Saving The Hornbill

(Published in Fountain Ink, July, 2015)

(The Kadar tribe in Kerala’s Thrissur district was blamed  for the decline in the critically threatened hornbill population. A researcher challenged this prevailing wisdom, roped in the tribe for conservation, and helped save the bird.)

Senthil Kumar was just a boy when he became a naturalist. It was the early Nineties and the teenager from the seasonally nomadic Kadar tribe that roams the Anamalai hills of the Western Ghats was in the right place. The riparian forests of Vazhachal on the banks of the Chalakudy River in Kerala’s Thrissur district had become a hub for research on hornbills. For the researchers someone like Senthil was a godsend.

Tribals know the forest and its creatures like no one else can hope to; it is their home. Ecologists and biologists in India, as elsewhere in the world, depend on tribal communities for their field work. Usually this is unacknowledged service. In the odd case when they do get credit, it is more as guides through impenetrable woods than for sharing their traditional knowledge which is absorbed into formal science.

The Vazhachal rainforest is one of the world’s most important hornbill habitats, the indicator species that defines their robustness. Four of India’s nine hornbill species are found here: the Great Indian Hornbill (Buceros bicornis), Malabar Pied Hornbill (Anthracoceros coronatus), Indian Grey Hornbill (Ocyceros birostris) and Malabar Grey Hornbill (Ocyceros griseus).

Understanding the hornbill and its world takes time and effort in challenging terrain and science could not have done without the illiterate Kadars. Senthil was not the only one; other relatives too were part of the process.

But their collaboration was a mixed blessing for the forest-dwelling, food-gathering Kadars. They got no recognition for their contribution in terms of information and data. Worse, they were named as the prime culprits behind the dwindling population of the Great Indian Hornbill, listed in Schedule 1 of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act (1972) and considered near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

There was no scientific evidence for the accusation but everyone who mattered believed it. The Great Indian Hornbill, Kerala’s state bird, was vanishing and the Kadars were to blame.

Maybe it would have made no difference if the topic had been confined to a few science journals. But it made the news as well, with reporting that never carried their side of the story. One report portrayed the tribe as zealous collectors of hornbill casques. According to this account the more casques a man had the greater his chance of impressing prospective brides and fathers-in-law.

It didn’t stop there. The men were depicted as manic dancers who wore hornbill casques on their heads for festive occasions and who ambushed hornbill nests with crude weapons. Not one of these increasingly bizarre accounts was true.

It’s water under the bridge now, but Senthil thinks he knows how this happened. “They must have asked someone who was helping them with their research. And that person must have said Kadars eat hornbill, and then it becomes a scientific truth.”

Senthil does not deny that at one point they did eat the meat of the Great Hornbill. “Of course we did, and I have heard my elders say it is a delicacy. But we didn’t hunt these birds. For starters, we’re not hunters. We just collected the birds the way we collected honey from the same trees. Are you telling me we ate all the hornbills here? They were dying because the trees were dying. Did we cut the trees and smuggle timber and build plantations?”

Almost a decade later, K. H. Amita Bachan, a young researcher working on his doctoral thesis on plant social structure in Vazhachal would be intrigued by the same question. If Senthil’s angst came from a sense of injustice, for Bachan the pressing concern was validating the legitimacy of such conclusions. Without tangible evidence to back your findings, how do you reach a consensus—Bachan prefers to use the term “local consumption”—that hunting by an indigenous community is the biggest threat to a species?

“For me, the issue was clear from the outset. If you study one particular species from one particular perspective—for instance the nesting behaviour of hornbills—you’re likely to miss many factors that determine the ecosystem dynamics of that species. That is why you come to such lazy conclusions, overlooking far more important factors like habitat destruction. We have six dams on the Chalakudy River which have substantially damaged the riparian ecosystem in the forests of the river basin. Why wasn’t this listed as a threat? Why this urge to blame the tribe?”

Bachan would find his answers, but only after an exhaustive interaction with the Kadars. In the process, Senthil became a research associate and friend, an association that affected both the political future of the Kadars and Bachan’s scientific journey.

***

“Their deep grunts, roars or barks and loud resonance call reverberate in the forest-clad valleys and are responsible for its Malayalam name Malamuzhakki, mountain shaking. It is a large pied bird. Its face is black; neck and tail white, wings black, two white bands on the wings are conspicuous in flight.”
—Salim Ali (Birds of Kerala)

Generally frugivorous, arboreal and secondary cavity-nesters, the large, stately hornbill is indispensable to the rainforest. A healthy population of hornbills mean a healthy ecosystem. With its jumbo beak splashed with an iridescent yellow, resonating toc-toc-toc calls and the whoosh of flapping wings flaps, it is an important agent of seed dispersal. You could call it the gardener of the rainforest as it seeds most of the new growth through its excretions on its flights through the trees. No hornbills means no rainforest.

Hornbills depend on massive old growth trees for their nests, usually hollows formed by splintered branches. In disturbed, degraded and low altitude forests, such trees are present only in riparian areas. That underscores the importance of Vazhachal. Nests here are most commonly found in seven species of trees: Pali (Palaquium ellipticum), Elavu (Bombax ceiba), Thanni (Terminalia bellirica), Kalpayin (Dipterocarpus Indicus), Kulavu (Kingiodendron pinnatum), Vellakil (Dysoxylum
malabaricum), and Vellapayin (Vateria indica).

Hornbills mate for life. Typically, courting starts around September. During this period they inhabit the upper branches of high canopy trees. Their long bills impede binocular vision, but their razor-sharp hearing and sight make them sensitive to the slightest disturbance on the ground. Courting is a season of music. Early morning and late evening, the lovers exchange metrical kock-kock duets, and their bills make cadenced clapping sounds.

Nesting in Vazhachal begins around the middle of December. Once the site is selected, the male and the female ensure the nest is properly prepared. The female cleans it thoroughly and then begins to seal the entrance with layers of her own excreta. Only a tiny slit is left through which the male feeds her regurgitated fruit. She lays two or three eggs at a time with a clutch success of one or two. Once the female completes the process of self incarceration, she sheds her flight feathers. These feathers and the excreta below the nesting trees are the tell-tale signs of nests.

If the male has an accident during incubation, the whole family is doomed. The male’s only job is to provide food, and he forages on around 44 species of fruiting trees, including 15-19 species of energy rich, sugary figs (Ficus). The clutch size and nesting success are heavily dependent on these trees.

The male feeds his mate three or four times a day. He calls constantly to signal his arrival and the female responds by tapping gently on the trunk with her beak. He then regurgitates each fruit and passes it through the slit. One feeding session lasts five to 20 minute with over 100 reasonably sized fruits passed. The female is fastidious when it comes to matters of taste and spits out anything that doesn’t meet her standards. Incubation lasts 30 to 40 days, with frequency of feeding increasing steadily.

