 Good afternoon, everyone. I am Dr. Devavar Bratheshutthar, HOD Department of Economics at So College. Today, I am delighted to introduce an eminent academician, Professor Ajit Manan. He is currently associated with Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He did his PhD from Madras Institute of Development Studies. And the title of his PhD thesis was the Political Economy of Decentralized Forest Management, State Communities, and the Forest Question in Coley Hills. He did his master's in rural development from University of Sussex, UK. And he did his graduation in history and political science from Williams College, USA. He is interested in political economy of natural resources, conflict, environmental discourse, and environmental policy. He also works on forest landscapes in South India and political ecology in fisheries. As of now, he supervised two PhD scholars. And at present, he is supervising seven more PhD scholars. As of now, he published, he co-authored two books entitled, Democratizing Forest Governance in India, published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. And he also co-authored a book entitled, Community-Based Natural Resource Management Issues and Cases from South Asia, published by Sage, New Delhi. As of now, he published more than 50 articles, published in national and international journals of repute, the edited books, and working paper. He is also the editor of many journals, such as Review of Development and Change, Conservation and Society, Burritan Studies, International Association for the Study of the Commons. He is also the recipient of many awards and fellowships, both in India and abroad. Latest being Carson Fellow, awarded by Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. He was awarded in the year 2019. He is also the visiting fellow in IITs and Ambedkar University, New Delhi. Without much ado, I want to welcome Professor Menon to deliver his lecture on conservation landscapes and the politics of belonging in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal. Welcome, Professor Menon. Please take your time. Thank you very much. I hope I'm audible at the right volume. Thank you, first of all, for that overly generous introduction. And thank you to Tetsuo College for extending this invitation. And specifically, Dr. Anirudha, who like in the old days, we have pen pals. He's become a WhatsApp pal with me. I've never met him. But through my brother-in-law, we've met and exchanged ideas through WhatsApp. So I would like to thank all of you for giving me this opportunity. I only wish I could have made it there to give a presentation, as opposed to doing it online. So let me start by saying I was trying to think about what it is that I could speak about today, which, of course, was related to the research that I've been doing, but also that would be topical and, I think, of importance. And hence, I came up with this topic, conservation landscapes and the politics of belonging in the Tamil Nadu, Western Ghats, which deals essentially with two, I think, important thematic concerns. One is the question of conservation. Conservation is important for all the self-evident reasons. We live in a time where our resources are being degraded, our forests are being degraded, our water sources are being degraded, climate change is there. And of course, there's the pandemic, which we hopefully will learn something from. So conservation is important in this historical context and this present day context. The other issue that I'm interested in belonging, and I'll explain this in a little bit more detail why I got interested in this issue, is important because all of us at individual levels have or want to have a sense of belonging to place, to a particular place. Often that sense of belonging is constant over time. People grow up and live in a place for their whole lives. Other times, people are mobile. But nonetheless, belonging is important to our sense of being. And it's also important because, however, we might feel about belonging, it is often other institutions, most notably the state, which decides as to whether people belong in a particular context or they don't belong in a particular landscape. So I'm going to talk about conservation and belonging, which I argue and I will argue are intrinsically linked to each other. That conservation landscapes, and I'll define this in more detail later, are all about belonging. And here I'm not talking only about human belonging. I'm also talking about non-human belonging. There are others who inhabit our world. They're not only human beings. There's fauna and flora. And questions about conservation are intrinsic to addressing the needs and aspirations, if I might say, of the non-human world as well. So this presentation is going to try to look at the relationships between conservation and belonging and the politics. And here by politics, I simply mean that ideas are contested. Politics is about contestation. We don't all agree about who belongs and who doesn't belong and what a landscape should look like. So politics is central to what has been going on in the Tamil Nadu, Western Ghats. So hopefully all of this will become much more clear as I explain to you why I'm looking at these issues and in what context I am going to be looking at these issues. So here's the context. In 2009, the government of India applied to UNESCO, the United Nations Agency on Scientific Research and Culture, asking that the Western Ghats mountain range, which is a mountain range that most of you, if not all of you are familiar with, that runs in southwest India from Maharashtra to Kerala. The government of India wanted UNESCO to recognize the Western Ghats as a World Heritage Site. After much deliberations, objections, et cetera, in 2012, 36 sites within the Western Ghats, when I mean 36 sites, 36 specific sites, not the whole region, was recognized as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. UNESCO has two categories of World Heritage Sites, which some of you might be familiar with. Cultural sites, such as, for example, Machu Piccio in Peru and natural sites. As the words cultural and natural suggest, one emphasizes culture, whereas the other emphasizes nature. The Western Ghats was recognized as a natural World Heritage Site. What I'm arguing in my presentation today and in work that I've been doing over the last decade or so, is that the declaration of the Western Ghats as a natural World Heritage Site has given impetus to conservationists to push a particular agenda of conservation, which results in some people and some species belonging and others not belonging. In other words, conservationists have been given a fillip to push an agenda where the Western Ghats is primarily seen as a conservation landscape, and that human beings living within this landscape are in a sense additional to the natural landscape. And so what I'm going to try to argue is what the consequences of considering the Western Ghats as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the people who inhabit this landscape and the politics of belonging that plays itself out. That's the main purpose of this presentation today, and I think hopefully it will become more clear as I make my arguments. So for those of you who are not familiar with South India, Goudalur is the region I'm going to look at. Goudalur is the small area in the Nilgri's district of Tamil Nadu. The Nilgri's district, most of you will probably know through Utti, which