Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design 3031465172, 9783031465178

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Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design Mathew A. Varghese

Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design

Mathew A. Varghese

Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design

Mathew A. Varghese School of International Relations and Politics Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam, India

ISBN 978-3-031-46517-8 ISBN 978-3-031-46518-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

I got hospitalised with typhoid during my sixth grade. My friends and teachers could not believe this thanks to my hyper clean habits! Besides the sadness of having to stop my basketball coaching midway (leaving me with a reason for not growing tall) as well as taking a break from a lively school environment I also became a less immune organism. Imagined ‘clean habits’ too eventually took a backseat. A strict regimen of ‘nonfibrous food’ that comprised everything I never enjoyed but now did, became a staple. During my hospital days my parents (Appa and Amma) got me a set of books. They took care to get me subjects I loved by default, animals and wildlife. Many of these were the man-eater and hunting stories by Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson. The Man Eaters of Kumaon, Temple Tiger, Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, or The Black Panther of Sivanipalli; brought into the dull hospital room the ‘marauding cats’ eventually silenced by the heroic Brits—of course for the ‘enfeebled and humble natives’. Yes, I should not forget the maverick Sloth Bear from Mysore! There was a book in Malayalam called ‘Anakadhakal ’ by Kottarathil Sankunni (Elephant stories as this could be translated into). The elephant book was about a dozen or so domesticated pachyderms across Kerala in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. But that is not the point. Most of the stories, obviously with decorations, imaginations, and recollections, were about the ways these giants cohabited with Homo sapiens, in the

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ecosystems comprised of temples, timber coops, towns, riversides, back yards, and feudal houses. I recall a dream from those days. A leopard was running hither and thither in our backyard. This was before I knew the felines as Panthera Pardus with associated habits. This leopard runs for no reason and besides, there was the benefit of dream! A primeval instinct worked even in the dream, and I remained indoors. Others also followed suit, except one. My Appa (father) was out—as in outdoor! And I got insecure for good reason. I saw him happily sitting on the laterite compound wall swinging his feet. The predator was running back and forth right in front of him. I begged him to run indoor and warned him of the feline threat. He smiled and said, ‘leopards do not attack, unless we provoke them’. That sounded like a statement out of an animal behavior text. A boy with an intense dream was not pacified. I kept telling and he repeated the tag line. This went on a loop until I woke up. Days hence, another morning rise- this time my parents woke me up earlier than usual and asked me whether I wanted to go to Silent Valley. I had only heard this name. There were vivid images from a recent magazine (yes, no internet those days!). It was a story of that patch of evergreen forests in the Western Ghats surviving a proposed hydroelectric project. There were the add-on images from bigger green patches like Amazon, Everglades or Congo—photo features in the then-popular Illustrated Weekly or occasionally in Span magazine. This was an offer the self-proclaimed Mowgli could not process easily first thing in the morning. I was assured that this was no offer in a dream as I got on my feet. And thus, I started walking the Ghats. The walks soon gathered details: streams, rivulets, catchments, leech, panoramic lightning in the night, the smell of sholas and evergreen. Sounds, smells, and aftereffects of animals were more frequent than real sightings. My first-ever forest walks were enshrouded in torrential rains, lightning, and thunder. Unnerving flashes in tropical forests though became solace for a rational father assuring a skeptical son on trek paths never taken before. Our night walks back to base camp after the day treks were through covering canopies, pitch dark nights, and narrow trek paths. The multicoloured and smoothly carved river stones weighed down inside my pocket. It did not make the already contemplative walk any better! I kept asking my Appa whether he knew the way back. Afterall there was no sign of the others. He solemnly replied that this is a path, and we should reach and that if we stop what is the guarantee that there are people behind us.

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The rational man in the leopard dream spoke again. We walked the logic and it worked. It worked until the first person whom we met a little ahead in a flash of lightning tempted us to take short cuts! We underestimated mysteries—from that moment meaning of short and long reversed. We walked wherever the deranged feet took us. Occasional trekking, tiger surveys, or bird counts from around the dwelling place continued for many years. There were weekend obsessions like measuring the length and size difference of all kinds of animals. My little sister was my trustworthy apprentice. Among the animals we measured and compared were the Siberian, Bengal, and Javanese tigers, the pumas and ocelots, as well as the blue, sperm, and fin-back whales. Little did we know that the irrational cartwheeling of foot scales in the yard and perambulations (especially while comparing whales) unknowingly nurtured a field archaeologist in my sister many years hence. We had our own interpretations of the books we read. The illustrated Paico classic of Moby Dick was never read for what it was. The ‘white devil’ (as the rogue sperm whale was called) was inevitably our hero. In the neverending recess in those schooldays, we slipped into ‘kallan kadhakal’. This should literally translate as thief-stories, though there hardly was a thief I remember. But the good thing about childhood is that we take liberties with signifiers! It is later that most unlearn these liberties and opt for straightjackets. Our narratives added animals in epic proportions (Cockatoos, Llamas, Marsupials, and Walruses even) and every new animal we read about became an integral character in the still unrecognised oral epic. Amongst the recallable vignettes from childhood that form this preface, there are small regrets as well. My mother’s father (Appachan) who was once a teacher-farmer combination used to take his grandchild for walks across the agrarian village and a hillock where he managed farming and trees. Throughout these walks, he narrated the coordinated presence of plants, birds, earth, and animals that we passed by. My selective brain though sieved the narrative and habitually picked only the winged and legged stories. The later ignorance of plant life is a regret after all these years. The sylvan beauty of it though was a backdrop for forever. Appachan, was the only geographer I met throughout my schooldays. Years have gone by since childhood and many passions dwindled or went to hibernation. Occasions after marriage when my partner called me Tarzan gave me goosebumps. When we saw our daughter putting us, her, other humans, and non-humans on the same pedestal quite naturally it became a comfort. Later in life, within the fields chosen, research,

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cohorts, and domains of work the hibernating passions come awake. I teach political ecologies, anthropocene and politics of climate change and I work on human–animal relationships. Entanglements in ecology have always been an unnamed curiosity. More so the non-human actors. I am unsure of where these take me when I think about the anthropogenic interventions and state designs. The book is the start of a string of thoughts with echoes from childhood. Like the character Ishmael in my childhood favorite Moby Dick, my mind is in a flux in the middle of an ocean of relationships in ecologies. Unlike captain Ahab, I will never call the whales evil. And like Ishmael, I am not a man of the sea. I am only trying to reorient in unsure waters and watery relationships. Maybe I can take liberties with a childhood vignette and invoke a favorite line to start with: ‘Call Me Ishmael’… I recall spaces and faces that/who were significant during parts of this work. The Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) at Shimla where I did a parallel work that is leading to another book, UKZN Durban—South Africa, University of Glasgow and Mahatma Gandhi University have been spaces to work in. Jayan Ponnappan (Forest Guard—Periyar Tiger Reserve), T.V. Sajeev (KFRI—Peechi), Shaji (Maala), Karunakaran (SACON—Coimbatore), Sony R K (WRI—Delhi), Martin (KUFOS—Ernakulam), Anoop Vellani (SSV College Valayamchirangara), Surajit Das (JNU—New Delhi), Neha Mishra (JNU— New Delhi), Meera Gopakumar (University of Edinburg), Sudhish, Ajayan and Kalesh (through Butterfly study networks in Kerala), Unnikrishnan (Retd. Teacher—Sree Sankara College Kalady), Shivan (Auto Driver—Aluva), Resource persons at CDS Trivandrum, K V Kunhikrishnan (Retd. Teacher—U C College Aluva), Caroline Osella (University of London—UK), Bruce Kapferer (UiB—Norway), Sebastian Joseph (U C College Aluva), Bjorn Enge Bertelsen (UiB—Norway), Tereza Kuldova (OsloMet—Norway), Sanjay Srivastava (SOAS, London), Grija Kizhakkepattathil, M V Narayanan (Kalady University), Aditya Pratap Deo (St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi), Charisma Lepcha, Soibam Haripriya (All at the IIAS), Ramdas (Teacher—Malappuram), Leo Kurian (Germany), Sharat and Ramseena (Keraleeyam—Thrissur), Aju John Mathai (Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council—Kerala), Deepa Pullanikkattil (Fiji), Mia Perry, Venessa Duclos and Lisa Bradley (Glasgow) have all been significant at different points of my enquiry or during commentaries.

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There were the comforting presences of many: Srijit, Mangala, Rohan, friends who visited our home, research scholars with me (Abhinand, Harisa, Gahana, and Nikhil) or colleagues (Aparna, Bijulal, Dinesan, Jojin, Ilyas, and Lirar). There are always many who are unintentionally missed. But I am sure they know the regard I have for them. It is ironic that a book on entanglements was insensitive to my own entanglements to my niche ecology—the Oikos. I kept on with nonsensical broodings on bumpy rhythms and slow pace when my family was doing everything, they could to get me going. Appa Amma Srija (My Partner) Rachel (my sister) and of course, Toto (our daughter Mihaela) who is the wild amongst us and Ginny (our dog) with her unconditional welcome-jumps, brushes, and licks—have been my unacknowledged oxygen. Whatever sense I make is for them and the rest is for me to deal with. For the innumerable non-humans amongst us

Kottayam, India

Mathew A. Varghese

Contents

1

Introduction: Ecologies in the Making—A Methodological Journey

1

2

Of Sovereign Designs

21

3

Voices from the Wetlands and Paddy Fields

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Prolegomenon to the Spectacles in the Making

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5

Invasives and Invadability in Perspective

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Riparian Ecologies from the Ghats to the Plains

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River Stories from Periyar

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The ‘Wild’ Among ‘Us’ or the Non-human Other

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Concluding Chapter: Unravelling Entanglements in Ecology

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

First page of the Ambio article with the concept of ‘Great Acceleration’ Earth system trends graph (Source Will Steffen et al. 2015) River networks and marks of riparian arteries (Source Google Map) Markers from the Erstwhile Cochin Princely State in Central Kerala (Source Own) Periyar meandering the industrial area around Eloor and Edayar mentioned (Source Google Map) Ipomea efflorescence along the fields in Veliyathunad, Kochi, Kerala (Source Own) Ipomea efflorescence in the Periyar Tiger Reserve, Idukki, Kerala (Source Own) 1924 Flooding of Munnar Town/The Kundala Valley Light Railway to Munnar, before 1924 destruction (Source Blog-Pazhayathu) Flood Damages Correlated with Ecologically Sensitive Zones in Gadgil Report (Source Indian Meteorological Department, Gadgil Committee Report) Regulator Shutters: Eloor region/Periyar (Source Own) At Pakshipaathalam: Old Tea Plantation taken over by local vegetation (Source Own)

8 10 38 132 143 148 149

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160 200 202

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LIST OF FIGURES

Graph 7.1

Map 7.1

Maps showing the High Flood Level (HFL) crossing days coinciding with increased rainfall (Source Central Water Commission)

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CWC Hydrograph for Vandiperiyar site during 14–16 August, 2018 (Source CWC Report, Sept 2018)

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Introduction: Ecologies in the Making—A Methodological Journey

During the liminal phase between childhood and boyhood, I made several forays into the ecologies outdoor, sitting under trees and spending time on things that never needed accounting or stocktaking. There were sand heaps in almost all compounds, especially where any type of construction work just got over. We had one at home, probably lying there for many years topped by leaves fallen from the nearby jackfruit tree (Plaavu in Malayalam). I seldom associated that with construction work. There was sand mixed with gravel, earth, and red stone pieces everywhere. Interspersed with sand there were mussel (kakka in Malayalam) shells. Some of these remained clasped. When priced open we saw rotting meat. I never knew that these were fresh water mussel shells that came along with river sand extensively depended upon as binders in house constructions. It was of course not yet those years of life when one associates all this with the hybrid grounds we trod on! Then there were the antlion (kuzhiyaana—in Malayalam literally means elephants that live in pits) pittraps along the fine sand, into which we pushed hapless ants and watched the showers of sand thrown by the hunters camoflaged in the small pits. I remember collecting sand with antlions. I brought this back indoors in a defunct school box (Canvas bags in all kinds of malleable shapes were yet to replace the boxes). I watched the fine pits and predations for days in the comforts of the old house verandah until one day the pits had all disappeared! It was only then that my dad, of course after © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_1

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convincing me that nobody threw them away, told that the hunters had become lacewings and flew away. It was my preliminary exposure to what I much later was to call a metamorphosis. The sand heaps offered other unexpected treasures like the small oval rubber balls found while burrowing slanting holes around these heaps for no reason. I probably held one a little too hard between my thumb and forefinger and it burst. The experience was saddening because there lay in slime a distant miniature of the house lizards, I was more familiar with. Obviously, it was dead, and I was the inadvertent murderer. Only much later did I associate these tiny rubber balls with a much larger sluggish lizard called Skinks (Arana in Malayalam). Skinks or the Keeled Grass Skinks, as I later knew them, lay eggs in these introduced sand ecosystems across the region. The moisture from the sand gets absorbed in and the eggs grow larger and rubberier. The heaps became anthropogenic hatcheries for these lizards. That too was a thought yet to be! The present academic drives to understand ecological processes might have surfaced from that liminal subconscious. It could be thanks to the taken for granted perspectives on nature jig-sawed during younger days— later added on with trekking in the wild, bird watching, and drawing delight from early attempts to find explanatory logic. These amateur preoccupations with non-human life worlds configured over course of time, with quasi-academic engagements with animal behaviour and social psychology and resurfaced during my research on urban reconfigurations and ‘urban effects’ (2004–2013). Many imagined projects that tempted me but were suspected to be ‘diversionary’ during early research also find points of entry in the present work. But here they are sustained by other problems, and premises and urgency of processes around. I now follow the actants of ecology in their dialectic and transformational relationships with the life world, which disassembles and reassembles over time and space. In the context of neoliberal globalisation, sovereign orders (states) have transformed. The transformations, far from being abstract, are perceptible, concrete grounded processes, with material and local effects. But states as a pun can also refer to the transforming states of being in the world of several interconnections. In that sense, the idea of state is also a philosophical quality of transacting with different orders within and beyond but with sovereign effects. The particular socioecological integrations and relationalities may be a product of working with or against dominant interests of capital.

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The present work examines the material effects in their relationalities, manifest in configurations of ecologies. It is ethnographically focused on regions in Kerala, but not limited to the region otherwise (in the nonethnographic aspects). But the ethnographic specifics in geography and the biotic order permit extrapolation of ideas that emerge from the field. Specificities however do not suggest insularity. The truth is quite the contrary. These have been unfolding through histories of interconnections. The process is unlike self-justifying isolated wholes (Wolf 1982) associated with functionalist engagements in the social sciences prior to the 1950s. The present work draws from my ethnographic work, the close observation of immediate—as well as remote—geographies, and related literature of both theoretical and empirical kinds. There is considerable diversity in the categories and nature of material that this study draws upon. These include documents related to formal studies, news reports, and administrative decisions. Archival material on ecological issues, early ‘environmental impact assessments’, maps, and survey reports make up another category. A substantial corpus of information has been gathered through direct observation, across a long span of time, during my research career. Much of this was collected through participant observations. Vital insights have been gained from interviews with experts in niche fields (on fish channels, riparian transformations, choice of living). The study also draws ideas, images, artefacts, and information from research in collateral fields like forestry, invasive ecologies, wildlife, and zoogeography. In the face of the diversity of the material, the methodology of the study cannot but be multi-pronged. The data and stories gathered have had to be analysed using rationale/logic of some diversity—causal (in terms of causes and effects)), phenomenological (in terms of subjective perception of, and reflection on, reality), and historical-dialectical (not only in terms of interconnections and interdependence but also of movement, changes, or development through time and space). I have been interested in the work that people do in different ecosystems, and as in this venture, I enter into dialogues premised on own ethnography. Much of this was part of my pre-doctoral and doctoral research on urban reconfigurations and new social formations (2004– 2006/2007–2013). Explanations may proceed from, the manner in which patterns emerge, as in the cases of continuous surfacing of ‘accumulations by dispossessions’ (of human and non-human actors) in the contexts of sovereign shifts. Metaphors have an interpretative role as well.

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The emergence of certain geographies as with the piscian ecosystems with various forms of connections to life around transformed into a parcelled waterscape may be visualised as the transforming logics of ordering places. Places reconfigure as spaces wired into emergent forms of production. Explanation would also involve starting out with certain propositions and relaxed theoretical frames. Propositions could evolve in the course of the work in unanticipated ways. There could be sequences of processes, for instance suggesting newer logics. The components and processes in the sequence could get contradictory or dialectical. Urban works have always had ecological imaginaries. Equilibrium models, and studies of garden cities are instances. These have also been taken up by the Chicago school (Parks 1925; Wirth 1938). But the ecosystemic processes gathered from riparian narratives and hydrological orders to animal life have been conceived of as imagined equilibriums. Things though seem to have worked dialectically and kept transforming. City spaces (distinct from urbanisation as such), still become important also in the sense that they are ecologies/centres of ‘resource’ use. Following from this urbanisation is about the processes that connect the cities with what is otherwise or the non-cities. So for the present work urbanisation can be an ecological lead in that it is also a configuration of social and ecological ‘flows’. Increasingly one confronts the operational landscapes of urbanisation without exception. One can bring back the older urban ecology type of work (Adler and Tanner 2013) that essentially uses the biological models for city habitats envisaged by the garden city movement and the Chicago school. Jane Jacobs (1961), among other critical thinkers, stressed the specific interactions among the different elements that needs to break the equilibrium or homeostatic assumptions. Human ecological studies too have interesting overlaps with urban ecology though the scope is broader. But at the same time some of the favorite technical ideas like ‘ecosystem services’ adopts the tone and tenor of neoliberal globalisation in its dehistoricising, abstracting (quantifying), and ecologising perspectives. Such perspectives delineate biodiversity in terms of value and service potential and have a global scale in terms of the policy. This subsequently translates to national policies (Seppelt et al. 2011). Carbon sequestration, agriculture, hydrological assessment etc. done at regional scales become the key emphasis. With all its depoliticised perspectives, ecosystem services have obviously factored in the environment more than the early developmentalist models. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s critical approaches also

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emerged, though legacies of past approaches are still much evident in the bounded logic of certain urban geographical approaches (Jonas et al. 2015). There is a plenitude of material based mostly on the Indian subcontinent (Gadgil and Thapar 1990; Guha 1983, 1994; Rangarajan 1994; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Skaria 1999; Baviskar 1995; Saberwal 1999) which maintain a broad focus on human ecology and which draw the connections between historical records, political technologies, classifications, geographies as well as the more recent interrogations of climate. Very significant perspectives on ecologies as connected with power orders like colonial processes, forest policies, and environmental history, important insights on the historically changing material underpinnings and classification of ecologies. Gadgil and Thapar’s work (1990) in fact happened much before some of the later work in that vein appeared in political ecology. Perspectives on forest dwellers and their implication in power, as well as the more recent attempts to incorporate factors like climate and evaluations of ecology as resources (Cederlof 2014) are all important and connect with much of the contemporary work elsewhere. A substantial part of this work (not all) is primarily focused on forests and relationalities with forests. Further, there are ecological questions and conflicting points of view that have often come with activists, naturalists, scientists, and nature enthusiasts who have kept intervening through pedagogies, field trips, public talks, publications, and natural history societies. In the Kerala context, it ranges from John C. and Satish Chandran or N. A. Nazeer— the latter through his photography. Further, there are people who have been with biodiversity boards, movements, and the innumerable alternative or popular magazines (e.g., Soochimukhi, Ankh, Keraliyam, Mathrubhoomi magazine). Though there is a lot to draw on in all the aforesaid material, my idea is to ethnographically explore phenomena, be that a geologic formation, system of life and non-life, ecosystem, or peculiar phenomenon, not necessarily in particular situations (i.e. forest or urban) but as processes that cut across situations and frames. A predominantly paddy-based wetland order cannot be delinked from riparian arteries, invasive ecologies from urban processes, or the wild from the domestic. Ecologies in the making for me involve breaking, assembling, or deconstructing, in epochal contexts like the anthropocene that emphasise

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relationalities/connectivities. The reconfigurations in ecological relationships emerge in dialectic interaction with, changing morphologies, and imaginations of power. Though not premised on the anthropocene Raymond Williams had argued (1973) that nature was a cultural artefact—not only was the natural world altered by human action, but our perceptions too have been structured by these.

The Anthropocene It is necessary to dwell briefly on the basic premise and idea of the athropocene and why this concept is important. Detailed evaluation of the concept with reference to the context will follow as chapters progress. The idea of anthropocene, generally attributed to the Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) refers to the time we transact with. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the temporal context may refer to the period when human impacts started leaving stratigraphic traces on earth. But this is yet to be formally approved by the commission as an epoch. Meanwhile, the idea itself has already taken a life of its own if cues are taken from the manner in which it appears with or without substantiation across academia. Hence it has taken flight from the realm of geology, chemistry, and stratigraphy into interdisciplinary attempts to grapple with contemporaneity. Geologists classify planetary history into eras, periods, and epochs. Accordingly, the epoch is well within the holocene. Holocene in Greek is made up of holo = whole and kainos = new. So it is a ‘wholly new’ epoch that followed the Pleistocene epoch [approximately 11,700 years before the present, and part of the Quaternary period]. There are differing points of view as to when the earth’s human age began. There are those who say this began ten thousand years ago. This coincides with the almost universal extinction of megafaunas such as giant sloths, woolly rhinos, and sabre-toothed cats. They were mostly hunted out by Neolithic hunters. This period sees an overlap between the Anthropocene and Holocene (Kunkel 2017). There is also a more modern periodisation. The 1600s depopulation of the Americas, after European conquest, had the unintended effect of reforestation across what was called the New World. These trees took away a major part of carbon dioxide in the then atmosphere. It is now known that the thinner atmosphere, along with diminished sunspot activity, resulted

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in a Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century (Davis 2016; Kunkel 2017). Further, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, ideas, and human populations; between the Americas and the so-called ‘old world’. The process was called ‘Columbian Exchange’, and had a major impact on zoogeography through human activity. By the 1800s ever greater amounts of fossil fuel were burned compared to the first industrial revolution. The new wealth accumulations were of course accompanied and supported by raw materials and slave labour on greater dimensions from the colonised spaces and the further forays into the Americas from where gold was extracted in greater quantities. Bullion accelerated anthropocene processes much further. Since anthropocene is measured stratigraphically as well the signs on the strata were carefully observed every since extractions of fossil fuels and minerals accelerated post-1900s. From the 1960s radionuclides made their presence felt as a result of nuclear technology and the soon-to-follow arms race during the cold wars. The Anthropocene Working Group/Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy keeps close watch on how significant some of these effects are at the geological scale. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) based on indicators and synchronous effects even in a single homo sapien lifespan puts the trends since the 1950s in sharp relief. The climatic dynamic that ensued was called ‘great acceleration’ (Fig. 1.1) by Crutzen et al. in the journal, Ambio (2007) and Will Steffen in the journal, The Anthropocene Review (2015). It is this second industrial revolution mediated by fossil fuel that released unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere led to a very warm planet, and ‘installed’ the anthropocene as per others. To dwell a bit on the science that understands such transformations— ice cores are often used to imaginatively reconstruct how the earth’s climate must have been in the past. As ice is drilled down in Antarctica or Greenland at around 360 meters one observes that the core was formed around 20,000 years BP. Here one finds ancient atmospheric bubbles and greenhouse gases. The ice cores also contain dust from volcanic action and storms. Further, there are also pollen, microbes, and parts of meteorites. The trapped air bubbles are aptly called ‘fossil air’. All these could be studied for the variations and could be crucial leads to some of the relatively new geological transformations mentioned earlier. We can take the case of the dip in carbon concentrations in the ice cores during the Columbian exchange which apart from the transfer of fauna and flora also

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Fig. 1.1 First page of the Ambio article with the concept of ‘Great Acceleration’1

resulted in a massive reduction in human population because of contact 1 The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Will Steffen; Paul J. Crutzen; John R. McNeill. Ambio; December 2007; 36, 8.

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with new microbes. The effect of this dip and the concomitant increase in green cover resulted in ever lesser concentrations of CO2 which is detectable from the ice cores. In the period between 1970 and 2005, as noted by Crutzen et al. (2007) and Steffen et al. (2015), human well-being measured in gross production and consumption has reached high levels in many countries, especially with reference to specific populations. The planetary life support system has simultaneously been eroded during this time. The United Nations Climate Change Conference at Paris (2015) marks the anthropocene climatic transformations as global in scale and geopolitical in scope. The ice cores provide an independent measure of the scale and tempo of human-induced change. This includes biodiversity loss, changes to the chemistry of atmosphere and ocean, as well as urbanisation, or globalisation (Fig. 1.2). This could be placed in the larger context of earth’s history. But anthropocene is an eminent candidate as a methodological model for ethnography. Its complex makeup would help to understand, the ‘situated connectivities that bind us into multi-species life’ (Rose 2009: 87).2 According to Anna Tsing (2015), it is a methodological invitation to tread the entangled landscapes, where ethnography follows landscapes and life to understand how they become interconnected and in the process, demands working in a space that violates the 200-year-old divide between social and natural sciences as well as divisions in intellectual life. Accordingly, many attempts to deal with the divide often happened through ‘formal’ gestures. Social scientists in the process of efforts ‘to look like scientists’, missed the interesting things in science like the relationalities to other beings and in extreme cases even remorphed evolution to ‘survival of the fittest’ type of logic—the logic gets exemplified in the post-Spenserian hijack of Darwin as a champion of capitalism. Natural scientists who went into ethics committees did not quite question the categories of ethics that had already been set in place. The most infamous instances were those of the neurologists called into ethics committees during the nazi period. Once again we feel the same tenor when psychiatrists from National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) were asked by the state to intervene—treat people who opposed the Kudamkulam nuclear plant in India (2012). 2 Rose, Deborah Bird. 2009. Introduction: Writing in the Anthropocene. Australian Humanities Review 49: 87.

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Fig. 1.2 Earth system trends graph (Source Will Steffen et al. 2015)3

3 Steffen, Will, et al. 2015. The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2 (1): 81–98.

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Fig. 1.2 (continued)

Disciplinary barriers were only rarely breached. But at present a gamut of work engages people across fields bound by common excitements (AURA Working Papers Vol. 2.; Kirskey and Helmreich 2010). This provides the present interrorations which is a coming together of sojourns in wildlife, curiosities in the sciences and ethnographic research, with some of the needed moorings. Here the anthropocene is not about the excitement of a new word coined, which obviously leads to a lot

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of hasty humanities and sciences who take it as a new ‘toy’, as Anna Tsing puts it (AURA Opening Conference, 2013); but it is about a major ‘problem’ confronted within the context of the scale and tempo of ecosystemic transformations. There are also those situations in which the livability within ecosystems is in question. And this does involve human disturbance. This is not just any disturbance and there is never an imagination of the undisturbed in the sense of ‘pristine’. Disturbances have been on for large scales of time, involving both humans as well as non-human actants from beavers who build dams to bacteria. Anthropocene refers not to disturbances per se but the recently emerging scope and scale of disturbance that threatens the multispecie life and relationship. Anthropocene is neither about control or mastery. Rather it is about how much is out of control as well as the unintentional designs that ensue. Intentionality in fact is a possible pitfall in highlighting the megalomaniac authorship of humans to excess. It makes you forget the role placed by other actants and the emergent relationalities. It can also lead to the logic that says ‘good intentions are what we need’, as if all problems are because of something that went aberrant from otherwise good ways. Thus there is a logical entailment of institutional fixes as demonstrated by carbon trade and stock market interventions by contemporary states to fund corporate debt-write-offs. The policy prescriptions and purposive creations to suit a running system expect a certain order in nature. The unintentional is precisely about the encounters with unexpected natures. These might not be delightful, pleasing, or idyllic as cataclysms like fires and floods convey. It can be pleasant as well as we will see in certain adaptive ecosystems. Encounters, whether pleasant or unpleasant points at the proliferation of counter-utilitarian discourses (Gandy 2019) from time to time and in accordance with the changing deployments of state designs. The anthropocene in Kerala talks about the vernacular presentations of such phenomena hitherto unrecognised and overlooked. Morphologies of sovereignities, metaphors from wetlands, relations in ecology, invasive ecologies, riparian orders, and the entanglements with animals through the chapters to follow are mostly about recognising the unrecognised and pausing by the overlooked. The divisions between sciences have often missed out on the intertwined nature of problems- from settled living, through urban processes

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to river diversions. Here I am prompted to explore the mess to understand the possibilities in anthropogenic landscapes replete with unintentional designs. So anthropocene as well as the problem at hand viz. ecologies in the making engage me with some of the ethnographic works which have critically reflected on the way the cosmos of living beings has been studied or understood. These works (Ingold 2000; Descola 1996; Vivieros de Castro 1998, 2004; and Latour 2004) have questioned the different kinds of divides that have characterised academic observations like the modern and postmodern, life and non-life, society and nature, human and animal, humans’ autonomous moral existence and animals’ amoral existence for the use of humans, etc. For Tim Ingold, the idea of open was something important. Gibson’s ecological perspectives are heavily drawn from and thus between earth and sky there is a gamut of objects, and this makes spaces habitable. But then we also have to take note of the fluxes in the mediums and get immersed in these. There is a great weaving of objects in the open and the open is cluttered with land features, animals, plants, inanimate objects, and artefacts. The open binds things beyond enclosures and boundaries that appear from moment to moment. To inhabit such a space is to be immersed in incessant movements. Substances and mediums entangle into the beings that inhabit this open. According to Descola who did his Amazon ethnography either saw nature as mere demonstrative props or methodological constraints on the way to understand society or put culture as an epiphenomenon to ecology’s ‘natural’ work, thus reducing the embodiment of nature in myths and cultural structures. So much of Descola’s work looks into relations between humans and their environments from the standpoint of symbolic relations of organising nature and the ways nature becomes socialised. Ingold’s participant observation is contingent on the circumstances and advances towards no end. Methodologically they tread ways of carrying on with humans and non-humans with a cognisance of the past but responding to contemporaneity and open towards multiple possibilities as well. The ecologies of materials that he works with deal with such limitations that prioritises materials as finished artifacts rather than differential properties as well as the conflation of things with objects. Rather the emphasis has been on flows of energy and circulations of materials and in the ways, things get enrolled in the forms studied. These works help to constitute a possible terrain of research in the problematic waters of unprecedented human action.

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So What Could Be the Anthropology of Anthropocene? Philippe Descola’s (2013) work on the Achuar since the 1970s focused on the relationship between human societies and natural systems they inhabit. Achuar is one of the Jivaroan peoples in the headwaters of the Marañon River (Peru and eastern Ecuador). The broad relations between nature/culture here, stressed the need to go beyond the binaries. Bruno Latour had been part of a French civil service mission to Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and worked mostly in the Salk Laboratories-Sandiego-Science Studies. His work (1986) attempts to diminish the separation between human and non–human actors—actor–network theory—when describing chains of interconnection and the move from experimental inscriptions to scientific ‘facts’. The approach and multispecies ethnography help to go beyond static, binary, or exclusive assumptions; into entanglements of technologies, humans, geographies, and non-humans; whereby everything gets foregrounded, and becomes political. A non-human animal is not just that, rather as Latour and Woolgar (Laboratory Life) say, it is made through certain epistemic processes. But the multiple ontologies of the animal take it through different becomings as part of the relationalities they enter into. The idea of relationality beyond language, culture, or communication (Farias and Bender 2010) and into all entities and objects—living and non-living, tools, technologies, texts, formulae, institutions and humans—becomes the key. Relationalities in these works pertain to distinct and incommensurable realms. Much of the ethnography realised that the nature/culture did not work on the ground and that not only did people create the environment but that the environment is never a mere backdrop. They are partners in a dialogic process. The modernist logic of binaries came undone with Achuar attributing agency and intentions to most things around them. Observing continuities and discontinuities with humans and nonhumans, the present project is interested in collectives which are not reducible to societies in the more anthropocentric sense. These socionatures are neither amenable to simplistic objectification, naturalisation, or sublimation of humans. Rather it renders it impossible to distinguish in the collective the part that used to be attributed to humans and that attributed to nature. Anthropocene though is also tricky if it is a reification of humans whereby humans become supreme geo engineers devising technologies

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for all around. With this could be added a hubris, exemplified in the contemporary authoring of interconnected rivers from the himalayas to the peninsula or in more nuanced embeddings in projects and proposals for sustainable development. This study of collectives needs to go not just ‘beyond’ nature and culture because ‘beyond’ imagines that there is a given that probably had never been there. So this will be rather a ‘before and beneath nature and culture’. The idea is not to have apriori nature and culture even if the concepts do come in the work. The different agencies or actants and the connections between them are best portrayed in the concept of interagentivity (Descola 2013). This is unlike linear causal relationships.

Ethnography Informed by Political Ecology One of the afterthoughts from global ecological enquiries is that while mega processes like climate crisis is true it is not just about change but also about the distinct effects on places. Climate changes are also extrapolations from inequality and distribution. Imagine a whole set of people in places moving towards imagined parities based on productivity (GDPs) alone and all depending on fossil fuel. What would that entail? And if that should not be the case in terms of a long term well-being then what model of equality needs to come up? Further, don’t these necessitate fundamental transformation in the production order itself? Now consider one of the categories used to assess the ecological impacts, viz. the ecological ‘footprints’. Do they (a Latourian fact) speak on their own in the abstract, considering the differential situations people across places are implied in? In order to move further, the history of earth systems, the biotic life, the complex history of human beings as well as the history of capitalism need to come together. That is what necessitates a project of political ecology that also necessitates politicising the anthropocene. This holds immense potential by way of thinking beyond binaries in relationships. Political ecology itself has moved from the classic Pigs for the Ancestors (1968) based in Papua New Guinea to Eric Wolf’s Ownership and Political Ecology (1972). The former by Roy Rappapport went beyond functionalist orientation to a more scientific and ecological ethnography. Rappaport’s work laid importance to complex ecological systems and the factoring in of non-human elements like flora and fauna as well. He

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argued that the different ritual cycles for instance operated as a homeostatic mechanism regulating the size of the pig population, acreage in cultivation, fallow periods, energy expenditure in subsistence activities, protein ingestion, man-land rations, and the frequency of fighting. PostFoucault discourses that become the basic architecture of language and which are wrapped in power relations have had to be considered. So even Rappaport who otherwise went further from bland separations and logics of functionalism wrote about people as if they live in a ‘state of nature’. Colonialism or coffee industries that people, non-humans, and places were implied in were missing. So certain regions ended up as ‘pasts’ or some ideal present, and bereft of political implications. Wolf’s Ownership and Political Ecology (1972) was one of the initial works that brought several of the outsides of ‘history’ into networks of relationships. Political ecology has hence moved towards the recent work on interspecies relationships in different ecological contexts to those (Cronon 1991; Swyngedouw 2004; Harvey 1996; Castree 2001) who closely interrogate the material transformations of nature. These go beyond the anthropocene proposals that only challenge boundaries (like Latour often does) to how habitats or ecologies play out power. The most urbanised commodities to the most ‘primordial’ looking wilderness are repositories of anthropocene contexts. As put forward and empirically substantiated by ethnographer and historian William Cronon wilderness ‘a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural’, is a myth and is unlike how nature is (Cronon et al. 1996: 7– 55). There are global networks of ecological relationalities subsumed even in some of the most unsuspicious ice cream balls to the most pristine island ecosystems. Vanilla, which is one of the prime ingredients in ice creams the world over is extracted from the pods of Vanilla planifolia, an orchid. Originating probably in the southern Americas, this plant, a part of colonial engagements of the French, got introduced in the Indian Ocean Island of Madagascar in the 1800s. At Present Madagascar which is also home to the greatest share of endemic species (both flora and fauna) holds the maximum share of the commercial cultivation of vanilla. What happens at present is the coming together of people within the government, contraband agents, and global trading networks that specialise in multimillion illegal trades in commodities like rosewood. This happens through the money laundering that takes place through vanilla’s global pricing (Watts 2018).