The hatchlings get protein-rich food like snakes, lizards, eggs and nestlings of other birds for two or three weeks. During his field study, Bachan has documented males carrying long snakes rolled in their beaks, which the female shreds before feeding the hatchlings. The female, identified by a distinct white band around her eyes, emerges from her self-imposed captivity only after the chick is about one-and-a-half months old.

Hornbills have no major predators in the wild. Humans—in physical form and through various markers of civilisation—present the greatest threat. The male is extremely sensitive to human presence during incubation and approaches the nest only after thoroughly scanning the surroundings. But indiscriminate forest clearing for mines, dams, roads and plantations, means nesting trees are increasingly hard to find.

The Chalakudy basin is a brutally abused region with six dams along the 144-kilometre river and the controversial Athirappilly hydroelectric project in the pipeline. If sanctioned, it will toll the death knell for hornbills here.

The other major threat is from fire. In the summer of 2004, fires that started at nearby plantations—mostly tea, coffee and teak—and human settlements ravaged the forests. Only a few patches of rainforest and wet riparian stretches in the deep interiors emerged unscathed. The buttresses and root systems of massive evergreen trees, which are not fire resistant, were damaged, and in a month’s time many of these trees collapsed, depriving the hornbills of nesting habitats.

***

The 1,500-2,000 people in the 10 Kadar settlements of Vazhachal forest division too have suffered, like hornbills, habitat destruction. This ancient tribe endemic to the Anamalai hills depends on the collection of non-timber forest produce like honey, white dammar, black dammar and wild nutmeg. Fishing in the Chalakudy is their other important source of livelihood.

The depletion of their natural habitat has left the Kadars on the verge of cultural extinction. Hydel projects in the Parambikkulam and Sholayar valleys had already resulted in their displacement. The people of the Perumbara Girijan Colony in Malakkappara where Senthil lives, for instance, dwelt in Chadanthodu in the deep interior before the Sholayar dam came.

“When these dams come, it’s not just our houses that we lose.  Our trees also go. And when the trees go, where will we collect our honey and dammar? This is how we have lived for ages. Now we are forced to seek other ways”, says Senthil.

Shrinking forests have forced many tribals to work as labourers, either with the forest department or in Chalakudy town. The jobs are mostly menial: cleaners in hotels; shop attendants; construction and so forth. For people who consider themselves Kings of Anamalai, this is “a crash down into a life of slaves, devoid of both the pleasures and the hardships of the forests that define who we are.”

Senthil once worked in a photocopy shop in the town, an experience he does not want to remember. “I felt suffocated. I had to run back to the forests, even if that meant I would be jobless. Even you guys find it difficult to survive with these jobs, so tell me how people of the forests can survive there?”

***

As his area of focus expanded from hornbills to their ecosystem, Bachan was forced to re-evaluate Indian notions of ecosystem conservation. They do not recognise the importance of indigenous tribal communities. According to him, the present legal definitions of forests and systems of conservation are inspired by colonial models that define forest as timber and forest lands as property belonging to the state over which indigenous people have no rights.

The Indian Forest Act of 1927 continues to be the fundamental law in India for matters relating to the environment. Such a framework, he says, rejects all possibilities of a model based on co-existence.

The present approach to conservation can be traced to Yellowstone National Park in America, the world’s first national park where, says Bachan, “the enjoyment of white people” and “the removal of indigenous people” were the guiding principles, not “an ecologically sustainable system of ethics”.

“All colonial states have followed this principle and even wild life conservationists go by this model which focuses on creating reserve forests and inviolate forest areas in the name of conservation, denying the tenurial and cultural rights of indigenous people,” he says.

“In this model, the dependence of local people on their habitat is pictured as the gravest threat to the ecosystem. Its only possible remedy is the eviction of these people. Now this is an act of injustice not just from a sociological point of view but from an ecological perspective as well.

“What you’re saying is this: adivasis, who have always lived here with all those species now listed as endangered, are not part of the ecosystem, while we, people who have no organic connection with this ecosystem, are the people with the right to devise successful plans to ‘protect’ it. It is the easiest way to justify our own acts of destruction and to continue unchecked with such activities: we have after all these adivasis to blame.”

In the Anamalai hills, only 34 per cent of the original forest remains. Even this is heavily degraded because of fragmentation and selective felling of old growth trees. The rest of the land has been converted into secondary degraded forest with the major contributing factors being timber extraction (17 per cent), forest monoculture, mainly teak (12 per cent), tea, coffee and other private plantations (13 per cent), and reservoirs of dams and canals (three per cent). Land occupied by around 40 tribal villages in the region, limited to a few hectares, amounts to less than 0.0002 per cent of this area.

“What these figures tell us,” according to Bachan, “is that any top-to-bottom conservation model which does not recognise the importance of co-existence in ecosystem management will only result in further damage to the overall ecological balance.”

While the eviction of adivasis proceeds apace, for both conservation and development projects, little attention is paid to the threat of unbridled tourism in wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. Just scan the pile of garbage around the Athirappilly waterfalls, one of Kerala’s prime tourist attractions and a hotspot for cinema shooting, for a sense of the hazards of ecotourism.

For Bachan this frenzied emphasis on tourism is part of a “criminal process of mainstreaming the forests, in the same way that tribes are also mainstreamed: one is an ecological crime, the other a sociological one. Ecotourism means more people, more vehicles and more intrusion, increased carbon emission, which means ecotourism actually exposes these fragile ecosystems to a world of high-carbon mainstream civilisation.”

***

Bachan’s search for a conservation model for hornbills aligned perfectly with a Kerala Forest Department initiative in 2004. After various research papers and the media named Kadars as the main threat to hornbills, a community-based conservation programme was initiated with VSS (Vana Samrakshana Samithi) taking the lead role. It is a community organisation of tribes under the department, formed as part of participatory forest management in the Eighties. Bachan, and the Western Ghats Hornbill Foundation, an organisation he heads, became active participants.

Twenty-three nests and around 120 birds were identified as part of a preliminary survey. Initially, seven tribesmen from five settlements were selected. Five of them used to catch the bird earlier. But there was little difficulty in winning them over. “They understood the project and were convinced of its significance. Moreover, they were all seething inside at the news coming out,” says Bachan.

For Senthil, one of the seven, it provided a way for connecting to a culture he had begun to lose. “The elders of that group had amazing knowledge about the forests. They knew which trees the bird would choose for nests, at what time they came out, when they would sing, what kind of fruits they ate. I was young and my generation had started moving away from the forests. Talking to these people made me realise what we were losing, how rich our knowledge systems are.”

Devoting more time to the project, to the extent of it becoming a passion, also helped Senthil to cure himself of his
addiction to alcohol, another trademark consequence of “dealing with too many people from the town.” Like many other adivasis of different tribes in the state, Senthil, too, believes alcoholism is the biggest threat the adivasis face.

The number of people involved grew steadily. Transects were selected from the routes they traditionally used to go as part of collecting forest produce. This covered almost all important forest areas. A nest monitoring protocol in Malayalam was developed and made operational by deploying tribesmen in pairs: an elder person who was a master in forest dwelling and a younger one who knew how to read and write.