is at the plateau of the Nilgri's district. But if you're going west from Utti towards Kerala, you go down the Ghat road, and you come to Goudalur, which is primarily a tea estate area today, and I'll explain about that a little bit more later. So this area borders Kerala, and it borders Karnataka. It borders Kerala on the west, and it borders Karnataka, borders it on the north. Why this region? Well, a number of regions. One is that in 2008, I started doing research here, and I became quite enamored and fond of this place, partly because it is a beautiful landscape for people who don't live in areas like all of you live in, but live in big urban concrete jungles like Chennai. Going to Goudalur is a refreshing change. You see forests, you see tea estates, you see quote unquote nature. And so I was attracted to the area for this region, but I was also attracted to the region for its diversity. So without getting into a long story, I have a bit of a mobile background myself. I've landed up in Tamil Nadu about 20 years ago. I'd been in different parts of the world in Delhi before I came here. So I quite liked being in a place where people spoke multiple languages, often pigeon varieties of these languages. Tamil, one person speaking Tamil, another person replying in Malayalam, it was extremely diverse. So this was another reason I enjoyed the place and liked it. But most substantively, I thought it was an important place to study because it brought to the fore this dichotomy that I'm trying to address here. Goudalur is home to Mudmila Tiger Reserve, which is one of the 50 tiger reserves in India today, but it, and it's also home to a number of elephant corridors. It is the watershed for a number of East flowing rivers, but on from a social point of view, it is also home to more than two and a half lack people who work and have migrated to this area over the last century and a half predominantly who work either in their own land, on their own lands or working in other people's on large scale estates as well. So I thought this would be a good area to look at this conflict between the human and the non-human in a sense between conservation and who belongs in conservation landscapes and suggest to you, which is the main purpose of my presentation, that conservation is often taken for granted. In other words, if I was to do a random handshow with all of you as to how many of you feel that conservation is important and that forests are important and we should promote conservation landscapes, my guess is that almost everyone is gonna put their hand up. And it is not that I am against conservation. I am just going to suggest in my presentation that conservation is not a win-win situation as economists would call it. Conservation is often a win-lose situation. Certain people who are deemed to belong might win, but other people might be deemed to be encroachers and hence do not win. So it is that story that I want to problematize in my presentation. I want to raise questions which hopefully will make you raise questions that complicates this whole story of conservation and belonging and suggest to all of us why it is extremely difficult actually to take grounded positions on questions of conservation without looking at historical reality. So finally, in terms of methodology, I went to Goodaloo for the first time in 2008. I've spent many months there doing all types of work from traveling around, trying to understand the landscape, to surveys, to more ethnographic work, but I've also spent an equally long amount of time in the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai and also four months when I got a fellowship to go to the UK in the British Library Archives, the India Office Records to look at this history in order to try to answer some of the questions I want to answer today. So just to sum up, I want to basically problematize the difficulty and hard choices that are being made when we say we want to conserve the natural landscape. When we say we want to protect the tiger, or we want to protect the elephant, or we want to protect even termites, these questions are difficult questions given the fact that all landscapes have for the most part human beings living there as well. As I am an academic, I'm going to try to conceptualize my problem a little bit around two themes that I've already talked about. The first theme is nature. In the 1980s and 90s, there was a big discussion about whether nature was actually natural. That seems like a stupid discussion to have, but I'm going to suggest to you that nature is actually not natural in fact that it is socially constructed. In other words, that all natural landscapes, what we call natural landscapes, are profoundly human. They have been shaped and reshaped by human beings. And I'm going to try to tell you how this particular landscape, Goodalore, has been reshaped by human beings and through conservation drawing on the work of the famous geographer William Cronin from the University of Wisconsin in the US. The other question that I'm going to look at as I've already mentioned is the question of belonging. And this idea that another academic, Lisa Malki, when she wrote this article in the late 90s, she was based at the University of California. She made the argument that belonging is a profoundly sedentary idea. In other words, sedentary meaning being in place, that the idea of belonging was very sedentarist. People wanted to belong in place. They identified themselves by belonging in place. They don't identify themselves by being mobile. So I'm going to use these two conceptual sort of literatures which I've engaged with quite extensively to show why the question of conservation and belonging in Goodalore is extremely complicated. I should tell you that if you want to ask any questions, you are free to interrupt me while I speak, but otherwise we can discuss this in more detail towards the end. So as before I get into these two questions of conservation and belonging, I'm just going to give you like a one minute history of a very complicated environmental history of this region. If you went to Goodalore in sort of the early 18th century, you would have probably found mostly Adivasis, Schedule Tribes communities there, different Schedule Tribe communities, Katanaikans who are mostly honey gatherers, Kurumbas who were shifting cultivators, Panias who are mostly labor for non-Adivasis castes in this and also in a wider region. But in the late 18th century, for those of you who know your history of South India, Tipu Sultan basically seeded Malabar region which is today in present day Kerala to the British as well as other parts of what would be today Dakshan, Kannada districts of Karnataka and also other areas of Kerala. But the manner in which this happened is actually quite complicated and I can't go into too many details here, but there were many Janmys or landlords, Kerala landlords who controlled much of this land when the British took over this land. And the British decided to allow these Janmys or landlords to retain control over much of what is today present day Gudlur. So about 50 to 60% of present day Gudlur was never directly under the control of the British in the way that many other areas of British presidency of the British Raj were or the different presidencies were. There were of course areas that were fully under control of British in Gudlur, but for the most part or at least the majority of lands remained under the control of Janmys. This