Introduction - Habitat of the Southwestern Ghats
The Western Ghats region, one of the world’s ‘hottest’ hotspots of biodiversity and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a diverse landscape mosaic stretching down most of the west coast of India from Gujarat to the southern-most tip of the subcontinent and beyond into Sri Lanka. It is nestled between the Arabian Sea and the Deccan Plateau. Ridges and valleys receive and carry rainwater to most of the subcontinent; rivers flow gently eastwards and rapidly down the steeper western aspects of the mountains into the sea. This is a monsoon landscape where it rains six to eight months a year, and which is humid, damp, moist, and soaked: never completely dry. This moisture-laden ground is the generator of rich cultural and natural diversity; a myriad of communities and practices that depend on rain; and a plethora of wildlife, vegetation, and minerals.
Today, these landscape features are at the heart of the development-environment conflict. The use of this language of landforms can be traced back to colonial texts; but the roots of the image behind it are more difficult to unravel as they are embedded in visual articulations of geographic maps and object drawings. This lens, which today tends to be assumed by both sides of the conflicts in the Western Ghats, is a work of design—the outsider’s way of making sense of place dominates our understanding of the Ghats while the local way of knowing has not been considered at all.
I speculate that this habitat of the Ghats has been constructed by a colonial intervention, the ubiquitous Mangalore Pattern Roofing Tile. The tile initiates an imaging of the Ghats as a landscape that drains rain off a surface, replacing the more local thatched roofs. Thatched roofs, made either from grasses from paddy fields or savannahs, or from coconut leaves, had the ability to hold rain in depth within its complex and non-linear material structure.
I explore these two different imaginations that allow us to see the imaging and language that each can initiate: how the Mangalore Tile perpetuates an imagination that is reductive, and how thatch generates an imagination that can hold complexity. Each stands apart from the other operationally, and, when engaged on the ground, this difference creates conflicts in the landscape.
While the tile creates a wet-dry binary, local everyday practices are rooted in a particular understanding of dynamic shifting ecological processes of this monsoon landscape that continually appropriate and reappropriate conditions of wetness across time in the Ghats. This paper will reveal the design of habitat (fixed)—the dominant colonial inherited image together with the language used—and make speculations about local imaging and vocabulary as well as the design of bidaara (temporal).1
Settlement and Surface - Constructing a Contentious Landscape
Surface
In 1864, the Basel Missionaries based in Mangalore, invented the Mangalore Pattern Roofing Tile (as stated in the 1865 Basel Mission Report, p. 30) and set up the first tile factory. Made from local clay found in the Netravati River, the tile was a colonial intervention that was designed as a roofing element to keep the heavy monsoon rain out. Its design introduced a new language to the locals who were being converted and employed by the missionary factories: the vocabulary of ridge and valley that is associated with separating wet from dry through the construction of a surface (the tile surface). The tile created new kinds of employment, destabilized non-linear practices, and stilled the terrain (Sateesh 2017). As it did these, it supported and hardened the idea of settlement together with new colonial regulations surrounding settlement (Permanent and Forest Settlement), stilling people, practices, and places. This caused conflicts between citizens and government, humans and wildlife, practices and climate. The tile was a political intervention that solidified colonial frames by giving the locals a common language to read and act within these new colonial frames.
The Mangalore Tile, through drawings, introduced a drainage imagination with the ridge catching rain to divert it on either side down towards the valleys, draining the roof, and moving water away from and off the roof along a smooth surface for efficient flow of water. The tile and its operations simultaneously separated wet and dry and, as it took over the habitat of the Ghats, it placed people indoors, out of the rain. The tile was designed to erase the monsoon from the everyday lives of local inhabitants.
Figure 4.
Photograph, profile of a tiled roof, Bantwal, Karnataka, created September 2017. Source: Deepta Sateesh, 2017
Figure 5.
Drawing: Tile ordering the landscape of the Ghats across scales. Assemblage of tile sections and landscape sections, created October 2017. Source: Deepta Sateesh, 2017.
Thatch does not remove water, instead it allows it to seep, holding it within the complex meshwork of its fronds. Working as a gradient of wetness, thatch generates a threshold imagination that privileges porosity, not an impervious surface. The language of thatch is: hold and release (Sateesh 2017), seep and ooze (Cons 2017), horizon and depth. This language may be conceptually extrapolated into a material operation of the terrain, allowing one to see a “rain terrain” (da Cunha 2018) of the Southwestern Ghats. If tile exposes the idea of surface, I posit that thatch leads to seeing or experiencing depth and horizon, which begins to expose the experiential/practical frames, language, and imagery that may have existed prior to the colonial eye.
Settlement
The habitat of the Western Ghats is described using a language based on the tile and is fixed by geography, geology, botany, and economics: as can be seen in the Western Ghats Ecological Expert Panel (WGEEP) report (Gadgil et al. 2011). This imaging of habitat, determined by measuring space, altitude, climate, slopes, vegetation, and soil types (Gadgil et al. 2011), is defined by boundaries that are embedded in the ideas of the Permanent and Forest Settlements. The act of settlement fixed space permanently (Powell 1892) and stilled this dynamic wet landscape in a moment of dryness, in a moment of scarcity, fixing it in a drawing of a map. The creation of a map, a visual representation of place, freezes this dynamic terrain in a moment when it is not raining, so that one can see what is there, from above, from afar, and plan. The map, a drawing of points and lines on a two-dimensional surface, allows the viewer to gaze at the world.