Nesting trees were located by following lone males, presence of regurgitated seeds in faecal matter or seedlings of trees preferred by the bird, and the presence of flight feathers at the middens under nesting trees. Measures were then taken to give these trees special protection from forest fire and poaching.

The hornbill guards were trained to use cameras and operate GPS systems. Sheets were prepared to record monitoring data. Details include the name of the nesting tree, girth at breast height, bole height and height at the nest cavity, location, nature of vegetation, terrain, nearest plants and activity of the nesting birds—entry of females, hatching of chicks, presence of females inside the nests, and fledging of chicks.

Once the operation was stabilised, both the forest department and the Hornbill Foundation made their presence as minimal as they could, and entrusted the tribesmen with the task.

“Our objective,” Bachan says, “was to find a way to integrate advanced scientific data monitoring methodologies with the traditional methods and knowledge of the tribes. We accompanied the groups only once a month. Even in those sessions the focus was more on documenting their perceptions.”

These included emotional perceptions. “The more we started to observe the bird, the more we started connecting to it at a personal level. Its quirks and eccentricities, the way the family structure functioned, all these to us were experiences to be savoured”, says Senthil.

For Bachan, this quality became most visible at the screening of the documentary The Fragile World of Great Hornbills he produced. He was struck by the way they mapped the character traits of the birds to their own people.

“I have taken this documentary to many conservationists, conferences and wildlife camps. But I have never got the kind of joy I got when I screened it for the Kadars. They are characters in the documentary just like the birds. And so they perceive the birds in a personalised way. This male hornbill who waits for the song of his lover was this Kadar man; that female who spits out the fruit is that Kadar woman … This was how they internalised the process of conservation.”

As the project now enters its 12th year, it is clear that hunting by Kadars or anyone else is no threat at all. The danger comes from other factors; 86 per cent of nesting trees are under threat from degradation in forest quality.

***

What started out as a pure conservation project has evolved into a political movement which gathered momentum with The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, known popularly as Forest Rights Act (FRA).

The introduction to this Act states: “The forest rights on ancestral lands and their habitat were not adequately recognised in the consolidation of state forests during the colonial as well as in independent India resulting in historical injustice to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who are integral to the survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem.”

The Act provides for the restitution of deprived forest rights—both individual rights over cultivated land in forest areas and community rights over common forest resources. It vests decision-making power to commune gatherings—(hamlet level Adivasi Grama Sabha) on matters pertaining to land, tenure, resource and sustainable forest management rights. This could be the first measure that opens up the possibility of a paradigm shift, transforming colonial frameworks of environmental management to ecologically sustainable perspectives.

For the Kadars of Vazhachal division this is a dream come true. All these years, the ownership of the honey and white dammar they collected rested with the forest department. Now they have rights over their resources. They can fix the price for the products they collect; have a major say in determining the extent of ecotourism; stall the Athirappilly project—both the Congress-led UDF and CPI (M)-led LDF root vociferously for it and if sanctioned, it will drown two settlements in Vazhachal Forest Division—and all future hydel projects too, because all projects would first require the consent of the Grama Sabha.

“The nine tribal settlements (Kadar and Malayan) are now able to take decisions, and any developmental or conservation activities need to be done after taking their consent,” says Iju C. Thomas, assistant coordinator, Western Ghats Nilgiris Landscape Programme, WWF. “If local communities are located in the area and use it or even if any area has any cultural significance for local communities , they need to play a major role in the management of these areas.”

However, Abdul Naser Kunju, the divisional forest officer of Vazhachal division says that tribals are often misled by tribal activists and conservationists.

“The hornbill conservation programme is not a community conservation programme: it’s a Kerala forest department initiative that uses tribesmen as paid employees. FRA won’t change the status quo as far as conservation policies are concerned. In theory, FRA will empower them to sell goods they collect without depending on VSS, but in practice they will only be further exploited by retailers in the town.” Kunju encourages the tribals to maintain their relationship with VSS.

It’s important for a conservation model to balance coexistence-based policies and inviolate reserve forest-based policies. With respect to this programme, the Kadars are justified in feeling aggrieved in how they were portrayed, “especially given the extent of habitat destruction for development models,” says Riney Pillai, a senior wildlife assistant. “However, that does not mean that one should do away with inviolate reserve forests because that is just as unscientific and as extreme a measure as putting the entire blame on Kadars. With FRA, the present conservation model will be further strengthened, as they would have greater rights over their habitat.”

The regular discussions and meetings that the Kadars used to have in connection with the hornbill programme had by the time the Act came into existence in 2008 became venues for political discussions. When FRA was introduced, the meetings turned into comprehensive discussions on the steps to ensure its successful implementation. Bachan too was an active participant; so much so that Western Ghats Hornbill Foundation published an exhaustive field guide to the law. The technical knowledge gained from hornbill monitoring about using GPS turned out to be pivotal in preparing the community resource maps that marked the areas of NTFP collection.

Senthil believes the rights they now enjoy owe a lot to the hornbills he has spent the last decade following. “It’s not just we who observe the birds; the birds must be observing us too. After all they can fly, while we cannot”, he says.

He does not forget to add that the community still needs the bird’s “power and blessings” to overcome the challenges to ensure a flawless implementation of FRA.

Caught in the middle

(Published in Fountain Ink, February, 2017)

(A resettlement scheme for tribals in Kerala goes really wrong, pitting humans and elephants in a conflict that hurts everyone.)

301 colony, located on the banks of the Anayirangal dam reservoir in Idukki, Kerala, derives its name from the design of the government scheme which brought it into existence in 2001-2002: one acre of land for 301 tribal families as part of a rehabilitation project. The scheme was conceived following the Kudilketti Samaram (hut building agitation) held by the Adivasis of the state under the leadership of C.K Janu. They had come with their protest to Thiruvananthapuram where they built makeshift tribal huts on the pavement outside the state Secretariat. The protest, which lasted for 48 days, ended only when the government agreed to the demands raised by the Adivasis, and set up a Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission (TRDM) with the stated objective of allotting one acre of land for every single landless Adivasi family and providing them with sufficient financial assiatance till the point they were completely self reliant in their new environment. As part of the project, various rehabilitation colonies were set up in the districts of Kannur, Palakkad, Wayanad and Idukki.

Paraman was in his early twenties when he first heard of the scheme. A member of the Hill Pulaya tribe, this stocky middle aged man was at the time living in a tribal colony in Marayur, bordering Chinnar wildlife sanctuary, about sixty kilometres from Anayirangal. Owning a piece of land which he could call his own was a dream he had been nurturing from when he was a child, and when the news of the TRDM scheme reached him, he did not have to think twice about applying for it. The Pattayamela (function to distribute title deeds) was held in 2003, and was attended by tribals from various communities across the state who had agreed to relocate to any place where they were allotted the land. None of them had previously seen the land on wich they were supposed to build their future. “In any case, given the circusmstances in which we were living we had nothing to lose, and so we were least bothered about the kind of land that were given to us. All we needed was a title deed”, says Paraman.