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Thus, ecosystems inhabited by the rarest of animals presented in all their serenity are connected to the unsuspicious balls of ice cream through networks of global trade, the nexus between governments and contraband, pricing of commodities, as well as thousands of farmers involved both in cultivation as well as violent engagements with illegal traders in wildlife products.

The Tools I Work With The tools I work with include interspecies bodies as well as multispecies landscapes and relationalities. Interspecies bodies are needed to understand how landscapes become. Through the chapters there will be many such situations, both ethnographic and from literature. Then there are the several disturbance ecologies that address imagined equilibriums and naturalisations. There is for example an island system that forms part of my riparian enquiries as well as invasive ecologies that deal with disturbance ecologies. Further, there are the unintentional designs. Very often ecological consequences and sociobiological outcomes are unintended designs (e.g. the foraging habitats of water birds in the part on waterscapes- the waste dump habitats in urbanising contexts). The present work points towards the need for an anthropological project to account for systems of difference that make sense and allow us to understand the variety of life forms as perceived and acted upon by humans. This follows a lot from the science of interagentivity of the kind pioneered by Gregory Bateston (1972—Steps to an Ecology of Mind) and continued therefrom by people like Descola (2013). I try to work in the interstices of contacts or on the interagentivity between actors. I did have to draw on the ways of ethologists, zoogeographers and ecologists to deal with this interagentivity in order to have a firmer grip on what is on. When anthropologists think in terms of the anthropocene there could well be a globe-enveloping objectification of the anthropocene. This harks on some imagined antediluvian global harmony. Politicisation of anthropocene makes it anything but homogenous. So there needs to be a constant caution on global power scales and schemes. The multiplicity of agency is a way in which collectives can be composed. With multispecies ethnography creatures/actants that appeared on the borders (as part of landscapes, food for humans, symbols, or in the newer identities as ‘resources or service’) come more to the foreground. In this way ‘zoe’

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or ‘bare life’ that Agamben talks about now becomes ‘bios’ or the political. One becomes concerned about ‘becomings’ or that which emerges from alliances. The idea is to work with some of these alliances, through chapters that flow in and out: from sovereign designs to wetlands, from the disconnected spectacles in ecologies to the operational fields in ecologies. Invasiveness in perspective, the variant topographies networked by riparian systems, stories from a river as well as the wild amongst us unpack the operational fields. I try to ask through these overlapping sessions what entangled and unintended socio-natures throw back at the designs of the day.

References Adler, Frederick R., and Colby J. Tanner. 2013. Urban Ecosystems: Ecological Principles for the Built Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Castree, N., and B. Braun (Eds.). 2001. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Cederlof, Gunnel. 2014. Monsoon Landscapes Spatial Politics and Mercantile Colonial Practice in India. RCC Perspectives, No. 3, Asian Environments: Connections Across Borders, Landscapes, and Times: 29–36. Cronon, William, Samuel P. Hays, Michael P. Cohen, and Thomas R. Dunlap. 1996. Forum: The Trouble with Wilderness. Environmental History 1 (1996): 7–55. Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton. Crutzen, P. J., and E. F. Stoermer. 2000. The “Anthropocene”. Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18. Crutzen, Paul, Will Steffen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio, December. Davis, Mike. 2016. The Coming Desert: Kropotkin, Mars and the Pulse of Asia. New Left Review 97, Jan/Feb. Descola, P. 1996. Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice. In Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. P. Descola and G. Palsson, 85–102. London: Routledge. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farias, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How ActorNetwork Theory Changes Urban Studies. London and New York: Routledge.

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Gadgil, Madhav, and Romila Thapar. 1990. Human Ecology in India: Some Historical Perspectives. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 15 (3): 209–223. Gandy, Matthew. 2019. The Fly that Tried to Save the World: Saproxylic Geographies and Other-than-Human Ecologies. Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, Wiley: 392–406. Guha, Ramachandra. 1983. Forestry in British and Post-British India: An Historical Analysis. Economic and Political Weekly 18(44 and 45): 1882–1896. Guha, Ranajit. 1994 [1983]. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, USA: Random House. Jonas, Andrew E.G., Eugene Mc Cann, and Mary Thomas. 2015. Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction. Wiley Blackwell. Kirskey, Eben S., and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–576. Kunkel, B. 2017. The Capitalocence. London Review of Books 39 (5): 22–28. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986 [1979]. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Park, Robert. 1925. The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (with R.D. McKenzie & Ernest Burgess). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rangarajan, Mahesh. 1994. Imperial Agendas and India’s Forests: The Early History of Indian Forestry, 1800–1878. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 31 (2): 147–167. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2009. Introduction: Writing in the Anthropocene. Australian Humanities Review 49: 87. Saberwal, Satish. 1999. Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conservation in the Western Himalaya. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Seppelt, R., C.F. Dormann, F.V. Eppink, S. Lautenbach, and S.A. Schmidt. 2011. A Quantitative Review of Ecosystem Service Studies: Approaches, Shortcomings and the Road Ahead. Journal of Applied Ecology 48 (3): 630–636. Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Steffen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, and Lisa Deutsch. 2015. The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2 (1): 81– 98. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vivieros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropolgical Institute 4 (3, September): 469–488. Vivieros de Castro, E. 2004. The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. Common Knowledge 10 (3): 463–484. Watts, Jonathan. 2018. Madagascar’s Vanilla Wars: Prized Spice Drives Death and Deforestation. The Guardian, March 31. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London and Nottingham: Chatto & Windus and Spokesman Books. Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44 (1): 1–24. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 2

Of Sovereign Designs

There has been comprehensive visions, standardisations or all encompassing designs in history, like that of globalisation invested both with archimedean and anthropocentric points of view. The spherical imagination of the earth we inhabit has been there in varying forms from Greco-Roman times. There were the more navigationally informed and mathematically informed ‘globe’ models during the mediaeval period in Europe, with Turkish astronomers or during the Mughals. Nevertheless, it is the modernising forces of communication, and satellite technology, mediated by states, with sovereign controls at home and imperial powers that expanded and made the globe an accessible political paradigm. The globe went on to become the caricature world propelled and played around with ease in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 movie ‘The Great Dictator’ in which the actor plays a parody character of Adolf Hitler. Adenoid Hynkel, the character wants to be left alone in his room. He gazes at the globe, feels the globe, spins it around at will, and dances with it in the background of Wagnerian symphony, until the globe bursts in his own hand. Systematic mapping proceeded from the seventeenth century along with colonial imperialism, and started structuring the topological and scaled globes that we now keep in our drawing rooms. But this is about the physical perception of the globe. Globalisation as an idea is not just about that. Presently globalisation is not only about interconnections, collapse of space and time, or the perception of earth as a globe. Rather © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_2

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it is about the expansion of a particular design of liberalism mediated by finance capital. This version allows for a spectrum of global philosophies from uninhibited development to sustainable development; from welfare states to oligarchic states; from modernist separation of humans and non-humans to incorporation of the latter as ‘resources’. Going back to where we started, it is notable that, along with some of the earlier attempts to imagine the sphere, and to make projection from the perfect sphere onto a flat surface, there was a desire to find perfection. So, any observed astronomical and geographical ‘imperfection’ was hard to be accommodated (Woodward 1989)! As with the sphere, there is a corollary to contemporary globalisation as well and that is what becomes of the spillovers, the excess or deemed ‘imperfections’; to the aforesaid protocols. In the Greek cartography, there was the map for the inhabited world or the Oikoumene and the Global world which was called Ges (Woodward and Harley 1987). The latter was informed by the then travels to lesser known parts. The inhabited world was kept separate from the lesser known Ges. The present globalisation does not stay separate; rather it imposes a certain idea of Ges constituted by the informational imbalances and needs of capital. So, the global is also about impositions of protocol on the Oikoumene. When I talk about a globalising state, I have to qualify what that means and entails for the ecosystems in the making. If that only refers to the networking of regions across the planet by means of trade and exchanges the process has been on for a long time. With respect to the region that now comprises Kerala the greater part of history was turned towards the oceanic systems of exchange. The Indian Ocean was a zone where different forms of power and engagements converged and it was towards the networks that spanned the Indian Ocean system that the region of the west coast has been turned towards until the advent of the modern nation state (Panikkar 1945; Heitzman 2008). There is another more contemporary use that refers to a ‘boundary less’ world that in turn becomes a highly unqualified rhetorical or abstract usage that does not address the coming to be of the global. It just becomes an extension of a marketing strategy (Masaki and Helsen 1998). When I use globalising state, I specifically refer to the relationalities inherent to state designs. Such designs deploy capital vis-à-vis actors not only in their human form but also in other life forms and non-life forms. Further, the reference is to the transformations in the sovereign order that governs and classifies life.

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The Indian state at present overtly expresses all the tendencies of corporate-oligarchic control (Kapferer 2005). Oligarchies refer to organised power informed by the dynastic controls and close-knit ties and corporation refers to a body that comes together in common interests (ibid.). They are based on family, kin modes of association and distributions of power. It is not that this was not in the making in the post-independence phase. The colonially inherited houses of power have always been behind the steering wheel (Ali 1986; Thakurdas 1945; Datta 1970; Damodaran 2008). The role of corporate houses like the Tatas, Birlas, Godrej or the post-independent banks have had structuring significance in the political ecologies both during the early planning phases till the end of 50s or the more piecemeal and gradually skeptical panning phases afterwards in the country (Ganguly 2013; Kudaisya 2011). Despite these, the body politics was inevitably qualified by the intervention of the state in its contractual obligations to the populations. In the present context, oligarchic corporations break lose all the checks and balances of the state and come to wield the rights of individuals. In response, the state acquires the form of such oligarchic formations. They become public–private hybrids that mediate people into neoliberal forms of globalisation. With the decline of contractual obligations, exemplified in the final dismantling of license raj by the 1990s, in the neoliberal phase, a façade of welfare state has been on the rise as in the persistence of the planning commission (Patnaik 2015). In hindsight one sees the gradual informalisation of what appeared to be social contracts post-independence by the 60s itself. This is evident in the slow but steady disempowerment of the planning process and the upper hand enjoyed by governmental agencies and development planning from the 60s onwards (Kudaisya 2011). Post-90s the last checks and balances on the free flow of capital have been undone with the supplanting of the structures in the post-colonial developmentalist state with neoliberal bodies of planning overseen by an authoritarian performative order. Significantly with the retreat of the contractual state, there has been ever more centralisation of power with the individual states (in the Indian context) only having the choice to fall in line. The nation state, in its role as manager of money flows, largely becomes a facilitative structure. There are newer protocols in the making that do not give any space for exceptions from the dominant modes of finance capital, whereby institutions that create credit (based on people’s indebtedness) and all other forms of capital merge, under the control of oligarchies. Apparatuses like Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

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are exemplary protocols. They create exceptions to the erstwhile rules and regulations. The point is that the exceptional order itself becomes omniscient. It is endlessly reproduced as urban reforms, land legislations that facilitate capital and massive loan write-offs for corporates (with concomitant public indebtedness). In the process, the exceptional protocols become synonymous with normative (Varghese 2013, 2017), unprecedented, and total state design. There is an obverse side to the way by which neoliberal protocols become manifest as malleable technologies that work through exceptions. This regards the manner in which the dominant order subsumes any possibility of recognising the crisis or disasters generated by the running system and power- be they climate events, deprivations, migrations, or environmental destruction. This often happens by the portrayal of such events as mere ‘exceptions’ that can be addressed by system-generated ‘fixes’.

Capitalist Logic, Binary Designs, and the Lack of ‘Recognition’: Very often the most overt phenomena with ‘political’ implications seem to happen in one realm, and those with environmental implications happen in another. This is because of the modernist disciplinarian divisions as well as the embodiment of such compartmentalised notions. And this is despite the common knowledge that they are mutually implicated. That is precisely one of the preoccupations of political ecologists. But despite that there are some major issues that are on that often hide the tenuous links that underlie. Among them are the refugee movements. Once again it might be common knowledge that there are climate-induced movements of refugees. But what about the conflict or war-induced movements of people, through the most difficult and dangerous conditions being related to climate as well. The Syrian refugee crisis has been the most prominent of human movements off late. But there has not been much public talk on the continuous draughts from year 2006 in Syria. The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) mentions ‘total crop failure’ for instance. There has been a massive exodus of people into the cities. The extremely tense political situation following the massive human rights abuses both by the existing regime as well as ISIS, added to the exploding population who moved to the cities out of desperation. The Guardian article ‘Global warming contributed to Syria’s 2011 uprising,

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scientists claim’ (Ian Sample, science editor, 2 Mar 2015), talks about the massive influx of people prior to the escalation in conflicts in 2011. Reduced rain, pressures from modes of agriculture on groundwater, the previous arrivals of Iraqi refugees following the war, and the ongoing political crisis, all assembled together into a hybrid scenario where environmental issues can no more be separated from political situations. The most visible movements of people following wars were no longer warinduced alone. That is precisely why there are arguments along the line (ibid) that bare changing of guards will not solve issues. Similar situations devolve with the refugees from East Africa or Central Africa. If one takes cues from history there is the infamous Bengal Famine of 1943 wherein there was a coming together of war, colonial governance, and climate into their extremes. Famine, which is often thought to be a result of poor rains or crop failures, can no more be just that, whether that is Bengal of 1943 or Ireland between 1845 and 1849 (Tharoor 2016; Mukherjee 2011; Purohit 2018; Williamson 1990; Cody 1987). The latter cannot be dissociated from the trade restrictions imposed by Britain in order to keep grain prices high (Corn Laws 1815–1846), unlike the Malthusian perspective that does not factor in the capitalistic order that was to be sustained at any cost. Such compartmentalised techno-managerialism that coincided with the industrial order of the day played a major part in what the famine became. In both these famines, millions died. It must be noted that the industrial order itself came to be in the West on the shoulders of the agrarian revolutions, from the early part of the eighteenth century. The conditions were already in place by the end of the 1690s, for a new order of production, raw materials, and wage labour relationships. The several changes in agrarian order like price rise and low productivity often supplied surplus labour in the form of wage labour in industries. Early forms of privatisations of the commons happened in the form of enclosure acts (Moore 2015). People were alienated from the land and were reduced to bare labourers who created profit for the industrial capitalist. At the same time, Homo sapiens had to be maintained on a thin line on which they neither get the value equivalent for what they produce nor get reduced to a being who cannot consume the surplus generated in capitalist production. Or else they threaten the system to come to a grinding halt with no one to consume. The new relationalities were also about ecological orders in the making that did not pertain to the effects on human beings. The closing off of open fields and what used to be pastures in the commons, in effect made it difficult to graze animals.

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There were more and more binaries between the wild and the non-wild. The arrival of legalities with respect to ‘property’ was not just about law, but it was about the advent of changes in relationalities to life. These in turn had their toll on what happened when climatic changes or crop failures occurred. All of these are wake-up calls towards more relational or dialectical thinking and less piecemeal or compartmentalised designs. The above instances that bring about relational thinking in the context of colonialism as well as capitalism bring natures, politics, power, and histories together but in a dialectical relationship. They also remind one that there are no social relations with humans alone (without the rest of nature) as well as environmental/ecological relations without human agencies. What the ‘enclosure’ acts in 1800s did in the process of driving away subsistence methods of farming in Europe were to degrade the system of soil replenishment as well (Holleman 2017). Such possibly unintended consequences were followed by commodified agriculture that dovetailed into industry. This soon made vast stretches of land uncultivable as well as off limits to other forms of life like those animals that grazed and the wild that coexisted with the commons. In the context of colonialism this also resulted in the dependencies on ecologies elsewhere that became usurped to replenish the soil at home. This is exactly what happened in the case of the exploitation of guano (excrement of sea birds) in colonial South Americas to fulfil the needs of a fertiliser industry that was needed to support the new farming methods. What Marx termed a ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster 2013) was an idea from the then scientific breakthroughs. This was effective in addressing the changing relations between humans and the rest of nature explanatory of the transactions by the exchange of ‘matter’ within ecosystems. Enclosures were also the primordial accumulations by dispossessions that hence have increased in scale and complexity with the transformations that capital has undergone. Capitalist forms of relationships that cut across humans, non-humans, politics, environment, nature, or culture in their imagined compartmentalised forms do so by hiding the gross asymmetries associated with the relationships involved. These are asymmetries in power at different points in history. There have been asymmetries in social relations as exemplified during the colonial contexts or the more neoliberal global contexts of nation states (as witnessed in wars and mass migrations) and environmental asymmetries (as associated with the famine drought or crop failures as produced ecological processes). But the asymmetries have been effectively effaced in history and naturalised by dominant ideologies like

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civilising and modernising missions or manufactured consents to be incorporated into globalised developmentalism. Effaced from view were the complex relationships that hosted these metabolic relationalities as well. Marx elaborates in detail about such effacements in the form of ‘debasement’ of ‘men and nature’ of all the associated values (1844). This is what money essentially did by its abstractions and the reduction of all relations into linear wage labour relationships. These designs were further consolidated with the biological metaphors drawn through an amalgamation of Darwinian ecological perceptions selectively added on with Malthusian values (Harvey 1996). Much of the insights from Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) on cooperative animal behaviour even across species as well as the sympathetic tendencies that help the survival of communities; in the larger context of colonialism and nascent capitalism got de-emphasised in evolutionist literature that resonated with capitalism. Thus, much like the deletions of kinds of relationalities in compartmentalised perceptions mentioned before, in the case of evolutionary theory with the intervention of philosophers like Herbert Spencer, Darwinism almost became synonymous to social Darwinism that met its right fit in Malthusian ideas. The inherent constitution of the animal world became that of disconnected individuated species with human beings as its epitome. These human individuals themselves get preoccupied in an endemic race to pass on the genes. This becomes the dominant theme in the social Darwinist extrapolations in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene (1989). If the biological metaphors in Darwinian evolution were individuated and extended towards the laissez faire order by Spencer the same metaphors were reworked and further individuated into selfish boundaries and fed into the upcoming neoliberal global order by Dawkins. Humphrey’s hypothesis on the evolution of social intelligence and how this happens as a correlate of large groups was a significant outcome in research that brought back the social.1 On further scientific investigations with other animals and in intraspecies comparisons the value of social intelligence was found to be important. The oft categorisations of certain social characteristics like sympathy, cooperation, or principles of equality as human aberrations from the natural worlds that otherwise works on individualism, competition amongst individuals, and wars of all

1 Climate Conflict. 2018. In Editorials: This Week. 15 Feb, Vol. 554. Nature: 275–276.

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against each other for survival we now know was a manufactured capitalist myth. The evolutionary studies from Darwin to the contemporary ones too point at the simplistic assumptions behind these.2 Survival is also through empathy, cooperation, and highly complex relations. Even competition in ecosystems does not preclude intentional or unintentional cooperations. The logic of capitalism further extends to the mythological and ecological arguments for equilibrium as extrapolated into the urban ecological arguments of the Chicago school. That there is nothing to be done with what happens to ‘ecology’ in its self-ordering design has extended to the sustainability logic in the present global order. There is a self-fulfilling logic of equilibrium with bland borrowings of metaphors not from ecologies in the making or process but from ecology that stays static (e.g., as in an urban ecology that facilitates certain ways of production). Likewise sustainability too has moved away from sustaining human and non-human environs for the future. Rather by the 90s sustainability has in complex ways assembled with ideas and techniques for maintaining growth in the face of recurring alarms and signals of crisis. This has resonated in all the global conventions that professedly expressed concerns about ecology starting at Rio going on to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio 2012) to the latest United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris and the follow-ups at Glasgow and Sharm-al-Sheikh. There is a profound absence of relationalities that link growth to ecologies. Economics has been decoupled from ecology in the abstract blanket understandings that go by sustainability. The abstraction of sustainability works through the global technologies that are there in place. These technologies in effect become a collective biopower in practice. The way control over the different bodies gets exercised is significant. There is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) initiative after the United Nations Kyoto Summit (2007), which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines as a flexible mode of reducing carbon emissions. The focus was on developing countries.

2 Geoffrey M. Hodgson. Economists Forgot Smith and Darwin’s Message: Society

Cannot Function without Moral Bonds. Evonomics [http://evonomics.com/smith-anddarwin-moral-bonds/]. Eric Michael Johnson. Chimpanzees Prove That Elites Don’t Understand Darwin’s Message About Cooperation. Evonomics [http://evonomics.com/chimpanzees-prove-eli tes-dont-understand-darwin/].

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The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) was a follow-up after the perceived ‘failure’ (Harvey 2012) of CDM.3 Both have been global technologies that were designed to maintain the status quo of existing global order. In the case of the former, there were incentives and credits given for afforestation. But things are in the abstract as to what constitutes a forest. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) does not define a forest. The concerned parties have the freedom. Thus, deforestation can be followed by massive commercial plantations (e.g., Eucalyptus or Acacia) or even commercial plantations like rubber, oil palm, bamboo, or cocoa (which are ready commodities); and in turn be defined as ‘forest’. The credits entrepreneurs earn like this could enter trading and even speculative trading in stock markets with flexible evaluations. In the case of REDD+ contracts were entered into with indigenous communities in places like Peru (Llanos and Feather 2011). Thereby forms of control were established over vast tracks of rainforests converted to commercial crops. In addition to the gross abstractions that miss out on the realities on the ground carbon was the sole focus with different mechanisms of evaluations and offsetting to suit and ‘sustain’ the existing modes of production. Plantation could be included on par with rainforests on the same spectrum if the focus is only on carbon. Here the tenuous relationships in the life worlds that include animals, indigenous groups, river systems, and millions who depend on the ecologies get obfuscated. There were major resistances towards REDD+4 for instance for such reasons and there was ready recognition that traders in ecosystem services and comprador state orders would get the upper hand (ibid.). Indian versions of such globalised strategies may be read in the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority Act (CAMPA). Here the Net Present Value (NPV) of existing forests converted by industries and capitalists were monetised and thus a fund was gathered. The consolidated fund becomes compensation as well as a ‘sustaining’ strategy of the existing order. It is not for no reason that all these global mechanisms adopted by international forums as well as globalising nation states under the banner of ‘sustainability’ have been termed as ‘colonialisms’ 3 Sandbag. 26 Jul 2011.What is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)?. The Guardian. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jul/26/clean-develo pment-mechanism]. 4 No REDD Papers: Vol. 1 [http://www.ienearth.org/docs/No-Redd-Papers.pdf].

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(Holleman 2017). This work comes out at a moment when legislation by the Indian governance has already amended existing biodiversity laws and conservation acts.5 The passage of the present bills of amendment (2021 and 2023) has left no more space of exception within existing legislatures. The exception here refers to provisions like the ‘deemed forests’ which are land that are not formally classified as forests but serves the same ecological function. The amended conservation act, by removing such provisions, was essentially doing away with one of the unintended benefits of legislatures and policy designs, i.e., to stay exempt and out of classification. The current moves in addition to freeing up lands for private infrastructure developments, mining rights, and urbanisation also bring in the language of strategy and security. It is significant that the preoccupation to maintain the status quo and move ahead only by sustaining the basic foundations of the capitalist system and the orders that ensue becomes deeply rooted in the neoliberal phase. It relegates any disturbance; be that in the form of a financial crash (2008) or an ecological event to the realm of the exception. The exceptional cannot be reason enough to interrogate or overhaul anything. The exceptions on the contrary are to be hidden away, dramatised or made fodder for advertisement-supported breaking news so that the status quos is left to flourish. In the process any possible recognitions of processual faults in the system, effacement of relationalities that form the infrastructure of any given order or the hybridities that have proliferated—all get blurred. Instead, the sustaining asymmetries of power regroup and reconstitute along imagined continuums and abstractions.

The Profound ‘Lacks’ in Imagination Climate change even after being discussed as the worst catastrophe still did not seriously enter the realm of popular cultural debates. The discussions pertained to alarms, human interest stories, and breaking news. This is well reflected in the failure to fictionalise climatic disturbances. Whenever an author has tried this out that happens in the genre of nonfiction. One of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘non-fiction works (2016) starts with this question and goes on to his own reminiscences of the flooding of river Padma. The flood was a marker in their lives in 1856, and it was what

5 Biological Diversity Act (2002) and Forest Coservation Act (1980).

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he calls a moment of recognition that involved the realisation of a potentiality that until then was hidden. An otherwise taken for granted river in Bangladesh floods and transforms the whole tenor of life. So, about the air in Congo when carbon dioxide bursts killed hundreds in 1988. There are the more recollectable moments that Ghosh points towards when the environment is not just an inert entity lying around like the choking pollution in Delhi. There are also landscapes like the Sundarbans delta, where the changeability is so rapid that the moments of recognition happen in quick succession. The Hungry Tide (2004) is such a rare novel that brings in the different constituent parts of an ecosystem in their dynamic assemblage where it’s not easy to separate fiction from fact, natural from cultural, human from non-human, or geography from society. But despite all the recurrences, barring a few works, like his own, there are not many that fictionalised climate change. There is a realisation that the era of massive human-induced transformations, which some call the Anthropocene, presents a situation that slips out not only from the fiction but also in the commonsensical. The author says there is a crisis of ‘imagination’ itself that is involved. Human desire is often led by a mélange of imageries, often concealed and that were once laid in place through histories of cultural invocation that include the great fictional representations. For instance, it is also the desire for ecosystems invoked in classical novels that leads people to make green islands in deserts or arid zones6 . But then there has been something about climate change or about cultural representations that conceals it from grand imaginations, apart perhaps from the science fiction works that are confined in their own genres and readership. This failure of ‘recognition’ despite living in an era of information is what the author calls the ‘Great Derangement’. The unpredictable as well as the spontaneous has often eluded evaluations. There are the unheard-of tornadoes in India or such cataclysmic events that often get covered up by a yearning for the regular or the everyday which mostly happens within frames of commonsensical human control. But there are fictional attempts from history like Bankim Chandra’s novels that built up from the exceptional. During his time when the Sanskritic styles focused only on the ‘mere narrative’ as Ghosh calls this, 6 The ecosystems in Jane Austen (lawns maintained by desalinated water in southern California) - now realised in fantasy archipelagos of Dubai/Or the invocations of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov novels in highways and convertibles (Ghosh 2016).

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Bankim talked about characters in their then-Bengali Life (Rajmohan’s Wife). But then very often the tone and tenor of modern bourgeois life impose a kind of order on representations that cannot take the exceptional into account. Thus, very often the events that exemplify the hybridity of forces that come into dialectical relationalities often evade imagination. Stephen Jay Gould (paleontologist, historian of science as well as evolutionist) in Times’s Arrow Time’s Cycle (1987), brings to us the fact that much of our scientific or geological interpretations i.e., when geology was briefly the queen of sciences in eighteenth to nineteenth century, follows a preset order. This is much like the Mosaic law wherein the catastrophic or the improbable only serve as prompts for the overarching voices from heaven to try humanity, punish those who fall out and ultimately restore the natural order. The moments of catastrophe or the unpredictable, which have only increased in their frequency in recent times, and that somehow brings up the problems involved with clear boundaries and separation into binaries; have often evaded substantial interdisciplinary queries as well. The importance of taking non-human entities and geological factors like climate as not dissociated from political transformations in political ecology as well as science journals.7 The myth of separate constituencies for politics and climate was reiterated in works on global warming and contemporary civil wars (Whiten 2018). The work on the 2003 Darfur conflict in Sudan to the water crisis that is ongoing in Cape Town (ibid.; Watts 2018) are exemplars. The dialectical relationships cannot be obviously overlooked. There is the aspect of the ‘uncanny’, that is unpredictable and strange, but more than all, that which unsettles. Ghosh brings this on in the experiential realm of life and non-life in Sundarbans, where the tiger and human encounters are those of self-realisation as well as the moments of recognition wherein one is involved in the other. A similar situation arises in those encounters with strange weather patterns, that which is often absent in representations. Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (1998) talks about engagements within Amerindian life worlds, where the animal encountered conceals the human, and the human encountered conceals the animal. There is a whole gamut of perceptions that incorporates the other

7 Climate Conflict. 2018. In Editorials: This Week. 15 Feb, Vol. 554. Nature: 275–276.

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and brings on the everyday mutual recognition. The idea of perspectivism (ibid.) is about relationships as well as mutual recognition in such moments of encounters. During the time of grand colonial appropriations, visions of grandeur translated into architectural designs. The local knowledge about the ocean, and ecosystems, informed cautions—none of these mattered. This was a superimposed vision. There was nothing stopping seaside constructions and port towns that facilitated colonial extractions. Such megalomaniac visions have found their later day kin in some of the middle- and upper-class imaginaries at present, precisely in the context of water side real estate and sea-blocking high rises. The aesthetics is mutually dissociated in that no greater ecological well-being is considered, not to mention a total dissociation with all that is not human enough. In the case of metropolitan Mumbai things have reached points where the human habitations and effects have already clogged all the natural drainages as well as sewage. Toxic waste has reached high concentrations. Any cataclysmic event could have disastrous effects on an exploding population precisely because of this continuous overlay of mutually dissociated aesthetics and assemblages of profit-making spaces. It is only sheer luck that until now the inhabitants have only encountered urban floods and associated wreckage. Kochi in Kerala offers smaller scale but comparable vignettes. Because of the lack of incorporations of the ecological relationships or the relegation of climatic and ecological reminders into the exceptional accounts, responses get geared towards particular events. They are nothing but post-evental lamentations that seldom problematise materialities of anthropogenic grandeur. There have been many such post-evental thoughts on cities in contemporary Indian contexts. But systemic evaluations as to what happens after a ‘natural disaster’ strike also sometimes happen as with observations on Chennai in the context of the 2014 floods (Amruth 2015). The context of the place is well portrayed in its relationship to contemporary forms of global production. There are thoughts on the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) into which a major share of production has moved towards, as well as the changing forms of consumption. Thus, there has been a change in the ‘urban’ role of the place as it becomes an international marketing hub. The problem comes when such new networks are not factored in the protocols of action in times of ‘natural disaster’ like the floods. Everything from pollution control, forest conservation, coastal conservation, or wetland conservation, fails to address the new contexts. This is because

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almost all discussions ensue in the ‘event’ of disaster. They are based on events and do not try to make such ‘exceptional’ events into an avenue for recognising the ecologies that are in the making, in this case, in urban Chennai. Urban designs are the starkest reminders that though climatic conditions and different forms of life including that of humans have always been in interactions, they have often been unattended. The frequencies of the exceptional and evental disasters are persistent reminders of hegemonically imposed visions in the anthropocene. What is significant and noticeable about responses of the system, the state or any form of bureaucratic deployment is that they emanate from the profound lack of ‘recognition’ of the encounters in the making as well as the hybrid orders that have started to proliferate. In addition to this very often top-down visions follow boundaries as well as do not take into account the ever-changing networks that take effect as regions change. What we see in the case of urban Chennai are such regional contexts spilling out from the immediate ecologies into making newer connections with global flows of capital with implications for recurring local events. As Timothy Morton (2013) says, these are times of ‘hyperobjects’ that defy the logic of separation. The bounded and binary designs of state fail in the face of ecosystemic changes induced by climate. These are moments we encounter hyperobjects in quick succession. The partitioning of perception that is best theorised perhaps by Bruno Latour (1993), essentially limits whatever is non-human to the realm of nature and nature in turn becomes the subject of the sciences in their puritan nature. Simultaneously there is a gamut of activities involving humans that become the subject matter of cultural interrogations. The deletion of the meshwork of relationships and hybrid activities in the real world was very much a construction of binary logic of modernity. The designs often did and do fail on the ground with unintended effects and encounters. Entangled ecologies and ruptures in the making are proliferating metaphors that prod us to unpack anthropogenic designs.

References Ali, Tariq. 1986. An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family. New York: Putnam Publishing Group. Amruth, M. 2015. Chennai Durantham: Keralam Kanenda Soochanakal (in Malayalam). Keraleeyam Maasika 11/12 (16, November/December): 5–14.

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Cody, D. 1987. Corn Laws. The Victorian Web: Literature, History, and Culture in the Age of Victoria. Damodaran, Harish. 2008. India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Datta, B. 1970. The Monopolies Legislation: A Measure to Prevent Concentration of Economic Power. Company News & Notes VIII (1 and 2): 17, 27–31, January 1 and 16. Foster, John Bellamy. 2013. Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature. Monthly Review 65 (7, December). Ganguly, D. 2013. Living Legacy of Things Past. The Economic Times (Corporate Dossier), September 13. Ghosh, Amitav. 2004. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Random House: Penguin. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, Fiona. 2012. Global Carbon Trading System Has ‘Essentially Collapsed’. The Guardian, September 10. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2012/sep/10/global-carbon-trading-system. Heitzman, James. 2008. The City in South Asia. Routledge. Holleman, Hannah. 2017. Capital and Ecology. In Reading ‘Capital’ Today, ed. Ingo Schmidt and Carlo Fanelli, 160–181. Pluto Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. New Formations of Power, the Oligarchic-Corporate State, and Anthropological Discource. Anthropological Theory 5 (3): 285–299. Kudaisya, M.M. (ed.). (2011). The Oxford India Anthology of Business History. Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Llanos, Roberto Espinoza, and Conrad Feather. 2011. The Reality of REDD+ in Peru: Between Theory and Practice: Indigenous Amazonian Peoples’ Analyses and Alternatives. Marx, Karl. 1844. On the Jewish Question. In Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Retrieved from Marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1844/jewish-question/). Masaki, Kotabe, and Kristiaan Helsen. 1998. Global Marketing Management. New York: Wiley. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London/New York: Verso. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mukherjee, Madhusree. 2011. Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II . Basic Books.

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Panikkar, K.M. 1945. India and the Indian Ocean. India: G. Allen & Unwin, Limited. Patnaik, Prabhat. 2015. From the Planning Commission to the NITI Aayog. EPW 50 (4): January 24. Purohit, Kunal. 2018. Digging Up British Empire’s Bloody Legacy in India. The Wire, January 3. https://thewire.in/209830/bengal-famine-documentary-bri tish-empire/. Thakurdas, Purushottamdas (ed.). 1945. A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (2 vols.). London: Penguin. Tharoor, Shashi. 2016. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. Aleph Books. Varghese, Mathew A. 2013. Spatial Reconfigurations and New Social Formations: The Contemporary Urban Context of Kerala. PhD Dissertation. Published by University of Bergen, Norway. Varghese, Mathew A. 2017. Vikasanam: The Expansionist Choreography of Space-Making in Kerala. In Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia, ed. Tereza Kulduva and Mathew A. Varghese, 74–95. Palgrave Macmillan. Vivieros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropolgical Institute 4 (3, September): 469–488. Watts, Jonathan. 2018. Madagascar’s Vanilla Wars: Prized Spice Drives Death and Deforestation. The Guardian, March 31. Whiten, Andrew. 2018. Brainpower Boost for Birds in Large Groups. Nature 554 (February 15): 303–304. Williamson, Jeffrey G. 1990. The Impact of the Corn Laws Just Prior to Repeal. Explorations in Economic History 27 (2): 123–156. Woodward, David, and J.B. Harley. 1987. The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Midieval Europe and the Mediterranian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woodward, David. 1989. The Image of the Spherical Earth. In Perspecta, vol. 5, 2–25. MIT Press.