will make more sense when I talk about present day politics in this area and why it's important. The second important point to know in terms of the history is that this area in the middle of the 19th century was largely a malarial, what the British considered a malarial treacherous forest that they had not really visited much other than on their way from Utti to Vainad. But in the 19th century and the second half of the 19th century there was a burgeoning plantation economy. First coffee and then later tea when there was disease within coffee plantations. And I'll talk about this more later. So there are many plantations today. You will see if you go to Gudlur large multinational estates, but also many small scale farmers who cultivate maybe 30 cents, 20 cents much less than an acre, largely with tea, but potentially also with other crops such as paddy and homestay tree, largely dense areas of agroforestry around their homes and houses. And then of course, as I've already mentioned there is Mudamle Tiger Reserve, which covers more than 500 square kilometers towards the north of the Gudlur region and also elephant corridors that pass through this region. So it is a complicated socio-economic landscape. I think what you should remember here and the point that I've already made it is both a rich landscape for the non-human and for the human. So let me now get to the two major themes that I wanted to talk about in order to sort of highlight why it is so difficult and complicated to talk about conservation in very simplistic terms. It's intertwined and entangled in complicated histories and politics. Now, again, if I was to ask you, do you think conservation is a good thing? You will mostly say yes. But if I was gonna then ask you what does conservation mean, my guess is though I might get a set of answers which will basically tell me it's about preserving wildlife, it's about preserving biodiversity and so on and so forth, there might be others who disagree and I would definitely be one of those people who would disagree. The reason I would disagree is if you look at the history of conservation in India, in British India, you will see that conservation as a number of environmental historians such as Ramachandra Guha and Mahesh Rangarajan have detailed already. Conservation started as an attempt to provide sustainable timber supply. Yes, timber supply for the British. So British were interested in raw materials in order to build an infrastructure, a shipping infrastructure and a railway infrastructure which would serve their colonial needs. So conservation's genealogy, if I might call it that, was not about biodiversity as it might be today. It was about timber and in this case, it was about teak. And if you look at conservation over the next 40 years, so I'm talking about the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, you will see that conservation has had different, what I would call political economy priorities over the 50 to 60 year period which have had consequences in terms of territory, spatial consequences, in terms of how far conservation reaches within Guralud and also consequences in terms of property rights and ownership of land. I can't get into too many details here, but the argument that I'm making is that besides for timber, the next important consideration for the British was hunting. The British were interested in hunting. Many of the planters in the Nilgri game association which ironically later became the Nilgri environmental association was that planters wanted to go hunting and Mudimale was an area for hunting. But based on archival material that I've sort of uncovered from the Tamil Nadu State Archives, there was a debate within the forest department in the 1940s and 50s where certain forest officers suggested that Mudimale actually be moved further east in order to allow for paddy cultivation which was taking place in this area called Mudimale. This was not a sanctuary yet, but there were people cultivating in what is today a sanctuary. And again, to cut a long story short, Mudimale was not moved and Mudimale was not moved because hunters did not want Mudimale moved to the Sigur plateau because this was an important area for hunting. The point that I'm trying to make is that conservation has been shaped by factors other than preserving biodiversity. In this case, conservation was shaped by British planters wanting to go hunting and they did not want that to be changed. So that's the second issue. In the 1940s and beyond, there's also a big debate that takes place within the forest department, the colonial bureaucracy and independent India's bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu about the forest department exerting its rights to control trees on private lands. So normally you would think that if someone has private lands, they can do what they want to do, at least in plain areas with their private land. But in 1949 and then in 61, there was the Madras Preservation of Private Forest Act and then the Madras Private Forest Assumption of Forest Act in 1961, which became the Tamil Nadu Act and also the Madras Hill Preservation Act which gave the state and specifically the forest department rights over trees on private land. So people could not just fell trees whenever they wanted. There were different sections in the act which allowed for different rules. Again, the point that I'm trying to make is that conservation had multiple political economic priorities. It had spatial implications. So from Mudamalai being an area of 500 square kilometers, the reach of the forest department extended across the Gurullu landscape to private lands. And I will again, a little bit later, explain to you why that is important in terms of the basic question that I'm trying to answer today about the complicatedness of conservation. So that's all I'm gonna say at this point about conservation. Conservation itself needs to be looked at. It means different things. Not only does it mean different things, it means that certain people benefit and other people don't benefit. So for example, in the context of hunting, it was the British who benefited from hunting. There was native hunting also, but a lot of restrictions were put on native people hunting because of the priority given to the British hunting. And that shaped the way this conservation landscape came about. So that's the question of conservation. Let me jump along to the question of belonging which is even more complicated. Remember at the outset, I tried to suggest to you that deciding who belongs in a particular place and who doesn't belong in a particular place is a complicated issue. And I would imagine, again, thanks to my brother-in-law, I've been reading a little bit about the Northeast much more than were taught in our schools here about questions of belonging and the politics of identity which is important there. It's equally important here also. So the question is how do you decide whether someone belongs? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the history of Goudalore to tell you why I have sympathy with certain people and groups of people who the state has decided do not belong. And I will tell you who they are later by telling you the history of how people arrived in Goudalore over the last 150 years or so, of course, in brief. There were three basic migrations to Goudalore, what was then known as the Nilgri Vineyard. Nilgri Vineyard belonged to Malabar, and then it came to, there was a separate district called the Nilgri's Carved Out later on in the 19th century. So three major periods of migration. The first period of migration was the estate migration. I already mentioned to you about tea estates being the predominant land use today in Goudalore. In the second half of the 19th century, the British capitalists, I should say, invested into plantations. And of course, nothing happens without labor, as Marx reminded us in his three-volume book on Das Kapital, without labor you cannot produce. So the estate economy required labor. Adivasi labor was there, but many Adivasis did not want to work in tea estates because Adivasis were mobile. They were more involved in shifting, cultivating, and they did not want to become labor. So while some did, many did not. So people had to come to this landscape, or they had to be brought to this landscape in order to work in the tea estate. And this happened from broadly speaking, what would be known today as parts of South India. So parts of Kerala from the princely states of Travancore predominantly, other parts of Malabar in present day Kerala, but also labor from Mysore, which is in today's Karnataka, and from some of the southern and central districts of Tamil Nadu, Tanjavore, Tirnaveli, these are districts which are predominantly agriculture. So a lot of labor came in to work, and many academics have written about this, about how there were what they call Kanganis or Maistris who brought labor from these different parts. Some of them stayed temporarily and went back because they also performed other agricultural functions in the place that they came from. Some ended up staying longer, some settled there. It's a complicated history. So this is the first period of migration. The second period of migration is sort of the early to mid 20th century. And this migration came mostly from Travancore, the princely state of Travancore. Again, the main reason for coming, economists might be familiar with push and pull factors. There were push factors which were pushing people away from Travancore, the lack of land, bonded social conditions that people wanted to get away from. So much labor moved up to Vineyard and Malabar area in present day Kerala. Some of this labor then moved over into Goodalore and to what is now the Tamil Nadu side. So this happened from the 1920s and 30s onwards. A number of scholars have written about this. And also in the 1940s and 50s because of World War II and because of famines that India was plagued with to some extent, the government promoted the Grow More Food campaign. And many people moved across the landscape, but some of these people came to Goodalore to grow more food campaign. The point I'm trying to make is that the state, and I'll return to this, was implicated in the movement of people to this region. This wasn't an accidental movement. People moved because of push and pull factors that brought them to this area. And these are questions which I think are important when I talk about belonging and I'll return to them. The third major migration, which to me in a sense is the most important migration, is the migration of Tamil labor from erstwhile Ceylon or present day Sri Lanka. Again, I'd already mentioned to you that much Tamil labor had migrated to estates in present day Goodalore and other parts of present day Kerala and parts of other parts of India. But a large scale migration took place to other parts of the British Empire. Most notably to Sri Lanka or Ceylon at that time, Burma, Singapore and Malaysia, South Africa, the West Indies. For those of you who are interested, Sunil Amrit, who's a historian at Harvard University, has written a fascinating book called Crossing the Bay of Bengal where he documents Tamil migration across the region. Now why is this important? In present day Sri Lanka, there are two sets of Tamil people. There are the Jaffna Tamils or the Northern Tamils who have a claim to being there much longer. This is the Tamil group which was in a civil war with the Sri Lankan Army for more than 30 years, which ended in 2009. So these are the Jaffna Tamils. The Estate Tamils are the Tamils who moved from Tamil Nadu, present day Tamil Nadu in the 19th century to work in T estates in Ceylon, Sri Lanka. And when this political problem became severe in the 1950s itself, before the armed conflict started, there was an increasing signalization of the Sri Lankan state. And there were many people within Sri Lanka who did not want Tamil people to be given citizenship because this would change the demography of the region. So under the Shastri Srimovar pact, Shastri was the Prime Minister of India, Srimovar Bandanaika was the president, finally of Sri Lanka. They signed a pact in which more than 5,000 people, mostly Tamil labor from these estates were repatriated to India. Many of them being Tamil, they moved back to their native places in Southern and Central Tamil Nadu, but because they were familiar with T estate work, many of them migrated to places like Goodalore, where even the government set up T estates which were under government control to absorb some of these labor. So these three periods of migration are important just to tell you why this is such a complicated landscape, why people who live there today consider that they belong there. Because for many of them, they moved from difficult circumstances and settled in this area. And if you ask them, which I have when I go to this area, where do you belong or where do you feel at home? Most of the people you talk to, whether they're Malayalam speaking or Tamil speaking, whether they're Aadivasis or Dalits, they will identify with the region that they live in, which makes it complicated when suddenly someone potentially tells them that they actually don't belong. So I've covered now, please tell me if I'm taking too long. I probably will take another 15 minutes. Is that okay? So what I'll do now is tell you why I think this history is, are you still there? I'm just checking online. Yeah? Aniruddha? Yes, sir. Okay. Sir, please continue, sir. So the reason I've told you this migration story is to now tell you why and how this has become very complicated in the context of Goodalore. As I mentioned, and as the title of my presentation suggests, Goodalore over the last 40 years or so in the middle class imagination for people, if you ask about Goodalore, if you ask about the Nilgrees, they will primarily identify this region as a region of conservation. They will identify it as a region of Mudamalai Tiger Reserve. They will identify it as an area where there are rich forests. They will identify it as an area where the elephants are roaming, where they can see tigers and so on. So that is why I've told you this story because in the middle class imagination, conservation takes precedence over this 2.5 lakh people who inhabit this landscape as well. And if you look at the post-independence history in this region, you will see how this complicated history plays itself out. So I'm going to talk about three major events in this post-independence history to try to make the argument why conservation has become complicated. The first event is the Janman Abolition Act, which was passed in 1969. As I had mentioned to you earlier, janmis are landlords. And Janman Abolition Act, like the Zamindari Abolition Act in other parts of the country, was an act which was meant not only to end the control of land by landlords, but it was meant to be an act of agrarian reform. What