That title deed, however, was to come at a very high price.

To those who relocated to 301 colony and the nearby Vilakkupadam colony, the very first day of land surveying informed them in no uncertain terms of the kind of life that awaited them. They were welcomed by a herd of wild, marauding elephants who made the survey team run for their lives and then went on a rampage. It was only then that the Adivasis came to know that the land allotted to them was part of a thriving elephant habitat: the name Anayirangal literally means Where the elephants come down to. This area which was a pine plantation before the land was taken up for the rehabilitation project was one of their favoured destinations in the region for water and forage. What for a group of homeless human beings was a rehabilitation project was for them a proposition of displacement from their already shrunken habitat. Resistance, therefore, was only a predictable course of action. And the mode they chose for it was to be even more aggressive.

Following frequent elephant raids that sometimes lasted all day and all night, almost 100 of the 301 families chose to abandon their land in the first week itself and went back to where they came from. Nothing that they did to scare away the elephants had worked. They had tried bursting crackers, making noise, lighting fire lamps; but all to no avail. There was no fencing available and it would have taken a while to build trenches. One third of the rehabilated families did not think that a struggle of such magnitude was a worthwhile option.

Over the years, many more families, unable to survive the fury of the elephants, left. Six have been killed, many injured, in elephant attacks. Most houses have been destroyed, and they now stand scatterred among the tall, topless pine trees as abandoned evidences of a rehabilitation project gone horribly wrong. Acres of farming land were ravaged. At present, only twenty families stay here on a permanent basis. Another twenty families retain the land, but they come only for the farming season. Fifty families of the Muthuva tribe too have retained their land, but they prefer, in strict adherence with the culture of exclusivity that distinguishes the Muthuva tribe, to stay in a Muthuva colony, five kilometres from 301 colony.  The situation is even more bleak in Vilakkupadam colony where out of the sixty eight families who were initially relocated only one old man remains. And even he has abandoned the land originally allotted to him and now stays on the fringes of the colony in an encroached piece of land.

Paraman was one of the few who chose to stay on in 301 colony. The title deed, he says, is more valuable than life itself. The hope that one day this piece of land will be a habitable place clings on to him, even when he wants to wriggle out of it. “It might not happen in my time, but at least if I stay put my future generations can live here. I mean, I have to justify why I am still here, right? Even if it makes no sense”, he says. He cultivates ginger and tapioca in his land, but does it more out of a sense of obligation than with any conviction or a well defined plan. “I have this land, and I need to do something with it, right? What’s the point in planning against elephants, anyway? And as if that wasn’t menacing enough, we also have to deal with acute water crisis—both for drinking and irrigation—despite staying so close to a dam reservoir”, he says. His only consistent source of income are the mandatory days of labour he gets as part of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. He also looks after a herd of buffaloes owned by people from outside the colony who employ Adivasis to manage their cattle farms and use their land for grazing. He gets paid Rs 150 per month for one buffalo.

***

More than ninety seven per cent of Idukki’s land is made up by mountains and forests of the Western Ghats. The high ranges of the district, populated mainly by tribals, estate labourers from Tamil Nadu and migrant settlers from the plains, have always been arenas for human-wildlife conflicts, in particular for human-elephant conflicts. The problem has only aggravated over the years on account of various changes in the pattern of land use. Vast areas of forest land have either been encroached upon for cultivation or converted into plantations—mainly tea, coffee, cardamom and pepper. The subsequent loss, fragmentation and degradation of the forests are the major reasosns cited for the worsening of the issue. Various eco-insensitive developmental projects and an unscientific tourism model that has resulted in a mushrooming of resorts and home stays around the region have further compounded the matter.

Chinnakanal, Anayirangal, Marayur, Vattavada, Pooppara, B L Ram, Chembakathodukudi, Aaduvilanthankudi, Singhukandam and Suryanelli are some of the worst affected regions. They are also the regions with the most number of plantations and estates. Crops and farming equipment are destroyed with such regularity that the farmers and labourers are now concerned only about the degree of carnage. Even the prospect of being killed by an elephant is one they now prefer to reconcile with rather than rage against. “One way or the other you have to die, right?”, asks 87-year old Eenasumuthu who lives in B L Ram. He had come to Idukki from Thirunelveli, Tamil Nadu as a cardamom estate labourer in the early forties and had gone on to become the president of Chinnakanal grama panchayat. Two of his sons and his brother were killed by elephants.  “What can we do? I have been caught helpless in front of an elephant four times, and yet nothing ever happened to me. “ He now lives alone and still goes out occasionally to the cardamom farms, a site particularly favoured by elephant herds on account of the lush forage it offers. “If I am meant to be killed by an elephant, I can do nothing about it. It doesn’t matter if I stay at home or go out to the forest”, he says.

In the last fifteen years, 29 persons have been killed and more than hundred injured in elephant attacks. Most of the attacks took place in cardamom farms; a few inside tribal colonies; a couple in tea estates. Some of those attacked were on their bikes when out of nowhere a herd of wild elephants appeared on a sharp hair pin bend winding up the hills. Most of those killed in the farms were either Adivasis or hired labourers from across the border in Tamil Nadu.

Thomas, a member of Malayaraya (Christian) tribe, and a resident of Vilakkupadam colony had to bear the brunt of what he perceives as “pure elephant wrath”, at three levels. After he had built a house and started farming in his land, an elephant bgean raiding the crops regularly. He then built a trench around his house. One day, when he was returning from Chinnakanal to the colony, the same elephant attacked him. Though he tried to run, the elephant got hold of him and, in his words,”mercifully spared me with just a shattered right shoulder” which he still can’t hold up. Not stopping at that, the same elephant would after a few months go on to cross the trench and destroy Thomas’ house completely. He now lives in a ramshackle shed he has built on an encroached piece of land on the outskirts of the colony, and earns his living from a small shop he has set up at Chinnakanal with the help of the government scheme for the differently abled. He is certain that the same elephant is still “thirsty for revenge”. His understanding of the attacks on him is based on an image that has a mythical status in this part of the world: the image of the elephant as a creature with the wildest of rage and a massive memory that perpetually fuels this rage. “It is not my fault”, he says, “nor is it the elephant’s fault. The place where I built my house must have been special for the elephant. He doesn’t know that it’s the government which put me there”.

Thomas, and everyone else here, also know the reasons for this rage: 1) encroachment of elephant habitat and its subsequent shrinkage which inhibits a vagabond creature whose movements are by nature uninhibited 2) shortage of water and forage in the forests 3) threat to life due to poaching. They also agree that they understand where the rage comes from, but like Thomas, they too prefer to put the onus on the state to devise a solution. Until such a point arrives, Thomas, like Eenasumuthu, thinks it is better to reconcile with the perils of this co-existence, philosophizing it as the “life he was meant to live.” He even cracks a joke at his plight: “But I hope the elephant doesn’t think so.”