CHAPTER 3

Voices from the Wetlands and Paddy Fields

On a broad canvas of time, ecosystems have always been changing and they have always been implicated in processes. This is best exemplified in the water systems especially in a region like Kerala which is practically divided into sub-regions, and micro-regions in terms of the forty-plus rivers, their branches, small water bodies, or wetlands that are all in turn interlinked in some way or the other. Rainfall, soil permeability, as well as the spacing of monsoon, the tenor of which depends upon the Ghat’s ecology morphed Kerala into a distinct ecological zone from the rest of the peninsula. This also had implications for the distinct social systems that evolved here over time maintained and managed by the modulations of hydrology and the structuring of a wetland agriculture-based human ecology. Then there are of course the backwaters that lace the west coast and open towards the sea. All these have always borne the marks of transformations. The transformations have been both human and non-human in nature and not necessarily binary in their unravelling. It can be gathered that the earlier forms of wetland agriculture that came up along with the pre-princely states heterarchical orders across Kerala have been ‘flood retreat’ type of wetland cropping (Park 1992; Scott 2017). Thus, the seeds were probably first sowed on the silt left by riparian floods. The silt itself is swept in from the Ghats and hills and is rich in different types of nutrients depending on the course of the particular river. So, the rivulets that join to form Periyar might pass © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_3

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Fig. 3.1 River networks and marks of riparian arteries (Source Google Map)

through a different ecological niche than Chalakudy. The types of crops too differed. These forms of earlier wild-rice cultivation did not follow a homogenous pattern and were often juxtaposed with other types of food sources like tubers and wild maize. Rather than planned irrigations which usually coincide with proto-state machinery the type of cultivation happened by seasonal draining of the flood plains of Periyar as in many other riverine agrarian orders (Pournelle 2003). Relatively sedentary cultivation might have risen on a wetland order inundated not only by the floods but also by the once live and now driedup rivulets. The traces and marks of these rivulets can still be seen in the geography around Aluva, Paravur, and Kalady. Marks of the myriad channels are evident from satellite photos (Fig. 3.1). The hydrological system has obviously undergone great transformations with the introduction of extensive rice cultivation by the princely states of Kochi and Travancore (Aiya 1906; Menon 1911; Mateer 1883). There are also particularities in the social geographies carved out by the rivers like Periyar and Chalakudy and thus a heterogeneous agrarian order. As wetland agriculture got extensive and oriented towards maximisation of production and possibly export their were necessities for taken for granted labour. The specific institutionalisation of land control-based caste and jati system could be placed in such a context. As Scott says (2017) just as the fire was once noticed as a causal agent for succession and renewals so were the agentive effects and cultural roles given to floods and riparian patterns.

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The archaeological work done at Pattanam (Cherian and Menon 2014)1 near Ernakulum (towards the west coast) talks about the wetlandriparian patterns that once sustained the settlements, that transacted with far-reaching oceanic networks. Apart from the significance of these networks, the region has been part of the work and also talks about the course of the river as well as the proximity of the land to the sea. The site comes from the delta of river Periyar. The marshlands here are inundated by backwater as well as the rivulets and throw light on the drainage-based agrarian order that preceded extensive irrigated rice lands and that must have once supported the settlement there. However the human agency has had exaggerated effects on hydrological systems since the modern states and more so in present situations. This reaches a much larger canvas with these modern states grappling with global-scale processes. Ecosystemic changes per se are not the problem or novelty. Such changes have been always in the making. The emphasis is on the scope and scale of changes that happen to ecosystems in their relationship to humans. The inland navigational networks, the several reclamations, earlier forms of irrigation, the first hydel projects, the assembly of smaller dams that followed, interstate water diversions and the context of nation state, as outlets for industrial spaces, the newer dependencies by real estate as well as the contemporary challenges like river-interlinking, all span into centuries of anthropocene effects on hydrography. The choreography of water systems has been determined by distinct constellations of power and its characteristic networking. Eric Swyngedouw has worked extensively on how water bore the marks of modernising effects of the state in Spain especially after the major naval defeats in the Americas in 1898 which put an end to four centuries of continental domination of one of the biggest colonial powers. The event in fact came to be called El Disastre (the Disaster). After this, there was an urge for regeneration. The regeneration efforts took the middle course between the traditional class who wanted a revival of glory and status quo and that anarchists and leftists who wanted nothing less than an overthrow of any remaining elitist orders. Now cut off from colonial resource bases, the focus was much on the inner geography of the nation. To be specific the focus was to work on the waterscapes, by reworking social,

1 Search for India’s ancient city, BBC News, 11 June 2006 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/south_asia/4970452.stm].

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cultural, political as well and hydraulic orders that existed at the time to mobilise economy. The idea is to explore the heterogeneous processes involved in the making and remaking of historical geographies and the reorganisation of spatial relations. The particular sociotechnical configurations like irrigation systems, or water transfers between basins, involve the assemblage of groups, cultures, techniques, materialities as well as the political and economic power configurations. The interconnections involved in socio-political processes are often metaphorically captured by hydrogeographies. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg metaphor as well as Bruno Latour’s QuasiObjects adds more dimensions so such interconnections and hybridities. Haraway’s multispecies ethnography says that people ‘become’ only in relationships with other species. Her work is on those situations when binaries like nature and culture break down in the creation of coproduced or cyborg ecologies. Quasi-objects for Latour are the objects that defy the forced categorisations of modernity. They are hybrids like ozone layer depletions or global warming that proliferate in contemporary times and bring in a whole set of actors that cannot be compartmentalised. There are other works in political ecology as well as social geography by Harvey (1996), Smith (1984), or Gandy (2002) that have incorporated nature in historical and materialist analysis. Urbanisation of nature in Chicago has been interrogated by William Cronon (1991). In Swyngedouw’s work, there is a portrayal of the ways human and non-human actants get incorporated in a sociotechnical process stretching more than a century. There are also depictions of how one sociotechnical order is followed by the next, through associated transformations as well as possible contradictions that arise within. Water has been the leading motif in the power transformations in many places. In Spain, during modernisation, the effect was exaggerated. Institutions, capital, concrete, steel, and labour often got roped in with supporting networks that extended out of the nation, into a new hydro-geo-social order. In the next phase, a democratic order was taking root. This brings up reverberations from the fascist past as well as the new emphasis that also dovetails with a neoliberal order not after long. Alongside this, the more eco-sensitive EU regime brings up contradictory tendencies like commodification and market linkage to water ‘resource’ as well as the responses towards local conflicts and sensitivities. The coming together of market-mediated environmentalism, the retreat of the state

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from welfare as well and the new management regimes in the making animate the political geography. The hydrological state in Spain indicates the probability of fragile and incoherent assemblages in the making with thoughts on interconnected problems elsewhere in the world as well. The predicament of anthropocene presses us to ever open up the spatio-temporalities in order to factor in the several relationships that inhere. The relationship between orders that came to be modern states and also entities ‘not quite the states’ (Scott 2009) is important for the making of ecologies. What is suggested is the uneasy relationship people have with states and state processes as well as the anthropogenic modifications that facilitate such modern organisations. Clastres (1989) suggests that those who were not quite into the state often devised exceptional spaces. These exceptionalities sometimes worked as intertribal wars and conflicts. The wars were categorised as a Hobbesian world by many. But the reality they were planned responses to evade incorporation in colonising states, across Latin America. There were then the zomias for instance, which were non-state spaces mainly in Southeast Asian uplands (Scott 2009) formed by people who ran away from states and rigid agrarian governance systems and controls. These ethnographic contexts are all important as pointers towards the heterogenous organisations people have had and the increasing conflicts these spaces of exceptions came to have with modern sovereign systems. The heterarchical nodes that informed the urban past in Kerala that transacted as far as the West Asian or Roman domains, through complex oceanic networks similarly becomes important in understanding how ecologies evolved as exceptions. The urban nodes that were part of Indian Ocean networks along the west coast (Chaudhuri 1985; Hietzman 2008; Abraham 1988) might not fit easily into a land-based centralised spatial narrative. Rather, such nodes and the political ecologies constituted therein possibly had distinct transactions with land-based feudal structures. This was informed by centuries of oceanic commercial networks preceding modern nation states (Abu-Lughod 1987). The archaeological work done at Pattanam (Vadakkekkara Village, Paravur, Central Kerala), about 25 kilometers north of Kochi/Ernakulum came out with pointers on the ways the heterachic mercantile orders of the day transacted with the Indian Ocean systems and Romans. Pattanam has become one of the most significant Indian sites excavated and has been mentioned in Roman and Tamil literary sources and can be identified according to some scholars with the port of Muziris (Shajan et al. 2004).

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I have had extensive field narratives on groups that transacted in parallel currencies and maintained distinct modes of production. The case of local salt-making practices during colonial and princely state controls (Varghese 2013) is worth mentioned. So, when the crown over administration from the East-India company the existing taxes were not repealed. The monopoly on salt in fact provided around ten percent of British India’s revenue. The tax was finally repealed only when Jawaharlal Nehru became the President of the Interim Government in 1946 (Singh 2002; Moxham 2001; Chandra 1966). But during this phase of supposedly total state control people in my field in central Kerala, in a region called Pallikkara devised ingenious strategies and in the process carved out spaces of exception. The non-human actor in their story is a plant called ‘Eera’. Locals knew that this plant held salt in its stem. And this happens because water from brackish backwaters seeps into the local river called Kadambra.2 The phenomenon, called ‘Orovella kayattam’ or the tidal action left only a single cropping of paddy as an option. So, the indigenous way of producing salt went hand in hand with the single agrarian season. The method of making salt during the agricultural off season was invisible to the state. They collected kachil (dry straw) and mixed this with Eera and burnt the mix to ashes. The ash was mixed in freshwater. Subsequent to the sedimentation of ash and other particles, the remaining water is collected. This is evaporated. The evaporation left for these people salt that was never taxed. During a period when the imperial/princely state managed to maintain bureaucratic control over urban nodes and ports Kachil Uppu extraction remained exempt. Further, we see that most of the forest lands were out of bounds even during the intervention of modern forestry (Kunhikrishnan 1995). These have all been exceptionalities, of differing scales, that nevertheless gave rise to distinct geographies as well as ecologies of relationships. Presently with the weaving of regions into a globalised and centralised state order with not much by way of welfarist obligations, exceptionalities may be getting co-opted into a dominant normative order of neoliberal capital and its movement. Anything antagonistic, be they people, forms of life, or geographies are obliterated and eviscerated. 2 Kadambra has been a natural irrigator of agriculture even before the bunds came into use. The river joins Chitrapuzha that in turn joins the main branch of Periyar that takes the waters to the sea.

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History speaks of large populations who were out of bounds for the state. Some of these groups even occasionally raided settled civilisations. The nomadic groups were often called barbarians. But such populations while remaining exceptional also became suppliers of resources for the proto states (Scott 2017). They became significant for the aggrandisement of states. But in due course, many of these heterogeneities ceased to be or got co-opted in modern orders and emerging sovereignties. What is significant about the anthropocene of today is the necessary ever-increased efficiency of subjectification to a dominant order, be that humans, nonhuman life forms, or physical structures. Waterscapes like wetland ecosystems in the plains of Kerala, Kole lands, paddy fields, or the interconnecting waterways indicate the reality of entangled and long-term relationships in their heterogeneity. Their myriad transactions informed the successive power formations. This knocks down any assumption of ‘pristine’ geography whose loss is lamented in nostalgic invocations. But as will be argued, it is the scale of anthropocene effects, qualified by epochal processes, that distinguishes the current effects. The early anthropocene effects of fire as well as the broadcasting of seeds on flood retreat plains brought in landscaping by pure chance. The observations of the continuous chance effects though accumulated into cultural knowledges. Fire has been probably the earliest accidental marker and the signs are there in the remotest of Amazonian rainforests. There in the Amazon, often perceived as ‘untouched nature’ the European invasions and prone to epidemics left their mark as spurt in vegetation and tree cover after mass epidemic deaths in the settlements. This even created a mini-ice age (1500s to 1850s) because of the reduction in CO2 . The wilderness of the past century as well as that Amazon we grew up seeing on travel, television, and through internet is the anthropocenic Amazon! Such early anthropocene transformations stand in contrast to the large-scale transformations after modernisations, industrialisations, state making, and fossil fuels. This is so for Amazon as well as Kerala. The early anthropocene was a long-drawn process, which did leave the mark as with the terra negra in Amazonia. The latter was intense, fast and the markers may even having climatic consequences. The coming of cooking externalised digestion over a period of time and made a vast array of food palatable. Fire as well as the settlements that happened at first in flood plains made humans the supreme invaders of the thin anthropocene.

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The later processes during the thick anthropocene replicated and rationalised the system across spaces. The early anthropocene in time also domesticated Homo sapiens into newer roles and relationships through planned agriculture, domestication of animals, crafts, and manufacture (Scott 2017: 42). Kerala region becomes another good case to explore how ecological relationships become entangled with non-human geographies. The ways of subsistence, proto-states, urban entrepôts, formation of heterarchical nodes within the Indian Ocean networks, the state orders that took root as part of mercantile orders, the activities of the modern princely state activities, etc. become phases through which such entanglements pass. The intervention of kayal rajakkanmaar, the feudal entrepreneurs who organised canals that transacted water bodies and managed waterlogged agriculture is a case in point. They carved hydrosocial geographies of rice cultivation. The entrepreneurs in their engagements with early states instituted rice both as an efficient order of production that is easily controllable and that could fetch export earnings. Eventually, extensive wetlands and waterlogged geographies replaced terrains that hid tubers and a vast heterogeneity of food sources. In relatively short spans of time, geographies co-evolved with alimentary systems. The Kole lands of the Thrissur district and the paddy fields of Alleppey, for example, are modern human interventions and have hence given rise to characteristic ecological niches. They illustrate that the ‘nature’ one savours is the product of culture, politics, and technology. As ecosystems, they were coproduced with the proto-states and transformed and co-evolved as the modern capitalist orders took effect in time. All these cannot be dissociated from the rise of a non-kinship based ruling order. The spread of paddy cultivation and associated modes of production gave lesser and lesser spaces of exception from a caste structure. Exceptions may be found in locations dominated by trade, port-based commerce, and trading communities or with the highland networks and resource supply chains. The mercantile orders encouraged export and the states found more efficient means to extract tax (Gurukkal 2010; Scott 2009; Madras 1901) than from heterogenous modes of subsistence. The rice and paddy ecosystems not only signified changing formats of power but also reciprocities as a means of atonement. This is testified by records that talk about grants made to temples (Brahman priests in the upcoming caste order) as atonement by feudatories and then ruling houses since the 1300s (Raja 1963).

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The Kole lands for instance started growing out of the phenomenal efforts to bund in water from the extensive backwater system as this was done in the Alleppey region as well. The below mean sea level of these agrarian fields receives all the water from the rechannelisation of canals and rivulets. There is an extensive network of river systems that support the Kole lands. The eco-zone lies between the Chalakudy and Bharathapuzha river systems. The general gradation of land sloped towards the west coast of Kerala from the Ghat highlands. The low-lying plains are criss-crossed by rivulets. The Karuvannur and Kechery rivers that flow through Thrissur overflow during the monsoon into these Kole lands. The Kole lands become the flood plains and transform into one vast stretch of wetland ecosystem during monsoon. From December to May when the rains go low, they revert to paddy fields. The ecological niches that develop in human-disturbed places like the paddy fields in Kerala are significant. The tide-dependent lake ecosystems in paddy wetland become permanent ecosystems with set patterns. The rivulets that flowed through Thrissur, through the making of Kole lands, became large lowland wetland orders. It becomes the unintended environmental receptacle for migrant birds as well as breeding grounds of small aquatic plants and fishes. The Kole wetlands attract more than two hundred species of birds and that include migratory birds from Eurasia like Cinerous Vulture, as well as Black Headed Ibis , Spot-Billed Pelican, and Painted Stork. The behaviour of avifauna, one should understand, has also been a product of a humanengineered ecological order. The Kole lands as well as the Paddy fields adjoining the backwaters of Alleppey from the 1800s were engineered by entrepreneurial ventures and land reclamations (Pillai and Panikker 1965; Rammohan 2006) of those who were known as the Kayal Rajakkanmaar (Lake Princes), often aided by ruling houses,3 point to the fact that large ecologies have been anthropocene processes in the making. Reclamations of marshes, swamps, and backwaters, coincide across the world with modernisation processes and associated perspectives on hygiene (Gandy 2002). Swamps, low-lying backwaters, or marshes in Kerala too may be seen as those intermediary zones between plains and the all-enveloping sea. The sea though is more legible and well defined compared to the swamps and backwaters because of the existing urban 3 In Allepey during the 1745–1799 period of Diwan Raja Kesavadas of the Travancore State.

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networks. The reclamations started as reciprocal relationships between those castes and communities that held money and farmers from these eco-regions (Geethadevi 1995). The expertise and grounded knowledge systems eventually made these farmers entrepreneurs and distinct unintentional eco-generators. They resorted to efficient subleasing and transactions. In 1865, there was the Pattom proclamation that in effect transferred rights to these entrepreneurs and upcoming classes set the stage for further consolidations through loans for such land and facilitated ever more investments from farmers of the then central Travancore. All these were followed in the upcoming decades by political economic cycles as regulation brought into reclamation activities to protect Kochi port, the downward cycles of export following the first world wars and the upswing afterwards also on the shoulders of modern technologies to pump out water (Thomas 2002). The wetlands were laid fallow or efforts were made to intensify farming in response to price rises for paddy. All these left distinct marks on the wetland topography of the eco-zones in question. The labour and skill of those from Pulaya communities in the emergent hierarchical order became capital for the entrepreneurs and well as the intermediaries to whom the land was often sublet. These wetlands had already become political manifestations of modernity. A region like Alleppey cannot be dissociated from the intervening Dutch period in Kerala which has had implications for the vast canal networks initiated by the royal house of Travancore. They are also conjoined with aforementioned bureaucratic processes and state making. This is not to suggest a unilateral human engineering, but a dialectical evolution facilitated by concomitant unintended floral and faunal ecologies. groundwater replenishment, food dependencies, and later in the present, as well as narrated ecological heritage zones for consumption (Ramsar site). Alongside human exceptions as well as lack of it, relationalities replete with newer forms of power, other forms of life as well as non-life to mediate the political ecologies. The domestications, the grazing, the frontiers of wild and non-wild, as well as the changing patterns of faunal and floral life acquire roles and changing significance as a function of regimes, they are part of. On the other hand, the predominant agrarian wetlands in Kerala based on paddy cultivation were pockmarked jati-rules that entwined with this hydrosocial feudal ecology. The hierarchy was maintained with those who benefitted most from the equilibrium being

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connected to those who suffered the most through complex intermediary jatis whose position was dependent on the maintenance of the whole. The metaphors from ecologies in the making are exemplified by the relationships that weave into waterscapes. Waterscapes, through time, become paradigmatic as they stand for the norm or rule in place (e.g., as pre-modern states or modern states). The hydrography of Kerala has been intervened upon and rechannelised along with the changing formats of rule and authority. We saw that the promotion of waterlogged agriculture in greater scales as the states aggrandised also went together with the coming down of heterogenous and exceptional ecologies. Here ecology does not feature as metaphors of stagnant, self-sustaining or equilibrium systems, as often conveyed in socio-ecological studies and biological garden city types of work that took human ecologies for granted as ‘natural habitat of civilized man’ (Park 1925: 1–46). Neither is ecology a metaphor for catastrophe as if human effects in the anthropocene are novel and has suddenly called for an SOS! It is often the binary assumptions of life and non-life or nature and culture, through prolonged modernist schoolings which result in catastrophic images, images of human–animal conflicts and megalomaniac visions of humans as supreme saviours through geoengineering. Cases of ecologies, as exemplified by waterscapes, instead point at metaphors of transforming hybridities and relationalities. Networks and channels of water connect the mostly continuous highlands of Ghats on the eastern side with the plains and then the coastline on the western rim of the Kerala region. The highlands here, through the greater part of recorded history, were major barriers against forces from the east and northern parts of peninsular India. On the other hand, the same highlands replenished the hydrogeography towards the west informed by networks that went all the way to backwaters and urban nodes and carved out a distinct eco-region. This has been so all through the eighteen hundreds as documented in extensive, grounded, cartographic surveys (Ward and Connor 1893) and Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS) processes (Meenakshi 2016; Philimore 1954). The monsoon cycles that are also interconnected to this topography reinforced these distinctions. For example, the early travel and survey processes during the GTS were more difficult than in many other parts of colonial India (Meenakshi 2016). This is also attested by the fact that some of the major war efforts and advancements by the Mysorean kingdom to

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central Kerala in the latter part of 1700s were thwarted by monsoon rains and wind (Menon 1911: 181). The topography of the Western Ghats like the Nilgiris was found to be similar to the highlands the colonising British were familiar with at home (Harkness 1832). Bordered at present by the modern states of peninsular India viz. Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, the Ghats still is populated by the endemic species of flora and fauna supported by copious rainfall and perennial supply of water thanks mostly to the Shola ecosystems. These are complex undulating grassland-forest complexes with the thick and mossy vegetation in the valleys becoming sponges assuring perennial sources of water downhill. Modern environmental sciences identify about 34 global biodiversity hotspots presently spread across 51 administrative districts in six Indian states. Besides the source of rivers, the Ghats are thought to neutralise ten percent of greenhouse emissions from the region and capture millions of carbon tons. There have been major transformations in the landscape with the settlements and the starting of ventures in the highlands especially with the introduction of plantations in the 1800s. Further migration of the population also as labourers in newer sectors changed the human ecology. But the story of colonial controls and organised plantation is distinct in the Kerala part. There were differences for example between the Jenmi (local feudatory) Malabar presidency combined and those places like the Bombay presidency where the controls on ecologies were more direct and sovereign. Even when the East Indian company’s highest offices sitting in London wanted strict divisions of land the conservator on the ground balanced the competing interests on the ground in a more practical and locally grounded way (Cederlof 2002). There were even conflicts between district administrators and revenue divisions. This is to say that colonial modernity was never coherent to start with. And unlike in the north where resistance and armed pacification were rife, in Nilgiris legal procedures were more the norm. In the 1800s beginning too the forests of ghats were distinct in the sense that plantations like teak were not very concentrated. People also shifted between herding and cultivation (ibid.) The ecologies were heterogenous and never totally governed well into the 1900s. The tea plantations, introduced varieties of plants and later, industries, brought in rapid transformations towards the 1900s. The post-90s explosion of resorts and tourism adds another layer of ecology overshadowing modern introduction in the preceding century. The present portrayals of

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Ghats as ‘pristine natural’ were the least about inaccessibility or remoteness. Rather this is all about a repackaging of ecology into imaginations of jungles and forests for consumption (Mahias 1997). Regions like Ootacamund (Ooty) by the early half of the 1800s became one of the prominent administrative centres and summer residences for the colonial state. The profile of the population in these regions transformed soon afterwards with populations that came as labourers increasingly becoming the inhabitants (Hunter 1886) and visible transformations in the reciprocities between the existing communities (Kurumbas, Todas, Badagas, and Kotas in the case of Nilgiris for example). Only cave paintings and oral traditions leave narratives of the preBritish arrival of communities to much of the Ghat regions though they could well be gathered to have played a major part in the then-mercantile overland networks between kingdoms of the plains (like the Pandalam and Tamil Kingdoms towards the middle part of Western Ghats). In the case of the Nilgiris region, which has been studied elaborately the linguistic divergence from the plains is a testimony to the efficient topographic separations (Emeneau 1989). The hills and mountains of the Ghats region cannot be imagined as isolates but the scale and range of interactions increased only after modern roads and state networks were laid out. Despite the oral narratives of old warfare and several transactions, there are still very few material records of large-scale interactions that became a norm after the colonial modernisation processes in the 1900s. There are census reports from the 1920s that suggest an ‘aversion to village life’ and favour of highly scattered and distributed living in the Kerala region, unlike the rest of peninsular India. This is so even after rice cultivation became more or less popular in the plains, though this changed rapidly afterwards. There were the aforementioned difficulties in navigating even the heavily settled terrains because of thick vegetation (Simkins 1933). These point to relatively more distributed human settlements unlike the concentration of human groups in patchy villages and urban zones surrounded by sparsely populated zones in most of India. Continuations from such patterns of the distributed urban life characterised almost all of Kerala state at later phases as well. Not until the latter part of the 1800s were bridges that crossed rivers or metalled roads even towards the plains of central Kerala (Menon 1911: 279–280) become popular. Until then it was even difficult for the cattle-pulled carts to get across the distinct hydrosocial terrains (Buchanan 1988). This in a

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way explains the multiple regionalisms even in the present times in this small state. The distributed living does not suggest isolation either. Rather they suggest independent connectivities of micro-regions through riparian networks to small urban nodes. An imagination of an urban system with one strong centre and a land-based transactional process would never convey a historically heterarchical distribution of power dependent on oceanic networks and inland waterways (Scott 2017). Of course, all of this changed fast since the 1900s. The situation was somewhat similar to the Mediterranean region where people from the mercantile towns and port towns were more networked through the ocean than necessarily across the land and as one would imagine within a modern national premise. Here too the physical boundaries like Carpathian or Alps in the longue-durée historical analysis of Braudel (1972) bear similarities with the geographical bounds on land the Ghats became. Braudel’s was a significant attempt to write place not through a dualistic nature–society lens. His was a dialectical perspective that took account of relationships between economies and regions but embedded in ecological movements. Thus, climate was never dissociated from politics, or mentalities from agriculture. Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean region mapped out the complex associations between waterscapes and political forms. Similarly, there is no suggestion of a cork on the bottle with respect to early historical phases in the Kerala region. Rather what is suggested is that until the arrival of modern roads (Aiya 1906; Menon 1911) air travel, satellite communication, present movement of finance despite physical boundaries, or the gigantic earth-moving devices, the Ghats were traversed mostly by heterogenous actors with links to heterarchical nodes mediated by waterways that opened out to possibly farther networks. Very often the current perspectives we have of places are informed by overarching modern maps or digitised satellite technologies. In order to understand places through their changing mediations with processes one requires a historicised cartography premised on the changing difficulties in mobilities, as conveyed by the ‘friction of distance maps’ (Scott 2009). The friction Scott used refers to the impediments that distinguish, highlands, plains, steepness, thickness in vegetation, or ruggedness. All these are features of a terrain that matters much more than a mere distance or adds more complexity to ordinary cartographic depiction. The complexity of the ecogeography along with climatic and biotic elements are given priority over assimilated or smooth imageries. The narratives from grand

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map making efforts in the 1800s convey such frictions and so do the attempts to survey that laid the foundations of modern visualisations of ecologies. All these communicate changing socio-political geographies in Kerala in a span of two centuries. The cultivation of wet rice (Gurukkal and Varrier 1999; Gurukkal 2010) determined the institution of early forms of state. The paddy field that one sees now hides the transforming effects of power, from kin to non-kin systems, to caste-based feudal order, or taxation-based landholdership. Alongside evolved the technologies to concentrate people divided into their distinct power-laden roles, domesticated animals, and materials into designated cosmologies with kin-based, feudal, casteist, or sovereign formats of supervision. The early channelisations of water along the natural courses, the more organised rechannelisations by emergent entrepreneurial farmers to larger reclamations in the 1800s were all about increasing intensities of life along wetlands. On a greater scale, this was also a complex assemblage of monsoon climatic conditions, water networks, food, people, and mercantile possibilities that got entrenched after the opening up of the Suez Canal for trade (Madras 1901). So, all of these are interconnected and the wetland ecologies are already global. Wet rice cultivation, coconut-based products as well as long-standing export items like pepper and turmeric, also is linked to an expanding exportbased order after the 1850s. The diversities of crops that characterised the plains of Kerala (Mateer 1883, 1991) were slowly replaced by rice as the predominant crop. Unlike other cultivations like tubers, or unevenly spaced millet-like plantations that cannot be easily quantified, assessed, or taxed, rice fields were spaces of efficient supervision. They also gave rise to extensive intervening wetlands between arteries and waterbodies in the region. State controls are not as pervasive as one moved uphill. It is the plantation order that brought in newer ecologies of control over the highlands towards the nineteenth century.4 Plantation along with modern forestry was also a fiscal form of control. In the process of extending controls into the highlands, there was also the first modern separation of what is

4 ‘Munnar Kaiyyettangal: Nayam, Niyamam, Nilapaadu’. 2017. Discussion- Tony Thomas, Harish Vasudevan, E Kunjikrishnan, S P Ravi, Jiyo Jose, Kusumam Joseph. In Keraleeyam Magazine. Volume 6/7. No. 18. June/July: 5–11.

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wild and non-wild. The measured, counted, and taxed spaces were juxtaposed to what is otherwise. The hybrid and heterogenous ecologies were starting to be reclassified as resources and waste/wildland. Swamps and marshes have been zones that early states across the world sought to control (Scott 2009). They have always been abodes for life that were out of supervision. In the Central Kerala region before the advent of rice cultivation most coastal zones were less penetrable wetlands where backwaters and rivers confluence (Valath 1991). Only few spaces remain at present. Presently such zones are classified as ‘wastelands’ inviting investments in the form of modern real estate. The imagination of vacant spaces totally misses the ecosystems that straddle urban spaces and host a gamut of human and non-human communities or the many such eco-historical layers. Development as an exception during the neoliberal present takes ownership and control of the little that is left out of bounds. Histories of swamps have been efforts at control not only in Kerala but across the world. Draining away was also correlated with hygiene and sanitisation in modern times. Civilisations in general and the early forms of states to be more specific were hell-bent on the elimination of liminal zones like the muddy marshlands. They separate such ecologies into more classifiable land and water (D’Souza 2006). This is true from Ancient China to Mussolini’s time in modern Italy. States have been investing efforts to, control, tax, and tap the ungovernable terrains (Scott 2017). Often the life systems dependent on these hybrid terrains with their complex relationships are eviscerated to make way for settlements, farming or rice cultivation in the past and real estate in the present. Early states converted most of the swamp territories, as with the erstwhile Ernakulum region (Valath 1991; Menon 1911) into legible fields. At present the ecosystems inhabited by people and animals in the island of Valanthakad in coastal central Kerala for instance are subjected to newer kinds of evaluations. They have been slated as tabula rasas for urban developments and are arrogated as ‘unintended city’ (Nandy 1998) in the sense that that which the space contains is never recognised or worse they are soon made invisible. For a place that remained outside much of formal constraints as well as any welfarist care, Valanthakkad now faces unprecedented attention and recalcitrant authority5 that envisions the space as vacant and ready to be occupied. The more than three hundred acres

5 World Wide Fund for Nature, Kerala State Office Annual Report, 2009–10.

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Table 3.1 Faunal and Fish life of Valanthakkad Ecosystem Mangrove Species: Acanthus ilicifolius, Avicennia officinalis, Bruguiera gymnorrhiza, Excoecaria agallocha, Rhizophora apiculata, R. mucronata, and Sonneratia caseolaris Fish that includes: Iindicator species on Mangrove health like Lutjanus argentimaculatus (Mangrove snapper) as well as Mystus gulio (Long whiskered catfish), Clarias batrachus (Walking catfish), Hyporhampus limbatus (Half beak), Etroplus (Karimeen), Oreochromis mossambica (Tilapia), Mugil cephalus (Mullet), Glossogobius giuris (Gobi)Anabas testudineus (Karipidi), Channa striatus (Pullivaral), Channa punctatus (Varal) Prawns like: Penaeus indicus (Naran Chemmeen), P.monodon (Kara Chemmeen), Metapenaeus dobsonii, Macrobrachium rosenbergii (Konju), and crab species like Scylla serrata, Portunus pelagicus Clams like: Villorita sp. which is a source of food and subsistence for islanders

that have been puramboke (no private entitlements), mangrove or excess land (michabhoomi) suddenly has takers. The inhabitants, and yes there are inhabitants! only remember the levies once paid to the temple board (Varghese 2013) and there have never been many other formal intrusions, positive (as welfare) or negative (as extensive entitlements or taxations). The people who carried on with subsistence systems like clam and oyster collection, or the mangrove ecology did not feature in the environmental impact assessments for the project while many similar instances these were considerations (Sudhi 2012). This talks about development without exception. In the process, not only humans but an ecologies of relationship to around eight mangrove species as well as 22 species of fish is obliterated (Table 3.1). Reference Mruthika/July–August 2009, Newsletter of WWF—India, Kerala State Office, Thiruvananthapuram The grand exceptions to coastal regulations etc., like single window clearances and bypassing of land ceilings through distribution on entitlements to private companies or the rhetoric of employment are the new forms of assertions over hydro-ecologies6 And in the era of satellite technology, it becomes easier for ecologies to be designated zones of intervention deploying google cartography during top-down policy

6 Coastal Regulation Zone notifications, Kerala Conservation of Paddy Lands and wetlands Act 2008, Forest and Wetland Policies 2008 as well as the radical and historical Land Reforms act (1963) has to be watered down to maintain (corporate) development as exemption.

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meetings! What is novel is not the anthropocentric interventions per se. The wet rice and wetland histories are testimonies on interventions and creations of newer ecologies. But as exemplified presently in Valanthakkad ‘meagre forty-eight families’ who lead subsistence life or a mangrove ecosystem has absolutely no place in the policy talks and alienated cartographies informed by information technology and real estate. Here the controlling strings are those of speculative finance capital. The idea of ‘vikasanam’ which is the local word for globalised development is also a metaphor of resultant transformations. The literal meaning of ‘vikasanam’ is expansion. And in expansion, ecologies are pushed away to the margins and subjected to deletions or total eviscerations.

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Park, Robert. 1925: The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (with R. D. McKenzie & Ernest Burgess). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Thomas. 1992. Early Trends Toward Class Stratification: Chaos, Common Property, and Flood Recession Agriculture. American Anthropologist 94: 90– 117. Philimore, R.H. 1954. Historical Records of the Survey of India: 1815–1830, vol. 3. Office of the Geodetic Branch, Survey of India. Pillai, V.R., and P.G.K. Panikker. 1965. Land Reclamation in Kerala. New York: Asia Publishing House. Pournelle, Jennifer. 2003. Marshland of Cities: Deltaic Landscapes and the Evolution of Early Mesopotamian Civilization. PhD Thesis. University of California at San Diego. Raja, P.K.S. 1963. Medieval Kerala. Annamalai University Historical Series No. 11. Rammohan, K.T. 2006. Tales of Rice: Kuttanad, Southwest India. KT Rammohan. CDS Monograph Series. Centre for Development Studies (CDS). Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: The Anarcist History of South East Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Shajan, K.P., R. Tomber, V. Selvakumar, and P.J. Chrian. 2004. Locating the Ancient Port of Muziris: Fresh Findings from Pattanam. Journal of Roman Archaeology 17: 351–359. Simkins, Ethel. 1933. The Coat Plains of South India, Part II. Economic Geography 9 (2): 136–159. Singh, Mohinder. 2002. The Story of Salt. Gandhi Marg 24 (3, October– December). Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Blackwell. Sudhi, K.S. 2012. Man-Animal Conflict to Be Studied Deeply. The Hindu. Thomas, P.M. 2002. Problems and Prospects of Paddy Cultivation in Kuttanad Region: A Case Study of Ramankari Village in Kuttanad Taluk. Draft Report: A Project of Kerala Research Programme on Local Level Development (KRPLLD). Thiruvananthapuram. Valath, V.V.K. 1991. Keralathile Sthala Charithrangal: Ernakulam Jilla (in Malayalam). Kerala Sahitya Academy. Varghese, Mathew A. 2013. Spatial Reconfigurations and New Social Formations: The Contemporary Urban Context of Kerala. PhD Dissertation. Published by University of Bergen, Norway. Ward and Connor. 1893. Geographical and Statistical Memoir of the Survey of the Travancore and Cochin States. Superintendent, Govt. Press: Madras.