is an act of agrarian reform? To me, an act of agrarian reform is that the state takes land from people who have too much land and they potentially distribute that land to people who don't have enough land, genuine cultivators, as I've suggested in this slide. Now, I can't get into the extremely complicated history of the Janman Abolition Act. This article on the right side of the slide is by a friend who was written extensively about it and it's been published in this journal called Conservation and Society. But to cut a long story short, the argument I'm making is the Janman Abolition Act, which was supposed to be an act of agrarian reform, has instead become an act through which the state and the forest department in particular has tried to reclaim land, which is under estates broadly speaking and reclaim it as forest land. So the argument is that a land redistribution act has been used primarily by the state to extend its control over what it considers forest land. Now, how can that be possible, you might ask? Well, if you look at estates and land use data on estates, you will see that estates are generally classified as developed land and undeveloped land. Developed land is a land under a plantation crop such as tea. Undeveloped land is land which is probably undeveloped and might be under some form of tree or forest cover. So the state through the Janman Abolition Act tried to reclaim many portions of this large landscape of Gudilur. And they were able to do this because again, if you recall, I had suggested to you that much of this land was owned by Janmys and leased to estates. So people who were cultivating the land did not own the land. And so the state had two options. They could either confiscate the land for themselves or they could confiscate the land and decide to give it to people that they thought were genuine cultivators. And over the last 40 years, much of this dispute, which is a extremely difficult political dispute and a sensitive topic that most political parties do not want to speak to for the obvious reasons that it will alienate people. This has gone through the courts. It's gone through the High Court. It's gone through the Supreme Court. And basically, again, a quick summary of the outcome is that much of this land continues to be cultivated by small scale farmers and larger estates. The state has tried to reclaim a lot of this land, but we are essentially in a legal limbo. And why is a legal limbo problematic for the people who live there? It is problematic for the people who live there because they don't have pata. They don't have title to the land that they're cultivating, which means that at any point of time, when the state decides that they need to go, they don't have title. They can't say, I have title to this land. Whenever they want to borrow money or take loans, banks or other government agencies will say, you're not the owner. So what is the collateral you're giving on the loan we're going to give you? In other words, life is made extremely difficult for people and problematic. And that is why for these types of people, the idea that good alour is a conservation landscape is not a win-win situation for them. It's a bad situation for them. And I will return to this later on. So that's one issue. The second issue is that some of you might be familiar that the Supreme Court in India has been very proactive over the last couple of decades. We call it public interest litigation. Interestingly, a member of the Godavaman family, the Nilambur Kovalagam family, which owned much of this land, I had mentioned that Janmi is on this land. The Nilambur Kovalagam was the main owner of Janmi land in Goodalore. Of course, that land was taken away when the 1969 act came, the German abolition act came. So this act in 1996, which is the period I'm now talking about was no longer under the control of the family. But interestingly, a member of this family filed an interim order in the Supreme Court, basically telling the Forest Department that you're not doing your job properly, which is after the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, it should have been to protect forests or whatever forests were still there after land had been converted to estate. So the Nilambur family approaches the Supreme Court, asks the Supreme Court to instruct the government to do their job of conservation better because they're not doing it well. And the Supreme Court comes up with an interim judgment and then later on again, to cut a very long story short, there is now a separate forest bench in the Supreme Court under this case, which looks at matters of conversion of non-forest land, conversion of forest land into non-forest land and whether it should be permitted or not. Again, from the human point of view, this is not a good story because it means that the courts are now supervising all activity in this landscape from basic agricultural activity to cutting down timber for house construction and so on. It's made life more difficult. I should say, and I'll return to this, many conservationists support this as they support the legal action the state took with regard to the German Abolition Act. But for people who are living there and I will differentiate who these people are a little bit later, it is a problematic occurrence. The final story I want to tell you about before sort of raising certain questions from my presentation is the Forest Rights Act versus Tigers. Again, some of you will be familiar with the Schedule Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers Rights to Forest Act 2006. This is an act which basically recognizes people's claims to forest land that they have historically used. And the act, which is not a very long document, tells people how Adivasi Schedule Tribes can make claims, but also other forest dwellers, but they make a distinction. Schedule Tribes can make claims if they show that they use this land in 2005 immediately before the act was implemented, whereas other forest dwellers have to show that they have used this land for three generations and a generation is defined as 25 years. So 75 years. And I'll tell you why this is important in a minute. But the other act that came about in 2006 was the Wildlife Protection Act Amendment or Wildlife Protection Amendment Act. Some people argue that this act was actually implemented to stall the Forest Rights Act because conservationists were worried that the Forest Rights Act would result in a number of people making claims to forest land and that that land would then potentially be converted. And again, there's a complicated story here that forest land is not always forest. Forest land is a legal classification. It could be barren, but it might be defined as forest land. So people who have used forest land, that land might not be forest in terms of use, but it might be legally forest. That's a complicated question maybe we can discuss later. So these two acts come about at the same time. And under this act, Tiger Reserves are formed and there is a whole procedure under Article 38 of the Wildlife Protection Amendment Act which tells the state government how it is that they can declare Tiger Reserves. The problem now is that Tiger Reserves and Forest Rights are in conflict with each other. There are people, remember, who live within protected areas, who live within Tiger Reserves, mostly Adivasis, but also others. So what happens when someone makes a claim to forest land within a Tiger Reserve? There's