Though there are a few electric fences around human settlements, people say they are not effective. To protest against political and bureaucratic apathy, they often hold blockades on NH-49 (Kochi-Madurai-Dhanushkodi). Except for five mass lights between Pooppara and Anayirangal, nothing has so far come out of those protests. The elephant squad, they say, is ineffective, and invariably comes to a place of conflict only after the elephants have moved away. The squad is also mocked for the way they use artificial tiger sounds to scare away the elephants. “If they had done something and then failed, we would have still understood”, says Thomas. “But they just don’t do anything. They don’t make trenches for us. They don’t even know how to properly scare away the elephants by bursting crackers. They say they will put some collar on the elephants, but its only talk and no action. And on top of all this they don’t allow us to do anything.”

With increasing cases of human-elephant conflicts reported, the wild life department has now set up a rapid response department. One of its objectives is to educate the people about the gravity of the menace, and to inform them about the dangers of their usual practice of blocking the way back to the forest for a wild elephant herd trapped in a human settlement. For this, they plan to hold workshops in the region and form people’s vigilante groups. Thomas has a pamphlet which the department had issued. The pamphlet describes in detail the various preventive measures that people need to take. As he reads it aloud in his typically insouciant manner, it is difficult to interpret the emotion in his voice.

***

The twenty families that now remain at 301 colony have formed an Oorukoottam—a self governing body of the Adivasis. Its purpose, according to its Secretary Samuel Issac, a member of the Malayaraya (Christian) tribe, is to ensure that they manage to get from the authorities what is legimitately theirs. The three immediate demands are: 1) proper water supply for purposes of drinking and irrigation. 2) build a road instead of the narrow mud track that runs through a portion of the colony. 3) evict all those who by manipulating the Adivasis who had left managed to get their land for lease at cheap rates and use it as farmlands

.

The first two of these demands are grievances common to most of the tribal settlements in Kerala. The third, however, is a problem specific to tribal colonies that were set up as part of the TRDM mission in 2001-02. Like 301 colony, a fair few of these settlements were built in regions through which active elephant corridors passed, and as a result a lot of the families were forced to abandon their allotted land.  This land would then be taken for lease at cheap rates—a recent deal at 301 colony, according to Samuel Issac was closed out at Rs 50,000 for a period of 99 years-- by non-tribals even though the title deed clearly defines it as an illegal act. In 301 colony, Samuel Issac says that the habitual offenders come from the neighbouring regions of Suryanelli and Pooppara,  and they are mostly small and midle scale farmers. “For those who abandoned the land, a sum of Rs 50,000 is a big amount, and they easily fall for the bait”, he says. “These land grabbers would then keep pestering those of us who have stayed back too. I have even been threatened a couple of times. Their grand plan is to take over this entire colony by evicting the few left.” Despite his many attempts to raise the issue with forest and tribal attempts, Samuel says the grabbing has only gained further momentum.

Samuel and other members of the Oorukoottam believe that the only possible way to meet all their demands is by persuading those who abandoned their allotted land to come back to the colony. “If they come back, the issue of land grabbing can be tackled without much fuss. ”, Samuel says. The other two issues—that of water and road—too can be dealt more effectively if the colony has sufficient strength in terms of sheer number of people. “Now no one takes us seriously because there aren’t many of us here. So it is easy for both authorities and politicians to shun us”, he says. More importantly, he feels that the only lasting solution to human-elephant conflicts is to increase the population strength in the colony. “We can then set up strong vigilante groups and manage them. Elephants will also gradually shy away from entering thickly populated regions. It will also increase the efficiency of farming. What happens now is that all through the night we stay awake guarding our land, and when it is time to work in the day we are just too numb with sleep.” He points out the example of the nearby Muthuva colony where fifty families who have land in 301 colony live. There have been very few instances of elephant attacks in that colony which Samuel says is because of their strong community sense. The same example is also used to expose the utter lack of thinking and planning that went into the TRDM plan at the time of its conception. According to Samuel, if various tribal communities were allotted separate and distinct blocks of land instead of randomly mixing them up, the initial exodus would not have been this massive. “Whoever devised this plan did not understand that within Adivasis the sense of community acts in a territorial manner. It is very difficult for one tribal community to mix with another so freely.”

Efforts have already been made to realise the objective of getting people back to the colony. But Samuel feels that it is going to be a tough ask. He is disappointed by the fact that despite various awareness and mobilization campaigns at a political level, Adivasis still do not recognize the value of a title deed. “If they understand what this title deed means, not just for them but for their future generations, elephants will never scare them away from their habitat”, he says.

***

Unscientifically conceived and executed tribal rehabilitation projects are the latest in the list of reasons that lead to human-elephant conflicts in the region. The 1600-sq km long stretch from Thekkady-Periar tiger reserve to Chinnar wildlife sanctuary was at one point in time filled with lush evergreen forests, grass banks and shola forests. The first threat to that ecosystem surfaced with the arrival of the British who cleared large areas of the forest and built tea estates. Since then, plantations, farming, various developmental projects (hydro electric and irrigation dams) and massive growth in the tourism sector have resulted in a substantial shrinkage of elephant habitat, forcing the creature to withdraw to tiny, isolated patches.

According to Dr P. S Easa, former director of Kerala Forest research Institute (KFRI) and an expert on the subject of human-elephant conflicts, it is not the plantations or rehabilitation colonies that trigger the conflict, but their faulty design plans which hamper the free roaming of wildlife. He cites the example of Mattupetty Indo-Swiss cattle project. “They went for a barrier to protect the fodder for cattle, thus forcing the animals to seek alternative routes for their movement which resulted in frequent conflicts. Remember, elephant is  a vagabond that requires large areas of land for forage and water. A herd may need about 300 to 700 sq kilometres as home range. Therefore, whenever they are deprived of their freedom of movement, there is every chance of the scenario escalating into a conflict.”

Dr Easa points out that the most important measure to tackle the issue is to have a landscape level management plan which needs to be developed with the active involvement of all the stakeholders. “The present methods of mitigation—solar fences, trenches etc—are ineffective because the beneficiaries are not interested in maintaining them. Government spends crores of money and all of that go to waste”, he says, and adds that “once proper mitigation measures are in place, no ex gratia for crop damage should be paid. Each human death due to human-elephant conflict should be analyzed, and if the death has taken place inside the forest where people are not allowed entry, then no ex gratia should be paid.”

Dr Easa also feels it is imperative that steps are taken as quickly as possible because with each reported instance of a human-elephant conflict, a dangerous sense of anti-conservation attitude strengthens in the psyche of the society. His claim is validated by both the tribals and non-tribals who ask whether the government is more interested in elephants or in human life.

Ramesan M and Jayasuryan K K, researchers at the Environmental studies department at M G University, Kottayam, have identified four major reasons for the present situation in and around Anayirangal dam reservoir. 1) In 1897, Udumbanchola taluk in the region was announced as a cardamom field research  area. In 1935, it was handed over to private individuals for lease. As a result, the elephant habitat shrunk to the tiny Mathikettan forest region. The natural elephant corridor was also severed. 2) The planting of pine trees on the banks of the Anayirangal dam propmpted the elephants to perceive the region as a safer habitat. The decision to convert these pine forests into tribal rehabilitation colonies was taken without conducting even a preliminary feasibility study. 3) The windmills constructed by the Tamil Nadu government on the grass banks of Chathurangappara have also inflicted irrepairable damage on a prime elephant corridor. 4) The electric fences which protect the cardamom plantations pose a major impediment to elephants.

