Movement and Place-making in a Monsoon Terrain
No. 26 (2020-01-01)Author(s)
-
Deepta SateeshManipal Academy of Higher Education. Manipal, Karnataka, India deeptasateesh@gmail.com
Abstract
The territorialization of the Western Ghats, India, is an act of colonial power either by settled or marginalized particular peoples, practices, and ecologies, privileging a wet-dry binary and spatializing a monsoon landscape. The environment of the Western Ghats, in particular, has been politicized and polarized. Today, indigenous peoples and other ‘forest dwellers’ have been compromised through the inherited colonial framework; they are excluded by conservation action as is their knowledge that is based on dynamic everyday relationships with place. Efforts to be inclusive are fraught with inadequacies of colonial imaging and use the language that continue to objectify and spatialize nature and culture, which, in turn, propagates the wet-dry divide. The disciplining of the Western Ghats is perpetuated through environmental laws: from the Indian Forest Act, 1865, guarding the land for production, to the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which gives rights to forest dwellers to protect it. Despite these laws, conflicts over access to land and resources continue as the lives of these inhabitants and their relationship with the ground, or world, were never considered on their own terms. How can design unravel how these inhabitants lived prior to colonialism? There is the possibility that they understand place by moving, occupying, and temporally appropriating dynamic conditions of ‘wetness’ in their ordinary everyday lives. What can be assembled from existing clues, and from a new imagination, to design futures that correspond (Ingold 2011) to a changing environment? This paper will reveal the possibility of a local/indigenous ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015) which privileges everyday practices across time and continually ‘makes home’ in this monsoon terrain.
References
Baindur, Meera.2015. “Topocentric Views of Nature.” In Nature in Indian Philosophy. Pages 105-118. New Delhi: Springer India.
Bhat, Shyam.1998. South Kanara, 1799-1860: A Study in Colonial Administration and Regional Response. New Delhi: Mittal Publications.
Bradshaw, John.1906. Rulers of India: Sir Thomas Munro and the British Settlement of the Madras Presidency. (William W.Hunter, Ed.) (Second Imp). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brandis, Dietrich.1897. Indian Forestry. Woking: Oriental University Institute.
Brandis, Dietrich.1875. Memorandum on the Forest Legislation proposed for British India, other than the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay. Simla: Government Press.
Buchanan, Francis.1807. A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, Volume 3. London: Fort. Cadell and W. Davies. Accessed from the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/journeyfrommadra03hami.
Buchy, Marlene.1995. “The British Colonial Forest Policy in South India, a Maladapted Policy?” Les Sciences Hors d’Occident Au XXe Siecle, 3(Nature et Environnement), 33–58.
Bureau of Indian Standards. 1992. Clay Roofing Tiles, Mangalore Pattern – Specification (Third Revision). New Delhi: Published by the Bureau of Indian Standards. Accessed from the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.654.1992.
Burnell, Arthur C.1894. The Devil Worship of the Tuluvas. Bombay: Education Society’s Skam Press.
Chandran, M.D. Subhash, Interviewed by author (DeeptaSateesh). Kumta, Uttara Kannada, May 19, 2019.
Chandran, M. D. Subhash, G.R.Rao, K.V.Gururaja, and T.V.Ramachandra. 2010. “Ecology of the Swampy Relic Forests of Kathalekan from Central Western Ghats, India.” Bioremediation, Biodiversity and Bioavailability, 4(1), 54–68.
Chandran, M. D. Subhash.1998. “Shifting cultivation, sacred groves and conflicts in colonial forest policy in the Western Ghats.” In Nature and the Orient: The environmental history of South and Southeast Asia, edited by R. H.Grove, V.Damodaran, and S.Sangwan, 674–707). Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Cornish, William R.1874. Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency 1871, with Appendix containing the Results of the Census arranged in Standard Form prescribed by the Government of India, Vol. I. Madras: Government Gazette Press.
Cleghorn, Hugh.1861. The Forests and Gardens of South India. London: W. H. Allen & Co. Accessed from the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/cu31924003683673
Cons, Jason.2017. “Seepage.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. Vol/issue no/pages. Retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/seepage.
Da Cunha, Dilip.2018. “River Literacy and the Challenge of a Rain Terrain”, in Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures, edited by D. VenkatRao. Pages 177-204. London, New York: Routledge, 2018.
Edgy Lines. (2017, May 20). Retrieved from https://dellaboratory.wordpress.com/portfolio/edgy-lines/.
Fairhead, James, and MelissaLeach. 1996. Misreading the African Landscape – Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savannah Mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forbes, James.1813. Oriental Memoirs: Selected and Abridged from a Series of Familiar Letters written during Seventeen Years Residence in India; including Observations on Parts of Africa and South America, and a Narrative of Occurrences in Four Indian Voyages. Volume I. London: White, Cochrane and Co. Accessed from the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/illustrationstoo00forb/page/n64
Gadgil, Madhav, B.J.Krishnan, K.N.Ganeshaiah, V.S.Vijayan, ReneeBorges, R.Sukumar, … G.V.Subrahmanyam. 2011. Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. The Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.
Illich, Ivan.2006. “Dwelling.” The Land. Issue 2, 39-41.
Indian Forest Act. 1865. “Act No. VII.” In A Collection of the Acts Passed by the Governor General of India in Council in the Year 1865. Calcutta: O. T. Cutter Military Orphan Press. Accessed from http://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/legislative_references/1865.pdf.
Indian Forest Act. 1878. “Act No. VII.” In A Collection of the Acts Passed by the Governor General of India in Council in the Year 1878. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing. Accessed from http://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/legislative_references/1878.pdf.
Ingold, Tim.2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge.
IS 654. 1992: Clay Roofing Tiles, Mangalore Pattern-Specification (Third Revision). New Delhi: Bureau of Indian Standards. Accessed from the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.654.1992/page/n5
Mahratti, S.S. Interviewed by author (DeeptaSateesh), Bangane, Uttara Kannada, May 21, 2019.
Powell, Baden.1892. The Land Systems of British India, being a Manual of the Land-Tenures and of the Systems of Land-Revenue Administration Prevalent in the Several Provinces. Volume III. Delhi: Low Price Publications.
Raman, Cheruvayal. Interviewed by author (DeeptaSateesh), Mananthavady, Wayanad, January 17, 2018.
Report of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. 1865. Twenty-Sixth Report of the Basel Evangelical Mission in South West India (1866). Mangalore: Basel Mission Press.
Ribbentrop, Berthold.1900. Forestry in British India. New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company.
Sateesh, Deepta.2017. “India in Transition” In Tile Colonialism. Published online June 3, 2017. Center for the Advanced Studies on India, University of Pennsylvania. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/deeptasateesh
Sateesh, Deepta, FalguniGupta, and AkritiSrivastava. 2018. Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Resilient Strategies, Wayanad, Kerala – A Pilot Project. Bangalore: Karnataka.
Steinberg, Peter E., and KimberleyPeters. 2015. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(2), 247–264. http://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p
The Waste Lands (Claims) Act, 1863. Accessed from http://theindianlawyer.in/statutesnbareacts/acts/w5.html.