a procedure to declare these as critical wildlife habitats under the Wildlife Protection Act, but there's also a procedure for people to make claims. And this is again a complicated story, but a shortcut version of the conclusion of this story is that in areas such as Goodalore, very little progress has been made with regard to recognizing forest rights claims of people. And I should stress so that there is no confusion. Forest rights claims by people are not random claims. It's not like I can go and say, I want this four hectares. You can have up to four hectares. It is based on establishing that you have used this area historically, okay? And you should remember that Tiger Reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, these are relatively modern inventions last 150 years. People have often lived in these landscapes much longer. So the question is complicated. So these three things, the German Abolition Act, the Supreme Court judgment and the tension between the Forest Rights Act and the Wildlife Protection Act has made Goodalore an extremely complicated landscape to try to understand what it is that we should be doing in terms of conservation, what it is that we should be doing in terms of people who live there, how do we decide who should be living there, given this complicated history that I have talked about? How do we decide what animals and plants should live there? Can these landscapes be transformed? These are the types of questions I am suggesting based on what I have presented that have no easy answers. At the moment, the current situation is something like this. We have a very polarized landscape in terms of how people are positioning themselves vis-a-vis conservation, vis-a-vis elephants, tigers, human beings and who should be living there. On the one hand, you have conservationists who are primarily, and of course there are different types of conservationists, they don't all think the same. Some are more pro-human present, some are less pro-human present, some believe only in inviolate areas. People like Valmik Thapar, for example, the tiger proponent and expert. So there are different positions, but by and large conservationists look at this landscape as a landscape that needs to be preserved and conserved because of its ecological functions, right? On the other hand, we have people, different types of people, activists who are working with people, and non-Adivasis and non-Adivasis who say that this is where we belong. How is it that we need to move? And if we need to move, where exactly are we supposed to move to in an extremely densely populated landscape that is India, where do we move? We know again, based on studies done and of large literature, that relocation has for the most part in India been, I would say, a disaster. It's not been done well. It's not been implemented well. So people are already skeptical about it, but these are the questions we need to answer. So that's one set of questions. Conservationists versus human beings and the non-human versus human. But there's a more complicated question which has emerged over the last 10 years. And that is between Adivasis and non-Adivasis. I started by telling you that TES states came about in the 19th century. It is true that the burgeoning of a T economy in this area had adverse impacts for Adivasis. Remember, they were not sentry people. So the T estate owners, British capital, assumed that no one was using land which was often used. People might not have been there because they were mobile. So the growth of the T economy had adverse impacts on Adivasis. So too did these three migrations that I've spoken about. The late 19th century, the early 20th century and the middle of the 20th century also had adverse impacts on Adivasis because it made the landscape more dense. So what you see when you go to a place like Good Lord is you now have NGOs and activists working only with Adivasis. And you have NGOs and activists working with all marginalized people or what they consider all marginalized people. So there's this division. And the Forest Department and the state in a very generic sense has been more willing to discuss the question of Adivasi forest rights as opposed to non-Adivasi forest rights. And many non-Adivasis, for example, Sri Lankan repatriates are often considered by the state to be encroachers. But this is a difficult question, again, given this history that I've spoken to you about. So what I'm suggesting, and I think I'll stop here so that maybe we can discuss some of these issues. The argument I'm trying to make here is not only, of course, that history is complicated. We probably knew that and you probably knew that before you heard me speak. But the reason I'm making this case in this presentation is again to reiterate the point that when we look at questions of conservation, we need to ask critical questions. Okay, the middle class especially, and I'm putting myself into this category, often do not ask critical questions. They will just say like, of course, this is a forest landscape. If people have to move, then they have to move, okay? Because we've destroyed nature. What I'm suggesting is that it's much more complicated to this, complicated than this. And I would go so far to suggest that we need to make a distinction between different types of people who live on this landscape, okay? So for example, there are big T estates, okay? To me, the priority of big estates is less than that of a small farmer. To me, someone who's living in Chennai and who's buying 20 acres of land in Goodalore as a summer holiday spot is less important than a farmer who's working as an agricultural laborer on a T estate. We can make critical environmental justice decisions about how conservation landscapes work and we can also have a discussion which looks at conservation landscapes of what some academics have called fluid mosaics where people are allowed to actually coexist as they do in Goodalore at the moment within conservation landscapes. So these two things do not necessarily need to be mutually exclusive from each other. So these are difficult questions, no doubt. I think I will stop here so that others maybe can jump in and we can have a discussion around some of these issues. So thank you again for extending this invitation to me. Thank you, sir. Now, I would like to ask the audience to raise their question. Okay, if you permit, Dr. Devrata, may I raise some of my questions? Please go ahead, Dr. Devrata. Okay, sir, thank you so much. Professor Menon, first of all, thank you so much for giving us your precious time and I'm really delighted actually to know more about your research work. So considering your arguments, what I learned from this is that the politics of conservation is basically increasingly characterized by struggles over the kinds of values attributed to nature. The forms of knowledge are able to understand the drivers and the causes of biodiversity loss and the appropriate frameworks for the equal distribution of the costs and benefits. So basically, I really congratulate you for your lecture. So my question is that, see, the politics is everywhere, right? I mean, we're born, the moment we are born, we're born into the world of politics, right? So when it comes to the reality, when it comes to the reality of conservation, right, we have our own, what do you call them? Of course, ecological concerns as well as we consider ourselves as a welfare state from a constitutional perspective, right? So