CHAPTER 4

Prolegomenon to the Spectacles in the Making

In Kerala transformations of human habitations are happening at a fast pace in the current decade. The effects are felt on a vast range of habitats from houses and immediate surroundings to fields, hillocks, waterways, and across the remaining urban hinterlands. Any black and white distinctions between rural and urban are difficult here because of the overlapping infrastructure, proximity, accessibility, occupational nature, or distribution of people. There are predominantly small towns, and the villages too are never too far away. The distinctions are mostly in terms of the broad geographical divisions such as coasts, midlands, and high ranges. In the past two decades, the welfare apparatus based on land redistributions, public health, labour norms, and universal education are giving way to unprecedented corporate interventions. The left movement and reform phase had once laid down due political procedures for equal opportunity and fairgrounds. This is now torn asunder in confrontation with superficial, insubstantial, caricatural, and literal level grounds across the state. These are literally ground zeros populated by earth movers and from where only buildings may ‘crop out’. Coinciding with the almost ‘spectacular’ transformation of the material geographies, are the biological and cultural reclassifications of places. What necessarily happens in the context of fast-paced and spectacular transformations are the abrupt detachments from the broad relationships

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and overlays of new ideologies and expectations of growth. Such relationships integral to life cannot be reestablished or made visible anymore (Debord 1967). Instead, places unfold as pseudo-orders complete in themselves with autonomous spectacular imageries representing the autocratic market (ibid.). This autocracy in itself is a reification because it deletes off the dependency on the surroundings. Instead, the commodities that populate the spaces, whether buildings or consumer spaces generate their own streams of logic. A family that takes the Kochi metro rail and gets down at the station catering to the grand shopping mall literally is doing phantasmagorical transit ala Walter Benjamin (2002). The circuit to this mall literally offers a magically alienated spatial ecology whose logic is entirely made out of images one transits through. This is why weekend visits to new urban spaces in Kerala are reified and subordinated to the experience of spectacle. In the everyday mediation and framing of dominant imageries, be that in inert-apolitical natures or of ahistorical traditions, relationships fade away from popular perceptions. The Actor–Network theory of Bruno Latour (2005) tried to bring the subsumed relationships onto surface whereby the separations and island effects prompted by imaginaries could be addressed. There is no isolate place that stands alone in distinct disconnected traditions. It becomes important to address the complex ideological meshwork through which imaginaries themselves take effect. The roles that the non-human elements assume as well as the ability of non-humans to assert their dialectical effect get disregarded. The ways humans and non-humans become significant (whether one takes a wetland field, a protected wilderness, or a built world) needs to be spelt out to problematise the ‘deletions’ of relationships that go into the making of such spectacular ecologies. The task becomes even more difficult when one engages with places where values like pristine, isolate, savage, or disconnected have been extensively presented marketed and instituted. But even in such places where the portrayals and presentations are next to total the tames and inert natures or the consolidated traditions sometimes break during unprecedented moments deep enough to expose the entrails of entanglements mar vision.

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Nature, Tradition, and Other Deletions There are places that one comes across where ‘nature’ seems to rule, where biology ‘pure and serene’ seems to dominate time and space like that conveyed by Amazonian wilderness. There are others where people seem to lead an unchanging life, islands onto themselves, largely unconcerned about whatever pulls you from all sides of a busy urban rhythm. Both situations obviously do not exist in all such intensity in any region in Kerala overtly articulated by roads from the highlands of Ghats to the low-lying paddy fields of Alappuzha steadily since the 1920s and more specifically ever since the relatively larger scale engineering work got underway. Nevertheless, there still is a yearning for people to places put themselves in places with distinctions of traditions and investment in nostalgia in the face of transformations. This is mostly a co-birth of modern states and unlike often assumed tradition and modernity are two sides of the same coin (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Modern states in the making do not claim novelty. Rather they seek distinct antiquities and naturalise them. Their denizens crave authenticities in their everyday life that even in the course of continuous transformations co-produce nostalgia. All this despite the obvious and vast networks of human relationships with global scales throughout history that one easily comes across anywhere on the west coast of India, the Roman or Babylonian entrepots, Chinese traders, European Colonists, as well as the pervasive connections to the Persian Gulf and all the overland networks during precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. But the yearning to locate places, people, or forms of life and non-life in self-contained sovereign serenities bypasses all the obvious connectivities. It goes beyond mere bypassing. Modern institutions can only sustain notions of terra nullius where there were no previous networks or existing connectivities. The implications of all of these may matter only in times of crisis. Relationships refer to the historically rich co-evolution of life and non-life subsumed in geographies of the present. They are formally distributed into wild and the non-wild, humans and non-humans, or the urban and the non-urban. In the contemporary age dominated by humanity, increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene, human impacts on ecologies often get all the emphasis that the dialectical relationships with ‘non-human’, gets downplayed. And so does the fact that these have been long in the making. Homo Sapiens in their distinct respective cultural

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ecologies of modern states start living their Robinson Crusoe stories made out of spectacles of modernisation, growth, and development. The idea is to look into the shared roles and dialectical relationship between separations into binaries, isolates, and weave back the strands of interconnections and mutual implications. For the entrenched separatist pedagogies of sciences (physical natural and social) and humanities on ecologies and the total distancing of the empirical and phenomenological needs to reground themselves in a broad spectrum of relationships synchronically and diachronically. Imagine a meandering channel that takes one to the backwaters surrounding the Alleppey region, southwest of Kerala. From here take a look back and one now sees what remains of the low-lying paddy fields that from time to time were seasonally waterlogged. The changing impact of capital especially after the financial liberalisation toward 2000 has had its toll on agrarian landscapes like this. But unlike paddy fields more towards the midlands of Kerala that immediately became landfills and development zones with walls appearing overnight, here with the reassuring narratives of tourism the fields maintained comparative showcased ‘serenity’ vis-à-vis the ever-expanding Ernakulum urban region towards its north. The white beach sands, the paddy fields, the channels, the houseboats as well as the narratives of tourism donated a veneer of distinction and isolation from the urban rhythm that surrounded them. But the veneer was another facet of the ongoing rhythms of capital that also showcases ecology as heritage- another spectacle. Apart from historical narratives on canal building in the latter 1700s during Raja Kesavadas (the then Divan of Travancore Prince Karthika Thirunal Rama Varma), the trade narratives, or the decline of Alleppey after Cochin port gained importance after the 1920s (both being a larger natural Harbour and the add on engineering work), all of which also suits the tour narratives, no other substantive connectivities in time or space inhabit the ahistorical serenity of paddy fields. The invasive ecologies of Water Hyacinths that carpet the canals with flowers often become ahistorical and (un)aesthetic add-on. So do all those varieties of rice crops that one sees now that either came post research station at Mankombu or the Green Revolutions after the 1970s. According to many ecologists, like Debal Deb, who is a full-time conservationist working in Odisha and who has raised the many varieties of rice that were going extinct, most of the pre-70s crops are not even around anymore. The ecology that is showcased is not only young but

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also entangled with life forms that have invaded these regions as part of the processes that ushered in the current ways of development. Though several waves of modern introductions of macrophytes like water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes ) might have occurred, the first waves happened as ornamental plants in West Bengal during colonial times. All this suggests the modern origins of the floral lives that our eyes confront. If one travels reverse in time, the heterarchical orders during preTravancore times had other ports of importance and sowed other crops with their own forms of irrigation, hydrological regimes and priorities. There was a Chempakasserry Raja for instance who controlled one of the earlier ports, with overland connectivities from KudamaloorKumaranellore of present Kottayam in Kerala, to the backwaters near Kumarakom. There were many such smaller nodes before state consolidations started taking effect in 1800s. The stories of lake reclamations and the paddy-scapes are integrally connected and remind us that paddy lands have been ‘produced’ by active human agency and settled living, during the pre-modern state. By the second half of nineteenth century Travancore gained control over most of the cultivated lands as well as ‘wastelands’ (another version of terra nullius ). As mentioned, this was an idea that co-evolved with modern states. The scale of lake reclamation went much higher during Diwan Kesavadas’ time. There was a further scalar shift after tenant communities gaining entitlements and independent entrepreneurial roles after 1865. One started seeing extensive paddy tracks during this time and many agrarian entrepreneurs in these regions were titled ‘kayal rajakkanmars ’ (lords over the lakes). The Memoir of Travancore by Ward and Connor (1863) as well as the Travancore State Manual (1906) mention the kind of saline acidic soil albeit with rich organic content and wood fossils in the then Travancore part of now southern Kerala. This helps us with reverse gears onto geologic moments when the sea was yet to recede and reveal the coasts, backwaters, and low-lying zones. The past ecologies speak through such fossils. The perceptions of swamps, bogs, and such ‘subliminal’ ecosystems transformed with the entrenchment of modern capitalism (Giblett 1996). Apart from an ‘aesthetic of creepiness’ (ibid.) there was an understanding that the less legible, amphibious habitats hold back capitalist potential. In the nineteenth century more and more avenues were opened up for capital to realise its profit in the shapes of: plantation sector in the highlands, small-scale industries like tile and coir works in the plains, forestry, or export-oriented wetland agriculture. The entrenchment of

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capital necessitates certain modes of production for which spaces cannot be allowed to stay unproductive. Thus, they had to be drained out or filled in. The idea of waste also surfaced in reference to land and ecology, and it continues to resonate in models of progress in the post neoliberal phase (Baviskar 2008). In the case of the transformation of the lake-side ecosystems or their allied agrarian landscapes more comprehensively the entrepreneurial drives of the local power holders might have worked synergistically with the nineteenth-century ideas of land revenue central to the colonial revenue system. It relied amongst other things on ‘villages’ in the control of waste (Gilmartin 2006). The colonial statecraft distinguished relationships that exist in ecologies into productive and unproductive ones. The idea of ‘waste’ was a rationale and pretext for increasing deletions of interrelationships within ecology. It was also a rationale as in the engineering works carried out elsewhere in colonial India in the 1800s like in the Indus Basin was also in the concomitant institution of scientific management and putting the land into use (ibid.). It was important for marking and ordering regimes of property as well as the naturalisation of colonially sanctioned communities for whom community laws were devised. Once again, we see an entrenchment of a colonially sanctioned communitarian tradition/as law was integral to colonial modernity and the association of village lives with complex entanglements and commons with waste was another way asserting authority and facilitating revenue structure. Until recently in Alappuzha (Coastal central Kerala) Chakrams (wheels) had to be used to drain off water into canals when it became too acidic or saline. The salinity comes in cycles now depending upon a collective of spillways, bunds, rains, and the season. Troughs were used to pour back water into the fields from lower lying area during summer. Canals that one navigates in ‘houseboats’ at present were also once receptacles for water that was drained off. Changes in the modes of production in the latter half of nineteenth century were colonial, global and interweaved the region onto the colonial entrepots. There was an increased importance of cash crops, spices, and tea in the highlands and coconut and rubber in low land. The latter, with global markets as well as greater potential for revenue through finished products soon started making its impact on paddy cultivation in Travancore. Urbanisation due to the simultaneous development of export-based agroindustry like coir led to increased revenues and transformation in the remand for rice as a food crop domestically. There was an ever-increased drive for land reclamations. We see

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once again ecologies speaking the stories that spill into networks far and wide. The enduring effects of human action on land, as manifested in paddy tracks, lake reclamations, canal systems, and invasive ecologies in Alappuzha, even in the past few decades often get obliterated in the dominant discourse of development. The idea of anthropocene generally attributed to the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) refers to the time that we transact. It is that temporal context when human impacts start leaving stratigraphic marks on Earth, according to International Commission on Stratigraphy. But this is yet to be formally approved by the commission as an epoch. Meanwhile, the idea itself has already taken a life of its own. Hence it has taken flight from the realm of geology, chemistry, and stratigraphy into interdisciplinary attempts to grapple with contemporaneity. Geologically the epoch is well within Holocene. Holocene in Greek is comprised of holo-whole and kainosnew…wholly new… geological epoch that began after the Pleistocene i.e., approximately 11,700 years before present, and is part of the Quaternary period. With the ever-increasing prioritisation on human agency and attention given to ecologies only as resources for human-use, there is the threat of obliterating the dialectical relationships with everything ‘non-human’ on their own terms. The implication of the acted ecosystems upon humans and vice versa is pointed out in the works of Bruno Latour (2005). He uses assembling to understand how the ‘social’ comes together through associations between human and non-human. There is no place that can just be out there, pure human and isolated. Instead, they come into being in multiple trajectories of relationships. The emphasis here is on the hybrid nature as well as the parliament of things, with most of the binaries rendered ethnographically and empirically meaningless. The quasi-objects Latour talks about, makes the human/non-human divides, for instance, superfluous. The networks of quasi-objects extend through materials, sciences, legalities, state orders, economies, etc. as well. The anthropocene which holds much potential as a framing idea for parliament still has to be on the guard against excessive anthropocentrism and hubris. Both can conflate and end up assuming too much responsibility and burden for the world as it has become and also devising techno-scientific and geoengineering solutions. The symbiotic possibilities and the problematic of boundaries are well

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explored in the works of Donna Haraway (2015). Haraway’s cyborgs break through all kinds of boundaries and also finds a problem with selfcontained identities and traditional notions of identity politics. What we are left with is a companion species pioneered by such hybridities like the dog–human that resists any dualistic explanation. Multispecies ethnographies, unintended designs, as well as co-species evolutions have become the focal point of critical research (e.g., Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene-AURA). Along with anthropocene are other interesting, conflicting, and wellgrounded theoretical positions such as the Capitalocene or the Cthulucene (Moore 2015; Haraway 2015). Moore is of the opinion that the rise of world capitalism post-1450 became a historical marker. Predominantly it inaugurated a gamut of relationships with the rest of nature, which became the next significant epoch after the rise of agrarian orders and early states. Though anthropocene proposes the idea that nature has been fundamentally reshaped by humans much before the scale has reached unprecedented proportions post Capitalism. Haraway (2015) proposes a framing epoch dominated by mobilities induced by environmental disasters for both humans and non-humans. ‘Chthulucene’ communicates the new boundaries, symbiotic relationships, and ecologies that start manifesting and take us further into the present. For Haraway, the Chthulucene has to collect the trash left by anthropocene and the extreme byproducts of capitalism. Another epochal classification of ‘Plantationocene’ may well be read along the new agrarian practices on the lowlands as well as the rise of cash crop political ecologies in the highlands that created a new string of overlapping and interconnected ecosystems from the Ghats to low-lying regions like Alappuzha. The significant transformation in biomass, species diversity as well as the tenuous and entangled relationships occur in unsuspecting places like in the case of now insignificant and patchy swamps. Some of these spaces come under the zone towards the west of ghat mountains and valleys, where plant diversity, bird species, canopy density, and rainfall intensity all grow with increasing gradient. These as well as the swamps like the Myristica (Gadgil 1996) that intersperse as wet valleys already got converted into plantations like arecanut and paddy fields before the current pressures like landfills for real estate. There are more of these small and patchy reminders of these entangled niche ecologies that grew along the first second or third order streams before all join to form the medium-sized rivers that define the hydrological topology of Kerala. These ‘insignificant’

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patches were once more interconnected. Ruptures to routines and ‘natural disasters’ are reminders of the hegemonic human impacts, diversions, divisions, and depletions. One of the three major landslides in the western Ghats district of Idukki in 2021 happened in Kokkayar. Several people were killed and houses were destroyed. Rubber plantations predominate this region and intersperse with dwellings, with rubble masonry in terraced land and rain pits along the slopes. But here the contour bunding and rain pits were found to interfere with the hydrological patterns of seasonal streams that form during monsoon rains (Ajin et al. 2022). Such zones of plantation unintentionally design the flows and destabilise soil. During rubber slaughter, the soil is further destabilised. The rain pits and planting pits result in over-infiltration and obstruction of flows. The landslides that are proliferating across the highlands in Kerala during the seasonal rainfalls of late bespeak the Plantationocene political ecology. All of these epochal classifications with their own broad or more focused rationale take away the self-correcting expectations invested in ecology that are often rationalised with a godly plan. There is enough and more of such unambiguously intertwined phenomena that call for frames of ecological entanglements. Such framing ideas and theoretical positions become important in the interrogations of ecologies not confined to any particular region but beyond as well. The emphasis of the regions or ecosystems also would vary, but there is an effort not just to stop human impacts but to dwell on the recognitions of environmental agencies of life or non-life. Often starting with the dominant imageries of places, be that ‘serene’, rural, urban, riparian, or invasive, I find myself veering away into the interlinkages and relationships among the actors that challenge the dominant and thus throwing open possibilities to think anew in the contemporary context. The social life of things, be they humans, plants, animals, or a river, tries to ward off the investiture of consequence upon any elect species with omnipotent agency (e.g., in Homo sapiens ) and thus to bring back the deleted relationships and hybrid imaginaries. This is precisely why newer imaginaries and frames are necessary to mark out the politics of deletions, and ahistorical cosmologies. Travelling upland in Kerala one passes the intermediary plains, all of them densely inhabited, like any other point in Kerala. Here in the Ghats imaginations of ‘wild’ start surfacing. Some years back we took our daughter to the airport while receiving a friend. We had to go towards the

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domestic terminal as this person was coming from somewhere within the national boundary. Then the little girl spontaneously asked us, this being domestic, whether the bigger terminal on the other side was called ‘Wild Terminal’. The expression sounded an ironically apt replacement for the understandably archaic ‘international terminal’. Especially so, with emergent global formats that follow the tenets of sovereign nation states only selectively—definitely with securitisation and governance of people and seldom on the wild flows of capital seeking profit. I may also dwell upon the wild as an idea that can address that which spills over and reminds one of deletions during the processes of anthropocentric domestications and allied hubris. On the other hand, the wild of the wilderness, parks, and forested spaces could also be placed in the modern imaginaries whether those are dams and developments or the contemporary showcasing for tourism. One may re-invoke the famous Gods Must be Crazy movie series (Especially the first one that came out in 1980 and the sequel that followed after nine years), the juxtaposition of timeless African terrain to the busy capitalist clock schedule, which by the way is still an exemplary portrayal of distinctions of space and time orders across the ‘homogenously portrayed’ global world. Nevertheless, there is somewhere an assumption of Robinson Crusoe Island ecosystem or that of pristine isolation. The islands and isolates become less so if one diachronically reads on to the African terrains with the cobber-belt economies during colonial modernity (up until the 70s; Fergusson 1999), end of apartheid capitalisms, diamond networks, or the civil wars with global implications. The second sequel in the series does bring in scenes of civil war in neighbouring Angola. But this is of course done in the lighter mood to fit into the narrative. Safely brushed away were the complex histories of the Atlantic slave trade, decolonising movements, or the staging of cold wars. The idyllic youth in the movie who bicycles the bushes with a chicken strapped on the carrier may also be imagined in another way. He could be a local human link in the global networks, supply, and transactions of diamonds/weapons. And he need not be that. But there are these oft superimpositions of the pristine into the not so pure and simple ecosystems. Around a million wildebeest migrate from Tanzania to Mara. Though the wildlife documentaries may not bring it up these animals are also surrounded by proliferating tourists. The capital from tourism seldom ‘trickles down’ to the natives who resort to charcoal and arable farming

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to make ends meet. Such spaces are not often imagined as animated by conflicts. But they are hybridities of animal migrations, tourscapes, and human miseries transacting with millions of dollars each year. The hybridities are so entrenched that lions have been known to start trapping their prey at the electric fences circling the tour lodges of Masai. At least this is the end of wildness as many knew it! Likewise, Amazonia is often portrayed as the most ‘pristine’ of forests with the later colonial period English documents describing Amazonia as against the civilised and culturally rich England. Such portrayals often missed the anthropogenic forests that cover more than eleven percent and such important soil phenomena like terra preta do Indio or Indian Black Earth (Kawa 2016), which is rich in biological and organic matter and is also a consequence of pre-Columbian settlements. Terra preta supports capital-intense watermelon cultivation, in turn, networked to markets within and scattered globally at present. This need not to suggest a terrain of solely human agency but to emphasise that the disturbances in ecosystems are often homogenised, naturalised or cleansed. What proceeds in such hegemonic design often brings up reminders in the form of unintentional designs. These are often the consequences of what was never factored in or relationships and connectivities that are underplayed in dominant modes of states and developmental processes. Wildlife in the Western Ghats transacting in the anthropocene also needs to acknowledge the hybrid and entwined evolution of ecosystems. This has to be informed and animated by non-human as well as human relationships that cannot proceed along linear temporalities and seamless spatialities. Instead, there will be multiple temporalities and frictional spatialities that redefine the wild and problematise the categories of wild and domestic. Like the ecological shifts in the wetlands and paddy field of Alappuzha that are often out of our vision the Ghats too have been part of ecological processes that are deleted off perceptions. The 2011/12 tiger episodes in Wayanad become interesting. A tiger that was perceived as a menace in a space solely defined as a human settlement was perceived as an invader into the domestic space. It was subsequently killed by the officials. The animal that ‘strayed’ into the human spaces, the larger issue of what constitutes wild and domestic, the boundaries, the inhabitants, the forest department as well as the perception that wildlife (expected to live only in protected forest areas) all gain traction.

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The idea of pristine in tourism literature is precisely showcased as wild around animal corridors and land entitled to forest dwellers that are encroached upon by resorts. More than a hundred resorts had sprung up in the Wayanad region of northern Kerala where the tiger was killed in the immediate years preceding the elimination of the animal. There is the concomitant creation of mobs thanks to the media frenzy that is built around the wild and domestic or human and animal. The mob is a new human community that can dictate terms. When they are not satisfied by tranquilisers, they build pressure to eliminate the intruder. All this resonates with a cynical middle-class dominated public domain that kept asking questions like ‘whether we want Lion Tailed Macaque or man’ during Silent Valley’s struggles in the 1970s against the proposed hydroelectric project. The public domain generated an exclusive logic in the 70s of Kerala slowly dominated by increased foreign remittance and solidification of a consumerist ambience that came on the shoulders of public redistributions and public education of previous decades. Other piecemeal commentaries against green movements include ‘why rain falls on the sea despite lack of trees! The cynicism reaches ominous proportions in the handling of the tiger issue. Subsequently, there were mobs that stood by and watched forest fires as if in moods of revenge and those who even set off wildfires. The epitome of such exclusivist perspectives attaining hegemonic proportions was witnessed in the ecologies of fear against a holistic report that factored in complex relationships and connectivities, called the Western Ghats Ecology Panel Report (2012). The Gadgil committee1 was constituted in the year 2010 at Kottagiri (Tamil Nadu), where there was a conclave on protecting the Western Ghats. The committee had the responsibility to evaluate the status quo of the ecosystem, its eco-sensitive zones, conservation as well as rejuvenation, strategies to categorise the different types of eco-sensitive regions, evaluate the developmental activities here and allied issues as well as certain specific interrogations and investigations into the proposed Athirapally hydroelectric project (in central Kerala). This committee went on with the aforesaid agenda and came out with an integrated holistic mapping of the eco-sensitive zones. There were special references based on water availability. There were three categories for Eco-Sensitive Zones (ESZs). There were directives for the formation of a Western Ghats 1 Madhav Gadgil Commission. The Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India [http://www.moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/wg-23052012.pdf].

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Ecology Authority (WGEA), with its local nodes. They were of the opinion that the Athirapally project is not ecologically feasible because of many interrelated issues ranging from the different kinds of forest dependencies to the peculiar impacts this project would have on a huge riparian order. Within the ESZs, there are activities that are permitted as well as prohibited. Even though a holistic consideration of Western Ghats’ ecology is made, the committee suggested a graded approach based on the geology, climate, possibilities of environmental disasters as well as historical evaluation of each place. There were significant differences vis-à-vis the Ecologically Fragile Land (EFL) classification of the forest departments. The major divergence was with respect to the ‘relationships’ emphasised to in the Gadgil report. The EFLs were by and large exclusively anthropocentric. From Kanyakumari in the south to Tapti River in the North there are different gradations of mountains and montane ecosystems. The reference was to roughly 165,000 square kilometers spread across six Indian states. The ecosystem which is also comprised of unique biospheres was understood as a source of water source for almost 25 crore (250 million) people. Agricultural practices, mining, sand dredging, as well as laterite extractions, in recent times, have created a situation in which there are significant transformations in the dependencies across humans and nonhumans in these realms. Further, the committee observed that both conservation and developmental activities go on as exclusive processes with the least participation and which never took long-term issues into account. The units that they chose for closer introspection were not always administrative units or followed administrative priorities and did not always follow boundaries on the map. Rather they were focused on strings of relationships. Even while the preliminary discussions of the findings as well as recommendations were taking shape, landowners, community groups, real estate lobbies, as well as the church started coordinating public opinion based on conspiracy theories. The regulation on the transfer of public land to private entities in order to prevent ecologically detrimental construction activities, for example, got misrepresented in church sermons, wayside speeches, and public interest stories as a provision not to give tenancies to settlers before 1977 land reforms. The reference of the committee though was to the ongoing takeovers of commons which not only was significant in maintaining socio-ecological well-being like provision of water or prevention of erosions but also have been common spaces that support

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livelihood like grazing. The ESZs were communicated as spaces where there would not be any kind of developmental activity and from where people would be driven off. Not only that; there were unfounded claims that the control on chemical fertilisers would destroy the livelihood of farmers, that schools and hospitals would not be allowed, that prohibition on laterite and sand extractions would stop the construction industry, and that the checks on hydel project would bring in darkness. None of the recommendations affected the majority save the upper middle class with real estate aspirations, resort lobbies, and profit-making in their different forms. There were even statements along the lines that the Sabarimala pilgrimage would cease, thus flaming up religious sensitivities! The reality was that the report targeted avenues of making a profit over long-term ecological damages and invocation of seasonal disasters that are anthropogenic. It also addressed the neoliberal forms of capital movement that transacted with these regions. Local bodies as well as localized public deliberation were to decide the boundaries and relationships with ESZs. So that was also contrary to the lack of consent and consultations suggested in rhetoric fanned out. The WGEA would be in charge of the coordination. Though the report was submitted to the government in a year the state never took the initiative to let the report be known in its true sense. Rather the government went along with the pressure lobbies and another committee was constituted. This was called the Kasturirangan Committee2 headed by a space scientist. They re-examined the Gadgil Report prepared by a group with expertise through decades in ecologies and environmental histories of the region. The present committee had the agenda among others to enquire how the biodiversity concerns raised, will affect development (which was also neoliberal and globally mediated by finance capital!), thus turning a blind eye towards the many holistic facets of the report. They also studied the report giving due importance to the power equations on the ground. The Kasturirangan committee significantly divided the Western Ghats into two kinds of orders, i.e., Natural Landscapes and Cultural Landscapes. Perhaps the most distinguishing factor was the artificial divisions of land that become a lived space through intricate relationships to water-tight chambers or binaries. In Lefebvre’s terms the land is just hegemonically conceived as belonging to a category

2 http://www.moef.gov.in/sites/default/files/1%20HLWG-Report-Part-1_0.pdf.

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and in the case of Karturirangan report, most of this was based literally on Satellite images. This was the opposite of the relationship-based recommendations from Gadgil. They thus kept almost 63 percent of the existing forms of human interventions off ecosystemic considerations. Unlike the Gadgil report that says ecologies cannot be strictly divided into human and non-human, cultural and natural, or living and nonliving, the present one was premised on all such separations. The hybrid nature of ecosystems in the making especially the anthropocene present brings to stark relief in the context of real estate induced mining, disruptions amongst life and non-life in riparian systems, as well as the fallouts from the contradictions involved in adopting global perspectives for profit and arguments against global insights on biodiversity relationships reminds one that the Gadgil report a significant ecological marker. Even the Green Tribunal recommendations that directed the implementors to take action following two separate reports went unheard. The pressure groups had their way of ensuring nothing got translated on the ground. The irony is that even the second report which was neither holistic nor eco-sensitive was presented as anti-people. What followed in effect was the reassurance for the spaces that could become zones for real estate and tourism investments. This was premised on the arbitrary rezoning of ecosystems replete with relationships into individuated parcels of land solely for certain human resource requirements. The cultural landscape into which more than fifty percent of Western Ghats fell was juxtaposed against ‘natural landscape’. The nature–culture divides that were epistemologically questioned by a range of scholars like Latour, Descola, or Viveiros de Castro evidently haunted the Kasturirangan report. Within the natural landscape, the report further marked out ecologically sensitive areas as the only spaces where there could be some reversals in the logic of the market (controls on mining, quarrying, and sand mining). The cultural landscapes were conceived as devoid of entangled relationships between living forms, and non-living formations. Anything non-human can only be a resource or at best a or non-living form, except in their capacity as resources or at best as ‘ecosystem services’. Ecologies have to articulate value for humans. The only ways non-human components come in are by way of commodities. Depoliticised environments (Swyngedouw 2011) in the classification of natural landscapes bring back the imagined Cartesian binaries alongside the individualistic logic of neoliberal capitalism.

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Ecosystem services engage with the forest precisely in this way and the trend has already found formal acceptance in policies and planning. This may be followed a lot in instances from the African continent where sustainability goals go alongside high-growth cities and become policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, things become more complicated because the occupational domains of people are mostly precarious, and the compounding effects of climate and ecological transformations make such terrains more complex. The interlocked challenges are factored into the sustainability arguments like in SDG goal 11 (sustainable cities) or SDG 13 (Climate) in a certain sense. But the question is whether the different approaches that help zoning and planning knits economic social and climatic issues across strict divides. Some put forward bioregions as a way to localise issues in the planning and policy domain. But such localisation of environment even while emphasising the need to ground sociality in ecologies and vice versa seems to be based on reductionist ecological thinking and reification of the regional ecologies (Alexander 1990). In addition, the place itself, as interrogated before with respect to regions in the west coast/Kerala may be already part of networked relationships with other entities and other regions. The ideas of conservation have already embraced the market in the conceptualisation of the ‘wild’ habitations. There has been a proliferation of governance technologies (biological, administrative, financial) that quantify nature. Everything from ecosystem services, heritage, ecotourism rhetoric as well as the more scientifically advanced gene-banking (when this involves the conversion of biological know-how to profit) follow such quantified logic assembled into modes of production. Of particular attention is the act passed in the Indian parliament (2016) with directives for using compensatory funds. The compensatory funds have been questioned for who decides on such compensation and what is compensated for. The Compensatory Afforestation, Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) and the idea of compensation have not taken public participation into account unlike the Forest Rights Act of 2006, which has many such provisions. In fact, the authority accumulated nearly 41,000 crores as recompense for forest conversions.3 And this fund is to be used for afforestation. There is arbitrariness in calculating value 3 Whose forests are these anyway?. The Indian Express. Neera Singh. July 28, 2016 [http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/campa-bil-monsoon-ses sion-compensatory-afforestation-fund-bill-forest-rights-act-2939306/].

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for forest conversion as well as the idea of afforestation, bereft of the already overshadowed relationships. There is the common perception of the wild, for instance, as something totally non-human and perhaps an alternative coming to be of nature. It becomes a line that separates the domestic. This is when wildlife is all about spaces defined by human absence. But wildlife can be also about what constitutes the non-human within our body as well as all those life forms that invade, co-evolve, regenerate, etc. amidst humans. As Eric Wolf in his anthropological studies concludes, there have never been absolute isolates and island systems (1982). It also serves well to start addressing possible assumptions of ‘unchanging cultures’ as well as ‘natures’, though the analysis still centres much on a European frame of reference post-1400 and in effect ignores much of the wider world outside. The analytical frame invests much in what gets ‘written out of history’. His work situates anthropology in its historical context and follows the genealogies of relationships of production and manifestations of power. Nature as well as the wild can be thought of as materialisations of the relationalities, like the class and ethnic identities were for Wolf. The emphasis here is on the differential roles of beings of diverse origins and social makeup in the creation of an interlinked world rather than isolates of any kind. We must understand that there is no self-contained wild adding up with equally self-contained domestic or the good old natural as against the social. Instead, whichever place that one might focus for the moment will be socio-natural hybridities with relationships and connectivities that fan in and out. Unintended designs and nonlinear outcomes are mere indicators of these interconnections and non-isolate landscapes. The multispecies encounters that inform such ecosystems are often left out of the designs that supposedly address issues connected with Ghats and wildlife. They leave out both the way life has come to be as well as what is becoming of the wild in its anthropocene present. The reason some knowledge forms or perspectives on the wild prevail rather than others has also to do with the political economy. The sustainability arguments, nature-culture divides, quantification of ecology (as services), or the theological circle of life- logic prevails over a perspective rooted in relationships, power equations, and hybridities. Another space and in this case neither highlands nor the paddy tracts (not that all of these ever overlap, because they often do in Kerala), where relationships often get deleted from popular perceptions are the built environments in urban spaces.

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A Government of India document dated 1891 (Census of India: 288) states: In Malayali houses, however, the owners are entirely at the mercy of the carpenter, for he is the supreme authority on dimensions of door frames, the inclination of rafters and their number for the roof, the area of the open yards, the position of the beams and their sections, for every trifling detail has its-own sasthram (science) to be followed.

In this caste-mediated ecology of built spaces, the reference of course is to the Nair house and the head carpenter (Moothasari) who designs the house, who recites the rules, by heart, and keeps the owner confident. The other castes belonging to different classes have had different ways of engaging in the construction of houses. But is to be noted are the direct interactions between the head carpenter (the artisan) and the owner. In the present context construction has become a complex process involving different layers of interaction and thus different actors. And most importantly there is a much wider range of ‘resource’ extraction. So ‘environment as resources’ incorporates most of the riverbeds, laterite hills as well as marble quarries that are often further away (from Rajasthan to Italy!). After the reform movements and the modernisation in Kerala, there has been a change in the caste-based framework and also the role of artisans and owners. There were also significant shifts in the way castebased hierarchies structured spaces and in the demand for public spaces. In recent decades large-scale construction, remittances from migrant labourers and the role of contractors have come into the picture. Social imaginaries in a town like Ernakulam increasingly finds it difficult to be moored in imagined pre-capitalist histories (Ramachandran 1996) and persist with all the imagined traditions. The invention (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) of ‘tradition’ becomes visible with the preoccupation with Bhoomipooja, Vaasthu, or Thachushastram bereft of periodic additions to such predominantly oral knowledge transmissions or the retrofit alongside hyper-modern capitalist present of the region. The built environment may comprise everything from modern high rises or gated communities with self-contained promises, secure spaces, and sacred points of origin (often through earth worship—bhoomipooja) or the ‘vaasthu’ mediated traditional living that has found its mooring in twenty-first century urban landscapes. With respect to the latter, there

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is an increased tendency to revive ‘traditions’ in the case of personal dwelling places and during the different stages of the making of other built forms as well. This is of course without the same social contexts that produced the corpus of material, be they orally transmitted, recollected, or added (Bhoomipooja, Thachushastram, Vaasthuvidya etc.) resorted to. The actors who involve in the making of a built form also have changed as may be seen in the role of contractors, architects, and contract labourers against the relationships between artisans and owners or the owner as the sole builder. So are the contexts where such knowledge systems are applied as in the case of modern corporate architecture. In the case of bhoomipooja there is even an active incorporation of the existing geography, earth, plants, birds, and animals; in a way that tapers towards the ‘project in the making’. Such selective depictions and legitimations of ‘tradition’ are thought to occur when societies are thrown into a vortex of more or less drastic social change, when the rigid normative framework of the past is strained to a breaking point and rendered incapable of functioning ‘properly’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Hobsbawm 1997). If one explores how social relations and social configurations are subsumed culturally and materially in the contemporary urban context of Ernakulum, the most urbanised part in Kerala, stories keep surfacing. And they surface from built forms in the context of urban spatial restructuring. Built forms don’t imply the physical structure or the environment per se but as these are perceived by social agents. These forms include not only dwelling places, shelters, or buildings, but also public spaces, and monuments. Humans as well as non-humans relate to the built environment mediated by changes and shifts in the organisation of spaces. Besides the material structures constitute themselves in and define spaces by what they represent. Moreover, new forms of spaces are continuously in the making as with public spaces that come up but within types of restrictive regulatory and surveilled enclosures such as gated communities, malls, and theme parks. Previously unregulated open spaces have been co-opted, walled and often privately regulated. The unregulated open spaces have been taken over for new utilities and value-added activities. The adherence to the language of nature (pure and original) and the extension of ecological/biological models that extend biology to the human made environment (in the construction of personal dwellings for example) may be perceived as happening together with the formation of a possibly new political cosmology with amorphous ideas like ‘globalisation’

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glorifying the triumph over space (‘Something might not be in the global community, but soon will be’; Vision 2020; ‘Catching up’). At the same time there are activities that are on the rise as a result of private investment in service sectors like education or health and corporate architecture that cuts across places with large-scale displacement of people (Ramakrishnan 2006: 4) or intolerance to other forms of life, adding more complexity to the idea of ‘urban’ during the transitions to corporate state versions.

