Divya Priyesh Shah (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
divya.shah.23@ucl.ac.uk

Landscape Perspectives of the Indian rural: ecological and place-sensibilities in the forest villages of a monsoon biome, The Western Ghats mountains, India

Indigenous landscapes and their natural and cultural ecologies are often understood and represented through dominant and colonial knowledge systems. My research challenges this by reframing such environments as holistic cultural-ecological ‘biomes’. I study the forest villages of an adivasi (original-inhabitants) community: the Kanikkarans of the Agasthyamalai ranges of the Western Ghats mountains and monsoonal (seasonal rainfall) system in India. Kanikkarans were earlier more peripatetic, enfolding interactions with diverse monsoon-biome worlds. They crossed multiple cultural-ecological thresholds and formed intricate webs of relationships across spaces, places, species, and time, till they were settled into villages by the Indian government in the 1970s through a colonial-era (1920s) forest act, transitioning into a sedentary community. I will explore how Kanikkarans bring their expansive, fluid, circulatory and generational knowledge to their situated life worlds, sensibilities, and spatial practices in their local villages and places. The study will break new grounds in terms of understanding, recording and evolving alternative forms of representation of the Kanikkaran’s (and more generally indigenous people’s) imagination of their wider universe, where forests, monsoons and mountains are key mediators. Transdisciplinary and drawing out ‘emic’ lived experiences and life worlds, my study will rely on landscape (including rurality) studies, architectural/ spatial histories, and anthropology (folklore, music, ritual studies). The methods include ethnography, field-based surveys, and drawings retracing Kanikkaran’s ways of engaging in the Ghats on foot.

Primary Supervisor: Dr Tania Sengupta

Secondary supervisor: Prof Tim Waterman

Back to the top