About NilgiriScapes 2023
The Nilgiris, or Blue Mountains, spreading across three state borders in southern India, is a global bio-cultural hotspot, and home to indigenous communities who share the land with rare endemic flora and fauna. The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR) is India's first biosphere reserve declared in 1986. The traditional Nilgiri communities live in economic and social symbioses with each other, and with the hills. Many travellers, scholars, missionaries, biologists, anthropologists, linguists and sociologists have documented and described this unique region since the 1600s.
The NilgiriScapes conference aims to play a role in addressing the challenge of sustaining the bio-cultural diversity of the hills. In a bid to understand and address some of the most crucial issues, we, a collective of civil society organisations, a research institute, and a university, in partnership with long-standing residents, are in the pursuit of bringing the scholarship on the Blue Mountains to its locale. We aim to create platforms for meaningful dialogue and exchange between various stakeholders and domain experts on the past, present and future prospects of the hills. We aim to initiate this process through conferences and public engagement via an annual series. Keeping with the series title, this edition focuses on social and cultural fluxes, including flows of people, technology, objects, symbols, and meanings that have defined and redefined the Nilgiris landscape.
A quick history of the landscape
Over the last two centuries with the establishment of townships and plantations, the demography and natural landscapes of Nilgiris have gone through overwhelming transformations and remain in flux. Plantation of exotic flora, commercial forestry, hydro-electric projects, clearing of grasslands and forests for tea estates, urbanisation, migration, climate change, and tourism have left the Nilgiris at a crossroads.
Deborah Sutton (2009) writes that the British colonists viewed the wild and virgin land of Nilgiris as those that had been neglected and damaged by indigenous people. She points out that the British, through colonial practice, sought to make the Nilgiris 'useful'. Founded upon this utilitarian logic, efforts of the colonial administration included clearing grassland and shola to plant exotic trees, reorder the relations between indigenous people and their lands, replace sustenance agriculture with profitable plantations, and moderate 'barbaric practices' like the annual burning of grassland, and swidden cultivation, through curtailment, suppression and retribution. The resulting displacements and re-orderings of the landscape laid the foundations of irreversible and rapid change in the land use and cover of the Nilgiris.
A unique peak within Mukurthi National Park, Nilgiris, and the inspiration behind our logo.
This year's theme: Nilgiris, a Land in Flux
At the 2023 edition of NilgiriScapes, which will focus on landscapes and their history, we hope to generate a body of knowledge that documents changes and appraises the current status of the Nilgiris from four perspectives: Ecological Impact, Economic Concerns, Socio-Cultural Change and Planning and Policy. These perspectives will offer both an on-the-ground and a bird's eye view of the status of changing land use.
1. Ecological Impact
Over the past 200 years, the ecology of the Nilgiris has been altered drastically, and we have yet to develop an overarching understanding of the broader environmental consequences of these anthropogenic actions. Under the Ecological Impact perspective, we would like to understand how the changes in land use have impacted the ecological structure and function or ecosystems services of the Nilgiris.
2. Economic Concerns
What Economic Concerns arise through the present land use pattern? What have Economic Opportunities contributed to such changes? Also, how does climate change intersect with land use and cover change? How have we altered the wildlife habitats in the region that have been the primary stakeholders of such a landscape? The efforts to preserve ecological diversity cannot undermine the need for improved civic and health infrastructure. How do these competing agendas sustain and navigate the course of time?
3. Socio-Cultural Change
In recognition of the inalienable link between land and indigenous people, we attempt to make sense of Socio-Cultural Change that has resulted from, or paralleled, concomitant changing patterns in land use. We are eager to understand how dominant gazes affected the landscape of the indigenous people and what their socio-cultural consequences were and are. We are aware that changes in the landscape also triggered a demographic change through migration and the establishment of new settlements. Hence we also seek to understand changes in socio-cultural practices and discourses among indigenous people and settler populations.
4. Planning and Policy
From the Planning and Policy perspective, we shall investigate various governance legislations on land use that have shaped the Nilgiri landscape today and how they have been violated. We would also benefit greatly by gaining some sense of the impact of land use legislation on the region's people, ecology, and economics.
In effect, research on the Nilgiris is ample, but the complex nuances of the Biosphere’s diversities and the impact that human activities have had on them are yet to be unpacked. We invite your contributions as a beginning of an ongoing conversation that will address some of these concerns and hopefully have a positive impact on the local landscape in time to come.