This temple built about 700 years ago to the snake god Naga now sits in the areca nut plantation of one of the women in the Vanastree seed keeping collective.
After 3 millennia of agricultural communities living in the Western Ghats, the tribes that settled there developed a system of living in equilibrium with their environment, encompassing economic, social and cultural spheres, called Kumri or shifting cultivation. This way of using the land requires less labor than any other agricultural community has ever practiced, and in combination with the preservation of sacred groves this way of living permits a maximum use of the biological resources while keeping the risk of resource extermination low. This is especially important in the Western Ghats rainforest, because the land is quite fragile and even the smallest change causes extreme ripple effects for the ecology.
Both of the readings for this week tell of what happens when larger ruling bodies become involved. In the first reading, “Shifting Cultivation, Sacred Groves and Conflicts in Colonial Forest Policy in the Western Ghats”, the argument is that control is lost to the Forest Department of India and therefore community preservation ceases. But the second reading, “Malaji’s Hill: Divine Sanction, Community Action”, tells a story of a community taking the initiative to preserve their sacred grove, despite technical control by the government. Interestingly though, both make the point that selfless service to the sacred grove, the environment, and the deities that reside there, translates to protection of the natural environment.
Place, is a term we refer to relentlessly in architecture school. The sacred grove is a place that reminds people to protect the environment and the temples built there encourage people to gather and celebrate this initiative. The stories told of Malaji, the hero-god of the Mautis Mina community, reinforce lessons about respect for the environment through the occurrence of his life’s events in those sacred places. Further, stories of how wood thieves are miraculously punished only reinforce the two-man, twenty-four-hour patrol created recently by the community.
In the first reading, however, we learn how community ownership was lost, and therefore protection of the kans, as soon as the Indian Forest act of 1878 seized all forests in India for government control. Because Uttara Kannada, the district I am residing in the Western Ghats, is mostly forest, this meant that 90% of the land was now under the control of the Forest Department. By 1890, kumri was prohibited altogether, causing a great decline of the agricultural population who had essentially been banned out of their way of living. In the end, economics had the final say. More profitable tea and coffee plantations developed. However, economics did work in the peoples favor when the government learned the ecological importance of the evergreen forests for spice gardens. So supina betta was implemented, meaning that people had the right to 9 acres of forest for the harvesting of leaf manure for each acre of garden. Essentially the government realized that in order to make 1 profitable acre yield, 9 acres of forest is necessary.
But because these common lands were only allowed for the collection of leaf manure, with the intolerance for any other use, community management collapsed under British rule. Generally the trend of British policy reflected a poor grasp of the intricacies of human livelihoods, culture, and ecology in this region.
Sources:
1) Grove, Richard, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan. “Shifting Cultivation, Sacred Groves and Conflicts in Colonial Forest Policy in the Western Ghats.” Nature and the Orient: the Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. 674-705. Print.
2) Gujar, Bhoju R., and Ann Grodzins Gold. “Malaji’s Hill; Divine Sanction, Community Action [Jahazpur, India].” Context : Built, Living, and Natural 3.1 (2006): 33-42. Print.