What the Forest-Dweller Knows
This story is supported by a grant from Shared Ecologies.
Translated and edited by Kamakshi Narayanan
We played with the stones, the earth, the sea, and the forests
Now we play with a phone in our hands.
The paths and plants familiar to my forebears are searching for their destiny,
The sholas and the sacred groves are searching for the gods that seem to have left them.
We know that the hills, the soil, the rocks, and the trees are our gods
But we, proud of our knowledge, have forgotten these
and ourselves.
At least now, let us turn back,
perceive our closeness, and connect
with the five elements, and how they gave us life.
In March 2025, a quiet corner of Anaikatti—a village in Coimbatore district nestled in the foothills of the Western Ghats—became the meeting ground for a unique gathering. The programme, convened by the Biodiversity Management Committee (a local-level body constituted under India’s Biological Diversity Act, 2002, to promote biological diversity), sought to rekindle ways of living more harmoniously with the natural world. A collaborative effort by the Environmental Information, Awareness, Capacity Building and Livelihood Programme (EIACP), the Southern Regional Centre for Marine Biology, the Indian Zoological Research Centre, the Centre for Natural History, and the Tamil Nadu Board for Biodiversity, the training brought together participants from across the state.
Later, I realized that we came together not to learn something new, but to see what we had already known for centuries in a new light.
Part of this programme’s work was to document and preserve the knowledge held by the indigenous people of the forests: the idea being that, having lived there for generations, relatively untainted by outside influences, our unique traditions, habits and culture, and our interactions with the animals we live alongside could help people seeking a more balanced way of living with the ecosystem. The training was offered to a few people representing most of the tribal communities in Tamil Nadu, to give them an idea of what the BMC is and what it aims to do.
Anaikatti is a picturesque, hilly village which lies around 30 kilometres from the city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Rich with streams and diverse wildlife, it is located in the foothills of the Western Ghats. Photo: Prasanth Kumar Dasari.
According to government guidelines, BMCs are to be formed in all panchayats as follows: the Village Administrative Officer (VAO), the tahsildar, and a clerk from his office will represent the government; and any three tribes from the panchayat will send their tribal heads plus three members—the village head (talaiyaari), the village president and one more member—to complete the list with a quorum of eight required. The group is formed to document and classify the soil, flora, fauna, and waterbodies of that region, along with the tribes that inhabit the area and their customs (food, clothing, farming habits and methods, housing, etc.).
The main responsibilities of a BMC include preparing the People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR), managing access to local biological resources, and ensuring fair sharing of benefits arising from their use. These committees form a key part of a three-tiered system for biodiversity governance in India, which also includes the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) at the national level and State Biodiversity Boards (SBB) at the state level. For more information visit the Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Board’s website.
Each participant was selected by their district’s Forest Department. Murugesan, Annamalai and I were selected to represent Dindigul. An Aadhaar card and voter ID were required, which might explain why three of us—Bala from Kanyakumari, Boothathaan from Tirunelveli, and me—were the only ones attending from adivasi communities. Unfortunately, we were not informed in advance what the training would involve; most of the workshops and classes were in either English or Malayalam and I had to depend on other participants to translate for me. I still felt at a loss and could not immerse myself fully in the training because of the communication gap. Luckily, the pamphlets which were distributed were in Tamil and I was able to piece together what was happening.
Wild animals like the Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), an ungulate that is endemic to the Nilgiri Hills and the southern portion of the Western and Eastern Ghats, are now endangered. Seen above in the Nilgiris (1) and below in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve (2), these are creatures the Pazhaiyars once peacefully coexisted alongside in the Palani Hills. Today, the tahr is no longer sighted in Kodaikanal and nearby environs. Photos: Shameer Kadakkal (1), Wikimedia Commons (2).
“Biodiversity includes all the living beings around us and dependent on us: from the single celled amoeba to insects, the plant life of grasses and shrubs and trees, the fishes, crabs, snakes and lizards, the birds and all the animals of the forest, big and small, and why, even humans”, said Professor Dr Raj Mohan, an entomologist and member of the BMC, re-introducing the concept to us.
Our community has foraging and farming practices that ensure the protection of biodiversity. For example, when harvesting vallikkizhangu (the most prized variety of yam we use), we always leave a good portion of the cultivar in the ground so it can regenerate—just as a squirrel stores food in a tree hole and returns for it. Living on the same land for generations, we remember what grows where and can return to harvest it again, when the time is right. When we forage for mushrooms or harvest honey, we never take everything—we leave honeycombs for the bees, and some mushrooms to sprout again. The forest gives because we don’t plunder it, and this ensures our own food security while protecting the land and its abundance.
Living in harmony with nature means choosing how much honey to take, and how much to leave for the bees, according to the Pazhaiyars. Photo: Kural.
Professor Dr Ramakrishnan highlighted an urgent concern, saying, “The farming of thinai, samai, kambu, ragi and other varieties of millets and grains grown by indigenous people has slowly declined over the past decades due to lack of awareness.”