During most of the nineteenth century, the British colonizers were surveying India to take control of resources through land settlement. Sir Thomas Munro introduced the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in the Southwestern Ghats from 1799 onwards; it was modified to respond to the more autonomous inhabitants at that time (Bradshaw 1906). This initiated multiple transformations across the terrain, people, and practices in the coming decades. New ideas of ownership, law, land management, and taxation were introduced, which caused multiple peasant revolts in Wayanad, Mangalore, and Coorg (Bhat 1998). These changes were designed to privilege surface, area, dryness, regularized time, a cash-based agricultural economy, and permanent buildings to live in: the setting up of systems that contributed to the singular agenda of the colonial revenue-based administration. By the 1880s, many of these regions were settled, and had become either revenue or forest land.
Figure 8.
Image of 1897 Revenue Survey Map, Village in Kasargod, District Collector’s Office, Mangalore. Taken on 23 November 2016. Source: Deepta Sateesh, 2016.
Surface and settlement created the habitat: the manifestation of a drainage imagination. This is distinct from a threshold imagination that constructs bidaara, privileging depth and movement.
Kumri Cultivation - Destructive versus Constructive
In search of depth and movement, my research led to identifying and focusing on shifting cultivation, an ancient agricultural practice of the Western Ghats. Shifting cultivation has long been studied by experts and, in India, has been described as a practice carried out by itinerant communities who live in the forests of Northeast India and the Western Ghats. In the 1860s, colonial foresters were experimenting with scientific forestry in the Southwestern Ghats in order to produce more timber for railways and ship-building. As they surveyed the vegetated areas, they saw the habitat of the Western Ghats in disarray—existing primeval forests were being unscrupulously cut down by the local inhabitants. These areas were then left abandoned for many years, thatched mud houses were left to collapse, and the people continually disappeared and moved across the landscape (Cornish 1874). The Ghats was incomprehensible, unstable, unpredictable and unreliable. The task for the foresters was to order this mess—so that they could see it with clear eyes and clear skies—to make the forests productive and organize them in such a way so as they could be managed by setting up control mechanisms and hierarchies.
Like thatch and the monsoon, shifting cultivation was not adequately understood and was written about in negative ways, particularly in the Kanara and Malabar regions, where it was traditionally called kumri and punam, respectively. Colonizers paid little attention to these communities as they saw them as vagrants: a nuisance. They recorded the practice of shifting cultivation as being wasteful. They recorded the timber that they valued being burnt (Brandis 1897; Cleghorn 1861), cultivation as being under-productive (Buchanan 1807), and the communities as being ‘heathen’ and devil-worshippers (Burnell 1894). However, the communities cut trees and set fire to a small patch of land to fertilize the soil to grow millets and access other edibles for their subsistence from the forests and other lands. Once the season was over, they would leave the site to regenerate itself by moving to another location and would only return a decade later, if at all.
In 1865, India’s first Forest Act was passed to initiate the settlement of forests, and to ban shifting cultivation. Subsequently, in the Indian Forest Act of 1878, a number of other practices were also banned including setting fire to grassy areas, accessing firewood and edibles from the forest, grazing, hunting, and building homes. Colonial records show that when the forest surveyors arrived in the late 1880s to settle the forest and assign rights, since kumri was already banned in 1865, the communities could not claim these lands (Chandran 2019). The only things left to claim by the locals were the valleys, with thota (gardens) and gadde/vayal (rice fields) that were taxed based on productivity. The kan (sacred grove) and kadu (forest) were annexed to government forests (reserved and protected) (Chandran, Rao, Gururaja, and Ramachandra 2010), betta (hill) lands were assigned only to collect leaf litter for manure (Buchy 1995), and bena/hakkal (savannah grasslands) were referred to as “wastelands”.
Banning kumri cultivation enabled foresters to survey, assign rights, and claim rights to any unclaimed lands (Ribbentrop 1900). Historically, the treed areas were designated either as Reserved Forest or Protected Forest (Brandis 1875) while areas that seemed to be uncultivated or abandoned were seen as unproductive and uninhabited and marked as wastelands (Waste Lands Act 1863). These were then designated either to the Revenue Department or Forest Department. Along with banning local practices, the land typologies were either erased or transformed, primarily transferred to one of two categories—forest land or revenue land. Due to the lack of understanding the complexity of the local inhabitant and monsoon, these mobile communities were slowly forced to stop moving, or were left out of the new system. This was the hardening of a nature-culture divide in the Ghats.