Exhuming Relationships The year 1924 has been vivid in the memories of the oldest generations alive in Kerala especially in the central parts until recent decades. There are not many now who are old enough to recall the floods as such anymore. Yet the stories have travelled across to the immediate generations and the year has hence become a geo-social marker. The Malayalam 1099 (1099 ME) year in the Malayalam Calendar gave the flood the name ‘the flood of 99’ (In Malayalam: tonnoottombathile vellapokkam). There are stories of whole semi-tarred roads washed away, monorails destroyed, fields inundated, settlements washed away, temporary settlements in schools and colleges, great rescues, the wild animals that washed ashore, etc. that people recall. There are more recollections from the next generations who practically grew up with the many episodes. At our house, these stories were extremely live because of the pilot role played by grandfather (Appachan-fathers’ father) in local rescue operations and initiatives taken to transfer whole families to relatively higher altitude places like the college campus near our house. I not only grew up with vivid stories of the tonnoottombathile vellapokkam, but listening to first-hand narratives from people who were either taken care of or who were familiar with Appachan’s prompt interventions during the deluge. The flood at that time was attributed to incessant rainfall, but there were also reasons attributed to a breach in the Mullaperiyaar dam on the upper reaches of the Periyar River in the Ghats. Following hybrid causalities, natural and man-made, water gushed downstream, even inundating the upper reaches of towns like Munnar while severely affecting districts like Ernakulum, Thrissur, and Kottayam. Apart from the unsettlements it produced in everyday life it also washed away thousands of records from old Churches that dotted the river line. Thus, histories too got literally washed away. Hundreds of stories of rescue narrated by people who have

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either survived or been active in flood relief are there (our Appachan’s being one from the Aluva region). This flood, apart from the then scale and effect was also an instance in which literally many of the oft-imagined binaries like the wild and domestic or human and non-human got breached on the ground. The rivers that are the most visible arteries across the landscapes in Kerala are also the networks that throughout history have reminded us of the relationships integral to particular states of being. Floods of a scale of 99 were the starkest reminders. People who have been in the ‘safest’ of cultural spaces got reduced to the status of ecological refugees, rivers changed courses in places, and villages altogether disappeared, all translating as moments when places as conceived in the modern everyday became reminders of the numerous networks that suddenly got exposed. The ‘taken for granted (s)’ was shaken as earth reshuffled the well-defined tracks animals and people trod. The century that followed the great floods too mad many reminders, probably of lesser scale, because of the dams that started dotting upstream and the techno-social ambience of security and feeling of control over ecology. Nevertheless, the reminders do come in greater frequency and starker impacts, though these often get forgotten either when the rivers recede after flash floods, the water reaches back after the driest of draughts, or when the interludes of normality between ‘maverick events’ bring back confidence. In the anthropocene present when human impacts are ever more recognised and awareness is probably the most the entanglements and relationships though become murkier. This could be so because the techno-managerial imaginaries have gained an upper hand. Such imaginaries are defined by a profound lack of politics and a blanket trust in the hegemonic ideals. In Kerala, it was one of progress in the post-independence socialist modernity of 60s and 70s, that of consumerist expectations after that, and developing into a trust in vikasanam, which is the local variant of neoliberal global developmentalism. The continuous deletions of interconnections and the whole politics behind ecologies in the making as part of hegemonic designs have gone to great extents. ‘Natural disasters’ often get presented as historical recurrences, repetitions or cycles, when they are neither natural, apolitical, or cyclical. Rather, human desires that have started taken spectacular proportions in valueadded spatial imaginaries like the real estate and heritage, as mentioned before, conceal the terrains where humans and non-humans, the wild and

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domestic, or nature and culture merge in complex relationships only to be exposed during great floods. It is on top of a series of deletions as well as non-factoring in of connectivities that popular perceptions of places and invocations of tradition are built upon. When rivers articulate the Ghats to midlands, supply water to the marshes and later to agricultural fields, network with canals, engage ports to mainland, as well as around which new urban imaginaries and contemporary life emerge alongside, they also become the best metaphors of myriad co-evolutions. They shatter any modern compartmentalised imaginaries and they also throw open possibilities to ward off obliterations. This is much required in the anthropocene present, when flash floods swamp cities, mosquitoes emerge from unsuspecting spaces, groundwater dries in shorter intervals or submerges further. It all looks like cycles and repetitive but none is the same as the others and the effects are different every time. Counting these in becomes all the more significant when imaginations and imaginaries bordering on the spectacular, now with global aspirations added on, wishes to keep the puritan binaries and ahistorical nostalgias intact, unrecognised and to be profited from. Despite the Coastal Regulation zonings introduced in India (1, 2, 3, 4), which include seas, estuaries, rivers, and backwaters under tidal sway as well as the several regulations on constructions near riversides, proximity to ‘waterscapes’ have become the symbol of affluence in the last two decades. Almost every seaside of Ernakulum town which is the most urbanised space in Kerala mainland has been effectively walled away. These openings of land towards the sea are walled away by huge apartments and real estate projects run by prominent builders. In many riverside towns too, land gets procured at inflated prices during the building booms as during the 2000s credit easing. The easing of regulation on foreign direct investments also had consequences for ecology. Massive tiling of the floor area around high rises has almost covered all the earth. Water can no longer be absorbed and it seeps away never getting into the water tables. The same is true of middle-class individual houseyards. This reduces the pressure that pushes off saline water incursions to aquifers underground, especially by the sea sides and backwater edges. The advertised and showcased living spaces by the rivers and seas with all the overtones of manicured ecosystem hide massive disruptions underground. The subterranean networks also incorporate the many complex networks of life and non-life that are literally hidden and disrupted. All these manifest only when drinking water becomes salty or rumblings from the underground

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send seismic panics. Of course, most of these get patchwork solutions and are met with cosmetic remedies. The contentious contexts have always been made starker in the metropolitan regions elsewhere in India than in second-tier cities like Kochi. The 2005 floods in Mumbai for instance brought together life and non-life in their hybridity, when water overflowed all the sewers, inundating every single stretch of road. The abrupt phenomenon brought out clearly the thousands of disregards and deletions of relationships on the altar of piecemeal urban progress and structural implosions. Chennai was another city in the eye of natural disasters. This is a city eviscerated of the earlier occupations and activities of production that has now been transplanted into designated zones of ‘exception’ (viz. the Special Economic Zones (SEZs)) since the 2000s. What unravelled were also contradictions between the urban plans made for a developmental bygone era and the present-day preoccupations with consumption and global marketing. Most of the policies and methods of addressing, be they pollution control, biodiversity, forest conservation, coastal conservation, or wetland conservation, fail to address these unprecedented situations in places (Amruth 2015). Only an ‘event’ of disaster prompts some action. State and bureaucracy modulate action, i.e., whenever they do, post-event and that too symptomatically. The water networks that articulate places, the natural drainage, the interconnections between human and non-human animals in urban ecosystems, and the totalitarian overlay of urban designs modulated by GDP figures- all of these interconnected processes will not find a place in policy prescriptions.

Ecologies Are Processual The important aspect is to perceive ecology not as stagnant but as processual. The idea is also to study a phenomenon, be that a geologic formation, a system of life and non-life, an ecosystem, or peculiar phenomenon, in its own right. In other words, do not see them as mere representations of self-contained biological models of equilibrium or that of a Cartesian machinic order comprised of dualities. The ‘making’ involves breaking, assembling, or deconstructing through points of time and through situations. The basic idea is to focus on the wide gamut of relationalities as well as entanglements. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene, despite their differences and apart from the types of human impact they engage with are also concepts that address interlinks and

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relationships as well as the taken for granted binaries. The attempt must be to make the interconnections oft hidden or deleted in human hubris manifest. Nature pure and simple or culture pure and simple does not exist in real. The episodes in Discovery Channel and popular television programmes on ecology or tourism often depict these as separate and as one juxtaposed with the other as contrasts. The narratives that follow out of it lament the loss of an ideal. They seldom try to portray ecologies as assemblages that come into existence or get stark and visible through climatic changes, state processes, invasions or the globalised mobility of capital with their localised effects. The fixity and timelessness are to be replaced by connections not only between the binaries mentioned but also methodologically and perceptually between sciences and politics. It is not as science logically leading to politics translated into policies. Rather political ecological points of view (Harvey 1996; Whatmore 2002; Mckibben 2006; Castree 2013) point at fundamental entanglements of sciences and politics and this is not about the simple addition of objective science plus politics leading to policies. It calls for a change in popular perceptions during moments of recognition and realisation of several connectivities like during floods. Anthropocene frames are an opportunity to wade out of the megalomanias that ensue from mechanical assumptions following modernist binaries or its postmodern reverberations that still assume modernity happened (Latour 1993). It is the objective or short-circuited science plus politics leading to policies that often inform megalomaniac projects like ‘river linking’ with plans to link 37 rivers (from Ganga to Cauvery) through 30 odd links with a whopping 560,000 crores/5.6 trillion rupees capital (River Research Centre 2004). Most modern state developmental models, colonial to post-colonial versions of this, started on grand narratives translated as actions, the consequences of which are borne to date, the most familiar (in Kerala) of which is perhaps the flood of 1924 with hybrid origins. A current version is the tagging of a region as ‘watersurplus’ and hence in need of tunnels to divert the excess in the southern peninsular Indian rivers by way of top-down plans. There are resonances from colonial Inter State Inter Basin projects. If the colonial interlinking projects factored in only the ease of export and import of goods, the postcolonial versions from the 1960s onwards are built on inadequate science and an improper understanding of hydrological systems.

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Deleted here is the topography of the Ghats, the flow of rivers along the gradients, sediments, shifting beds, and banks, the diversity not just based on terrains through which they flow but seasonal and annual variations in water, the diversity of watersheds or river basins effects on cultures, the tribal associations, or the industrial and mining groups and lobbies. There are quantified perceptions like ‘ecosystem service’ that feed into the contemporary rhetoric of sustainable development. The hydraulic logic of plans, the reports, the surplus-deficit views, etc. are the policy births of bland additions of self-contained science with politics. Anthropocene itself can be hubristic, imagining top-down technological interventions, accelerating global solutions, geoengineering (river linking being an extreme form), or system-conservative sustainability models that supposedly bring human beings and ecology under one umbrella. In effect, this translates into a cosy free-market order rooted in notions of equilibrium as if life is about establishing homeostasis with whatever order that prevails. The logic resonates from garden city movements and such biological models that were once applied in urban studies that took the city itself as a ‘natural habitat of civilized man’ (Park 1925: 1–46). According to ecological theory, every subsection in the city reflects what holds for the entire city. The city presents itself as an externally organised unit produced by its own laws. The urban center may be portrayed as characterised by typical zones. As plants and animal forms are studied under ecology ‘human ecology’ is a parallel study of spatial and temporal relations of humans as affected by the social environment. The ecological study of urban spaces conceives science as autonomous and drained of social processes. The perspective is that human behavior is determined by universal laws and displays certain fundamental patterns. The ecological theorists took spaces as given. The other extreme is a puritan idea of nature that perceives modern and urban as unnatural. As we already saw some primordial purity of nature as well as prehistorical and pre-modern romanticism and valorisation ensues.

References Aiya, Nagam. 1906. The Travancore State Manual I, II, III . Trivandrum: Travancore Government Press. Ajin, R.S., et al. 2022. The Tale of Three Landslides in the Western Ghats, India: Lessons to Be Learnt. Geoenvironmental Disasters 9: 16.

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Alexander, D. 1990. Bioregionalism: Science or Sensibility? Environmental Ethics (12): 161–173. Amruth, M. 2015. Chennai Durantham: Keralam Kanenda Soochanakal (in Malayalam). Keraleeyam Maasika 11/12 (16, November/December): 5–14. Baviskar, Amita (ed.). 2008. Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture, and Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press. Castree, Noel. 2013. Making Sense of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Crutzen, P.J., and E.F. Stoermer. 2000. The “Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17. Debord, Guy. 1994 [1967]. Society of Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Zone Books: New York. Fergusson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadgil, Madhav. 1996. Western Ghats: A lifescape. Journal of Indian Institute of Sciences 76: 495–504. Giblett, Rod. 1996. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press. Gilmartin, David. 2006. Imperial Rivers: Irrigations and British Visions of Empire. In Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Dane Kennedy and Durba Ghosh. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Haraway, Donna. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. www.environme ntalhumanities.org. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1997. On History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terrence Ranger (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Kawa, Nicholas C. 2016. Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests. Austin: University of Texas Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. McKibben, Bill. 2006. End of Nature. Random House Trade Paperbacks. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London/New York: Verso.

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Park, Robert. 1925: The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (with R. D. McKenzie & Ernest Burgess). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramachandran, V.K. 1996. On Kerala’s Development Achievements. In Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, ed. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Clarendon Press. Ramakrishnan, Venkitesh. 2006. Conflict Zones. Frontline, October 20. River Research Centre (S.P. Ravi/C.G. Madhusoodhanan/A. Latha/S. Unnikrishnan/K.H. Amita Bachan). 2004. Tragedy of Commons: The Kerala Experience in River Linking. RRC and SANDRP. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. Depoliticized Environments: The End of Nature, Climate Change and the Post-Political Condition. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement October: 253–274. Whatmore, Sarah. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 5

Invasives and Invadability in Perspective

Until a couple of decades back when digital games and smartphones were yet to make a popular presence in the summer social geographies in Kerala vacations for school kids comprised mostly of outdoor games. Most of these games were instant concoctions if not one of the regular field games played on roads or fields. During recess kids get atop the roadside walls, culverts, or the still to be found commons-like places. This was incidentally a time when the ‘real estate’ boom with global networks of credit ease, transformations in state, or the intervention of finance capital was yet to make its literal marks on geographies. The vacant lands, spaces in between properties, uncultivated/cultivated fields, etc. were yet to be price tagged on the basis of ‘land value’ and nothing else. So, during the recess and interval, in between one of the games children played, they sometimes plucked the ubiquitous leaves of a plant vernacularly known as ‘communist pacha’ (communist-green). They pluck the leaves and place in top-down on a palm folded cylindrically. On the other hand, they clap on the thus-placed leaf. A right clap produces a tiny blast, almost with the same decibel as that of a small cracker. Communist pacha has always been a plant alongside life as it unfurled all around. It was one of the most prominent bushes by the side of any small alley, front yards, roadsides, railway tracks, or urban pavements. Except for its strange vernacular name, the reason for which often became a curiosity among kids, there was nothing too peculiar about this plant. Of course, the leaves were often © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_5

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seen to be used, after necessary crushing on wounds, cuts, and bruises; once again with visible vacation links! More academic enquiries then brought out other stories to this most mundane herb. Along with the more ‘notorious’ Mikania Micranthia (vernacularly known as Dritharashtra pacha), communist pacha now became what became known as an ‘invasive’ plant. It also turned out that the plant vernacularly referred to as a communist pacha was different as one moves from the northern parts of Kerala to the South. There were at least three plants in reference which also speaks about a totally different basis for nomenclature than the binomial nomenclature. There was the bush that grew on the ground whose leaf became improvised crackers. This was earlier known as Eupatorium odorata and later became Chromolaena odorata. There was something which was popularly called curtain creeper or curtain plant and then there was the infamous Mikania. The more popular communist pacha was of course the former one. Of the three Mikania became the subject of major botanical and ecological enquiries (Gunasekera 2009). This was a creeper that spread so rapidly, that it enveloped the vegetation around and even carpeted the canopy of forest to such an extent that sunlight never reached the vegetation underneath. The literal choking of other plants gave it the vernacular name Dritharashtra pacha, after the epic King in Mahabharata, who was born blind. But his anger at the Pandavas (for killing all his Kaurava sons) translated into a killer-hug with the power of ten thousand elephants! It naturally becomes interesting to further the childhood inquisitiveness behind communist pacha. The 40s to 60s was a time when the communist idea was taking firm roots in the southwest, with unprecedented transformation in the socio-political scape. All the aforementioned plants spread very fast, and it is not for no reason that they were called communist in Kerala. And understandably the christening was done by the centrist political antagonists or their co-travellers who found the ready metaphors in the all-pervasive and burgeoning bushes! The transformation of a ‘benign’ (not that it is not at present) herb into an ‘invader’ (the nature of which becomes important) does call for a review of ecologies around. It is a mosaic story not only of humans and non-humans, animate and inanimate, or life and non-life, but also one of natives and invaders. There is a need to start from the basic definitions of invasive and this is not to be a simplistic ‘othering’. Rather there has to be specific genealogies to invasion. There is the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity which has been evolving

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ever since the first meetings in Rio (1992). Since then, this has developed into a protocol which it developed in 20101 in Japan. The idea of Invasive Alien Species (IAS) as a useful category to interpret ecological data was put forward in that convention. Ever since then, the idea has been discussed in public, social scientific circles as well as ecological debates and there has been nuanced take on the concept. There were of course many perspectives on the usefulness of the concept, and people fell along a broad spectrum of reasons, with substantiated justification. There was also a broad spectrum of oppositions and those too necessarily did not fall into absolutisms. But some did point out unsettling resonances of xenophobia in the terminology. And the resonances emanate and get imbibed as part of the exclusive implications of the idea of nation that has one body with all the possibilities of getting pathologised. As Swyngedouw and Ernstson suggests (2018) there is an immuno-politics at work and there is a layering of infrastructure as laws, surveillance, physical barriers and enclosures to ward off the unwanted. The unwanted in the broad sense may include everything from microbes, waste, CO2 , and different forms of crisis (climatic…financial) but also refugees and those expressing unrest. So, ecological management, including sustainable democracy, good governance, or ecosystem services, focuses all its resources on immunise the existing order against all forms of recalcitrant tendencies. There is a mediaeval notion of body-politic runs parallel to the biological body that could be diseased. As Amitav Ghosh (2016) puts it the threat to the biological body is imagined to come from the ‘bare lives’ across the boundaries. The values laden in ‘what is good or what is bad’ also threatened to mark and designate things, black and white. In 2016 there was a report in The Guardian (Wahlquist 2016, December 28). It reported that a Queensland man (Australia) may face fines of up to $ 60,000 for keeping rabbits. And rabbits, in popular parlance are the cuddliest of creatures to become a subject of crime. It turns out that according to the Biosecurities Act of 2014, rabbits are a ‘restricted matter’ in Queensland. There are rabbit-proof fences in this place to keep rabbits off certain spaces. Biosecurity talks about the modern state engaging in acts or management techniques that impinge on biological lives. This becomes increasingly so with certain recognitions. There is a sovereign perception of ‘humans’

1 https://www.cbd.int/cop10/.

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and the ecosystems here as susceptible and in this case, rabbits become the eye of the storm! Control (the rabbit-proof fences) becomes a key technique in biosecurity. It is not without reason and the issue of invasiveness becomes highlighted. Here invasiveness is in general about organisms harmful not because of what they are but where they are. The rabbits in Australia and the vines from East Asia once brought into the United States (Kudzu), become the popular subjects. In their places of origins, these organisms formed part of an entangled evolution with the living and non-living. For instance, the vines in East Asia were also eaten by the native insects and they were killed off during winters. But this was not so in Fiji or Vanuatu where the US army introduced them as camouflage or in the United States where they were introduced into as ornamental plants, cattle feed and components for landscaping. The aesthetics of landscaping or the logic on controlling soil erosion was overshadowed by the phenomenal spread of this vine to the extent of suffocating life around, with a conducive climate and no biological control (much like Mikania in Kerala). The story of European rabbits introduced in Australia by settlers as pets was a process of bringing in familiar ecology to an alien land (i.e., alien for the settler!). The rabbits ate away all the plants to the extent of starving all the native animals and their populations kept skyrocketing. This became the logic of the 2014 act of control and many such measures. Bringing back the immune-political logic mentioned before we see the rabbit as the eye of the storm, the invader, or the supreme threat and not the system that brought here the rabbits or the present versions of such colonisations mediated by ever more flexible capital. The logic of invasion here is that ecosystems are the results of millennia of co-evolutions as well as long processes of adaptation. Inherent here is also the concept of ‘balance’ or ‘equilibrium’ there was, with factors like natural geography, food, and predators coming in. The non-native species, in most cases somehow alter this balance. Not only that, they even overgrow with the invasive effect. There is no presumption here that invasions are always with human agency and that they are intentional. There are unintentional invasions, like the introductions of giant alien molluscs with voracious appetites (like African Snail—Achatina fulica) through cargo on the west coast or that come in through storms ocean currents, etc. But human introductions are more pervasive ever since the first major voyages or colonial enterprises themselves became the epochal mark of ‘anthropocene’. In the case of the African Snails, that has become

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all-pervasive, especially during the seasonal monsoon rains in Kerala, it is the import of wood through harbours for the proliferating middle to upper middle-class housing needs that may be pointed at as an active agent. Even the nuances of invasion narratives often are anthropocentric for the very reason that they never turn the radar towards the human interlocutors, entrants, or processes into native ecologies as aliens and thus ‘invasive’. The idea of invasiveness of course must be taken together with the sociobiological contexts in which this is implicated (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Robbins 2001). Thus, the blaming on invasive species for some of the natural disasters (Neely 2010) has often missed the situations that gave rise to invasion as well as the mutually reinforcing relationships the discourse of invasion had with the existing flows of capital and institutional order. The bureaucratic entrenchment in plans of social forestry and the resultant spread of acacia across the landscapes in India is a case in point. There are also superficial focuses on weeds as such that often miss the ongoing ecologies of global capitalist relationships that states become part of and become facilitators of. Everything from the increased demand for building material created by credit relaxations in real estate, import of exotic wood, the new aesthetics of cleanliness that results in tiling away of exposed soil, the artificial lawns that are supported by toxic fertilisers (of course with parallel effects of their run offs) or the whole discourse of invasion becoming xenophobia for anything non-human, all have to become part of any understanding of invasion. Following Paul Robbins (ibid.) we have to understand any invasion as a sociobiological phenomenon and factor in the complex networks of power-laden relationships in the making. In South Africa where wildfires were studied, it was found that certain alien invasive species with resistance to wildfires colonised endemic ecologies post-fires (van Wilgen 2009). Fire management policies like prescribed burning have changed in the endemic biomes called fynbos in western and eastern Cape in South Africa. The changes have been always connected to the political regimes, the 1930s conservation plans and prescribed burning, the adaptation of alien invasives, and the Working for Water programme postapartheid that sought to reduce poverty alongside alien species control, all show that management is intricately related to political regimes, ecological paradigms and the science of the time. With the poverty reduction programme called Working for Water we see the entangled nature of sociobiological nature through invasiveness and poverty to divert funds

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into a programme. The complex relationships between fires, poverty relief, foreign floral species, and ecological research made the ecology of invasiveness an anthropocene process. If one takes the case of social forestry activities, the current threats of invasion as well as some of the justifications given for employing Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA) labour for Lantana removal from sanctuaries we see a coming together of biological, political, and policy rationales given in terms of existing flows of capital (as a productive activity/employment generation). A programme initiated at Bandipur Tiger Reserve in the Karnataka state of India, when it addresses the proliferation of Lantana, brings together the policies for wildlife reserves, MNREGA jobs, tigers as well as other animals and endemic plants (as against invasive Lantana). Further, there have been continuous alterations in the edaphic (soil) environment as a result of changing climate, decreased permeability of ground due to extensive tiling, as well as the concentration of weeds, insects, etc. due to increasing urban processes in surrounding zones. Fertility Island-like formations have been observed in parts of South America, Africa, and Australia (Ridolfi et al. 2008). These are comprised of vegetated, fertile soil patches. The phenomena are a result of largescale resource redistributions and concomitant nutrient depletions in un-vegetated areas. The shrubs that invade have fertile soil beneath their canopies. Nitrogen-fixing properties of some of these shrubs add to the impact.2 Such a phenomenon can result in ‘desertification’ kind of processes in the surrounding regions and anthropocenic irreversibility like a decrease in species diversity as well as the chain effects on host insects. In regions that are already resource-strained, in many parts of Kerala, due to accumulated human interventions, the effect could reach exaggerated proportions. There is another major problem. This is the fact that invasive ecologies also become part of existing ecologies and form associate systems. It is not as if they stand away and against, rather they become part of a process. So, a mere ahistorical deletion of the ‘invader’ may not be a great idea. And while the effects of invasiveness may become drastic like in the destruction of forests or catastrophic depletions of fish it simultaneously adds even more complexity. Based on the fact that a species was

2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383633/.

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translocated and which subsequently had intended and unintended effects they get classified as ‘weed’. Such classifications might not factor in the associate systems and adaptations in ecology that took root over time. In the case of communist pacha the popular connotations and popular parlance are testimonies to the presence of these plants in everyday life as well as about the ecologies that took root ever since the plants started off, in this case with the cargoes that brought in wheat in the early 1900s. The case of Chromolaena was never as drastic (at most a Weed- Kuttikaadu, Chavaru in Malayalam) as that of Mikania introduced by the military. The latter is now invading even into the canopy of Western Ghats. It definitely locates the anthropocene in modern contexts and state moments when one of the apparatuses of modern state and state making, viz. the military, with roles like security as well as invasion, if need be, also becomes the agency for other biotic invasions as well! Another theory of the arrival of Chromolaena is that they came out of the once-closed botanical gardens during colonial times (Binggeli 2001). These gardens and their characteristic aesthetics were also a representation of the imperial control of nature that necessarily accompanies the other dominations. Control was a mixture of technologies that included aesthetic, coercive, cultural, economic, and statistical. A colonial garden in itself is representative of this mixture of the structural plans, the labourers deployed from the colonised places, the colonial officers in charge as well as the respective institutions or dwelling places with its own sets of differentiations from the surroundings. The journey of Chromolaena from the tropical Americas or places around where this was native to the gardens in 1840s (Gautier 1992) and then proliferating and adapting to floodplains is a case wherein the invasion for sure happened but the agency as well as the adaptive ecologies make the picture complicated. So attributing agency to the ‘invader’ takes away the systemic contexts, in this case a colonial and modern aesthetics. Whatever the reason whole new ecologies took root ever since its entry. Apart from the games kids play or the medicinal uses, the leaves have also been known as a repellent for mosquitoes. Mosquito prevalence in contemporary times, itself, being a hybrid product of human and nonhuman agency (land use, construction, changes in hydraulic networks); communist pacha has evolved through hybrid ontologies that also questioned any exceptional or flattened ontology assumed to human agents.

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This again becomes a chance in ecology to look further into the heterogenous multiplicities that always enfold but somehow become effaced in time or the hegemonic prerogatives of the economy or a system. The Kerala State Biodiversity Board study reported (The Hindu, May 30, 2012) around 89 invasive plants, of which around 19 pose the highest risk to native vegetation. It is interesting to note the geographical range of such invasions with many originating in Latin Americas or Central Americas. Contemporary appetites in the construction sector as well as patterns of food consumption drew in such cargo. Often, we see better adaptations among the invasive species in ecologies altered to suit the interests of powerful processes that are reordered in quick succession at present. Among the species which pose the highest risk and better adaptive abilities are Acacia mearnsii (Black wattle), Antigonon leptopus (Mountain rose), Arundo donax (Giant reed), Chromolaena odorata (Siam weed), Ipomoea cairica (Kolambipoo), Mikania micrantha (American valley, Kaipu valley, Dhritharashtra pacha), Mimosa diplotricha var. diplotricha (Anathottavadi), Prosopis juliflora (Sali) and Sphagneticola trilobata (Singapore daisy). There is an Invasive Species Assessment Protocol developed in Virginia that becomes a basis for creating lists based on impacts. The protocol distinguishes, the type of risk (levels—high to insignificant) to the ecosystems based on state, nation, or region which, like the biosecurity issue referred to before is a hybridisation of control with the coming together of life forms spread across places, the existing ecosystem as well as political and cultural, categories like state or nation. According to this study and as pointed out in the report by Dr. T.V. Sajeev (Scientist and expert on invasive species at the Kerala Forest Research Institute), some species have even started the process that is known as naturalisation. Chromolaena odorata and Lantana camera come under this status. In fact, Lantana (vernacularly known as kongini poovu), in the process of naturalisation has also become the host plant for Slate Flash (Rapala Manea) and Tiny Grass Blue (Zizula Hylax) butterflies. The host plant refers to the plant upon which a life form subsists. Likewise, the communist pacha’s bush ecology not only adds on to the vacation spatiotemporalities, and becomes the food source to the butterflies, Dark Blue Tiger (Tirumala septentrionis ) and Grass Daemon (Udaspus Folus ), but also offer necessary hideouts to the increasingly marginalised mongoose, hare, snakes, or jackals. Communist pacha and Kongini have assembled

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into an ecological whole from where it will be violently intrusive to cut away, mark out, or flush away the individuated invader. What becomes evident from all of these hybrid landscapes is the need for an ecological frame that does not separate its component parts according to historical or stagnant assumptions. Studies on invasions perhaps bring to relief the possible problems involved in perceptions that do not factor in the multiple agencies in question and that of obliteration of the human agency from the complex relationships. There have also been significant interrogations into ecologies from urban geographic, urban ecosystemic, and human ecologic points of view. Though Jane Jacobs, among other critical thinkers, stressed the specific interactions among different elements (Jacobs 1961), urban ecology essentially used the biological models for city habitats envisaged by the Chicago school. The biological models never paid heed to mixed uses, did not have a critical thought on slum clearances or rights-based approach, unlike Jacobs. Thus, there could be built, aquatic, waste, and green habitats within and not necessarily in dialectical relationships to each other. For instance, landfills are thought to have the highest degrees of disturbance and support the toughest plants. There is a certain evolution of the ecosystem as coproduced by disturbance. Such ecosystems are not the equilibrium systems that biological models for cities predicted. Rather these are co-creations. Further, there are classifications of living beings like pigeon and rats into urban organisms with the respective distributions within designated zones where they have adapted. Species in urban communities are imagined as producers, consumers, parasites, decomposers, and with different balances in between (mostly like a division of labour among the organs that essentially form a whole). There are also interesting takes on evolutionary adaptations in what could be called ‘hybrid’ systems that are often talked about in anthropocene contexts. But because of an assumption that urban habitat is a standalone or selfcontained ecosystem vis-à-vis the non-urban, this becomes problematic. Of course, there are interesting takes on the unintended consequences of urban ecologies but the watertight conceptualisation and deployment of bio-ecological approaches pioneered in Chicago sociology departments become the predominant emphasis of the approach. Human ecological studies too have interesting overlaps with urban ecology though the scope is broader. There are interesting insights on the tenuous interlinkages between forms of life and environment here as well. So are there comprehensive takes on the effects of the alteration as with

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the correlative studies of population spurts and dependence on forests or other life orders as fuel in ‘developing’ countries, the usage of certain types of fishing nets, or the consequences of the proliferation of hyacinths in water bodies. But at the same time some of the favourite technical ideas like ‘ecosystem services’ invite critical evaluation. The implication of quantified takes on ecological components within contemporary forms of neoliberal globalisation in its de-historicising and ecologising perspectives becomes important. So there needs to be an evaluation of such ideas as socially constituted political acts. Critical geography (Harvey 1996) and urban political ecology (Swyngedouw 2004, Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018), by analysing landscapes of different kinds as emergent from modes of relationships, with complex networks laden with power precisely addresses these concerns. Otherwise, methods in human ecology, like positive and negative feedback models, can become mechanical. The parallels to certain models of political analysis wherein reciprocal positive or negative stimulations like the mutually assured destruction concept (MAD) become justifications for the weapons race are noteworthy. Such analysis and expectations that flow out of these do not factor in the power networks and complexities in relationships and maintain a theological trust in systemic equilibrium. There is least or next to nothing inquiry on a capitalist order that wants to sustain a weapons and war industry intact with all the risks. Ecosystems do not organise ‘themselves’ and fall into inbuilt equilibriums, best exemplified in the long processes involved in invasive ecologies. At the same time, there are several ideas of co-evolution, hybridities as well and unintended designs suggested by human ecological interrogations. Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (2005) tries to address the possible shortfalls in not factoring in the relationalities. He studies scientific processes and explanations as political programmes. The values attributed to one ‘artefact’ (like an environmental impact assessment) can generate different effects across a socially sensitive groups, the non-human agents are concerned or that of a real estate developer. The entanglement of human and non-human is referred to as actor–networks. The value is not in the abstract but laden with ‘material effects’. Conceptually the network says that if one has to define a substance we have to talk about its attributes. Thus, any actor is nothing but a network and vice versa. The network helps one reallocate action. To be self-contained and to be thoroughly dependent is to say the same thing. Further (as brought forth by urban social geographers or political ecologists like Harvey, Castree,

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Swyngedouw), the societal production of both scarcities as well as quantified ‘services’ mentioned with respect to ecosystem service arguments are in real discursive, material, and metabolic. A self-contained gentrified urban enclave draws all its resources from socio-ecologies mountains, rivers, underpaid labour, and facilitative state deployments. A mere tagging of a certain species as ‘invader’ misses the significant facets of its implication in a network with geographies, human agencies, and climate. It is only when one understands the former as replete with power structures, transactions between human and nonhuman segments as well as the metabolic processes that sustain and eventually threaten some spaces do we get to the political ecologies. In the case of invasions, it becomes a challenge to factor in the newer ecologies that also incorporate the invader. Only then one can approximate the affects or the effects. The genealogy of urban geography, though with urban epistemes, perhaps offers analytic coordinates to locate broader ecologies. There are approaches to the urban experience from the sensorial moods about spaces or phenomenological awe or anomies to planning, zoning, etc. Space for instance becomes a major component in its social and material formats and so does the social and spatial mutuality which is connoted by spatiality. There are clear differentiations across regions with respect to the meaning ridden ideas of place and the implication of living in spaces through time and contexts. There are also the different scales from the local, through national, or global. Populations and their distribution (like with the typical urban projections—e.g., increasing from 3.6 billion in 2013 to projections of 6.3 by 2050) also become significant. There is a processual understanding like that of the way power is represented by the monumentality of structures, and institutions in cities as well as the role of elites. Attention is given to the idea of uneven development as well as the problems of diffusionist logic and hierarchies in the value given to land and landscapes. Top–down investments in urbanisms that translate into designs, that become determinative of life are also important. There could be more nuanced engagements than suggested by distinguished by early work on cities and rural differentiations by Simmel, or the idea of anomie by Durkheim. The pioneering studies mentioned though remain significant interventions to factor in the experiential realm as well as the perception of socio-economic life as always embodied. Urban geographical enquiries became critical of planning, zoning, and the role of the state and the whole apparatus of governance. From its