Having lost their connectivity with Periar tiger reserve and Thekkady, the elephants in the Anayirangal region have now become more or less genetically isolated animals. The only way to preserve them is by rebuilding the original elephant corridor. Of the 1600-sq km long stretch from Thekkady-Periar tiger reserve to Chinnar wildlife sanctuary, only 365 sq. km now comes under the category of the protected area. A standard elephant herd typically requires around 500 sq km for its normal life.

***

Kumareshan, a member of the Hill Pulaya tribe stays with his wife and two children at a house right at the edge of 301 colony, about 50 meters from the banks of the reservoir. The house belongs to his wife’s brother who was killed by an elephant. Kumareshan, who like Paraman was at the time living in a tribal colony in Marayur, came here in 2010. Neither his nor his wife’s family was in favour of relocating. But Kumareshan, who used to visit his brother in law had already made up his mind. “I just liked the place. Cannot really explain why. Maybe it’s the lake. Maybe it’s these grass banks. I don’t know”, he says.

During the day, Kumareshan herds the buffaloes of a cattle farm owned by a non-tribal. There are 12 buffaloes that he takes care of. He believes buffaloes are helpful in keeping the elephants away because elephants are finicky creatures who wouldn’t dine on food pissed and defecated upon by a herd of buffaloes. He leads his buffaloes through the pine trees, among the abandoned derelict houses, to the grass banks by the lake. It is these grass banks, contiguous with the forest land, that the elephants too come down to most often. Yet, Kumareshan is unfazed.

By the banks of the lake, he lies down, thinking about nothing, though he is fully aware of the travails of his and the colony’s hazardous existence. “When I am here, I just try to listen to the stillness of these waves and to birdsongs”, he says. Across the lake is the popular tourist destination of Anayirangal dam. A couple of resorts can be seen which Kuthiresan says have been been built on brazenly encroached land. ‘Nobody asks these resort people anything”, he says and wonders why the government cannot make a law that would make it mandatory for resorts in tribal areas to employ Adivasis.

It is from this lake that people of the colony take water for drinking and irrigation. The water is carried as headload. The same lake is used for bathing and washing clothes. On its banks lies a damaged steamer boat which was provided by the government to the Adivasis to travel across to Anayirangal. Once the boat was damaged, it was never repaired or replaced. Now, instead of a five-minute ride across the lake, they have to walk five kilometres and then travel a further eight kilometres by bus to reach Anayirangal.

Once the buffaloes have had their fill, Kuthireshan guides them back to the cattle shed. There is pretty much nothing to do for the rest of the day. His is the only house that does not have electricity in the colony, but even that doesn’t seem to deter him much. Occasionaly, he walks all the way to the other edge of the colony, and goes to Singhukandam. If it is a lucky day, there would be tourists roaming around waiting for a glimpse of a wild elephant. He would approach them and somehow convey across the fact that he knows the exact location where elephants come down to.

***

The Spirit of The Subaltern

(Published in Fountain Ink, December 2016)

(Dalit poet S. Kalesh reflects on the childhood which inspired his poetry, trends in Malayalam literature, and the synergy between politics and his craft.)

As I walk gathering the shadows

Of a bird in the sky of the field

It waves its wings and flies away.

I touch the soil and take back my empty hand.

-S Kalesh (In the sky of the field)

Hailed for the spectral splendour of their image system filled with ghosts and creatures of the night, for the ingenuity of their narrative style premised on a synthesis of oral and cinematic traditions of storytelling, and for charting a distinctive subaltern aesthetic framework, S Kalesh’s poems represent the contemporary face of Dalit poetry in Malayalam, and have been performed in various protests and land struggle movements. Presently working as a sub-editor with Samakalika Malayalam, he is the author of two collections—Hairpin Bend and Sabdamahasumdram (The Great Ocean of Sounds).   

***

Let us start from your childhood which in many ways, sometimes as characters in re-imagined memories like in Plavinte Katha (Story of the  jackfruit tree), and sometimes as the landscape of re-claimed stories like in Vayalkkarayile Aanpatti (The male dog on the banks of a paddy field), appears repeatedly in your poems.    

If the beginning of one’s poetic journey can be traced back to a singular moment, then the image I return to most often is this: a four year old boy is standing in the open courtyard of his thatched hut, singing I am a Disco Dancer, and there comes his mother’s mother who promptly tucks him up into a yellow dress with four pockets. I must have been four years old then. Once my parents went for work, I was under her supervision. Her name was Chinna, a farming labourer in a village called Kunnanthanam, in Pathanamthitta district. She was a seemingly endless anthology of stories and poems and songs. She had gone to school only till fourth standard—apparently, a teacher had beaten her up, which enraged her mother who went and questioned him, and from the next day she stopped going to school fearing that the teacher would take revenge on her. No one and nothing have influenced me as much as this woman and her stories and songs. I will share one of them. Must have been in the 1930’s or 40’s. Chinna and her mother were coming back from Changanacherry market where they had gone to buy tapioca, dried fish and betel pan. The twelve-kilometre stretch back to their home was thronged with bushes and thickets. It was dark and they were walking with a country torch made of dried coconut leaves rolled into a scroll and lit at one end. On the way, there was a pond right in the middle of a rubber farm. When they reached that pond, they felt as if someone was persistently blowing out their torch. Despite the panic, they kept walking in the dark, and kept losing their way, always coming back to the same pond. They could hear Chinna’s father crying for them from their home, but when they tried to cry back they found to their horror that their tongues were tied. At last, Chinna’s mother, a midwife, chewed the betel pan and spit it out hard, took the names of some spirits and prayed to them, and then the wind blew, and the torch was lit again, and they were able to find their way home. In Chinna’s version, they were haunted by one of those spirits who was greedy for the dried fish they were carrying as head load.

It was not just songs and stories like these which were filled with ghosts that she used to share with me. There were also those rhythmic slogans that she once used to sing and shout with fervour in Communist marches of her youth for such leaders like Rosamma Punnoos and P T Punnoos. She was proud of the fact that there was not a field in our neighbouring areas that she had not harvested. She had a flair for narrating these experiences too. I remember her describing a memory in which a group of travellers from a speeding train throws oranges to the workers in a field where she was also present. Such was her narrative style that it was as if she was describing a scene from a movie.  

And then there were those many, many songs of the fields too. I regret the fact that I could record none of them. With her, those songs and those stories too disappeared. To a certain extent, I remember the stories; but only a few scattered lines of the songs remain with me.

Looking back, I realise it was she who pushed me into poetry, and shaped my poetic journey. She died in 1999. It was after her death that I started writing poems. Sometimes I feel that I am merely marking her absence through my poetry.