Wetness, Depth, and Movement - Traversing the Terrain
From the colonial engagement in the Ghats, two major concepts emerge as being marginalized: shifting cultivation which was banned through settlement and forest laws, and a gradient of wetness, removed from people’s everyday lives through the design of the tile and the idea of surface separating wet from dry. Both were marginalized through viewing the landscape of the Ghats from a distance and seeing it in a state of deterioration. In order to reveal a different ontology, it is important to consider movement (rather than settlement) and depth (rather than wet-dry).
It is possible that the local inhabitants valorized movement and depth, perhaps in correspondence (Ingold 2011) with each other across space and time, through operations of wetness, and seeping and oozing. I borrow from Fairhead and Leach (1996) as they suggest, in the case of Kissidougou, Guinea, that “if forest is considered to be ‘closer to nature’, for example, the assumption that use degrades contradicts the Kuranko experience that untouched land tends to be savanna, and that where one cultivates, trees multiply. Different ecologies— interacting soils, vegetation and so on—respond differently to use…” (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 13), and respond differently to wetness through movement.
With these concepts, issues, and images, how can one see as a local, in a rain terrain (da Cunha, 2018)? The architect, planner, and conservationist must shed their view from above that they take for granted to be real and true, and see what is here and now on the ground in the environment, through wetness, and what is changing. Field research was carried out in Wayanad, Thirthahalli, and Kumta to understand the relationship between movement and wetness, particularly with communities who were shifting cultivators only one or two generations ago. Art and design methods were used to record stories and practices over time, through images, drawings, sound, and videos. Here, design is an imaginative, speculative, and visionary process, and a heightened level of curiosity is required to explore what kind of framework determined the lives of these local inhabitants of the Ghats. What if, when imagining their world, they were viewed as constructive rather than destructive? From gathering and assembling all the things that were erased, banned, or converted, I can speculate that these things (including the things that were not marginalized) were all part of a different frame, one in which the gradient of wetness is visible across multiple places, and one that requires movement to correspond with, to continually make, and to maintain. Field recordings were made with the intention of blurring lines that divide boundaries: to find clues of this other world.
Figure 10.
Field notes on types of rain, Raman’s interview, 17 January 2018. Source: Deepta Sateesh, 2018.
From the fieldwork, I found that in many regions of the Southwestern Ghats, such as Kumta, Thirthahalli, and Wayanad, communities practiced kumri or punam and also grazed in the bena or hakkal, fetched fruits, honey, and firewood from the kadu and betta; water from the hole (stream) and keni (small temporal mud well); cultivated thota and gadde or vayal; and nurtured medicinal plants in the kan or kavu (Chandran 2019; Mahratti 2019). Their shelter, it can be imagined, was situated in the center of all these grounds of practices that may blur into each other—in a state of liminality: an anchor. The communities tended to each of these places with care, nurturing and nourishing them over time as they moved in correspondence with rain.
Figure 12.
Photograph assemblage: Shaping the terrain to hold wetness across thota, hakkal and gadde. Village headman’s house, Bangane, Kumta, Karnataka, May 2019. Source: Deepta Sateesh, 2019.
Although the colonial foresters banned the practice that required more movement and restricted people’s access to certain conditions of wetness and porosity that were necessary for everyday life, traces of kumri can still be seen in settled terrains, where simple innovations are designed to hold water (bunds, trenches, terraces), and the home is still a threshold for the multiple practices across thota, vayal, hakkal, and kadu. These multiple practices extend beyond habitat boundaries, beyond the shelter, and depend on particular conditions relating to the ground, moisture, and humidity. This has led to rethinking these local words for landscape: they may be based on conditions of wetness, a relational quality that reimagines the Ghats as a threshold. Dwelling is an act of situating an anchor and generating trajectories of emergent practices that depend on wetness; as Illich writes, “the threshold is like the pivot of the space that dwelling creates” (2006). Each of these places may be seen as temporal, changing across seasons from more to less wet, like the operations of thatch. The monsoon terrain of the Ghats is an ocean of anchors across time, constructing a dynamic meshwork of movement (Ingold 2011) of materials and practices that correspond with rain.
Conclusion - Making Place, Making Home
In Indian thought and philosophical writings, nature is represented in multiple modes, practices, and forms that are intertwined in the active engagement of the ordinary inhabitant. In texts, such as Sangam literature or fables and oral myths, nature is within culture, and descriptions of culture are interwoven through everyday practices drawn into nature (Baindur 2015). The idea of resilience is when (not where) nature and culture are synchronous with one another. Wetness is not everywhere but it is everyday, in the ordinary, and in the practice of the local inhabitant’s everyday life. Bidaara, another design (threshold) imagination, is the continual design of dwelling by movement across a gradient of wetness; movement that corresponds with rhythms of rain, working with a different non-linear understanding of time.
While the tile and disciplines settled the landscape and local communities through spatialization, bidaara, derived from assembling and synthesizing qualitative data, reveals the possibility of the pre-colonial world of the local inhabitant on the ground of wetness: in a “rain terrain” (da Cunha, 2018). Design research here affords a non-linear understanding. It is geared towards inventing new categories and forms of data, strategizing new resilient futures. Design here is the process of describing what is (ontological) rather than constructing solutions to problems (epistemological).