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early moorings in the Chicago school that approached the city as a biological system of ecological equilibrium, (urban ecology though has borrowed ideas of invasion and succession much like the inter or intraspecies engagements), the approach has become reflective of such ideas of imagined balances. The 1960s and 1970s economic analysis were on how cities grew and changed and to find nomothetic/legal basis. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s critical approaches also emerged, though legacies of past approaches still dominate urban geographical explanations. In light of the contributions as well as the shortcomings of attempts to understand ecologies in the making, interventions of some of the critical social geographers and political ecologists become valid in understanding relationalities. The idea is now to study a phenomenon, be that a geologic formation, a system of life and non-life, an ecosystem, or a peculiar phenomenon, in its own right. Ecosystems, accordingly, cannot be merely representative of a given order, be that of biological equilibrium or urban equilibrium. Rather the ‘making’ involves breaking, assembling, or deconstructing, as the situation that unravels demand. Interspecies life, disturbance ecologies, unintentional designs (Robbins 2004; Haraway 2003; Tsing 2012) as well as historicisation bring in the necessary precautions in order to understand non-binary, dynamic, and interrelated ecologies. Interspecies bodies bring up the intersection of biology and ecologies, even to the level of our bodies, which itself are multispecies environments (and have always been in changing ways). The linear logic followed algorithms of ‘population biology’ or statistics, with concerns of enumeration and sovereign prerogatives to control biological bodies (Foucault 1978 [2001]). The abstract and generalising requirement of statecraft during modernisation contexts created such watertight categories out of complex hybridities and grand parliaments of life and non-life (Latour 2004). The provision for disturbances be that through introductions of species, change in the global implications of regions, geological reasons, or the transforming public perceptions, must also be factored into. And there need not be an assumption of anthropocentric control to all the processes involved. This leaves space for unintended consequences as well as reciprocal relationships. Historicisation of ecologies in the making also becomes important as places do not exist in a vacuum and there have never been island systems. For example, there were no singular ahistorical forests in Kerala; rather there were always distinct forest types linked to the kinds of controls exercised by feudatories, early state managements,

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zones exempt from all such deployments, as well as the more total colonial incorporations (Kunhikrishnan 1991). The world has been a place with different forms of interconnections and mobilities and this has only increased, albeit mediated by changing forms of power, modes of production as well as relationships. This does have implications for the arrival and spread of a non-native species (Elton 1958). Invasions as such cannot be understood unless the place they invade, the ‘invadability, human networks, the socio-cultural effects on landscapes that make them more or less invadable or the multispecies interactions are not taken into account (Robbins 2004). The allied terms like exotic or foreign also have socio-political investments. In effect, it is the hybrid sociobiological networks that need to be taken into account (ibid.; Latour 1993). In addition to the most common definition of invasion i.e., ‘harmful not because of what they are, but where they are’ there is the ‘right plant (or any other species), in the right place, at the right time’ logic as well. The latter factors in the invadability of the land and there is an ecological dialectics in the sense of the invasive meeting the invadable. In addition to the climatic and edaphic (soil-related) factors there are levels of disturbances to the existing ecologies that have been known to contribute to invadability (Hobbs and Huenneke 1992). The conditions in turn are connected to the long durée relationships of the region mediated by people as well as geological processes to others. The human element in invasion (Hall 2003) cannot be overlooked, though this works also through reciprocations from what may not be human (Kawa 2016). What becomes also important is the differential ‘benefits’ the invaded’ ecology offers across species, like in the case of communist pacha or kongini, wherein the bush has characteristic engagements with rodents, butterflies as well as young kids. Lantana plant may be portrayed in a broad canvas of Dutch colonial transportations from Brazil in the 1600s, later ornamental additions into botanical gardens of Calcutta in the 1800s beginning, the spread and diversification in kind or the classification as ‘invader’ or non-native. But the experiential story of Lantana as the kongini plant in Kerala has to travel through the complex naturalisation processes atop the general historical frames and broad durations. The all-year-round flowering for instance has endeared the plan during the floral festivals around August/September called Onam. Onam is inextricably linked to the cultural history and distinctiveness of Kerala as a region. The rapid shoot growth and adaptability to a vast range of ecosystems have resulted in co-evolution. Having said these micro-ecologies

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have been impoverished by the massive spread of adaptable Lantana and in many buffer regions between wild and non-wild other problems may be getting exaggerated. In Kerala, stories of human–animal conflicts are proliferating (Sudhi 2012a, b, c) fanned as wildfires by an aggressive media campaign. But wherever real conflicts could be happening there is a likely coming together of real estate or tourism incursions, disturbing ecologies as well as impoverished landscapes like the ones where Lantana proliferate. The contested cultural effect of invasion also adds on to a general aesthetics that ropes in a whole gamut of non-human components into the category of weeds or invaders. The most extreme form of course is the perception of earth or exposed ground as ‘dirt’ and the tendency to tile away any such space and thus warding off any ‘other’ life form from precincts of pure-human ecologies. Like the immunological environments (Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018) people start picturising boundaries more clearly and they attribute outside agencies to every other element. In the process, the co-creations as well as suppressions in everyday life are comfortably negated. But not only that, but the sanitised stories also could be profited out of as may be gathered from the burgeoning tile industry, market for media stories that depict human–animal conflicts or the general preoccupation with different levels of security. But there are locally entrenched instances with positive and negative implications on ecologies entangle in specific across Kerala. The local self-government mediated Tozhilurappu (guarantee of labour scheme), while providing basic income under the National Rural Employment Generation Scheme (NREGS) since it came in 2005 had an unintended consequence. Though it had positive effects like gender empowerment as well as interesting effects in the constitution of public spaces, there were massive removals of bushes and plants from roadsides and commons. This also has to do with the all-pervasive urban aesthetics and perceptions of waste (Baviskar 2008/Ghertner 2015) percolating into popular perceptions. This resulted in the exposure of an already disturbed earth to direct heat and the increase in atmospheric dust. There were also erosions of organically rich top soil in many places. Apart from the removal of herbs like communist pacha that had consequences for long cocreated ecologies, there was also the destruction of medicinal shrubs gathered especially by more marginalised social groups and supplied to Ayurvedic pharmacies. The Ulladan groups officially classified under the scheduled tribes who migrated from the hills in Idukki district to the plain held immense

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knowledge of the medical properties of herbs and have been prominent in central Kerala as suppliers to pharmacies. I have listened to the story of the pseudobulbs of epiphytes like Pannamaravaazha (Pholidota imbricata) collected in the plains of Thrissur district and from near the foothills of Peechi. The older generation narrates that they knew how to make the paste from these bulbs to be applied to inflammation and swellings. Later such ethnobotanical knowledge became part of a supply chain system for modern Ayurvedic institutions. Designs imposed by states in later times though, often have detrimental effects on both of the indigenous knowledge as well as means of living. Similar are the consequences of modern pavements, concepts of cleaning as clearing as well as beautifications for Kurunthotti (Sida rhombifolia), Kizharnelli (Phyllanthus niruri) Thottavaadi (Mimosa pudica) or Cheroola (Aerva lanata). The usage and knowledge that addressed issues ranging from hairfall to jaundice were embedded in ecologies of entangled living. Cheroola and Thottavaadi adapted well to the land bereft of agriculture after the 70s and 80s in Kerala. But they get eviscerated during contemporary neoliberal beautifications and insensitive welfare programmes that often proceed ritualistically. Louis Awanyo’s work (2001) on Chromolaena Odorata (communist Pacha in Kerala) brings another context and further dimensions of interrelationships. Accordingly in Ghana, people who have been already marginalised because of decreasing state support as well as the swings and interests of global developmental aid do not often find the financial means to support the labour needed to keep the ‘weed’ out of the fields. They in turn get further marginalised and large land owners, with either real estate interest or the means to control landscapes take control. The social is differentiated according to the class contexts of communities, but also through the social life of a plant. Thus, as Robbins puts it (2004) orders of invasion are the assemblage of defining events, the frameworks for the landscape, as well as the unevenness in impact according to human conditions. The defining event of the Chromolaena landscapes cannot be easily marked out either is the subcontinent in general or Kerala in particular because of long symbiosis unlike perhaps that of Mikania. Further, the naturalisation of the herb into the ecosystem as well as the taking shape of novel ecosystem with allied adaptions (unlike the forest and plantation strangulating Mikania), brings up the hybridities in the making. Read along with this, as the unintended effects of weed-clearances, there is the coming in of state bureaucracy into the depletions of existing patterns of

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eco-scape. The effect of the transformation will be always different across places. It differs with respect to the host butterflies, whether there are collectors that depend on herbs, the small number of cattle-owners for whom many of the ‘weeds’ are fodder in contexts of rising feed-prices and other market effects, or to the middle-class aesthetics that see bushes as eyesore. For them, even with immense knowledge about predominantly anthropogenic threats like pollution or road accidents, threats and expected threats from chance snakes become paramount! What started off with a vignette from a school vacation some decades back bringing into relief a whole set of relationalities in a region with children, certain plants that become wayside bushes, butterflies, rodents, soil, the local self-government, labour, urban aesthetics, technologies of classification as well as the historical connectivity. A ubiquitous plant like the communist pacha also gathered local politics. The vernacular nomenclature coupled the character of the plant with the spreading leftist politics and in the process assembled the flora as a caricature of the intense social landscape. Such incorporations into political, historical and mythological worlds render the invader a biocultural actor within a network. It becomes part of a process that connects and enrolls human and non-human, politics and culture, biological and social. In other words, beings in their existence constitute each other and themselves through what Haraway calls, their ‘prehensions’ (2003). If Chromolaena in Kerala was an unintentional introduction, others like Mikania or the well-studied Prosopsis Juliflora (Junglee Kikar in Hindi) have been more conscious. The introduction of Mikania after the Second World War mainly as a camouflage then took flight into every nook and cranny of biomes aided by an incredibly fast growth (Venkataraman 2009). Prosopsis came from its native North America to Indian Kutch thanks to the Jodhpur Raja (Hocking 1993). The plant, much like others that were introduced when the colonial state machinery was at its peak between the end of the 1800s and to beginning of the 1900s, was subsequently declared a ‘royal plant’ by the princely state of Jodhpur. Prosopsis along with Lantana after many decades began to define the ‘natural’ vegetation of parts of central India and Rajasthan. The plant even became a priority in agroforestry and social forestry programmes. The pointers from the vignettes are also about the anthropocene contexts when human impacts become visible, but not only that. They are also pointers to the uncertainties involved, complex relationalities, as well as unintended effects that call for more efforts to bring out the tenuous ties among the component parts. Taking

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important cues from the critical interventions of political ecologists and social geographers it broadens the scope of ecology into ecologies of relationships.

Bibliography Awanyo, L. 2001. Labour, Ecology, and a Failed Agenda of Market Incentives: The Political Ecology of Agrarian Reforms in Ghana. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (1): 92–121. Baviskar, Amita (ed). 2008. Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture, and Power. Oxford University Press. Binggeli, P. 2001. The Human Dimensions of Invasive Woody Plants. In The Great Reshuffling - Human Dimensions of Invasive Alien Species, ed. J.A McNeely, 145–159. Gland: IUCN. Comaroff, and J.L. Comaroff. 2001. Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Posteolonial State. Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (3): 627– 651. Elton, C.S. 1958. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. London: Methuen. Foucault, M. 1978 [2001]. Governmentality. In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984: Power, ed. J.D. Faubion, vol. 3, 201–222. Penguin: London. Gautier, L. 1992. Taxonomy and Distribution of a Tropical Weed, Chromolaena odorata (L.) R. King and H. Robinson. Candollea 47: 645–662. Ghertner, Asher. 2015. Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Random House: Penguin. Gunasekera, Lalith. 2009. Invasive Plants: A Guide to the Identification of the Most Invasive Plants of Sri Lanka, Colombo. Hall, M. 2003. Editorial: The Native, Naturalised and Exotic- Plants and Animals in Human History. Landscape Research 28 (1): 5–9. Haraway, D. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice. Nature and the Geography of Difference: Blackwell. Hobbs, R.J., and L.F. Huenneke. 1992. Disturbance, Diversity, and Invasion: Implications for Conservation. Conservation Biology 6 (3): 324–337. Hocking, D., ed. 1993. Trees for Drylands. New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing. Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, USA: Random House.

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Kawa, Nicholas C. 2016. Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kunhikrishnan, K.V. 1991. The Colonial State and India’s Forests: Strategic Requirements and Policy Shift. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 59 (1998): 496–505. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Ridolfi, Luca, Francesco Laio ,and Paolo D’Odorico. 2008. Fertility Island Formation and Evolution in Dryland Ecosystems. Ecology and Society 13 (1). Robbins, Paul. 2001. Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (4): 637–659. Robbins, Paul. 2004. Comparing Invasive Networks: Cultural and Political Biographies of Invasive Species. Geographical Review 94 (2). People, Place, and Invasive Species, 139–156. Sudhi, K.S. 2012a. Man-Animal Conflict to Be Studied Deeply. The Hindu. Sudhi, K.S. 2012b. Oceanarium: Compensatory Mangroves Planting Mooted. The Hindu, March 27. Sudhi, K.S. 2012c. 89 Invasive Plant Species Present a Threat to Kerala’s. The Hindu, May 30. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-enviro nment/89-invasive-plant-speciespresent-a-threat-to-keralas-biodiversity/articl e3470290.ece. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Henrik Ernstson. 2018. Interrupting the AnthropoobScene: Immuno-biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society 35 (6): 3–30. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species (for Donna Haraway). Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 141– 154. van Wilgen, B.W. 2009. The Evolution of Fire and Invasive Alien Plant Management Practices in Fynbos. South African Journal of Science 105 (September/ October). Venkataraman, K. 2009. Alien Invasion. Frontline 26 (13), June 20–July 03. Wahlquist, Calla. 2016. Queensland Man May Be Fined $60,000 After Allegations He Illegally Kept Rabbits. The Guardian, December 28 Wed. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/28/queens land-man-may-be-fined-60000-after-allegations-he-illegally-kept-rabbits.

CHAPTER 6

Riparian Ecologies from the Ghats to the Plains

Rivers are not only animated by the live forms in and around, the sand and stones that get moved across through millennia, or the profound support of life in their different forms. They simultaneously gather the processes of governance, sustainability arguments, urban design, spatial knowledge, and the myriad forms of relationships, in their courses. River is not a conduit of water alone, rather it is an assemblage of actors and the changes that punctuate its course. They become environmental paradigms of the orders in the making. The orders in the making refer predominantly to states and the changing techniques of state making. The sovereign clauses and the contract to pay heed to the others sovereignty have always been transgressed by the provision for transgression as both violence over subjects as well as urges to expand beyond by means of war (Kapferer 2004). Presently the power instituted through states is that of corporations and private capital and the erstwhile state structures have transformed or are transforming into efficient managers of this rhizomatic and distributive capacity of capital. Lost in the process could be the consideration of relationalities and entangled ecologies that are now overlain by layers of management and confidence building measures.

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The idea of sustainability has mutated (Monbiot 2012)1 with all its abstractions, into sustainable development, and then into sustainable growth; ever since the first concerted environmental summits in 1992. The caution I would like to exercise while drawing on an engagement with a riparian system and the way ideas of life and non-life emerge in the concrete could well relate to the critique of the merger of sustainability into sustained growth. The growth that is unhindered is espoused by the local concept of vikasanam in Kerala. Though connoting development, the literal meaning of the word is expansion and conveys the procedures therein better. Post-democratic processes have well set the dynamics of the state in India and there are regional contexts with fine divergences as in the case of Kerala. With ever more power invested in private corporate houses and public assets diverted for private use a corporate state order has been in the making post-1990s neoliberal reforms and has gotten entrenched. This leaves only a few threatened spaces of exception ever since the rightwing governance took effect post-2014. There has been a reconfiguration of the meaning and nature of spaces in the context of social reconfigurations that ensued in particular unravelling of neoliberal globalisation. It has become neoliberalism without exception. Consequently, one has to understand how regions get remapped. For instance, since the 1990s the Indian state has adopted extensive financial ‘reforms’ that have centralised policies further in favour of private capital. This has accelerated in the past few years as with the new regimes of tax, citizenship rulings as well as hegemonic control of federated states (Chatterjee 2020). The latest and the starkest of socioecological hegemony of the centre that challenges localised historical associations and cultural distinctions are the overtures towards the Arabian Sea Island groups called the Lakshadweep. Here there is a pronounced emphasis on imposing a regime based on corporate tourism in combination with an import of Hindutva ideology (In Serene Lakshadweep, a new Administrator Stirs up Big Trouble with Several Controversial Administrative and Policy Measures, R Krishnakumar, 28 May 2021, Frontline). There are lesser and lesser options for ecologies to stay exempt. The present normative regime, with extensive liquidation of public infrastructure and privatisation of spaces, has unleashed new sets of conflicts over territory, ecology, and resources. It is in this larger 1 How ‘Sustainability’ Became “Sustained Growth”, June 22, 2012, George Monbiot, http://www.monbiot.com/2012/06/22/how-sustainability-became-sustained-growth/.

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context that comparative inquiries on ecologies in the making in distinct developmental trajectories, within Indian subcontinent come in. The role of the state as a possibly welfare apparatus rooted in normative egalitarianism has changed. The once-generated public spheres are now being appropriated by neoliberal capital that privatise and evaluate spaces, transforms them into homogenous conduits of consumption and makes them products in market (e.g., real estate). Spaces become nodes of investment (tourist industry, real estate) for mobile capital. They are fragmented to suit tourism, commerce, or real estate; all of which would form significant coordinates to ground comparisons. At present governance, is an agenda to lure highly mobile and flexible consumption flows into its space(s) (Harvey 1989). The only hindrances were the last protective walls of a developmental state carved out in the post-colonial context. These were systematically torn asunder, in order for the capital to have free reign in a regime free of checks and balances. This is not about the state receding, quite the contrary. The state got more entrenched in its new avatar of a corporate state, suited best for oligarch like entities/ houses who made most out of the order of exemptions and facilitative governance, accumulating ever most wealth (Prasad 2020).2 Across regions, there are transformations of human habitations. In Kerala a vast range of habitats from houses and immediate surroundings, fields, hillocks, waterways, and in general all the remaining urban hinterlands got incorporated into agglomerations. Here instead of the distinction between rural and urban visible in many other states in India, a single network of small towns strings the state. The differences are mostly transversal and geographical. This is despite towns or fringe regions, such as coasts, midlands, and high ranges. In the past two decades, the welfarist apparatus functioning since the first left movements and land reforms has had to incorporate more neoliberal reforms with the least scope of exception. The rhetoric of equal opportunity and fairground translated into the flattening and levelling of topography across the region. Ground zeroes were generated in the processes involved in real estate ‘land developments’ and from here new structures rose towards the sky. But it is also significant that with a gamut of catastrophic events in the forms of outbreaks (Nipa Virus and then the covid pandemic), floods, and ever 2 Prasad, Gireesh Chandra. 2020. Richest 10% of Indians have three-fourths of nation’s wealth: Oxfam. 21 Jan 2020. Mint, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/richest-10of-indians-have-three-fourths-of-nation-s-wealth-oxfam-11579546648078.html.

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centralising economic regimes, entangled ecologies, historically instituted spatialities otherwise managed or submerged found their way back. The chapter focuses broadly on ecological relations entrenched through history most visible as hydrological regimes. It is most visible because of the more than forty small to medium rivers flowing in Kerala with articulations through a diverse topography worked and reworked by human agencies and implicated in articulations of power. Modern irrigation, the making of conduits as well as dam buildings all modulated the relationships in ecology obliterating or damaging some and instituting others.

The River in Context Modern states have always found it difficult to define boundaries, rationalise institutions, or define sovereignties over resources like water (Aguilar and Iza 2011; Gleick 1993; Clarke 1991). This is not limited to international water issues that attract better press and references, but also those within nation states with their different scales of federation or changing regimes of control. All this reaches exaggerated proportions when corporate globalisations demand production, evaluations based on value generation, ratings, and conditional funding. In a state like India where the idea of federation is minimal (in fact there is no meditation or mention of the term ‘federal’ in the constitution), individual states get differential treatment, depending on the priorities of those who steer the central government. So, for a river that also becomes an interstate river in its political avatar, it has to be marked with power relationships (Anand 2004). The ecosystem of the Periyar sanctuary that one sees now has historically remote-sounding connections with the colonial agreements between the Travancore state and the British. The water sharing agreements and the terms have ever since become points of contention between what became Kerala and Tamil Nadu (Parthasarathy 2013; Krishnakumar 2006). The rechannelisation of water from the catchment area in Mullaperiyaar through tunnels by Tamil Nadu, the height of the dam which often becomes the Damocles sword over Kerala with fears of cracks, seismic instabilities or aging, and all the contemporary interstate disputes and water wars—makes the whole ecology political. The stories of interstate disputes over water will soon become even more turbulent with the more than ever hegemonic central governance.

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There is the statutory and constitutionally instituted finance commission that now tows more the line of a body like NITI Aayog that replaced the earlier longer term planning based organ (viz. planning commission). The Aayog is a think tank that runs more along neoliberal capitalist lines. The body is representative of a transition from a planning-based developmental regime to one guided by policy think tanks. The Aayog, when we also take into account that fact that it is more under the control of finance ministry, exemplifies the further centralisation of developmental decisions and least exception for states (Patnaik 2015).3 In addition, comes the tax levies that burden states as well as the terms of reference on 2011 census data on population to be used instead of that of the 1971 and the consequent reduction of central support and representation in parliament for the more welfarist states. The point is to suggest tenser times for non-favourite states in any ecological issues with interstate overtones. The Fifteenth Finance Commission also places more performance-based demands that also pressure the states and punishes those that do not oblige. There is an increase in the demands placed on states in developmental schemes, especially in the bearing of burden and infrastructural provisions. In effect, there is a gross reduction in the federal autonomy (Sarma 2019).4 There is a compound effect when we take conditionalities in packages and multibillion developmental schemes5 like urban reforms (JNNURM/ AMRUT) that in ways normalise the exceptional provisions (lack of labour rights, control over public spaces, facilitation of private capital, and easy repatriation of profit) otherwise reserved for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Everything becomes more politically contentious, especially towards the nineties with deregulations and privatisation of ‘natural resources’ as well as the differential values assigned to populations (Baviskar 1995; Roy 1999). The issues that arise with forced deprivations of ecologies, impacts of large-scale activities, and portrayal of the native as a stagnant category (Baviskar 1995; Guha 2016; Joshi 2016; Mc Colly 1996), are all 3 Patnaik, Prabhat. 2015. From the Planning Commission to the NITI Aayog. Economic

and Political Weekly, vol. 50, no. 4 (January 24), pp. 10–12. 4 Sarma, Atul 2019. A Challenge to the 15th Finance Commission’s Credibility. The Wire, October 8, https://thewire.in/economy/a-challenge-to-the-15th-finance-com missions-credibility. 5 Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT were approved for 500 cities in 2015. This is with outlays 1 lakh crore (US$13 billion).

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dimensions of power over socio-ecologies rendered inert. Assigning rivers across boundaries as well as into communities through large-scale designs, disruptions, and rechannelisations become cases (Anand 2004; Joseph 2003). With respect to the state and bureaucracy-mediated redesigns and rechannelisations, there have been arbitrary and top-down evaluations like surplus and deficit that are laden with abstract economistic logic. This does not take into account the thousands of entangled relationships that run both diachronically through the life of a river or synchronically through the living and non-living. The point of reference here will be to riparian ecologies in the making in the larger contexts of massive human interventions on rivers. Rivers have always been related to and engaged with. But there are those sovereign interventions that are unmatched in scale. They have increased in scale from the early modern water diversions during the time of colonial state orders through the massive activities connected with the construction of dams during the post-colonial developmental phase and to the present behemothian ideas to link up to 37 rivers from Cauvery in the south to Ganga in the north with a staggering capital outlay of 5,60,000 crore (5600 billion Rupees)! This is the enveloping environment of big money and finance capital that reconstitutes fluvial relationships. Anthropocene, beyond the unprecedented scales and intensities of human interventions, connotes a certain kind of irreversibility. There is an undo-ability vis-à-vis ecological transformation, as with extensive transformations in riparian orders. There are concentrations of peculiar biogeochemistry on the one hand and the dispersals, reductions, and invasiveness of life forms on the other. None of these are separable from the human relationalities that weave in the form of communities that are directly dependent on the river. There are also others like those who labour in factories whose means of livelihood unintentionally perpetuate exploitative relationships with the ecology (like with scores of chemical fertiliser factories around Periyar). The river also abuts all kinds of human interactions. If I take the lower fluvial segments or arteries these have been historically enlivened with the barters and riverside agriculture or the sanatoriums and myriad institutions including social reform initiatives like the Sree Narayana Dharma Paraipalana (SNDP) Ashram that became a historical marker of social inclusiveness. Then there are the modern irrigation systems that transport water through channels and the municipal dependencies to quench the thirst and changing demands in an ecology of consumption and market. The rivers also become drains for factories.

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In addition, there are pilgrimage spaces, spaces for ablution, and grazing grounds. There are then the everyday dependencies for evening relaxation, recreation, swimming, or strolls. Of course, the riverbanks have most significantly metamorphosed as a result of real estate interests as luxury spaces.

Rivers, Rice, and Rains in Kerala Commonsense were in for rapid reversals in recent decades especially with notions about weather, climate, or environment (i.e., end of 1980s to present). Transformations in topography like the disappearance of midland hills through earth excavations, the changing fluvial patterns with river sand mining, siltation and takeovers of riverbanks, and the superseding of tertiary sector and services over remaining agrarian and even industrial spaces have all contributed to this unsettling. Until a few decades back the njaattuvelas (solar transits) were used to determine the behaviour of rain fed rivers. Those with farming traditions from the central plains still recall such rain-linked cosmologies. The agricultural cycle for them depended obviously on the rainfall and was mediated by the existing systems of canals and irrigation systems connected by rivers, rivulets, as well as wetlands generated by waterlogged paddy fields. The different njaattuvelas punctuated the planning of sowing, planting, or weeding activities. Thus, there were twenty-seven of these (named after different stars in constellations) solar transits and the most important one was perhaps Thiruvathira Njattuvela, when the transit of Alpha Orionis (star in the Orion constellation) happened. This roughly coincided with the final weeks in June and rains came in plenty. The rains stretched for more than a fortnight and was more intense than ten other njaattuvelas that also brought in rains. The South West Monsoon rains were gauged as spread across seven of the sidereal transits. The spacing of rain within each Njattuvela was common knowledge for inhabitants. The different njaattuvelas (Thiruvathira, Punartham, Aaayilyam, Pooyam, Atham, Aswathi, Bharani, and Karthika) has associated patterns of rain, varying in intensity, spacing, or frequency. One of the farmers elaborated on the way he coordinated the planting of crops according to the punartham transit, when sunlight and rainfall came together. There are local expressions like ‘fox’s marriage’ (kurukkante kalyaanam), precisely to refer to the time when rain and sun coincide. There were crops that cannot stand the rougher rains during

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Aaayilyam. There were peculiar smells of soil that were talked about with respect to intermittent showers that hit dry soil during Bharani Njaattuvela. The patterns of paddy cultivation that evolved over time in different parts of Kerala were linked to the hydrological order before the more modern forms of modulations took effect. Mundakan, Puncha, Pokkali, or Myaal were methods that were inextricably linked to the geological order (Rajagopalan 2004). They as well as the extensive Kole cultivations and paddy systems of the south-central region of Kuttanad gave rise to parallel ecological systems with distinct bird life, animal life and mutual dependencies. There were of course ingenious methods that improved upon these practices. But the point here is the determining role of the peculiar rain and hydrological order of the region west of the Western Ghats tapering down gradually from uplands to midlands and then towards the coasts. Not only the different methods of cultivation and the fields but also the types of labour were bound to seasonal variations and weather. There was no clear boundary between one’s occupation, the feudal order, the rains, or the deployment of water according to Pokkudan (2010). There were the different types of labour that incorporated all of this whether it was moorcha, cherappani, chemmenpani, pottakoottal, thodumarikkal, or pottakothu/marikkal (ibid.). Mundakan happens during the 100 to 120 days from June to September with intense care from cropping to harvest. For an acre of paddy, nearly a cent of seed bedding needs to be done on muddy organically rich earth (Njaattadi-preparation of this bed). For Puncha preparation of field happens after the rain during the Onam season and this is dependent on water logging in grand scales. There are other activities like duck farming that happen in waterlogged places, especially in Alapuzha. Several Anseriforme (includes ducks and geese) and Ciconiiforme (Herons, Storks ergrets) species also flock in during the time and feed on the aquatic life. Pokkali is again a waterlogged type of rice cultivation in salt water. This is prevalent more towards the mid-west coast of Cherai. The salinity levels go low during monsoon. But postmonsoon, from October end, prawn farming is done. The rice ecosystem supports the prawn, and the prawn excrements manure the crop. This is in every respect an anthropogenic symbiosis. The field is not only below sea level by a few meters. During the rains when rivers are full, there is the incursion of fresh water and during the drier months there is salt

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water incursion. Prawn cultivation takes over in the latter period. Kole in Thrissur region is also below sea level but there is no salt water incursion and it is not a coastal cultivation. Myaal happens more in summer and water was diverted using different techniques. These fields were not so low-lying. Myaal krishi also came up as part of making paddy cultivation more extensive and this is usually interspersed with coconut plantation. The hybrid cropping pattern is dependent on lift irrigation and the early forms were called ‘thekal’, ‘chaalukeeral’ etc. Wetlands were created out of drylands through Myaal. Though the Mughal-derived pan Indian classification into Kharif, Rabi, and Zaid may not fit the cropping of paddy throughout the region, Puncha is generally considered as Rabbi and Mundakan is the second season crop. What is important about the several methods of rain and riverdependent paddy cultivation is also the varieties of wetlands they gave rice to in Kerala. Each type of wetland catered to particular forms of life. There were complex interconnections not only with the small spring fed ponds, but also with human-made channels and rivulets. The seasonal movements of fishes gave rise to local dependencies for essential nutrients both by human and non-human living forms. Rains were categorised based on the agrarian systems. So, there was Varambumuriyan, Panthalothukki, or Kannimundan, depending upon the peculiar relationships rains make with the existing human interventions or cultivation. Seasonal and climatic phenomena were perceived always in terms of the phenomenological experience of farmers. Rice cultivation became extensive only during the period of modern states as well as the opening up of export markets in the 1800s. Even though rice soon replaced a heterogenous palette, enough land was never diverted to feed the regional requirements. In Kerala along with modernity commercial plantations took precedence in high lands, midlands and lowlands. So there had to be more imports to meet the dietary habits (Rammohan 2006). Of course, there were extensive entrepreneurial reclamations of wetland ecosystems for rice cultivation (Pillai and Panikker 1965). Even in the 1940s, there were extensive and lush paddy fields of different varieties across Kerala (Sommervell 1940). Rice became the predominant diet that replaced a vast repertoire of other items. Many of the earlier forms of cultivation and varieties of seeds ceased to exist with the arrival of newer varieties of seeds brought out by modern research centers. With the arrival of newer varieties, there was a transformation in priorities of farmers as well as concomitant change in

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dependencies in respective ecologies. The perceived yield, the availability of the market, or means of efficiency became the newer priorities. But we see interdependencies between farmers in storing rice, the timing of sowing synchronised with njaattuvelas or the relative absence of pests, the dependencies on animals like frogs that control certain pests, etc. being overshadowed by these newer priorities. The long presence of traditional rice varieties may be gathered from documents on ‘Palakkadan Matta’ in the Tamil classic Tirukkural, Geerakashala of Wayanad region in recitations, Kaipad rice mentioned in Francis Buchanan’s A journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (1807) after a journey through these regions by Buchanan as well as the mention of the waterlogged pokkali that interspersed with prawn farming mentioned in the Cochin State Government in 1911. So there might have been many forms of entangled ecologies that will not find a place in modern rice farms that, in addition to those priorities mentioned above, are more turned towards policies, credit provisions, and minimum supports in pricing. By the 1960s there was a marked reduction not only in the acreage of other crops but also in the grazing land and open pastures6 . The language of ownership, claims, fragmented private properties, etc. gain significance. There was already a rise in the efficiency of paddy cultivation in the context of the green revolutions before cycles of decline in the acreage of cultivated land began to take root for other reasons during the mid-seventies across Kerala. The combined effect of land reforms, redistribution, and thereby division of fields (predominantly rice), and relative unattractiveness of paddy (Zachariah et al. 1999) in terms of returns further contributed to the decline. Because the wetland ecosystem was comprised mostly of paddy fields, full or fallow, there was a marked change. Large segments of land got fast converted first to land farming and then to real estate. Only the lukewarm reporting of land as paddy land after the passing of Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Acts 2008 made the decline less steep. The clauses in the act for conversions that factor in ecological consequences, pressing needs for residence or proof of no adverse effect on nearby paddy lands made fast conversions perhaps more difficult. Even then exceptions to norms often got invoked in conversions and

6 Government of Kerala, Statistics for Plannings, Issues.

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reclamations. Meanwhile, extensive land where paddy cultivation no more happened became wild wetland ecologies that still replenished groundwater and that straddled urban life. The genealogy of paddy wetlands are reminders that ecosystems are neither pure nor timeless but become so in dialectical relationship with human activities and interventions. After a major dip in cultivation since the late 1970s, there was a slight reversal post-2000. Wetlands were still getting created by the comebacks and maintenance of land classified as paddy field albeit lying fallow. The Department of Economics and Statistics data shows these brief reversals as with the year 2020–21 (2.02 Lakh hectares). This in fact was a trend started in 2017–18. But the details are also significant in that while declines continued in traditional virippu (Autumn) and mundakan (winter) crops, the waterlogged summer crop called puncha is that which increased7 . Reversals are thanks to the deployment of Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) funds, Kudumbasree work, which is by a women-based self-help group, more than a thousand self-governing bodies, as part of a state programme called Haritha Kerala Mission (HKM).8 Ponds that were getting clogged and dried up and that once used to be nodes in the land stretching between branches of rivers are restored with mass participation and significant participation from youngsters. These are about new technologies of the state with calculations and mathematical projections on water availability through monsoon. Ideas of protection, revival and rejuvenation happen through contemporary water security plans, in Kannur, Kattakkada, Pathanamthitta or Vadakkancherry, even amidst continuing pressures on the other hand because of waste disposals, tiling away of earth surfaces in both public and private places, depletion of water tables through unearthing of hills as well as pilings for real estate. Though there has been a reduction of wetland surfaces in the past fifty to sixty years from around 8 to 2 lakh hectares9 there are also at present ecological sensitive interventions and restorations like the Haritha Mission. We can 7 Estimates of area, production and yield of crops in respect of Kerala state for the year

2020–21. 8 Reviving glory of Wadakkanchery river. Mini Muringatheri. October 13, 2017. The Hindu/ Kerala takes up new project to revive its dying rivers and canals. Sreedevi Jayarajan. February 20, 2018. The NewsMinute. 9 South India’s Drought Part 7: Kerala’s efforts to revive water bodies bear fruit at grassroot level. Naveen Nair May 02, 2017, Firstpost.