Your earlier poems, the ones collected in Hairpin Bend, do not have the distinctive stylistic traits that have since been associated with you. On the one hand, they seem to inhabit the same emotional space of high romanticism celebrated by poets of the Seventies, and on the other, their political space seems to be influenced by the poets of Nineties who sought a break from the Seventies. How do you now review that phase?

The poets of the Seventies wrote about an absolute human being, one that on the surface did not have any markers of identity—this was a creature that had no religion, no caste, no gender, and no race. Yet, if one looked beneath the flimsy facade of this absoluteness, it was not difficult to see that their identity-less human being was not a Muslim, not a Dalit, not a woman and not Black. It was this creature that paved and popularised the ways of radical left politics, one which sometimes out of compulsions imposed by its own framework and sometimes deliberately, paid no heed to the finer details and realms of politics and aesthetics. For corroborative evidence, we don’t have to look beyond the complete obliteration of Dalit and subaltern poets from the canonically accepted poetic history of that era. It was not as if they did not exist at the time!  

The poets of the Nineties, in their attempts to move away from this space, ended up, however, creating an absolute space of their own: one characterised by a resolute insistence on minimalism, an ambience that had no space for noise—you wouldn’t find a boisterous street or a scene of conflict in them, a conscious denial of all intense forms of expression, emphasis on short—often, very short—poems, and assertions of a poetic voice that was fond of speaking softly, almost whispering. Sometimes I wonder if their extreme fondness for decency was a consequence of their profession—most of them, after all, were Professors. It is also interesting to note that the distinguishable features of the poetry of Nineties were first to be seen in the Puthumozhivazhikal (Ways of the new word) of Attoor Ravi Varma, a poet who started his career in the late Fifties and who was also one of the distinctive voices of the Seventies.

During my formative years as a poet, Balachandran Chullikkad, a stalwart of the Seventies and the Eighties, was my primary influence. However, when I started writing seriously in the early years of this millennium’s first decade, my inclination gradually shifted, not without conflicts, towards the poets of the Nineties. I was impressed by the way they tried to look into spaces of environment and womanhood, two areas almost unnoticed by the poets of the Seventies. I was also fortunate to have been be guided by D Vinayachandran, who was a Professor at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, where I was at the time doing my MCA. He was the only poet of the seventies, in my opinion, to have treaded a different path.

But is it possible to arrive at a generalised aesthetic framework for the poets of the Nineties? Wasn’t there also a revival of subaltern poetry during that period?

Yes, there was, and coming as I did from a subaltern space, it was this aspect of the Nineties’ poetry that eventually ended up having the most significant influence on me during this phase. This subaltern stream of sensibility, represented primarily by S Joseph, M B Manoj, M R Renukumar and Binu M Pallippadu, was in many ways at loggerheads with the Attoor school of sensibility. But I would say there is a difference of approaches even among them. S Joseph, who is the more canonically recognized poet of this group, chose to mark the subaltern spaces of his poetry without breaking away too much from the aesthetic sensibilities of the Nineties. But Manoj, Renukumar and Binu were poets who located themselves outside the realm of that dominant sensibility, preferring instead to create an alternative subaltern space. It was after closely reading them that I and my poems, instead of constantly looking outside, started looking inwards, towards my own life and its myriad spaces. Their poems directly addressed the many dimensions of subaltern politics, while Joseph was keener to use a dialogic style of poetics to find an expression for the subaltern spaces of his poems.

Despite this shift in my poetic approach, when I look back, it is not difficult for me to say that those poems were immature—in terms of both their political and aesthetic aspects. I would like to think that it was after 2009, when I started blogging regularly, that I embarked on a journey of evolving a style of my own.  I was going through a very difficult phase in my life at that point—financial crisis to start with: I was a poet who was handling obituary pages of a local newspaper at the time, various discriminations at my workplace... It was a phase where I was convinced that the good times of my life were all gone. On top of that, the poems of Hairpin Bend were met with trenchant criticism almost all of which were based on finding the various shadows and influences in those poems. It led to a period of dejection and depression which was compounded when various mainstream journals chose to encourage me by promptly sending back the poems I used to send them. Luckily, I found a friend, Mathen, who guided me through this phase, in the process making someone like me who comes from a non-urban background realise that the city is a wonderful abode for those in deep distress. 

In what ways do you think the medium of blog—though short lived in terms of its popularity, having now been usurped by social media—influenced your generation of poets? Suddenly, poetry blogs were dime-a-dozen, it was almost like a sub-culture at that point; so much so that even many mainstream publishers were keen to come out with anthologies of blog poetry.

During the initial period of blogs, I was, to be honest, very sceptical. I was still under the impression, and definitely a feudal one at that, that poetry is supposed to be published only in journals. But soon, I realised the potential of blogs in terms of reaching the readers, and started one of my own. It proved to be the definitive turning point of my poetic journey. I was very impressed by the various styles that were being explored by many poets, in particular those employed by Latheesh Mohan and Vishnuprasad. All those poets were for all intents and purposes unpublished in print. It was a very democratic medium, and over time, the period I spent in that space proved extremely helpful in breaking away completely from the influence of the Nineties.

I came to the conclusion that to find an expression for the changed circumstances of modern life, one needs to look for innovations in one’s craft. It was around this time that I started writing long poems, fuelled by the conviction that the short and crisp poems of the previous era could no longer be of any assistance to me. I also started working elaborately on a thematic landscape that was distinctively and unapologetically subaltern. I realized the importance of finding a poetic language for the various identity crises of my life, the otherness I was experiencing in the city, and the many manic attempts to merely survive. And to do that I had to give up all those nostalgic spaces of romanticism that had till then populated my poetry.

My objectives were to develop a style whose defining features would be an emphasis on a noisy and chaotic acoustic texture and a zig-zag, haphazard narrative form. Of course, while doing so, the greatest challenge is to make sure that one stays away from sloganeering. I realized that if I was not capable of writing a poem that is entirely my own, then there is no point in writing at all. And to do that, I realised I had to work hard on my language, as hard as one would in an agricultural field. 

Though it came to mainstream prominence only in the last three decades, the history of Dalit and subaltern poetics in Malayalam goes back a long, long way; in fact the oral traditions of subaltern poetry go much farther back than that of what has now come to be accepted as the hegemonic poetic history of our language. Even in the written form, though obscured for a very long time, Malayalam does have a rich and diverse poetic tradition that delineated its subaltern sensibilities. How would you mark your interactions with this tradition and what has the influence it has played in your attempts to chart what you describe as poetry of your own?

