Preface

वडाच्ा बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[1]

नळाला नळ जोड नी, पाणी नेलया मुंबईला रं, पाणी नेलया मुंबईला ।।….[2]

वडाच्ा बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[3]

नळाला नळ जोड नी, पाणी नेलया वसईला रं, पाणी नेलया वसईला ।। ….[4]

वडाच्ा बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[5]

नळाला नळ जोड नी, पाणी नेलया भिवंडीला रं, पाणी नेलया भिवंडीला ।। ….[6] The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[1]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Mumbai || ….[2]

The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[3]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Vasai || ….[4]

The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[5]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Bhiwandi || ….[6]

Fig. P.1: The Tarpa dance

Fig. P.2: The Warli village

15 September 2018,

As the morning proceedings opened to an electric mood with bright smiles dancing in circles to the Tarpa dance with sounds of dholak and ghungroo, a veil of the thick clouds carrying the rains loomed over the ‘ वडाच्या बुडाची चोरी ’ song that speaks of a long standing battle, which a forest-dependent tribal community perceives as an appropriation of their water, forest and land resources, and more broadly, their continuing conflict with the Forest Department. The popular invocation of the mythological “demon” king Raavana in the above song draws attention to an established resource flow relationship between the tribal community’s hamlet located on the northern periphery of a metropolitan core. Allow me to dip into my experience of arrival and the proceedings of the Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav in Ghatalpada, a small hamlet inhabited by the Warli community whose seventeen households perch atop a ridge of a small mound next to a river in Maharashtra’s Palghar district. Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav, the Forest Food Festival, was a celebration of the Warli community’s relationship to the forest areas in the vicinity. It was a humid back-monsoon morning when I set-off for a journey to this remote region in the western ghats along with a few friends with vey little idea of what to expect. Another friend who hails from the region and knew the way to the village had joined us. He had convinced me that it would be a great adventure to go there. We followed his scooter along a severely corroded road with a thick forest foliage on both sides. At one point, the condition of the road turned so bad that our car was stuck in a deep pothole and we found no flat surface to jack raise the car. After much ordeal, we managed to pull the car up by placing the jack on some stones only to realise that Ghatalpada is a

village with no road connection. We would require to cross the Lendhi river to reach the village. A young boy helped us cross the river on foot. After an exhausting thirty minutes we finally made it to the other side. As we started moving towards Ghatalpada, carefully traversing through a small, slippery uphill path, we started hearing the polyphonic notes of a tarpa, a traditional windpipe instrument of the Warlis, made out of dried gourd, bamboos and wax, which produced a haunting hornlike sound. We were told that all the materials required to build the tarpa apparently came from the nearby forest. Traversing a hundred and fifty kilometre journey that took nearly four hours, we arrived by lunchtime and were given a grand welcome. Each one of us was received with an aukshan, a form of greeting in which an elderly woman moves a plate carrying a flame in a clockwise and anticlockwise alternate loop, a few seeds of rice and a flower facing the person receiving it. The village had a shamiana in the central space held together by a set of bamboos erected whereas the floor was a bright shade of yellow tarpaulin. A person from the village made a small speech to welcome us over there. Soon the food arrived in small steel bowls laid neatly on the floor. We were served bhakri made of rice and nagli1, and about fifteen different preparations of green leafy vegetables found in the forest only during monsoon: Kovli bhaaji, kadu kand, dangar, pendhar, shind, tetav etc. As we savoured the hot meal, the locals explained to us the various medicinal properties of these vegetables, many of which I had never heard of, forget having eaten before.