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be sure that the scale and tempo of human interventions as well as the unintended fall outs in ecology is bound to compound. The behaviour of rain fed rivers that originate in the Ghats used to be gauged by the patterns of njaattuvelas among other seasonal observations. The high or low flows, the alluvial deposit pattern, the floods, as well as the peculiar meanderings of the rivulets, that branched off and re-joined the main branches, all followed the tone and tenor of the solar transits according to farmers. The monsoons as well as the summer rains determined the flow of the rivers. There were cycles of inland fishing that coincided with the river overflowing during certain njaattuvelas. Fishes like the snakeheads (braal, bigger vakas, spotted braals—Channa striata, Channa micropeltes, Channa punctata) entered the fields during such times and became one of the major diets. The diet too followed the larger cosmology of rains and fluvial patterns. There are also expectations of forest wood that came downriver during monsoon at certain times of the year. So dwelling places were repaired, erected or rebuilt in synchrony with the expected material downriver. Reeds (Ama in Malayalam) and other riparian vegetation offered protection to the river banks. These and rattan also offered shelter to the animal life on the banks. River otters used to thrive in such ecosystems, and so did many water birds like cormorants, jacanas, and kingfishers. Older generation recollect mugger crocodiles basking on the banks and sheltered by the vegetation. There are records to the same (Menon 1911). These reptiles have totally disappeared from the central Keralan River banks and perhaps are wonderful signifiers of a lifeworld unimaginable for present-day inhabitants in these locations. The older generation of Paraya community narrated regular visits to collect the reeds and rattan for weaving. Communities depended on riversides as a rich source of medicinal plants. There was already a mention of Ulladan community who now lived by the plains coming from the hilly regions of the west of Thrissur regularly resorted to the banks and river edges to gather particular plants to be taken to the local pharmacies. People who once owned country boats and regularly plied people and commodities across the largely shallow rivers (shallow because of the uniform bedding of layers and layers of river sand) narrate the transfer and supply of Kurunthotti (Sida rhombifolia), Kanjiram (Nux vomica) and many such medicinal plants. Many depended on local methods of treatment which were intricately linked to the cycles, biomes, and agents of transfer. Many herbs also found their way into the digestive tracks of domestic animals grazing the

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banks and grass lands they were left to feed from. The quality of animal products depended a lot of the micro-ecologies that they resorted to. So, the quality of milk, meat or eggs were attributed to the heterogenous ecologies and the niche diets animals chose from these. And all of these could not be disconnected from hydrological cycles and spaces available. The inextricable links of the rivers to the ecosystems in the highlands, like the shola forests that sponge in rain water and in turn become almost perennial sources. These sponges ensure the arteries of water that feed the rivulets that branch into rivers. Such ecologies have been mentioned all the way from the Sangam literature, through colonial records and into the contemporary studies on Western Ghats and in academic works (Zvelebil 1973; Balambal 1998; Bourdillon 1908; Gurukkal and Ramesh 2007; Nair 1994; Pascal 1988). Odd floods were markers in memory as with the floods of the Malayalam year 1099 known as the flood of 99 (Thonnoottonpathile Vellapokkam)— coinciding with the English year 1924. With the increase in check dams and well as hydel projects, it became difficult to gauge the patterns of floods with respect to the rains alone. The expressions like ‘Mazha Peythaal Puzha Ariyum’ (The river knows when it rains) slowly became outlandish. The transformations starting from highlands ever since the advent of colonial plantations, modern forestry, contemporary tourism, as well as the resource extractions by the real estate sector (post 2000) have been making serious dents in the ecological makeup of these sources of rivers. The impacts down the river gets compounded by dams on the way, sand extractions from rivers, and the remapping of riversides as prime locations for real estate. Add on to these the all-pervasive impacts of weather phenomena like El Nino, one gets significant transformations in the cosmologies that connected rivers to the rain cycles. Most of the narrations by farmers now in their eighties or nineties convey the change in ecologies and associated logic.

References Aguilar, Grethel and Alejandro Iza. 2011. Governance of Shared Waters: Legal and Institutional Issues. IUCN Environmental Law and Policy Paper No.58 rev. Anand, P.B. (2004). Water and Identity—An Analysis of the Cauvery River Water Dispute. Bradford: University of Bradford.

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Balambal, V. 1998. Studies in the History of the Sangam Age. New Delhi: Kalinga Publications. Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bourdillon, T.F. 1908. The Forest Trees of Travancore. Trivandrum: The Travancore Govt. Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2020. True Federalism Is the Counter-Narrative India Needs Right Now. The Wire, January 18. Clarke, Robin. 1991. Water: The International Crisis. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. Gleick, P. 1993. Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources. New York: OUP. Guha, Ramachandra. 2016. Sinister Development: Looting the Himalaya—And the Himalayans. TheTelegraph, Saturday, July 23. https://www.telegraphindia. com/1160723/jsp/opinion/story_98164.jsp. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Joseph, J. Karoor. 2003. Mullaperiyar Diversion. Paper presented at the National Workshop on Inter Linking of Rivers in India, July 12–13. Thrissur. Sandrp and CPSS. Joshi, Hridayesh. 2016. Rage of the River: The Untold Story of Kedarnath Disaster. Penguin. Kapferer, Bruce. 2004. Introduction: Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State, and Global Transgression. Social Analysis, 48(1): 64–72. Krishnakumar, R. 2006. Verdict on Mullaperiyar. The Hindu, Frontline, Chennai, India, 11–24 March 23—Issue 5. Menon, C. Achyuta. 1911. The Cochin State Manual. Govt. of Kerala. Nair, Satish Chandran. 1994.The High Ranges: Problems and Potential of a Hill Region in the Southern Western Ghats. Western Ghats (India): INTACH. Parthasarathy, Suhrith. 2013. Water Wars in India’s South. New York Times. Pascal, J.P. 1988. Wet Evergreen Forests of the Western Ghats of India: Ecology, Structure, Floristic Composition and Succession. Pondicherry: French Institute. Patnaik, Prabhat. 2015. From the Planning Commission to the NITI Aayog. EPW 50 (4): January 24. Pillai, V.R., and P.G.K. Panikker. 1965. Land Reclamation in Kerala. New York: Asia Publishing House. Pokkudan, Kallen. 2010. Chuttachi (In Malayalam). Kottayam: DC Books. Rajagopalan, C.R., ed. 2004. Puzhayude Nattariv (In Malayalam). Kottayam: DC Books. Ramesh, B.R., and R. Gurukkal. 2007. Forest Landscapes of the Southern Western Ghats, India—Biodiversity, Human Ecology and Management Strategies. Pondicherry: French Institute.

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Rammohan, K.T. 2006. Tales of Rice: Kuttanad, Southwest India. KT Rammohan. CDS Monograph Series. Centre for Development Studies (CDS). Roy, Arundhati. 1999. The Greater Common Good 16 (11, May 22–June 4). http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1611/16110040.htm. Sommervell, Howart T. 1940. Knife and Life in India, the Story of a Surgical Missionary at Neyyoor. Zachariah, K.C., E.T. Mathew, and S. Irudaya Rajan. 1999. Impact of Migration on Kerala’s Economy and Society. CDS Working Paper No. 297. Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. Zvelebil, Kamil (1973). The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

CHAPTER 7

River Stories from Periyar

The Periyar is the longest river with the largest discharge capacity flowing through Kerala. The ‘human ecology’ of the regions around the lower stretches of Periyar becomes my focus. The contextual perspectives provided by the ecological assemblages of the larger area through histories of human habitation and unintentional designs add further dimensions to bare human ecologies. I could only see and understand this river as part of the urban regimes that are proliferating. If one takes the sources of Periyar or any medium to small river for that matter we understand that animals that are protected from human-induced disturbances are only taken care of in protected areas (PAs). But the fact is that these animals and animal lives spill away into networks further from designated zones and the human impact extends into the PAs and vice versa. Studies show that many endemic freshwater species from different broad taxonomic groups (Fishes, Shrimps, Crabs, or Amphibians among them) have distributional networks and entanglements with human and urban life much further (Das et al. 2016). The prevalence of species entirely foreign to ecosystems like the Himalayan fishes in western ghats, Periyar river or the other major rivers like Bharatapuzha, Kabini, as well as Achenkoil (Kurup et al. 2006) replicate urban trends that non-human species also follow but through human entanglements. So, the modern fish farms that abut ecosystems, the urbanised and consumerist dietary needs, etc., accidentally introduce exotic species into the upper reaches of Periyar. The 2018 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_7

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and 2019 floods might have resulted in the crossing of waters and mixing of captive and wild ecologies further. The otherwise endemic ecologies of PAs become urban ecologies because of such intrusions. In retrospect, the cumulative effects of the morphologies of all these processes could be called ‘urban’. The processes have transformed the river and its ecosystem during the last two decades. The complex networking of the human and the non-human, influenced by contingent contexts, may not produce results that have been anticipated. Like in the case of climate, but in scales that are different, unintentional design factors intervene. Consequently, the wholes seldom turn out to be the sum of the planned components. Emergent designs become animated as ecologies network into newer assemblages of life/non-life. Geographical features like hillocks, ponds, water channels, and occupational features like agricultural fields serviced by some of the smaller rivulets used to be the predominant riparian markers. These were also important spatial boundary markers. This is not to suggest that places or regions existed in conditions of insularity (that islands often suggest), till the current neoliberal urban processes dissolved the boundaries and borders. As Eric Wolf (1982) argues, there never have been any ‘cultural isolates’. Some of the ‘original’ features associated with these places are often marked by routes more widely flung than generally imagined. But in contemporary contexts, technologies of control and the versatile flows of capital have dissolved erstwhile geographical features, coordinates and boundaries and reconfigured the region in terms of capital traversing newer spaces. The land is now perceived exclusively in terms of its real estate monetised value which is ever open to adventurous speculation. The places around River Periyar also gained new importance as ‘prime zones’ representing new priorities. A relatively new airport and the emerging Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Kakkanad (which is outside the urban centre) are both products and catalysts of transformative processes. Corresponding to these processes, degradation and pollution by sewage and industrial effluents, resonances from an earlier developmental regime that promoted industries and secondary sector, is also massive. And presently the boom in construction around the so called non-polluting greenfield tertiary sectors depletes and exhausts the sand on the river bed as well as mines away at all elevated formations. New Urbanisation has triggered innumerable tourism projects initiated and facilitated by the state government. The big footfalls of people

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though are inevitably accompanied by governmental and ever proliferating private retail all on the way. There is the widening of road and motor traffic. In addition, we see the camps and increased boating accidentally introducing invasive alien species into the surrounding. The religious establishments along the banks of the river have been drawn into newly invented circuits of pilgrimage tourism. The visits to four temples in central Kerala associated with the four brothers in the Ramayana epic is known as Naalambala Darshanam (Holy visits to the four temples) especially in the Malayalam month of Karkitakam (the traditionally rainiest time coinciding with July–August). But this pilgrim circuit in such a narrative order itself is relatively new and presently four more such circuits are invented incorporating more regions. With the proliferating infrastructure for the Sabari hill pilgrimage swathes of spaces even in the erstwhile forests were urbanised in the last decades. But things have taken a different turn with a greenfield airport and railroad proposed to facilitate this pilgrimage. The economic potential of pilgrimage has gained hegemony over any rare and sensitive socio-ecological impact assessments that gets undertaken. Another river called Pampa River that is incorporated into the circuit and mythology of this pilgrimage gets an overload of E. coli bacteria as a consequence. This has made the river an urban microbial ecology. The faecal material in the river also contains traces of antibiotics the visitors use and the bacteria in the waters eventually become resistant to existing drugs. River banks are being aggressively claimed by ‘land developers’ and converted into exclusive zones. The high rises that are sold as riverside dream dwellings are made by depleting the sand and in the process the aquifers. New riparian narratives are spawned in the rhetoric of ‘development’. The human ecologies that inform the narratives are populated by a network of actors involved in sand mining: the labourers, the truck drivers, the truck owners, the brokers, the developers, as well as the local bodies or the police. With such range of actors and incorporations, it becomes difficult to locate the legal and illegal. On top of it comes the modern building codes that classify individual dwellings made of concrete as development and improvement over any other material. So, there is implicit recognition of the ecologies of river sand extraction as improvement on top of the range of human incorporations. The region can only be perceived as mediated by such narratives. The small towns Periyar transects with as well as the river as such may be put in historical context. During the pre-state forms of urbanisation,

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the river along with the backwater system afforded easy means of transport and trade. The navigability of rivers for long stretches deep into interiors and the later development (1800s) of the canals provided for an elaborate system of cargo boats and ferries. This was an efficient and convenient conduit for early inland trade, especially for the transportation of raw materials from the eastern mountains to the Cochin Harbour. This served as the prime channel for colonial timber trade. At present the river is the sole source of drinking water for the city of Kochi in Central Kerala and the small towns along the banks of the river which themselves are spatially taken closer to special economic zones sprouting across. The river islands used to remain unmarked in the larger economic cartography until the 2000s. They enjoyed exception from certain routine expectations and deployments otherwise. Some of these islands were parts of banks that might have later got severed off because of the changing meanderings of rivers. There are islands that were routinely used for grazing with bovines easily getting across the shallow water bodies. After 2000s the islands became the source of a resource that was getting scarce otherwise in the river—the accumulated river sand! On the islands place bound relationships have changed over time in tune with the processes in which people are enmeshed. The sense of place can suggest new forms or gets formed as part of dynamic processes (Massey 1994, 2005) rather than existing as frozen entities. There may never have been any coherent and homogeneous place ever in history. Rather it has always been ‘a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (ibid. 1994). In contexts of major transformations and disruptions the way people make sense of place would depend on whether they look inwards (nostalgias) or outwards (futuristic extrapolations). Place, according to Heidegger, is also an orientation where a thinking of being gets structured. The present urban proposals of heritage and tourism presuppose terrains or tabula rasa ‘sites’ that have been invested with new values. The analytical focus here is on the anthropocene as a located process as well as critical enquiries into deletions of past, histories in the making, and production of new ecologies. Kerala got rated as the second-best investment zone within India by an Investment Climate Surveys by the World Bank and indexes further developed (Iarossi 2009). Publicly laid out infrastructure was the key distinguishing factor for the Bank. Since then, there was a flurry of activity the cumulative effect of which has been the materialisation

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of a new urban frame oriented towards private capital. Seven years on, one starts hearing of ‘Emerging Kerala’—an investors’ meeting for which the entire region is urgently spruced up. The general impression is that something new is emerging in this hub of unprecedented activities. As some event planners put forth and expected this is the newest way to make global connections/commitments. One of course has to go beyond rhetoric in order to explore whether another urban phase is ‘emerging’ that is conditional on implementing certain governance procedures. The ease of doing business, the contributions from the individual states as well as the regulations in the financing as part of service delivery, all make the urban reform packages like AMRUT conditional. The urban local bodies have to depend on taxes, fees, transfers both from centre and states and also debts. In all this the dwellers have to be persuaded to bear the burden of costs. So, a debt incurred through a loan may be repaid by the implementation of higher property tax that people have to shoulder. All of these add on to the assembly line of some of the most serious issues that people will grapple with in years to come. The present urban turn becomes interesting because of the possibility of unprecedented tendencies as well as contingent continuities. The immense flexibilities associated with urban ideas as in the case of cities in the making and their disjuncture with the regional patterns could become important pointers. The exclusive and hierarchical spaces that were historically opened up for the public during reform movements and legislations in the twentieth century once made Kerala exceptional within India. Now these spaces are being appropriated by neoliberal capital which privatises spaces and transforms them into homogenous conduits of consumption or products for consumption (space as real estate). Spaces in the new context become new institutional nodes (tourism, industry. property) for mobile capital. In the process spaces are fragmented to suit the language of tourism, commerce, or real estate; all of which are important coordinates to ground the anthropocene. Contemporary urbanism naturalised these changes of the social topography. The task of the bandied good governance is precisely ‘to lure highly mobile and flexible consumption flows into its space(s)’ (Harvey 1989: 11). The point is to qualitatively understand the conceptualisations and deployment of space through life processes in distinct contexts within Kerala. These life processes negotiate distinct coordinates and regulatory schemes in spatiality as with jati-based feudal orders, colonial modernity, modern state (or princely states), left reformist phase, agrarian, expatriate,

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consumerist, or urban situations as the case might be. Abstract economic shifts often materialise through the holistic social, ecological, political, and psychological determinants. Many of the dominant tendencies also leave their marks along the river because it is impossible to think of any place in Kerala as too away from one of the 44 riparian hydrological influences. Cases exemplify the coordinates of space and time as well as the dominant tendencies that leave their marks. Ecologies metaphorically capture attention for the way they assemble a variety of agents both synchronically and diachronically. The wetland cultivations that predate the state were mostly in the valleys that received water. The pre-state and early state interventions brought more land under irrigation and the dwindling of other forms of agrarian ecologies. Rice fields and wetlands the sustained rice increased even after land reorganisations. But after the 1970s wetland acreage was coming down. Gulf migrations and concomitant expectations of returns, rise in labour costs and consumerist tendencies had ecological resonances. From this period onwards, across Kerala, may be observed a concomitant rice in clay extractions for brick manufacture. In fact, the priority of once paddy fields was as supply sources for the resource. In a decade paddy fields became catchment of decaying matter and water and less of a biodiverse wetland. Proliferating construction industry made sand on the river bed, clay below wetlands, and earth from the hillock into nothing but resources. Coconut and cash crops though were on the rise up until the mid-2000s as per the Kerala State Land Use Board (1995) data, when real estate evaluations resulted in reductions in land under any form of cultivation. There were also the less visible subterranean changes in the quality of water, water tables, and mutual organo-chemical effects like nitrogen fixation. So were the consequences for flood water absorptions and biodiversity. Even then unintended wetlands could be seen interspersed with urban processes that were eating away at the fringes. A very small island called Parunthuraanchi, enveloped on all sides by Periyar, brings in better visualisations. This island until the 1990s used to be the haunt of domestic bovines. Few more decades back larger groups of these bovines grazed the grass that grew on the alluvium. This was a time when individual households maintained more domestic animals Soon the islands were occupied by more random strays. The fringes of the island increasingly looked chipped away post 2000s. This exposed a metre deep layer of river sand. Sand of course is the sine qua non in the construction based urban booms during this time. River beds were soon depleted of sand. Regulatory regimes were easily bypassed in the illegible

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gaps between the formally legal, illegal, limits, quotas as well as the lack of any provision of putting the ‘illegally mined’ sand back where it came from. The trucks that carry sand from rivers or earth from hillocks became quintessential road scenes from Kerala. The drivers earned notoriety for rash driving while taking the resource away and while occasionally outrunning the law. Sand mining is an activity that compels the convergence of contraries—ecology, water, the construction industry, non-resident money, brokerage, politicians and politics, and new living. Islands like Parunthuraanchi represent a complex matrix of processes, the composite effect of which cannot be understood within analytical frames with lucid binaries between human and non-human, boundaries of the modern state, or insides and outsides. There were domestic animals that went feral only to rejoin the domestic space or market, there have been no specified revenue records of some of their once flood islands, and more recently the insides of these islands have transformed into sources of the prime resource on demand—sand. There are characteristic and unintentional ways in which the ecological assemblages reconfigure and network into newer designs. The experiential and real world in which life is lived is a profusion of interspecies relations, living–non-living hybrids and relationship formed with the respective environments. On the islands by the river banks, we see changing inhabitations and not compartmentalised existence of the sand, the bovines, the water, and people. Neither are these entities pre-fixed or pre-furnished into any stagnant role. Rather we see entanglements and interweaving and changing identities in a continual coming into being that Ingold talks about (2008). This is when we think beyond the comfortable but non-existent divides into lives and non-lives, nature and society and a permanent nature and the human engineer. This is also about constituting the terrains of research too in the messy, entangled, and may be even problematic waters of Periyar and its obscure islands. Often many of the contemporary catastrophes associated with ‘natural disasters’ are also rooted in entrenched binaries (Chakrabarty 2009) or denial of ‘direct involvement with the non-human’ (Ingold 2000). There are many ecological developments of recent times that compel attention. Some of these developments take decisive political effects that even determine election results. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) better known as the Gadgil Committee submitted its report (2011) with recommendations that reflect a holistic concern for

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ecology. The report had to be mediated in diverse ways to satisfy pressure lobbies. The debates that ensued created a terrain that denied the historically informed links between human and non-human, wild and non-wild, culture and nature, resident and invader, culturally embedded life as well as politics. The separations pre-empted any reflection on the relationally conceived report. The proliferation of hybrids (Latour 1993) compels such frames of comprehension. Institutions like religion that make separatist assumptions that lays the ground of conflictual and compartmentalised grounds keeps people away from entangled visions. The urban space in Kerala in its contemporary transformations is a locus that illustrates how localised human ecologies work more generally and how the ecology of places makes certain kinds of citizens. There are possibilities to explore and understand space and place in its ontological, ecological, economic, and social context and to formulate new questions as part of the larger concerns which include issues, animate or inanimate, that crowd in as hybrid formations with fuzzy boundaries. How do people in places fit into unique urban ecologies and how do they become the kind of people they are as inhabitants in socio-economic environs? How do concerns of ecological health, systemic problems, and developmental discourse weigh against each other? There is a need to unravel how human ecologies work and the extent to which we become constituent elements or agents of contemporaneity as a condition. One may encounter situations in which human life is reduced to the bare minimum of existence. On the contrary, agents representing markets or the elect within the capitalist order like investors gain amplified priorities from the system. The system will never let a corporate billionaire or the instruments they deploy fail. They make their best out of smart cities. Agglomeration plans like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the contemporary ‘Smart City guidelines’, envisaged by the central government (2015) as well as comprehensive and total urban plans like Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) are about cities getting smart over environments (human and non-human) and governance more comprehensive. Within the contemporary discourses of ‘development’ the boundaries between what are generally conceived as separate presses to get blurred. A river also flows through the operational spaces of plans and policies—from developmentalist era to the era of smartness. As it flows it coagulated the dominant discourse of the day. River becomes a possibility to explore and understand regions in their ecological, economic, and social contexts

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and to formulate new questions on life in its hybridity. The anthropocene situations that keep surfacing in the rivers of Kerala leave immense scope for interdisciplinary engagements.

Narratives by the River Periyar River is important because it reflects the dynamics of the social processes through which Kerala in general and Cochin in particular has been through. The succession of production systems and the relationships have been played out and shaped along this river. The significance of this river has been in continuous transformation as a result. The three princely states, into which Kerala spread out before the state formation, each had a major river. Periyar was the major river in the Cochin State and the longest in Kerala. It originates in the Western Ghats and flows from North to South East through several tributaries. It was once the favourite trade route for eastern spices to the ports of Cochin and with colonialism it facilitated the lucrative timber industry. The banks of the river are known to have been barter grounds where grand exchanges1 of goods from different regions took place. Some of the present trade fairs during festivals like Sivarathri 2 carry overtones of those times. The seasonal flooding of the river has also made the land along the river fertile. Agriculture used to be abundant along the banks and places like Aluva were predominantly agricultural not very long ago. Kodungalloor, which in the northern part of Ernakulam/Kochi is at the confluence of Periyar and was a major port before the colonial times visited by Nestorians, Arabs, Chinese, Jews, and the Romans. A major change in the flow of this river is thought to have silted up this port and facilitated the formation of Cochin harbour. The confluence of culture around this harbour that built up a niche social structure, later made Cochin a preferred enclave for colonial extraction. Aluva used to be an integral part in the colonial and domestic economic circuit. Here the river, 1 Travancore State Manual (Velupillai 1940). 2 The festival is commemorates the day on which Siva protected the world from a total

annihilation either by drinking the deadly Kaalakoodum poison which was held up in his neck, or by effecting a healthy compromise between Brahma, the Creator and Vishnu, the Protector. Sivarathri comes in the Malayalam month of Kumbham (February–March period). The river bank in Aluva is believed to be the place where Rama, in the Ramayana epic, did the last rites for Jatayu. Thus in Aluva many pay homage to the ancestors and concomitantly a trade fair takes place on the river bank.

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as a channel for timbre trade and transport of spices from the hills of the east played a major role. The urbanisation centred on Ernakulam and the advent of roads and bridges as the major means of transport has changed the significance of the river. Now it holds a lot of significance in terms of tourism and leisure industry. Land value has skyrocketed with the boom in real estate business. River Periyar has weaved in multitudes of eco-social narratives as it meanders as well as bears imprints of material and economic dependencies. The river has churned human and non-human ecologies depending on the dominant trends, spatial specificities, cultural associations, as well as transforming relationships as mentioned before. It flows in different drainage patterns according to the topography as well as the intervening dams, shutters, and spill ways in central Kerala, especially in the Ernakulam district region, before emptying into the Arabian Sea. The premodern Kochi Harbour is said to have formed as a result of the changing course of rivers. Periyar is the major source of fresh water to most of the Kochiites and continues to be the major source of water both for domestic and industrial use. The additional burden on the river, in the form of sand mining, points more towards anthropocene pressures. Aluva town is a medium sized town that practically grew up along the river with mutually constituted morphologies. Both Aluva and the river Periyar that traverses it are important for this study. During the early forms of urbanisation, the river along with the backwater system afforded easy means of communication. The navigability of rivers for long stretches towards the interior parts as branches and the later development (1800s) of canal system resorted to by cargo boats and ferries (Menon 1911: 355– 357).3 It was a conduit of early inland trade and also connected the raw materials bound from eastern mountains to the Cochin harbour. It was a prime channel of colonial timber trade. The riparian town extends to its suburban industrial spaces that are also constituted along the river. The attitudes towards the river have changed from the medieval times to the present. As conduits and determinants for barter, facilitator, and destroyer of agriculture, as flood and flood retreat alluvial plain or as receptacle of industrial effluents or resource base for construction and dam mediated deluge—the town and the river may be dialectically understood.

3 During the Diwanships of Sankara Warrier and Sankunni Menon.

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The deluges and patterns of flow of the river have significant effect on the development of the riverside social system. There are geological indications of a deluge seven centuries back that forced the river to diverge into two tributaries at a place now known as Thottumukham. One branch continued the older course and flowed into the Kodungalloor backwaters. The other flowed to the Varapuzha backwaters and was one of the causes for a natural harbour at Cochin. In the process Aluva got divided into northern and southern parts, later linked by a bridge put across by the princely state of Travancore. The material significance of the river finds parallels in the several spiritual and cultural values attached to it, though the contract works assigned by the temple boards, etc., are not entirely spiritual! The public spaces and religious centres along Periyar are important as they have been under continuous formation and reformation with relation to the changing roles of the river. In the process they have also provided counter spaces that people could resort to and where they could reflect upon their social life in different ways. This constitutes a process of dialogue with the dominant social relationships. At present there is a crucial shift in the balance of this dialogue which has taken a new turn with an almost total redefinition of public spaces and religious centres along the river. Periyar has had many centres of religious significance along its banks. Some of them have been local in character and others became pilgrim centres on occasions. The annual Sivarathri and Malayattoor pilgrimage4 are two main events along the Periyar. These places become pilgrim centres on certain occasions. In the case of Sivarathri Manalppuram it transforms into a pilgrim centre in the Malayalam month of Kumbham (February–March) when pilgrim congregate here and do the Bali (sacrifice) for their ancestors in the morning after the holy night (rathri). The Malayattoor Church is associated with the legend of one of Christ’s disciples, St. Thomas, who is believed to have come to Kerala in AD 52 and established a church on the Malayattoor hill. The place becomes a major pilgrim centre during Easter when a huge number of devotees climb the

4 There is a St. Thomas Church here in Malayattoor village along the northern stretches of the river. Many climb the hill which is over 2000 feet high as a pilgrimage. The chief festival at the shrine is second Sunday, since the first moon, after the Vernal Equinox (March 21).

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hill. The legend of Sankara5 too is believed to have evolved around the river. The institutions in Kalady built in the name of Sankara form a permanent pilgrim centre. The Advaida Ashram built under the initiative of the social reformer; Narayana Guru is also on the banks of Periyar. The ashram was also a venue to a major all-religious meeting in 1924. Besides, plans for the famous Vaikom Satyagraha 6 were made in Aluva. Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore have visited the Advaida Ashram and held talks with Narayana Guru. The town has always been an expensive place to live in. The Travancore State Manual Gazetteer describes Aluva as ‘a first-class sanatorium on the banks of the Periyar, Alangad Taluk…’. It was the summer resort of the Travancore prince. Only very rich people7 could afford a huge house here. It was by mass mobilisation of fund collection from the locals, the working class, Ezhavas, and other excluded groups that Narayana Guru generated the means to build the Ashram.8 Agriculture used to be the chief occupation of the people (Sugarcane and Paddy) because of the fertility of the alluvial soil and sugar was processed on a large scale.9 The outskirts (of Aluva became industrialised during the forties and fifties (mostly tile factories and brick industries). Along with the railway station, the river became a causal factor for the growth of industries on the outskirts. When the real estate values skyrocketed all the way, added on by a new airport after year 2000, the riparian ecosystems in the middle course of Periyar once again became ‘prime real estate zones’ with allied priorities. In addition to degradation, pollution by sewage, industrial effluents, and the boom in construction, depleted most of the sand from the river bed.

5 The legend goes that Sankara, the eighth-century Advaida philosopher, got initiation into the ascetic world through a trial. His mother was against the son becoming an ascetic and consented only when god came disguised as a crocodile and dragged the young Sankara into water. The boy told his mother that he would die unless she gave her consent. So she did and the crocodile released him from its grip. 6 One of the major movements against untouchability was centred at the Shiva temple at Vaikom, south of Ernakulam. It led to the abolishment of untouchability in the realm of Trvancore principality. 7 Like S. S. Codder, a Jewish businessman whose Bungalow can still be found near the bridge that connects the northern and southern parts. 8 This was registered under the Societies Act at Aluva. 9 Travancore State Manuals.

