Epilogue

As I began working on this project, I was confronted by a plethora of questions that emerged from the many stories I encountered. Why is it that the systems of organisation I was taught were rendered useless in a context such as this? Why is it that I don’t imagine my home in the same way a Warli imagines? Why do I imagine caste and other social categories so differently as opposed to the people in this region? Why do I find an opaque curtain between me and the other people over here? At the first glance, one might find these questions quite irrelevant. But they are important questions, for they are the probes that we use to study the difference in the different schools of thought. The point of this intervention was to examine if these sociocultural practices formed a symbiotic relationship with the lived environment or not. The stories that were mentioned earlier aim at establishing this exact relationship. One realises that it is not always merely blind faith that makes up such stories, but rather a sense of deep rooted purpose that exists within the realm of the people that share this relationship with the forest, the form of which will always remain an area of contention for naturalist modes. I have chosen to probe into four different areas in order to better

understand these relationships: the collective, the home, the faith, and migrations. This list can be extended further to many more things and the work remains to be done in those aspects for mapping the difference. So what did we learn from the rigmarole of investigations? Despite the many physiological discontinuities that are evident between the human and the non human organisms, there exists a constant communication of the souls which don’t exist as independent entities, but rather as a continuum. This forms the basis for the animist thought as it encompasses all living creatures under its network of sociability. Another aspect which I found peculiar to this territory was the fact that there were no exclusive streams. The differences that existed, only existed linguistically. As far as the study goes, there seemed to be no exclusive professionals, no impositions of linear time, no compulsion for a hereditary lineage, no deliberation to create and maintain social assemblies, hardly any taste for a materialistic life. It almost comes across as though there is a lack of necessity felt by the people to care for or protect the forests they live within. This position is in stark contrast to the naturalist mode of imagination, where the concepts of exchange (free market mechanisms) and protection of the environmental resources form the ethos of modern day democracies. They are built on the ideals and values of providing for freer markets and protection to the people that populate the countries. But can we say the same for the non human aspects of society? Such aspects generally find themselves pushed to the margins by the virtue of their lack of developed faculty of a moral conscience. The areas within which the non human aspects of nature find protection happen to be the environment policies. This protection that gets afforded to these elements roots from the interests that humans derive from them by the conversion into goods and services and their

consumption. This when seen from an animistic perspective cannot be said to be truly inclusive. Capitalism, disguised as naturalism therefore finds a way to see nature through the lens of subordination of the non human species for their exchange values and benefit to the humans. In a world where inequality thrives in enormous proportions within different collectives of people, it seems highly unlikely that non human species will find any autonomy greater than what is currently granted to them by the people in power. The naturalist machine also in part manages to demonise the animist mode, and extending beyond just the mode, the communities that thrive within the immediate context of the forest regions citing a lack of scientific thought by using propaganda as a tool to sway public opinion in its favour. This difference between the two imaginations has been a source of continuous conflict not only in this region, but in most other regions in the country. The other form that this conflict takes up can also be seen as the dialogue between the urban and the rural, wherein the urban cores import human resources, land, and water from the rural peripheries and export their brand of urbanisation. This is evident from the many stories that we encountered that the life of people is changing quite fast as the urban life entices the lives of quite a few people who intend to move themselves to the city. When the people move to the city, they take their rural experience with them. And as they return, they bring the city back with them. The region thus finds itself stuck in this conundrum where on one hand, the all pervasive urban force finds its way into the rural life, and the rural practices adhere themselves tightly to the everyday lives of people. The study of the weave between nature and culture gives us a much more nuanced picture of the way society functions. It can provide us with a fresh perspective to redraw our maps and reimagine our

position with respect to the natural resources by radically altering our point of view of how we as a collective species shape and are shaped by our non human context. This mode of operation is and probably always stay as a topic which will create some degree of polarisation within the society we thrive within. The task that lays ahead is to find ways of negotiating through our differences and finding methods that we could deploy as a collective. How can we draw from this difference to build a framework to maintain this delicate balance between nature and culture? Can this difference lead us to think in ways that can radically change our landscapes?