Some Roots Go Deeper Than Rights
I went to Kudremukh with a research question.
I came back with something I
hadn't expected — a quiet sense of inadequacy. Not about the work. About
myself.
I sat with tribal communities in
and around Kudremukh National Park — in village circles, in small homes, under
areca trees with the forest just a few feet away. I was there to study the
Forest Rights Act of 2006 and what it had meant for the people who live inside
one of India's most biodiverse landscapes.
I had my frameworks. My coding
software. My FGD guides with their structured open-ended questions. What I
didn't have was preparation for the kind of people I was about to meet.
There was a man — I won't forget
him. Yoghappa, around 70 years old, from Balekadi village. He spoke about his
mother's practice of healing — a grinding stone in every home, leaves and roots
brought in from the forest, treatments passed down not through books but
through presence and patience. He still carried some of it. He laughed a
little, saying the medicines work, but people nowadays don't have the trust.
They want to heal fast.
He wasn't complaining. He was
just... observing. The way you'd watch a season change.
That was the thing about most
conversations I had in those months. People spoke about their lives — the
restrictions, the wildlife that raided their crops, the fog of bureaucracy
around land rights — without the bitterness I might have expected. Without the
bitterness I think I would have felt, in their place.
One afternoon, the discussion
turned to the animals.
Sambhar deer, bison, wild boar —
they were eating the crops. Entire harvests sometimes. I had my pen ready,
thinking this was the part where the grievances would come. Where the
relationship between community and conservation would crack open.
Instead, one of the farmers said
something that made me put the pen down.
"We can't even blame the
animals. They have to eat, too. We are the ones who came into their home."
There was no performance in it.
No awareness that it was a profound thing to say. It was just — how they saw
it.
I've been in rooms with ecologists,
conservationists, and policy researchers. I've read the literature. And I'm not
sure I've encountered that sentence said so plainly, so without agenda,
anywhere else.
The sacred forests confirmed it
even more.
Near Balekadi, there is a patch
of forest adjoining the Durgaparameshwari temple — the villagers call it Devermane
kadu, the forest of the deity's home. No extraction happens there. No
cultivation. It is simply left alone, tended by faith rather than policy. Twice
a year, the Gowdlu tribes cross the stream for rituals. The rest of the time,
the forest breathes undisturbed.
Nobody needed a law to tell them
to do that.
This is what I kept coming back
to throughout the fieldwork — how much of what we call conservation these
communities had already been doing, quietly, without the vocabulary we've built
around it. Sacred groves. Seasonal restraint. A felt sense of belonging to the
land rather than owning it.
The Forest Rights Act gave them
legal recognition of something they had always known. That is meaningful. But
the knowledge, the love, the careful relationship — that was never absent. It
was there long before any document.
There were hardships, yes. Real
ones.
Children are sent to hostels at
age six because the roads don't exist. Crops lost to floods and monkeys, and
the particular chaos of farming at the edge of a wild forest. Uncertainty about
what the land rights paper actually grants them and what it quietly doesn't.
But even in talking about these
things, what I sensed was not despair. It was resilience of a particular kind —
not loud, not performed, just deeply rooted. The kind that comes from knowing
where you are from. From having a relationship with a place that goes back
further than memory.
"If we have Rs. 20, we
manage with Rs. 5. If there's no dal, we use coconut. We make do with what is
here."
A man told me this. He had lost
land, cattle, and an entire way of life. And he was telling me — almost gently
— that it was okay. That the forest, the rivers, the country mattered more than
what he had personally held.
I didn't know what to do with
that kind of grace. I still don't, fully.
I came back to Bengaluru and
wrote a research paper. Codes, themes, policy implications — all of it
necessary, all of it true.
But the thing that has stayed
with me, the thing I find myself returning to, is simpler than any finding.
These communities don't need to
be taught to love the forest. They don't need to be incentivised into
conservation. They are not waiting for a policy to tell them that the river
matters, that the animals belong, that the land is something to be cared for,
not just used.
They already know.
Maybe the more honest question — the
one I left Kudremukh carrying — is not what the law can do for them.
It's what we can learn from the
way they live.
This post is a reflection drawn from my
research paper "Forest Right Act: An End to Hostility of Conservation and
Livelihood? A Case Study from Western Ghats, India," published in Studies
in Science of Science, Volume 43, Issue 06, 2025, co-authored with Dr. B.C.
Nagaraja, Bangalore University.
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