Following the meal as we sat in a group again, I came to realise that the Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav was in fact, an occasion to conduct a

1 Nagli, commonly referred to as Nachni in Marathi refers to Raagi or finger millet, a crop produced on sloping lands in the tropics, used to roast a Bhakri or Indian flatbreads

Fig. P.3: Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav

Fig.P.4: The Shamiana

Fig. P.5: Gram Sabha

Fig. P.6:The Handmap

Gram Sabha, the monthly village council meeting. A Gram Sabha, which is the smallest unit of governance in the region, is affiliated to a Mahsooli2 Gram Panchayat, which is a much bigger body of governance responsible for tax collection. It primarily consists of all bonafide residents of the village, whose names are present on the electoral rolls. The Central Government conceptualised the Gram Sabha in an attempt to democratise the decision making process at the level of the village. The agenda for that day’s Gram Sabha was to map out the vegetables on a hand drawn map of Ghatalpada and it’s surrounding areas. This exercise of mapping was happening for the first time in their village. A man brought a hand drawn map on a big green board and made it rest on a bamboo pole of the shamiana. All the villagers sat facing the board. After having spent a while to understand the orientation of the map, one after the other, they started naming the vegetables that were cooked, and started locating the vegetable that was plucked from the forest on the map. Before we could finish the tagging exercise, it started pouring heavily. The shamiana started leaking and we had to continue the exercise inside the home of a person. As the meeting came to an end, one of the villagers briefly addressed everyone mentioning the pivotal role taken up by a non-governmental organisation (NGO)3 , which works with issues pertaining to land rights of villages in this region with the locals. He was constantly referring to a particular Constitutional Act called the PESA, The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996. According to him, the NGO had enabled their Gram Sabha to gain community forest rights

2 Mahsool directly translates to tax. The taxes collected by the mahsooli Gram Panchayat are Paani Patti (Water tax) and Ghar Patti (Property tax) 3 It was through the same NGO that I had come to know about this festival through a Facebook event. The Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav was an initiative taken by the Gram Sabha in collaboration with them.

under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. This meant that the village council could take control of Minor Forest Produce (MFP)4 within the demarcated forest region assigned to them. During the proceedings of the meeting of that day, a person raised a question as to why were the plants being geo-tagged when they already knew where the vegetables came from. He said that even a small child in the village could find the whereabouts of all the vegetables in the village as the forest was not something that anyone was afraid of, but rather was more like a backyard for them and everyone seemed to be well versed with the entire region and the vegetables were in fact, not “resources” but rather gifts from the first rains of the monsoons. The Kovli bhaaji preparation specifically was to signify the birth of the monsoons. He said that they would always cook the vegetable before the planting of rice in their paddies because it was auspicious. After a moment of silence, a quick witted person argued back that these maps weren’t being produced for the villagers to know the whereabouts, but for the Forest Department official, who didn’t know their way around

4 Section 2(4) of the Indian Forest Act 1927 defines only “forest-produce” and this term connotes to those products whether found in, or brought from a forest such as:

1. timber, charcoal, caoutchouc, catechu, wood-oil, resin, natural varnish, bark, lac, mahua flowers, mahua seeds, kuth and myrabolams, 2. trees and leaves, flowers and fruits, and all other parts or produce

of trees,

3. plants not being trees (including grass, creepers, reeds and moss), and all parts or produce of such plants, 4. wild animals and skins, tusks, horns, bones, silk, cocoons, honey and wax, and all other parts or produce of animals, and 5. peat, surface soil, rock and minerals (including lime-stone, laterite, mineral oils), and all products of mines or quarries

Minor Forest Produce (MFP) is a subset of forest produce and got a definition only in 2007 when the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, was enacted.

the forests. The room was filled with a fit of laughter. Granted this shift, the conflict of tribal communities in Ghatalpada, and more broadly across the country, with the Forest Departments stand far from being settled. They continue on an everyday basis with several instances that point to the Forest Department filing police complaints against individuals or groups over the use of forest resources or creating bureaucratic hurdles over their use, on the one hand. Evolving policies and judicial orders of eviction, framed in the name of an abstract “public interest,” cite the illegitimacy of large numbers of tribal populations in forests and their detrimentality to forest conservation, on the other hand.