It goes without saying that the Dalit poetic tradition has been one of the greatest guiding forces for a poet like me. For anyone who tries to formulate a new subaltern sensibility, the radical nature of the songs of Poykayil Appachan, the unique patterns of rhythm, the wild strangeness of imagery and the doughty combativeness of Chengannoorathi songs, and numerous other folk songs provide a very fertile soil to work on. Most importantly, this subaltern history instructs you that one cannot develop a subaltern aesthetics based on Hindu mythology. I do believe that it is an insult for a subaltern to even live with the feeling of being a Hindu. It is with this perspective that I engage with a poet like Poykayil Appachan, who had, a century ago, built his poetic identity on a Dravidian Dalit tradition that is neither Hindu nor Christian. He was a pastor who searched the Bible in vain for the history of the people he sermoned to. Eventually, he burned the Bible, having come to the conclusion that there is no business for Kerala’s subaltern people in a book that narrated the story of the people of Israel. In many ways, this is similar to Dr B R Ambedkar burning the Manusmriti. 

These are some of the lined penned by Poykayil Appachan:

I cannot see

A single letter on my race

Though I can see

The Histories of so many races.

When I think about it

I am filled with regret

So let me add something

In my own tune.

...

We travelled like orphans

In the waste lands of Hinduism

And we travelled like orphans

In the waste lands of Christianity

But neither the Hindus nor the Christians

Welcomed us.

Why then do you think that this tradition of Dalit and subaltern poetry represented by poets like Poykayil Appachan and Pandit Karuppan was later completely obscured by the much celebrated progressive movements of subsequent times, and especially by the poetry of the Red and ‘modern’ Seventies?

The poetry of Malayalam’s modernity quashed and invalidated such voices. Probably because the politics on which it was based had no space for them. One must also remember that most subaltern poets of that era were not privileged in terms of educational status. That must have further aggravated their plight.

But what, in my opinion, is of greater significance is the fact that these famous poets of modernity who were either active participants or fellow travellers of left ideology had no problems in incorporating themes from Hindu mythology in their oeuvre. Those who search for subaltern spaces in modernity’s poetry will have to be content with Kadamanitta’s Padayani poems. Even Poykayil Appachan’s songs were re-discovered much later with the advent and subsequent consolidation of identity politics. In times of Ghar Vapasi, what better slogan can be raised than the one he did?

Most of your poems follow the narrative framework of storytelling. At the same time, they seem to deliberately eschew music and patterns of rhythm. Can you elaborate on the specifics of your craft?

The craft of a poem, in my view, is defined primarily by the theme it tries to address. Writing is a conscious art, though poetry occurs outside of the purview of consciousness. Unplanned and random journeys, the order of events as they occur in a day—sometimes a strange day, the narrative styles of cinema and painting—these have all influenced my craft. I even look at ways in which a simple algebraic equation is solved, and use the pattern that I find in such problem-solving techniques to develop a narrative framework for my poems like Pranayam Kothichuvalarunna Aankutti (A boy growing up greedy for love).

As for rhythm, I agree that I haven’t so far made a concerted effort to incorporate aspects of music and rhythm in my poetry despite having always wanted to make use of the rhythms of folk songs. I think it will be possible only when the poem’s theme itself is based on rhythm. At the same time, I also believe that prose too has a rhythm of its own, and it is this rhythm that I am more comfortable with in my poetry. And perhaps, it is the inner and invisible rhythms of the various subaltern folk traditions of which I too am a part that save my language from being too harsh and too crude.

More importantly, one must not forget that following large scale appropriations by the mainstream, folk music enjoy a great deal of popularity now. And this popularity, to a large extent, is based on its Hindutvaisation and on the ways in which its subaltern features are rendered invisible by making them appear as if they are secular expressions—this is most clearly illustrated by the songs of Kavalam Narayanan Panikkar and the popularity enjoyed by rock bands like Avial which use many of these songs. As a poet, I think it is my responsibility to my art to always be on the guard against the perils of populism. Otherwise one might not be able to say what one really wants to say.    

The politics of land is a recurring theme in your poems. It is at its most intense in a poem like Rathrisamaram (Night Protest), where the narrator who appears almost midway through the poem, and who has come to participate in a night protest conducted by those evicted from their habitats, describes the multi-storied building that has come up in the land from which he was driven away.

The political imagination that spurred that poem was this thought about a spider trying to view an eight-storied building. Its craft is one which tries to mimic the methodology involved in building a city, and the narrative eye is one which follows this process of city-building like a movie camera.

When one writes about the politics of land eviction in a poem, it is not the politics of an identity-less citizen that is being written down. Rather, the ‘other’ in the poem takes the subjectivity of the poet, and becomes a subaltern citizen with empty pockets who does not have any right over the nation’s resources, and whose own resources are forcefully dragged away.

Even when I live in a city, I don’t own a cent of land there. My urban identity, like that of a majority of the urban Indian population, is an alienated one; it is the identity of a tenant. That is why the space of my poetry is spread over both urban and rural landscapes: as if my head is in a city and the feet are in a village. 

It is now clear that subaltern resistance is the only possibility available to us against forces of Hindutwa. Just look at the aftermaths of Rohit Vemula’s institutional murder, and the movements against Sangh Parivar in Una and Uduppi. In Kerala, where the land reform movements are so much celebrated, more than 2.5 lakh people live in waste lands and colonies without a piece of land of their own. How, then, can poets and poetry move forward by discussing only aesthetics? It was for the same reason that I participated in the Rights Over Land Convention in Thrissur where I performed the poem Night Protest. 

The timescape of your poems too follows a jumbled pattern. In fact, rather than through images it is through the manipulation of time that you create a sense of surrealism in your poems, especially in a poem like Plavinte Katha (Story of the jackfruit).

That is a direct consequence of my belief that any poetic thought, while being grounded in the present, must also necessarily connect at the same time to both the future and the past. In times like ours in which various tools and mechanisms of the virtual world have rendered meaningless all conventionally accepted norms and ideas of time and space, it is imperative that this shift in perspective should be reflected in the poetics of that age too. I don’t think there is any space in our times for a poetic idea that concerns itself only with the present.

Is it for the same reason that your poems are filled with so many ghosts—of both people and various creatures?

That aspect of my poetry comes from the many stories and songs that I heard from Chinna and other elders in my childhood. And from the many customs, traditions and events in connection with death that I had witnessed as a child. One of them was called  Chavedukku: This happens on the seventh day after the death has occurred. The sorcerer would come home by evening. He would go to where the dead has been buried, and would invoke the spirit into an eerkkil (the mid-rib of the blade of a coconut leaf) which he would whirl around. He would then come back with this eerkkil to the altar around which the relatives of the dead would have by then assembled. The spirit invoked in the eerkkil would enter one of these relatives who would then start dancing in frenzy. He would list the flaws and ills that have afflicted the family. The sorcerer would suggest possible solutions and would eventually recall the spirit from the relative. Next day, the spirit would be taken away after it has been made to promise that it would return only if it has been asked to.

I have seen a function where glasses would be filled with toddy before the dead would be called upon to drink them. This is to quench the thirst of the wandering spirits. An elderly person would fill the glasses and would call the spirits by their names. After a while, the relatives would start drinking from those glasses. In my childhood, I have also drunk from one of those glasses; toddy that was left over after the dead had had their fill. Perhaps, the undrunk intoxication persists.   

***