indigenous people have been considered the original affluent people and the interconnectedness between age and society is something so valuable to the societies in the present time of climate change, in anthropomorphic destruction of the forest. This case study stands out as a symbol of what indigenous worlds have to offer especially after covid, so Deepa hopes that these small worlds become refuge providers in which people can reconstruct the ways of life. So Deepa’s project looks at the scarcities because when she started the project in 2003, there was extreme scarcity in the region because there was deforestation, scarcity of food, land disposition and extreme poverty. But Deepa is following certain new studies on rural India and indigeneity which breaks new ground in Indian ethnographic studies by looking at the richness of the indigenous cultures whether it is ecological or technological because even if these foraging communities were at one point archaic, they still had ecologically sound ways of being with nature in terms of their agricultural practices, healing practices. The questions Deepa started to study were; how nomadic agro-pastoralists were ‘sedentarised’ in recent history and she traces the trajectory of the transformation of their habitat as well as how foraging communities became peasant community. What were the changes in their diets meant as they moved from millets to rice based cultivation of the plains and what this transformation did to their farming. Finally Deepa looked at the non-farm livelihood and institutionalization of traditional healing system and this is where the design aspect has not been integrated into the development paradigm amongst the people.
Some of the findings of Deepa’s research are; the forests are actually making a comeback because they were deforested through the 70s, the development model drastically changed the landscape, there was already land tenure system introduced which led to individual land title and further the Forest Department control over the forest continued. Despite that they were not able to stop deforestation by the mafia who were present in those habitats. She found that the Attapadi women have been able to be in the forefront of preserving seeds, forming groups and through their poverty alleviation skills and their livelihood mission to come together to conserve seed, do community gardening, community cooking etc. they are in the forefront of preserving certain indigenous cultures of biota and remarkable aspect is that the forests themselves have regenerated, so species are continuously being found, new species are being identified and they are at a juncture where the surgance while at the same time where there is so much disease causing species, barriers, covid and in other parts. So one has to look at what, how these forests can be refuges and their healing system which continues to be economic efficacious. All these oral histories that are found among these people like poems, songs, etc. they would speak about how the community went into the forest and how closely their lives were intertwined. Those living in the interior parts of the forest continued to depend on the forest for a number of resources while those in the periphery have begun to go less into the forest. So there is a lot of intersectional differences among the groups in their forest dependency. Deepa still thinks that there is so much richness which is left rudimentary but can still take off. Deepa thinks ‘Beun Vivir’- indigenous imagination which sees social, cultural, environmental and economic issues together and in balance and not separately and hierarchally, as something which would transform both the communities and its habitat. The indigenous Geist would require this buen vivr and the convivial aspects to conservation which links people to forest. So, indigenous Geist is really about the beun vivir imagination, it’s about convivial conservation.
About the Speaker
Deepa Kozhisseri
Deepa Kozhisseri is a Qualitative Social Scientist who hails from Palakkad District in Kerala and has trained in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research interest is in rural sociology and she will be sharing her study on the inter-relationship of nature and tribal communities in the forests of Attapadi Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala.