In our own communities, the availability of ration rice has reduced the consumption of millets. The lack of access to our traditional commons has meant that cultivation of these ancient grains has dwindled, reflecting the loss of an entire community of people. Dr. Ramakrishnan insisted that a seed bank must be established to preserve them for future generations, and felt that the BMC could play a major role in making this possible. Dr Mariam of the Keystone Foundation, which we visited the next day, also spoke about the importance of a seed bank for preserving heirloom varieties of black beans, vanishing varieties of paddy, and all the millets.
Dr Oliver King, an ethnobotanist and Director of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Coimbatore, spoke about elephants, bears and leopards, and how conflict with them can be avoided. Some facts about elephants were new and interesting to me—I hadn’t known that elephants have different and specific places within the forest for foraging, mating, and giving birth, and that it is the older females that guide and lead the herd! I also learnt that when elephants roam the forests, their dung is scattered across a large area, and that not only fertilises the soil but also helps in seed dispersal. Data suggests that more than 5,000 seedlings sprout each month from the dung of a single elephant, helping to rewild the forest!
As seen in the second image above, taken in Topslip, which is located in the Anaimalai Tiger Reserve range in Tamil Nadu, humans and elephants don’t always mingle to good effect. Here, a captive elephant carries its feed for the night home. In contrast, adivasi people coexist with wild elephants, photographed here by the author (2). Photos: Murugeshwari Balan (1), Adidas430 (2).
Elephants do not change their habits or paths when moving between areas, which shows how vital the ‘elephant corridor’ is to their lives. With the modernisation of the countryside, their regular paths are now blocked by tarred roads, villages, and railway tracks—hence, the frequent train collisions with calves and pregnant elephants. It was heart-wrenching to watch the short film they showed us on elephant deaths.
Dr King also shared his experiences with the tribal people he had met in Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli districts: “The adivasis need just one look at a tree to give a dissertation worthy of a botany professor. A cursory glance at a piece of rock or soil is enough for them to say where it comes from and what can grow there. Even children can easily identify and mimic bird calls, as if they were trained ornithologists.”
This deep knowledge is ingrained in forest dwellers because they live with the forest; it cannot be acquired through college education alone. Our children, by walking, observing and foraging in the forest with family, absorbed the lore of the wild—learning about insects, whether poisonous or edible, as well as plants, birds and the relationships among them. When we rested in our alais, our elders would share bedtime stories that offered insights into our past and our ways of living in the world. What the world called ‘knowledge’ was a way of life for us.
*
There are three main tribes in the Western Ghats: Pazhaiyar, Pulaiyar and Irular. All have similar lifestyles as hunter-gatherers, but generally do not intermarry. Irulars are the snake-catchers and Pulaiyars are those who bury or cremate the dead. There is no higher or lower caste among them.
During our training, we visited Sembukarai panchayat, near Anaikatti, where many Irular people live, and learnt about their interactions with forest animals in that area and the human-animal conflicts they have faced.
Anaikatti is also home to the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON). Devika, an Irular research scholar at SACON, told us, “We have identified at least 133 varieties of spiders eaten by the Irular community.” What the Irulars eat does not, in any way, diminish insect or animal populations, as the vanavasis (a general term for forest-dwellers) are always careful not to denude their habitat for any reason.
Spotted deer (above) and kaatu maadu or gaur (below) are often encountered in close proximity by Pazhaiyars. Photos: Murugeshwari Balan
During the training, I began to see things differently. It seemed the programme was not so much for us to learn, but for us to understand how to teach the world what we already live by. What they called learnt knowledge, we have carried all along as awareness in our songs, in the way we walk through the forest, in how we read the land. All this is intrinsic to our cultural knowledge, which the outside world does not know, or has forgotten.
Development and the forest: Anaikatti is located in the foothills of the Nilgiris, and features attractions like the well-known Silent Valley National Park, full of water bodies and scenic vistas like the one seen here (1). En route: a view of brick kilns in the Thadagam valley from the road to Anaikatti from Coimbatore (2). Photos: Prasanth Kumar Dasari (1); P Jeganathan (2).
When I became a mother, I thought that sharing these things could begin with children. If children from cities and towns could come and live with us for a few days, they would grasp some of this knowledge, transforming their understanding of a forest, what it contains, and its place in the world; listen to birds, observe how insects behave, notice how mushrooms appear with the rain. I also think of our own children and how we are trying hard to keep them close to our roots. The pull of the town and of school and work, is strong. We must continue to tell them stories, take them to the hills, and show them how our elders gathered honey or herbs, so they don’t forget where they come from.
As for me, when I go down to Dindigul for work, I feel the distance from the hills. Inside the office building, I find it hard to breathe and wait for the day to end.
Only when I return to the hills, when the cool air touches my face, do I feel like myself again: the sholas give life to me and all those who have lived in them.
*At the time of publication, Sky Islands could find no news regarding the formation of new groups, despite three separate representations to the tahsildar by the Pazhaiyar community and others in their village, over an extended period of time.