it is really difficult, I believe, to find the middle path approach. But I just want to ask you, because I'm very curious, that what is the situation about this topic of conservation and its political and legal implications in the West? For example, take an example of United States. How is the situation over there? And the tribal people over there, say, take an example of red Indians, right? Their land rights and the conservation policies of the various states in the United States, they have also been rigorously criticized by the people over there. So do you see any similarities between Indian context and the Western context of conservation politics and the policy chaos? Are there lessons that Indians can learn from the West or how is the situation over there? Sir, thank you. Thank you so much. Sure. So should I try answering that or should I wait for others or what is the best method? Should I try, has it been again answered? Yeah. Sir, you can answer these questions. Okay. So don't have any questions. Okay. Thanks, Aniruddha. So let me start with your second question and then work back to the first question. The protected area model that we have in India today, largely, yes, originated in the West and there's a large environmental history literature which documents that. So for example, Yellowstone National Park, which is, you know, or Yosemite National Park, which people talk about. These were areas which were constructed partly for wildlife but partly for middle-class people to go and have a nice holiday, right? So that's the logic. They were meant to be inviolate and I'm using the word inviolate to mean free of people. In fact, yesterday a friend and activist called Bijoy has written an article in The Wire where he sort of questions why the government is not implementing the Forest Rights Act. But the historical model of protected areas was free of people, okay? And again, without mincing my words, I guess, that resulted in the massacre of many people in the US context. So the Native American Indians that you talk about were basically either butchered or moved out of the areas that they inhabited. So that's the history. These areas are protected area, these protected area histories were violent histories. They might have been well-intentioned. I'm not saying that they were not well-intentioned but at that point of time they were also extremely divisive and they were meant for certain people and for animals. Now, there's been a big debate in the Indian context about protected areas also, right? Most of our protected areas continue to have people living within these areas though legally there is supposed to be a core area and a buffer area and core area, especially these newly constituted tiger reserves should not have people in it. But the difference today, I would argue is because we're living in a sort of nominally democratic setup, it is much more difficult for people to be moved out without raising major social concerns, right? If you move people out of tiger reserves today, even for ecological reasons, it's going to, they're going to be protest and there's going to be counter responses to what is going on, which makes it more difficult. And I would argue is one of the reason that even when the state legally has implemented inviolate tiger reserves on the ground, Forest Department staff might not implement that order. So there is a book again for those who are interesting called Democratizing Nature, by Vasan Savarwal and Ashwini Chhatri where they look at the great Himalayan National Park where people were supposed to have been moved, but the local forest department has allowed them to continue to go in and out of these reserves because they collect non-timber forest produce and they collect firewood and fuelwood. So it is a complicated scenario. Now, going to be a first question, which is even more complicated, the point I guess I'm trying to make is this. I'm not arguing against conservation, I'm not arguing against preserving forests because we know they all serve certain, what economists call ecological ecosystem, they're ecosystem services which are embedded in forests from agriculture to non-timber forest produce to carbon sequestration to watershed functions, all of these types of things. And in fact, recently a set of economists has come out with a report trying to argue in favor of tiger reserves because of these functions that these tiger reserves contain economically. The point I'm trying to make rather is that the composition of the forest has different consequences for different people. So for example, if I have a timber forest, okay, or if Mudamalai is a timber forest, the beneficiaries of a timber forest are people who are going to use timber. Katanaikans who are collecting honey are not going to benefit from a teak forest because they don't collect honey from a teak trees. So each type of landscape, each type of forest has different type of ecosystem services. And it is our job to try to understand how different functions tally or do not tally with each other and who benefits and who doesn't benefit. Again, economists will use some type of a cost-benefit analysis, but this would be a disaggregated cost-benefit analysis where you can identify each set of people and how they benefit or not benefit, including wildlife. So that's a complicated discussion. And in my mind, there is no reason that that discussion cannot take place. I think the sad part of the story is that there are very polarized positions. The forest department believes in what they call scientific forestry, which often doesn't have any time for traditional ecological knowledge. And therefore, there is no conversation taking place. If there is no conversation taking place, it is difficult to come to a solution. So our conversation is the first thing we need to do. And a lot of people are, I mean, writing about this, talking about how different forests mean different things and so on. It is not a battle between forests and people. It is a battle about how we govern forests and what type of forests we govern. That's it from myself. So ultimately... Yeah, yeah. So professor, ultimately, it is a question of governance. And if it is a question of governance, that means it is an intention of the government, therefore the politics, right? So if I'm defining politics loosely here, Aniruddha, I'm just saying that politics means contestation. Okay, and yes, I agree with you, everything is political. I have no doubt about that. But everything in life is political in some way. So when I'm emphasizing politics, I'm suggesting that there is contestation over even what our end goal should be. And these conversations are being talked about to some extent. Sometimes the positions are too polarized so people don't even talk to each other about it. Probably there is more happening in the Western world because the Western world scenario is different because you don't have people who are dependent on natural resources like forests or non-timber forest produce so much as you do in the case of countries like India, right? The Native Americans have already been largely moved out to reservations and things like that. Their rights were already taken. So they don't have to address those type of issues like we have to address it. I think what I'm trying to suggest is that since both humans and non-humans are important, how do we come to a conversation and hopefully a win-win situation that takes into account through conversation what