Problem Statement:

Against this backdrop, the proceedings of Ghatalpada’s festivalmeeting open out a thought provoking puzzle: Ghatalpada and other surrounding Warli villages present an ontological difference in the way they perceive the forest as a lived environment, where the forest is not imagined as being separate from habitation. The proceedings of the festival-meeting suggest that there exists a weave between the natural resources and cultural practices of tribal groups, which have a significant implication on the (un)built form. These relationships are not static but in a continuous process of transformation. There exist mechanisms, tended by “animistic” belief systems which pose the humans and other creatures as being dissimilar beings whilst recognising the similar interrelations with their lived environments. Notions of gifting, exchange or hunting characterise this mode of imagination. We can posit this on one end of the spectrum. On the other end lies an antithetical imagination which poses the forests as resources for city regions to thrive. The mechanisms that exist to safeguard the forest reserves are based in scientific resource management practices which place humans at the centre of the resource use, as being similar beings (ways in which all beings are subjected to the laws of nature), but with dissimilar interrelations with their lived environments as opposed to the other organisms. We can refer to this method as a “Naturalist” mode of imagination. Notions of production or conservation characterise this mode. They essentially establish a subject and a dependent subordinate object. When both these modes of imagination face each other, the animistic systems followed by the communities and the naturalistic systems followed by the Forest Department, it leads to certain conflict.

Seen from the perspective of the local communities, instances such as the re-allocation of water resources to the city or closure of access to forests presents a break in the weave of their ‘culture-nature’ relationships causing great upheaval and gloom. In addressing the ‘how’ in this puzzle, I intend to build my thoughts on the ways in which this ontological difference advances alternate conceptualisation of nature-culture relationships.

Research objectives:

Based on my problematisation, I set two objectives for this research: 1. developing a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of nature-culture practices in an tribal resource region, and 2. mapping and analysing local practices

Research question:

How do the practices of local institutions shape and are shaped by the interrelations of land, forest, water, humans and other organisms in Ghatalpada and how do we form lenses of reading into the syntax of the local practices in the context of scientific practices of resource use and management? In doing so, the research will draw points of clear distinction between the imaginations of nature as perceived by the western civilisation and the groups of people native to the forests. The main objective of this research is to study the implications of this difference, not with the intention of demonising or deifying any school of thought over other, but to move ahead with a comprehensive understanding of this difference.

Geographical settings:

The study focusses on the Warli tribe which is situated in the western part of India. The major Warli settlements lie in northern Maharashtra in the Palghar district and southern Gujarat. The Warli belt stretches from the western ghats (Sahyadris) in the east to the Arabian sea coast in the west. A major portion covered by the Warlis is a dense forest and the people are dependent on farming as the main source for their livelihood. . The areas are still extremely remote in terms of accessibility.

Fig. P.7: Palghar district, Maharashtra

The major recognised Scheduled Tribes in this region are the Mahadev Koli, Warli, Kukna and Thakur. According to the 2011 census data, The ST population in this region constitutes to about 34% of ST population throughout Maharashtra. The Mahadev Koli is the largest ST at 1,227,562 (14.3%), followed by Warli 627,197 (7.3%), Kukna 572,195 (6.7%) and Thakur 487,696 (5.7%). As per the 2011 Census, 87.3 per cent of the ST population of Maharashtra is residing in the rural areas. Among major STs in this region, the statistics showing the population residing in rural areas is as follows: Kukna (93.4%), Warli (92.7%), Thakur (86.3%) and Koli Mahadev (80.3%). The zone lies to the north and north-west of Mumbai. Interestingly, the tribal areas start within a mere 100 kilometre radius of Mumbai, which happens to be the financially biggest city in the country. The study will encompass the district of Palghar which is subdivided into talukas from east such as Jawhar, Vikramgad, Wada, Palghar, Mokhada, and finally culminate into Dahanu in west, a small town on the coast of the Arabian sea having a railway connection via the western line to Mumbai.