it is that is required that addresses everyone's concerns to some extent? Then have you constructed or visualized any solution model? I visualize lots of things, but at the end of the day, to be very straightforward, I'm a researcher. I do not have a place at the table. When I do research, because when you go into reserve forests or you go into Mudamale Tiger Reserve, I need permission from the forest department. So that means when I went into Mudamale Tiger Reserve, they wanted a report from me when I finished my research and I gave them a report. Much of what I've told you today, I've given to them. But the thing is I understand my solutions are very messy. They're not easy. They're complicated. And I have never heard back from the forest department after giving them a report. So the question or dilemma that I have is, so what do I do as primarily a researcher and a teacher, what do I do if a policymaker doesn't want to listen? And I'm not saying all are not listening, but the space for conversation is often not so easy. Would you like to use this platform to share your solutions? We can convey it to the policymaker, sir. No, my solutions are simple to the extent that people who are living in this landscape and I'm not living in this landscape, right? They need to be part of the discussion that takes place around building conservation landscapes. What in policy language is stakeholder participation. Now, that happens to some extent in urban areas. I don't see these conversations really taking place for issues like this, at least not in areas that I've been working. So I stand to be corrected. I'm not saying that it's not happening anywhere. It partly depends also on sort of ambitious or brave forest department officials who want to table this. It depends on a lot of factors. So that is the only solution I'm going to offer because I don't feel as a non-primary stakeholder that I'm the person who needs to give the answer. Everything that I've presented to you today is what I have learned from the people I have interacted with in Guru Luwa. So I am not presenting myself as an expert. I'm presenting myself as a researcher who is trying to, in whatever capacity I have, echo the voices of some people who I've interacted with over long periods of time who do not have a voice at the table. So that's the extent of my solution I'm going to offer. If they call me with stakeholders, then I don't mind going and being part of that discussion but the primary stakeholders need to be the first people who are spoken to in any context, not only this context. Sir, and my last question would be what made you choose this area as your research? Why not any other area in Maharashtra? Why not any other area in Andhra or in some tribal bells in Bihar? Why, why good? Yeah, a couple of reasons. One is that I work at Madras Institute of Development Studies, which is an ICSSR Institute funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the Tamil Nadu State Government, which means that there are about 30 of these institutes across the country and primarily, not totally, primarily people in a particular institute do research in their state. So that's part of the reason. It's not the whole reason, that's part of the reason. The more complicated personal reason, which I don't mind sharing, but is a personal one, right? Like I've spoken to you, I spent the first 25 years of my life living in another country or living in other countries. I moved back to Delhi. I ended up in Tamil Nadu for personal reasons. I am nominally in Malayali who doesn't speak the great Malayalam. So an area like Gudalur was interesting to me because I could speak my Pijin Malayalam and my Pijin Tamil and no one would really worry about it. Whereas if I do that in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, people would ask me straight away, where are you from? And then probably say, why don't you know the language is better? So I felt very home in Gudalur. The third reason, which I can probably get away saying in this forum, but I would only say it on this forum, I, if you like parathas and beef, you get excellent parathas and beef in Gudalur. So that kept me in the area, but that's just for this forum. Thank you, sir. Over to you, Dr. Devrata. Thank you, sir. There is one more question for you. This is from our faculty member, Pijaya Chavandeshwari. So her question is how can you visualize the role of civil society in the issues related to marginal sections? Right. Yeah, very important question. Well, civil society without getting into a big academic debate about what civil society means. So I'm treating it as a sort of generic category is already involved in areas like this. So you have NGOs, of course, and there are a range of NGOs, no? NGOs sometimes tend to get lumped together, but they're all different types of NGOs. So you have more conservation oriented NGOs. You have more people oriented NGOs, some working more with Adivasi, some working with the wider strata of society. You have individual people. So there are bigger campaigns which are going on. So around some of you will, I'm sure, be familiar. There's this whole campaign for survival and dignity, which was very central to the Whole Forest Rights Act movement in India. So there are individual members of these campaigns who live in this landscape. There are interested individuals as just individuals as part of civil society who want to get involved in the society that they work in. So all these people are involved in different ways. Some set up NGOs. Some people interact more with government bodies if they have access to government departments and bodies. Other people do things on their own. They maybe support particular households who are having trouble or difficult times, help them get title to their land. So I see civil society as a major actor. It was one of the reasons we did this first book of ours on community-based natural resource management, which was all about the role of NGOs and what the role of NGOs and civil society could be. My only concern I would say is that because there's such diversity today in what we call civil society, we need to be a little bit careful with how and who we involve. Not all civil society actors necessarily, there's a lot of money floating around in civil society also. And though I don't want to sound like I want to stifle anyone's voice, sometimes one needs to do one's homework also on different actors within civil society. Look at what they've done over time and how they've contributed in different ways. And I would finally say that I hope the state and sometimes the state does involves these actors in conversations like the one we're having today. I hope, Ms. Tramundeshwari, you are satisfied with the answer. So it's been more than one hour. And thank you, sir, for sparing your precious time. It was indeed pleasure listening to you. I can assure you that our faculty members and students, we really enjoyed your lecture. And I really liked the concept and your research finding that conservation is not a win-win situation. So in future, we would like to invite you again. Thank you, sir, for being with us. Thank you very much for inviting me. I have a soft corner for the Northeast, so I've only been there a couple of times. So I'm very happy and maybe next time, I can actually make it there in person and I will be happy to interact more. Yes, sir, I think. You come, I welcome you. Thank you. Definitely, yes, sir. Thank you, sir, once again.