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Along with contemporary urban processes service sectors like that of tourism got rejuvenated. Pilgrimage tourism drew on the presence of religious establishments along the banks of the river. This ‘necessitated’ additional infrastructure. River banks were increasingly claimed by ‘land-developers’. Gated communities advertised exclusive and secure spaces. Security became more appealing in the privatised media ecology that bandied human interest stories about crime, criminals, and criminality. Several new religious centres gained prominence. Advertisements and announcements abounded both in the media and in the form of hoardings. They made sacred narratives along the river. One may travel from the mouth of the river at Munambam where it meets the back waters. Fishing Boats may be seen returning to the harbour by evening. Munambam fishing harbour is among the biggest in the state. Not far from here is the old town of Chendamangalam near Paravur. Chendamangalam and Kottayil Kovilakam have been part of an Indian Ocean trading network and were spaces of entrepots commerce for about two thousand. Associated merchant settlements have left their mark in these places. The reverberations may be sensed in the ways the ruling houses, the synagogue, a Syrian church, etc., are laid out. Presently, as part of a heritage rhetoric the place as well as its artefactual cosmology is entering a new discourse that strings the region to the place called Pattanam where a major archaeological excavation recently took place. Heritage also weaves in the river to further configurations of capital just as the real estate, tourism or religion does in other ways. At Chendamangalam there is an old bridge over a branch of Periyar, with markers from the princely state of Kochi (Fig. 7.1), which was one of the three state systems that through legislations became Kerala. The bridge is in a dilapidated state and parallel to it could be seen the road used by motorists at present which is a state highway with no more interstate crossings. Riparian islans may be seen from the Malavana point and across the river is Puthenvelikkara. Further south east is the place called Mattupuram, and the name suggests cattle (Maadu being Cattle) market that once thrived here. Down the Manjali road enroute to the crossings of Chalakudy River which is another major west flowing river of central Kerala there is a Jaram. Jaram is a tomb where a Thangal (Muslim priest with divine and magical gifts) is buried. Usually in such places there are Nercha festivals and markets. According to Aboobacker who was now 60 years old, there used to be regular markets during his childhood with goods transported through rivulets and less paved roads. Almost a

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decade back a skirmish at a market ensued after someone brought sugarcane (karimbu) to be sold. Sugarcane, incidentally was one of the major crops in the region and places like Alangad get the name (Ala) because they were processing centres (Valath 1991; Menon 1911). There is not even a trace of this agrarian order left, except in the names of places. As per Aboobacker’s narrative the brawl developed into a brief period of communal tension. To complicate things there were two factions and perspectives among Muslims, one supporting and the other opposing Jaram traditions—Sunni as against Mujahids (salafis) or Jamaat I Islami. Rawthers, who had Tamil Muslim traditions and whose families have been a major part of the mercantile orders in Kerala also played a key role in the dispute. There was truce and a feast was arranged. But the festival itself was relocated and soon ceased following problems here. These artefacts and narratives are about the interweaving palimpsest of human ecologies that went along with anthropogenic agrarian ecologies, floral and faunal presences, infrastructural connectivities. These suggest an ecology inseparable into human and non-human or living and non-living but inevitably subject to socio-ecological processes along the river. Once the Manjaali Bridge is crossed, there is a place called Elanthikkara, quite near to Puthenvelikkara and Kunnukara where Chalakudy

Fig. 7.1 Markers from the Erstwhile Cochin Princely State in Central Kerala (Source Own)

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River almost meets Periyar. The names with ‘Kara’ (bank) as suffix are obvious reference to topographical positioning on the river banks and their inextricable links to the river which at several points have gotten reduced either to a narrow canal or clogged by invasive weeds and plants that took root through the muddied floors. Further north east the Chalakudy River flows past Parakadavu and Moozhikulam. Again the ‘kadavu’ refers to the point by the river where either the country boats docked or places frequented for daily ablutions. Moozhikulam hosts a temple with once Jain tradition, and which used to have legal authorities in these regions. In recent years (post 2013) the Nitta Gelatin Company, at Kathikudam, started discharging effluents into this river. Earlier, with sand mining there have been problems like muddying of floor as well as the proliferation of rooted water plants and hindrances to other life forms. And with Gelatin effluents fishes as well as weeds died out. It may sound ironic that the company which is based in Japan has recently entered into a partnership with the government to manufacture health-care products! At the same time, it is a miniature exemplar of the state-corporate orders in the making across India. In the process the state itself acquires the form and format of corporation and the corporation along with people starts enjoying similar rights. The Nitta forms part of a collection of small to medium size industries and chemical plants along rivers in Kerala, starting by late 50s. There are more than 200 of these on the banks of Periyar at Edayar/Eloor and Nitta is at Koratty on the banks of Chalakudy river which joins Periyar before the river mouth. The join venture with the Japanese corporation started in 1975. Products for pharma, food, as well as agro-industries are manufactured here. Despite the problems like human health hazards reported, fish deaths and other forms of pollution, the company presents itself as a provider of employment and investment. It threatens to leave Kerala and relocate to other states warning protestors of losses in employment. As a result, unions come in loggerheads with environmental activists. The companies and corporates can be producer, polluter, and doctor all in one and they negotiate modern sovereignties with ease. Anthropogenic interventions usually have compound effects and the combinations of disturbances bring up ever new challenges. The first was from the indiscriminate sand mining that adversely affected the flow of the river. This set the ecology ever ready for the easier proliferation of invasive species that deoxygenated the water bodies, clogged the flows, and killed off

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native species. The industrial pollution killed off what was remaining as well, bringing with this a total devastation of life. Presently, with the Kanakkankadavu shutters down to prevent the salt incursions from backwaters the river seldom flows except during monsoon. The fluvial transformation as well as edaphic changes has created new ecologies in quick succession. The chemical companies and treatment plants become actants that modify everything else by being part of the whole network (Latour 2004, 2005), i.e., The company metamorphoses into other forms as well in the process (e.g., Corporate social responsibilities—as may be seen elsewhere as well in similar of large-scale processes). Circling back along the course of the river back towards south, near the town in Aluva there is a chira—a big water body fed by rain and springs but that seldom flows. The chira itself was once a part of a flowing water body and fed by many rivulets. Most of the channels either got filled up or reduced to a trickle during the construction of the airport in this region. Exceptional clauses were invoked to fill up the vast paddy fields that help water at catchments, then to be transported further. The Chira itself in its present form is now getting roped into tourism proposals straddling the airport, with landscaped banks, parks, and pedal boats, inaugurating newer priorities. Underneath the bridge over the oldest and biggest branch of Periyar at Aluva, named Mangalapuzha, a new ecosystem was taking root. The kind was a common sight at several points along the river. Here, a new island system started taking root (literally) and got rooted and built upon during preceding monsoon. Initially certain debris and weed came flowing and started taking root on the river floor which was now full of mud instead of the sand that got mined away during construction boom. With reduced flow especially near the big pillars of bridges large masses of weed that got reinforced by mud and debris all the way down into tiny islands took shape. There are bigger stories to these miniatures. One is from Kalady, which is a nearby river town. Here bigger island systems developed in the middle of broad stretches of Periyar during the 2000 real estate booms along the meanderings. There were tortoises, snakes, and otters that started making these their new abodes or stop overs. Niche ecologies took life. But along with that there was also drastic dampening in the flow of the river and concomitant transformations at the river mounts further downstream like with salt water incursions and changes in biotic life. More chemicals mix into the river before it reaches one of its mouths near a place named Varapuzha. Private entities like Biocon Organics that

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produces gelatin (Like Nitta), Periyar Chemicals, Sud Chemie, Ceejee Lubricants, Binani Zinc, and Active Char, on one side and the public sector companies like Travancore Cochin Chemical and FACT on the other, are all in the Eloor region of Periyar. Here the river is wide and it is near the backwaters. This is an industrial space and has been growing since the 1940s, ever since the Thirukochi state emerged from Travancore and Kochi. Allied with their genealogy were stories of pollution, labour rights, privatisations, and public protests. Environmentalists came into loggerheads with labour unions and there has been arguments over whose point is valid. The piecemeal perspectives of labour that unions hold often become a more powerful mediator between state and companies. The entangled ecologies of precarious employments, polluting industries, the receptacle rivers, fishes and aquatic life, animals and people dependent in multifarious ways on the river take backseat when it comes to the making of policies. Regulator shutters have been in place here ever since the salt water incursions were noted. Presently the shutters have the unintended role of precenting the industrial waste from entering upstream, though the effect is minimal as the effluents are released all the way from the rivers midwestern course. There is a kaleidoscope of novel ecosystems comprised of dead fishes, phytoplankton, eutrophication, and coloured waters. Environmentalist and citizens bodies like Periyaar Samrakshana Samithi and Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samiti have often brought the reduction in flow in the last four decades because of the different hydel projects and dams upstream, into attention. The effect compounds with the increasing quantities of effluents as well as increased incursion of salt water, because of reduced pressure downriver. There have been studies (Green Peace 2003; Joy 1992; NEERI 1992; Paul and Pillai 1976) on the effects of compounds of nitrogen and phosphorus chemicals leading to excessive concentration and density in certain types of vegetation. Some of the algal blooms get further nutrients because of the introduction of enclosed septic tanks that eventually get emptied into the water bodies. The accelerated rate of growth of algae and other plants is called eutrophication. Certain forms of algae are known to have clouded the river system at points. Further their mass decay as well as photosynthesis changes the chemical environment of the slow running rivers. The ecological niches of Periyar have already been affected by the chain effects from eutrophication like methane production, sulphur emissions, and turbidity. Cyanobacteria proliferates in eutrophic ecologies quickens these emissions because

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these organisms can thrive the clouded, dark, and anoxic conditions. The concentration of heavy metals (Manganese, Zinc, and Cadmium), radioactivity, toxins like ammonia, as well as the presence of silicates and nitrates that produce eutrophication, together with the fluvial changes accelerated by anthropogenic interventions have created an ecology highlighted best through increasing episodes of dead fishes that float around and coloured water. The change in ecosystem may be substantiated by fishermen recollecting of big catches and varieties of fishes. There is another dimension to the more damaging effects. The buffer of the industrial zones had to have mandatory green zones. Over time these zones became hosts to a variety of life forms from bats to egrets. The Cochin Natural History Society (CNHS) bird surveys continuously report this rich avian and faunal life in the green buffer zones. Rare storks like the Woolly Necked Storks, different kinds of nightjars and owls have been reported by birdwatchers. So are the different insects butterflies and moths. The 70 plus acre mini forest around the machine tool factory in Kalamassery (Figure), in Ernakulam has become the focus of the documentary ‘Urban Canopy’ (Nagagathile IthiriPacha) by M G Sujith. Such unintended ecosystems have evolved over relatively short periods—decades. But the neoliberal urban projects like Special Economic Zones, the highways to airport, the calculations that classify buffer land as excess and hence to be put to ‘use’, the everyday disposal of consumer waste—all are already covering up and burying the coevolved ecologies in Kochi. The service industries that often advertise manicured green aesthetics and non-polluting production are ironically bulldozing such urban ecologies. Changing nature of labour, informalisations and migrations from other states in India have increased the pressure on some of the small branches that feed the river. The animal life that adapts to the disturbed ecosystems, many more that die out, dead fishes, anoxic water, or buffaloes that still loiter in patchy wetlands, all form a complex matrix of relationships. Narrations till now pertained to the middle to lower course of the river Periyar. There is an array of processes that accumulate as the river flows. Starting from the histories of mercantile past, entrepot commerce or the fluvially designed early harbours, one reaches a point where the reverberations from the past resurface. But they now resurface as selective heritage and potential returns in capital. The spiritual gatherings now occupy the façades of the early forms of barter and inland mercantilism by river banks that was intricately linked to seasonals as well as ebbs and flows of water

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and tides. The bare religious spaces they became with modern states now reconfigure into an industry called pilgrim tourism. In the modern state formations albeit informed by many religious idioms and mythologies, religion was subject to the political or religion was mostly in terms of the state. The current reconfigurations are linked to the reconfigurations of socio-economic relations loosely defined as neoliberal globalisation. What becomes of the river is metaphorical of what has become of heterogenous human beings: resources, informalities, cheap labour and always following the needs of capital. So, the river that weathers and breaks down rocks over millennia into river sand gets dredged and mined away in a decade leaving a muddy floor ready to be colonised by foreign roots that in turn reduce indigenous and heterogenous life. Meanwhile the industrial plants discharge effluents and kill the remaining life in one part and result in eutrophication in another. The fishermen who drew sustenance from rivers and frequented local markets with excess catch not sat idle and watch the dead fishes that float by on ochre-coloured waters. Panaikulam, further north of this industrial area, with an agrarian past nurtured by the alluvium deposited through the once seasonal floods was never linked to the industrial area by road until few decades back. The area became part of a network of roads ever since the industry called Binani Zinc got established (1967). At present this industry as well as many others like Sreeshakthi paper mills are dysfunctional. New priorities for such industrial zones have been set most of which toe the line of real estate-information technology complexes. The contemporary accumulations of land that drew from social capital of the region like the myriad social networks of people, like the everyday networks of brokers and the local contacts that are often known as ‘earths’ also leave their impact on the riparian arteries. The Onjithodu (kaivazhi/branch of Periyar) once separated the Eramam region from mainland. Eramam for all practical purposes had an island-ecology. But sand mining as well as eutrophication resulted in the weeds clogging this rivulet into a marsh-like state. Depleted of flow, the pump houses belonging to property owners on either side as well as mineral water-bottling plants run by private groups kept pumping out whatever water remains. Bottling units have an inverse relationship with changing water bodies. The more the latter dries out, the better it is for these plants—the market logic taps on whatever if left and more dear gaining better deal from an environment. Ecology/ecological knowledge is often portrayed as something apart from the socio-political order. The life around is often seen as ruled

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by some homeostatic permanency. But like, state or family, ecology is thoroughly social. Often the entrenched interests of the day draw their sustenance from the dichotomy and device their plans and policies accordingly. The policy makers and system, when they say the environment is threatened, for example, one has to ask whether the environment dichotomous with society was ever inhabited. The ecology includes the materialities in their moving, static, live, and non-living forms in complex relationships but more than that—in entanglement. This is often phenomenologically experience but seldom factored in. The data driven policy making that has become normalised at present may not get this entangled reality because of the discrete data. So, there is always a lot of data on a village, the extent of field, the range of rain, demography, the statistics on occupation, and even the evental news reports or disaster induced surveys. Such data is hardly the inhabited world but the world that surrounds us as the ethnographer Tim Ingolds writings suggest. Then there is the perception of ecology, once again divorced of perceivers like us, that demands protection for the sustainability needs they meet. This clearly resonates with the greater global debates on protecting environment for the future. The algorithm of sustainability is more geared towards the corporate ideas of alienated management. But the problem is that in everyday life things exist as cyborg systems, albeit governed by relationships of power and control. It is the relationships of control that present an alienated ecology. That is the irony! Ecology is not destiny, rather they are produced processes. A river like Periyar, Chalakudy, or Pamba in Kerala are not just a bare geological data set. Rather they accumulate and embody inhabitations from the upper reaches at Ghats, maintained by Shola systems, flowing down as rapids, joining to form rivers that form estuarine systems by their mouths. They are complex processes that look: wild in human-protected national parks like Periyar Tiger Reserve, part of tribal settlements and plantation ecologies, straddle deforestations and real estate interventions, cater to agrarian dependencies or invasive ecosystems. Periyar has multiple roles in terms of its modern urban existence. It is the prime source of water for the entire district for decades in addition to beknown until recently as the best sanatoriums in early 1900s. Apart from the rich and resourced who were drawn it there were many who sought cleaner air and salubrious life. But by 2000s it has also become the thirty fifth toxic hot spot in the world (at the Eloor Region) as per the

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Greenpeace10 The salubrious ecology of early 1900s was by now replete with cases of cancer and congenital diseases. Such changes are fast. The river has always been a system of relationships that come into play and surface as ruptures and events in contexts of plans and policies that imagine partial ecosystems. Whether it is about major transformations in the islands like Parunthuraanchi that straddle Periyar or the many branches like Onjithodu the river is replete with marks of change thick and fast. According to Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samiti activists, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was 2157 cubic metres flow per second. And this has now become 9 cubic metres per second. The different kinds of barriers created in the course, many of which incidentally were fixes for recurring problems and the burgeoning effects of a real estate driven economic order, has left their marks on the tone and tenor of the river. Riparian ecologies like this are zones where abstract ideas like neoliberal economy take identifiable roots. The ecological moment of the urban river we are dealing with here is similar to what writers like Matthew Gandy (2022) perceptively talk about. They mention a time when ecology or environment remained marginal to enquiries even in the 1970s, a decade after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) perceptively put anthropogenic ecologies into clear relief. Accordingly, even the otherwise sensitive and continuously nuanced Marxist enquiries (Castells 1983) remained bereft of ecology in any detail. Then one slowly sees political ecological analysis extending into urban realms, critiques of technology and science, as well as the binary visions on nature and culture in the works towards the nineties like Bellamy Fosters (1999) engagement with metabolic rifts. The kind of estranged relationships with river as may be seen with gated communities near riverscapes, tourism, construction sector as well as industries with effluent outlets with rivers—while driving all the energy and resources from the same river exemplifies Foster’s idea. Urban ecological contextualisation of Periyar must combine ecological insights beyond datasets into processual understandings of the entangled ‘operational landscapes’ (Cronon 1991) that provide both resources and moorings for abstract ideas like global capitalism. Further the economisation of riparian spaces as with the prevalence and proliferation of service sector that requires river as both landscapes and lavatory must proceed through operational landscapes also ensue 10 Joint work by Greenpeace International, Occupational Health and Safety Centre, Mumbai, NIMHANS and St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore.

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from capitalist excess. We see the ontologies of many of the ecological problems like waterlogging, flashfloods, stagnating toxic rivers, etc., in its making from modern states increasingly draining marshes and practising wetland agriculture to the present extensions of neoliberal legal frameworks to create exceptions in ecology. Fluid entangled ecologies are separated by designations of different kind much like what happened with colonial ‘deltaic ecologies’ (Bhattacharyya 2018) but in grossly bigger scales. There is no suggestion that follows that human interventions are new, rather to make evident the ongoing processes and shifts in scale of riparian interventions. The post democratic ecological politics, that perceives events like the dead fishes, drying riparian orders, toxins from two hundred plus industries changing the colour of water, eutrophication, or the new floating islands that take root on the muddy river floors as mere exceptions. There is a profound lack or recognition of the hybrid orders of relationships in the anthropocene present in the patchy perceptions and piecemeal policies.

Living the Disturbed Terrains: Of Fishes Chemicals and Concrete The Indian Aluminum Company that came in 1930s, the fertiliser companies like FACT, and companies that process uranium—all empty their effluents and reject into the river. There are both public and private sector companies. The Cochin Minerals and Rutile Limited that manufacture synthetic rutile generates Ferrous Chloride and Ferric Chloride that make the river red. The presence of dioxins in eggs, cadmium and other heavy metals in soil as well as waste pumped into water from gelatin processing add on to the trouble. For five decades such companies have existed and in an 11 square kilometre space more than 40,000 people inhabit. It is precisely the flow of the river and possibilities of emptying the reject that made this the ideal space for industries. From the seventies dead fishes started surfacing on the waters of Periyar. In 2014 the fish deaths peaked. In the 80s there were about 35 species of fishes in the lower reaches of Periyar and around the industrial zone. This in itself was a reduction from double the variety according to inland fisherfolk as well as according to the study by researchers of the School of Industrial Fisheries (SIF) of the Cochin University of Science and Technology. By 2000s the fish species around the industrial zone at Eloor further reduced to

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nearly 12.11 The Delhi IIT study in 2009 found the region to be among the most toxic zones in India. So, the river is a lot more disturbed and anthropocenic than suggested by the nostalgic photos, country boats, or the birds that still fly overhead. The ‘green’ advertisement backdrops of upcoming apartments on the other hand may be seen as hyperreal. The signs on such billboards that proliferated during the credit relaxations and the provisions created for Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in real estate. For about a decade or more until the credit crunches due to subprime mortgage crisis that spread globally from the United States, the images of new-living projects and investment-expos provided nostalgic green experiences foregrounded by modern life more intensely than the banal every day. Everything looks more real than real within a gamut of images that even literally blocked the unearthed terrains and waste dumbs of a consumer state. The intensity of the anthropocene has already left its indelible marks on the midland hills, buffer zones of industries, on any land that is deemed excess and hence has to be price tagged as well as the rivers and marshes. Yet the information technology real estate discourse claims to be pollution free and unlike the smokestacks and chem-spitters. The overt expressions of service sector, tourism, ICT based industries—suggest such a non-intrusive picture, with no outlets to river or factory funnels. But it misses the intrusions into the mandatory green spaces that were kept as buffers for early industries, the burgeoning sand mining and earth extractions and the concomitant growth in retail and consumption spaces. The intruded ecosystems with complex life dependencies from birds and rodents, to spawning grounds for fishes near its banks, in the contemporary growth-based discourse are mere wastelands, bereft of life. Not only that the prevailing media stories supplemented by instant WhatsApp feeds and profusion of imageries connote all such ecosystems as ‘security threats’ and in need for control, surveillance, amelioration measures, and ultimately utilisation. The ‘fortress city’ (Davis 1992) aesthetics that are imagined into gated livings and urban formats pervade the land and create further anthropogenic pressures on the hydrological circuitry and niche ecosystems. 11 A comparatively less polluted Chalakudy river system at the time maintained around 70, though this is not to turn blind eyes towards the threats there like the gelatine company effluents as well as the gross consequences if a proposed hydel plant carries forward.

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The anthropocenic processes that informed such biodiverse niches around zones of toxic waste and effluents around Periyar is a story of unintended ecologies. These niches in the process also become carbon sinks, temperature regulators, or urban lungs. The designation of ‘excess land’ and zones from the erstwhile buffer spaces for electronic industries, software companies is inevitably accompanied by demands of freehold rights by the Public Private Partnership (PPP) ventures and the ripple effects on the real estate prices (and resultant conversions of more land as real estate) in the surrounding places. The consequences for non-human ecologies as well as the scale of impacts are as big or even more than the polluting industries of the developmentalist phase of the state. In the neoliberal post-developmentalist Kerala, the compulsive discourse of ‘vikasanam’ (literally expansion) proceeds to appropriate places as spaces of growth and evisceration of existing geographies and life forms. Ironically, they gain credibility with the backdrop of such extremely polluted zones like that of Eloor. One of the rationales for steam rolling the post-developmentalist order is that of the generation of employment which is comfortably bereft of the politics of generating insecure jobs. It also never factors in the disruptions to life, lifeworld, and livelihoods for an after all ‘imagined’ creation of jobs. For instance, there are around 22,000 small to medium scale inland fishing dependent communities around the main branches and sub branches of Periyar. They are much more than the existing industrial employees in the companies around, not to speak of the imagined or virtual employments that are to come (of course by abruptly destroying the existing socio-physical geography). There are hundreds of families that live on side of river branches. Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Organo Chlorines present in such regions have already made most in the region sick. There have been several studies like ones by Kerala Shastra Saahitya Parishad (KSSP) and Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samiti in 2000 as well as Greenpeace (2003). Accordingly, the prevalence of nearly 18 human diseases is higher than in the controls in surrounding places. There is no ecosystemic scheme that factors in the different dependencies, relationships, ecosystemic transformations; other than those who carry on with top-down, linear, binary, or bare-ecosystemic methods like that of the Pollution Control Boards. The same applies to much of the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA reports). This was particularly true of the EIAs done for the Athirapally hydroelectric project that has been planned on the already heavily dammed 144 km small Chalakudy River,

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that at present still holds a lot of heterogenous and entwined lives. This was observed specifically by the Gadgil Panel. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) had come up with a large report on Ghats that factored in much of the anthropocene processes, in September 2011. But the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) never disclosed the report and instead instituted another committee that came out with a regular watertight and binary conceptuatisations of ecology and the riparian systems like Periyar or Chalakudy. Travelling through the Eloor–Edayar industrial zone as well as the places around (Fig. 7.2) one cannot miss the traces of fresh water networks formed by man-made canals, once waterlogged paddy fields, spring fed ponds, branches of rivers, as well as the main channel. The fish life here has followed cycles that have not been grossly altered even after the wetland agriculture became a norm, later even when the agriculture as such declined leaving the waterscapes fallow. People recall their fishing experiences, expertise of their parental generations, nuanced knowledges and classifications of aquatic life as well as the value attributed to fishes from specific parts. Some of these fishes are: 1. Muthi—the mouth shape changes in this fish, as per the ex-catchers. 2. Aaron (Is a longish eel-like fish) 3. Vanklanji (They have whisker) 4. Three kinds of Paral:

Fig. 7.2 Periyar meandering the industrial area around Eloor and Edayar mentioned (Source Google Map)

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a. Vayamban[striped] b. Poovali [Red Spot] c. Karua [biggest of the Parals] It is was very difficult for me to represent these embodied knowledges. It does not mean embodied or indigenous knowledges themselves are some stagnant artefacts never to be recovered. These have been adapting and changing with the environments. But abrupt transformations create chasms. Some of these fishes were difficult to be identified. But I made certain correlations based on descriptions. So Vanklanji seemed similar with the Kaari fish from the creeks that crossed waterlogged puncha fields to the regular wetland rice ecologies in our parts. But narrations suggested that the whiskers of the former where softer than that of Kaaris. I could gather that Paral was a kind of Barb, the smaller version of which I was more familiar with the Manathukanni (Rasbora) was so known because of the spot of light that looks like an eye towards the sky but in nearby places the fish with the same description was Tuppal kothi (Spittlebiter) precisely because of the habit of congregating whereever you spit in the water! It could well be that many of these species are extinct and gone for good. So will be those names and classifications (made using habits, imaginations, niche ecologies, or associations). All the aforementioned fishes dwelled in the waterlogged punchas , ponds, and connecting networks in varying density along with other fishes like varaals/braals (channa striata), vakas (channa marulis ), mushis (catfishes), kallemuttis (climbing perch), or kooris (Mystus). Although taxonomy has devised a system of communication of species type that cuts across place and time there are other ways of classifying and naming that are based on criteria that are quite different, localised and most importantly suggestive of entanglements in ecology. We know that within the scientific fraternity there have been challenges to Linnaean classification like the one from evolutionary biologists at Yale.12 Michael Donoghue claims that the binomial system in fact does limit the scope of understanding the relationships between different groups of animals or plants. But simultaneously there are counter arguments as well that also point to the threat that this poses to the gamut of legalities that exist for biodiversity protection. This is not to suggest that there needs to be an overhaul of the binomial nomenclature, but 12 Holmes (2004).

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to be sensitive to other ways of seeing that adds on phenomenological, entangled, and a more rooted dimensions to this hierarchical method. Nomenclatures and methods of classification also follows the voices that regional or localised agencies have vis a vis more powerful hegemonic determinants—pre-modern states, modern states, implications in postcolonial nation, or neoliberal capitalisms. With regional heterogeneities subsumed in larger tendencies so will these rooted nomenclatures and ecologies. Stephen Jay Gould and R C Lewontin in 197913 has elaborated that the relationalities and adaptations that emerge are not unilaterally determined by an environmental outside. Rather they coevolve dialectically and always in interactions. The changing riparian worlds around Periyar with modulations in scale, speed, or impact speak the stories of dialectical relations and transforming determinants. The broken marshlands that are products of two decades of sand mining and land reclamations are fossils of the once articulated waterways. But at the same time, it is also true that some of the wetlands generated during the spread of agriculture and wet rice cultivation, themselves mediated by patterns of rain and rivers, were also about the demarcation of land from water. As James Scott says (2009), such demarcations have also made the less-classifiable marshes more legible for the state. So, it may sound ironic that the contemporary transformation of fluvial system to bogs and marshes is also about another turn of state processes whereby, flows of capital under the facilitative guise of state are carving novel ecosystems of illegibility. This is perhaps also metaphorical of the new sovereignties in the making. The new state orders in the making may not look like a contractual order with classic Hobbesian forms of control, but the more rhizomic models (Kapferer 2005) have the forms of control immanent to it, though probably more concealed from every day. This is also because of the newer assemblages of actors are themselves facilitated by the patterns and proclivities of finance capital. The working together of public and private actors as with Public Private Partnership (PPP) models present a more inclusive structure. But the inclusion is more in the sense of not having any exception from the dominant regime. The state no longer stays back and supervises, rather it starts creating markets. And because it is the state that has to create markets (like with PPPs, or stakeholder policy making) not only the

13 Gould and Lewontin (1979).

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economy, but the different relationships and erstwhile agencies also have to have market paradigms. This applies to the heterogenous actors in the networks, distinct ecologies (as services or resources that have been managed sustainably), or relationships. Biopower is exercised over ecologies by the careful creation of self-regulatory regimes that work through participative language and responsibilitisation. The rivers were once channelised to fields and bogs when they were deployed for rice cultivations; at present the rivers themselves are eviscerated or ejected from an order except as riverscapes, receptacles, or resources. The brokers who deal with land, informal employees, the components that can be neatly classified as ecosystem services are precisely the ways of such inclusive regimes. The actors are included in the technologies that impose secure, exclusive, biopolitical, and binary habitats. There can be now an imposition of drone-based evaluation from outside. The remaining marshes could be utilised for water, a certain rivulet may be unclogged with the help of earthmovers, environmental impact assessments and social impact assessments could be easily made—and all by leaving the system running as before. This works because it evades the connectivities, the interspecies relations, the unintended ecologies as well as actors with no agencies except the ones imposed. Ethnographic thought does have to continuously fight off any impending tendency of thinking anthropocene as globe enveloping objectification or harking back on some antediluvian global harmony. Along with this any notion of pristine also needs to be fought off. The anthropocene of the riparian ecologies in Kerala, as we see, is parochial, performative, and perspectival. It is so precisely because it exists as the patches that one sees in case of the river. And in these patches, one sees different actants get foreground. Near the Kalady town the river Periyar flows one of the widest (around 400 m) but presently there are several island formations in the river and some of them have become hardened grounds with their own ecosystem and severe effects of the flow of the river—the post 90s increase in sand mining has piled up a muddy base onto which weeds possibly clang on, later caught the debris and more reinforcements during flood. Meanwhile in the upper reaches of Periyar we see yet another phenomenon. These are the wilder ecologies rich in endemism and where species like the Mahseer thrive. But after floods and possible increases in turbidity of water introduced species like certain varieties of carp (fish) was found to better adapt (Sandilyan et al. 2018) to

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the disturbed ecologies and further compound the effects by uprooting the macrophytes while feeding. There are also the ongoing processes connected with the pilgrimage ecosystem. This is specifically in reference to the Sivarathri based pilgrimage processes that bring in a whole gamut of relationalities with the riparian order in the context of pilgrimage tourism, new religiosity, accumulation of land as well as the contemporary assemblages of geological processes and myth making. As indicated already, the wetlands that one sees at present, have not been pristine natural processes, but have evolved through agrarian interventions, hydraulic interventions, changing fluvial patterns, youth political interventions, environmental movements, and even recent legislations like Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008. The wetlands act created a data base for all the paddy fields and wetland in the state. But the collective work towards this helped only in piecemeal ways resulting in further conversions and reclassifications of land. Informal ways of circumventing the act remained live. The almost 8 lakh hectares of paddy fields/ wetlands that were there in the beginning of 80s had already come down to nearly 2 lakh hectares when the act was introduced. The steepness of the slope reduced afterwards. At Veliyathunad, a natural gas pipeline that passes underneath many regions. As per 1962 legislation and because of security concerns no construction is allowed in the vicinity save agriculture. The unintended effect here was that the wetlands stayed out of bounds for the real estate networks that saw bounty in any field, marsh, hillock, or wetland in the 2000s. Here the ecology that one sees now where paddy cultivation has been revived through cooperatives like paadashekharasamitis are unintentional consequences in every sense. The state governments wetland laws also brought tracts that got reported as paddy fields (the quality and comprehensiveness of the reports of course varied across regions) under certain degrees of protection. While dump-truckers that came to fill wetlands were driven off in some places in others they were met with blind eyes. Once dumped no earth ever gets taken off! So eventually the offloads on wetlands may be levelled and later legal sanctions may be obtained through technical loopholes. Veliyathunad kept on with wetlands as well as revived paddy fields in certain cases, because of the pipeline that went underneath. There were restrictions on construction work.

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Despite the paddy fields lush in green and ready for harvest these are not the older versions of wetland ecologies. Straddling the banks of such wetlands Ipomea flowers (In Malayalam—Cheruthali, Thirutaali/ In English—Morning Glory) were colonising roads, yards, and hedges. These plants that even abound in the Periyar Tiger Reserve of the Western Ghats have unbroken presence from highlands to plains like these (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). And the edges of these fields were getting knocked by tall buildings and rubbles that had otherwise laid concrete all around in the once similar ecologies by the early 2000s. The concrete and Ipomea are invasions in their abiotic and biotic formats! Since the 1990s, the Aluva Manalppuram, (Sandy River bank) where the Sivarathri festival unravels became bereft of sand and covered by earth and wild grass. There is not even a facade of the once barter system that prevailed in this region as well as the mercantile order controlled by Buddhists. Alam-Vaaya, I am told gave rise to the Aluva. Alam being spear and vaaya being mouth—the name could be a resonance of the violent takeover of the barter grounds from the Buddhist overseers by a Namboothiri led Hindu Brahmanical order. Presently, despite the governmental procedures to deal with the phenomenal debris during the balikarmas (obeisance to the dead), the grounds had already got

Fig. 7.3 Ipomea efflorescence along the fields in Veliyathunad, Kochi, Kerala (Source Own)

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Fig. 7.4 Ipomea efflorescence in the Periyar Tiger Reserve, Idukki, Kerala (Source Own)

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littered with refuse. The kind of debris that accumulates here is also a consequence of the establishment of permanent pilgrim centres out of more transient and liminal spiritual spaces. In the case of Manalppuram the myth was one of the temple appearing when water retreats, only to be cleansed away by rising waters soon. The myth was one of seasonal rebirths that went alongside the seasonal barters that followed trade winds, flood retreats, as well as the movement of itinerant merchants and connectivities to entrepot commerce by the west coast. Many things and actors were in conjunction. The permanent structure with a concretised buffer zone and a big temple on raised platforms is about severance from the entangled ecology and realignment with new forms of capital exemplified in pilgrim circuits discussed earlier. The Manalppuram is now a patch disengaged from the local ecologies (themselves in transformation) and aligned with a string of temples visited enroute Sabarimala which itself has been elevated to a year-round and delocalised national pilgrim centre. The festive grounds at Sivarathri Manalppuram were prime shopping grounds till the 2000s and were facilitated by the town municipality. Ever since 2000s there were further transformations in the profile of shoppers after the arrival of large malls and innumerable shops that catered to reformed middle-class consumer expectation on a global register. Unlike before when festival time was the only time when certain consumables arrived, now they are a mere façade of what had once been. If one thinks ‘what has once been’ itself as a façade of the earlier barter-based seasonal business, the current festival ground around a permanent pilgrim centre is yet another layer of facade. Post 2000 almost all the sand, both from the river bed and on these banks got dredged away for the booming construction activities. The sand became one of the resources for growth, in turn linked to the expatriate investments from the Gulf, the relaxation on credit, as well as the entry of multinationals into real estate. The river banks have hence been covered by layers of mud. River now had only mud both on the floor as well as in the flow. Floods and seasonal rises during rains deposited the mud on the erstwhile sand banks, thus setting grounds for new ecologies of grasslands. The man-made-forests alongside the bank were the consequence of environmental concerns that developed into movements like the ones at Eloor and Edayar. They sought to prevent any further erosion of the banks during flood. This has hence created a forest ecology on the banks, on one side, and the inlets of river into these forests have carved new ecosystems for the fishes as well as the buffaloes. The animals are let

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loose in one of the few remaining commons around this place. Buffaloes cannot survive without water bodies. Other bovines too are seldom kept domestically because of the reduction in common grazing lands and the concomitant dependence on, and economic drain for, cattle feeds from markets. Riparian narratives now move to Muttar, another branch of Periyar, before the river empties into Varapuzha backwaters and again towards the industrial area of Elloor. Edapally thodu, a stream that from in from the eastern midlands meets Muttar. On the way the stream flows literally through the ever-growing municipal waste mounts and dumping yards. The dumping yards are anthropogenic hillocks in themselves and have been built up from time to time, pressing the previous litter ever deeper possibly with changing the chemical composition with pressure. Due to continuous landfilling and pressing down of previous layers, the site has also become an ecosystem of microorganisms, which produce components like methane and carbon dioxide in addition to other forms of chemical reactions both in aerobic and anaerobic conditions. There is a major risk of such chemicals coming into contact both with groundwater as well as the wetlands around and the running water of Muttar River, which eventually joins Periyar. Herons and Brahminy kites have made these dumps their ecological niche. Not far from the dump are the cleaner looking water bodies that serrate the newly sanctioned metro yard. The ‘Executive Summary of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Study & Environment Monitoring Plan for Kochi Metro Rail Project’ prepared by SENES Consultants India Pvt. Ltd., conveys the project is eco-friendly throughout its 25 km stretch as well as the metro maintenance depot. The Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) planned by the Kerala state was called the Kerala Metro Rail Ltd. (KMRL). In fact, a 2006 EIA notification gives exception to projects like the metro exception from a clearance from the Ministry of Environment & Forest (MoEF). The EIA in this case is put forward as an option exercised that nevertheless appreciates the lesser soil excavation (compared to an underground metro), or CO2 reduction (in kg) projected for years up to 2048. Ways of state and policy texts start from a taken for granted need for projects and then go on to compare different types (overhead vs underground metro). They appreciate carbon reductions. But as with most of the carbon-based claims it misses the fact that it is not the carbon that is the outside agent against which we need immunity, rather carbon itself is a creation of a consumer

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order and capitalist system. Without addressing the order or the system carbon claims are only piecemeal imaginations and projections. Further there have been various protests from the locality especially at the place called Muttom where a depot and yard were proposed alongside futuristic investments in real estate. This is a zone of paddy cultivation or wetland ecology on which the state was exerting pressure on behalf of the SPV. Here the possible disruptions in the channels running through the place, the consequences for humans and non-humans because of the lowering of groundwater levels, etc., were seldom attended to. On top of it the massive flood event in Kerala (2018) had peculiar ecological ramifications here as a consequence of the binary logic or the logic of the state that was applied onto entangled ecologies in Muttom and its wetlands. The effects of flood were unprecedented without the fields and wetlands that would have otherwise absorbed the rising waters and drained away the rest. And the flood effect did not just pertain to the 2018 flood. Even in the following years when the rainfall was lesser waterlogging continued. With reference to the Application NO. 157 of 2014(SZ) before the National Green Tribunal (The case filed by Dr. G. D. Martin against Union of India/State of Kerala/ Kochi Metro Rail Ltd./Kerala Pollution Control Board), several objections to the conversion of wetlands for the metro yard, metro village as well as the roads were made. But citing the fallow nature of the land, norms that were to be followed while filling, EIAs (by many like the aforementioned private agency), due procedures, and portrayal as wasteland—land conversions were justified. One sees here resonances from the idea of terra nullius (land that belongs to none) invoked mostly during colonial occupations (Hendlin 2014) to justify the act of occupation. But many such concepts and clauses found ready acceptance in written and unwritten state-discourses—more so as the orders transformed towards neoliberal evaluations of space and land. The idea of terra nullius or deeming any land as waste, wild and hence available becomes more problematic at present with capital ever more powerful in its scalar impacts. Unused land is thus never understood in terms of relationalities between the elements therein or the myriad invisible dependencies (i.e., invisible for justificatory documents, EIA reports, and policy papers). The documents that provide rationales for clearances do incorporate certain mandatory provisions for the sheer technical requirement. A channel may be maintained to give the impression that the flow of water is not affected, saplings may be planted instead of the hundreds of mature

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trees axed or rain harvesting activities might get advertised. Some of these even go under the scheme of corporate social responsibility. But the channels bereft of the ecologies around and with additional pressures from debris never substitute or even stay live. The saplings seldom grow in the chaos. There are no provisions or review or scrutiny of the ameliorative gestures. Objections to the conversion of wetlands took a relational perspective on ecology which understands wetlands, with or without cultivation, as sponges that absorb and regulate the flow of rainwater. The stabilisation of water table as well as controls of flash floods was also noticed. The anthropocenic irretrievability of damage was emphasised. But the exceptionalities enjoyed by developmental projects like the metro, reductive definitions of wetland rules (2010) [for instance: saying this was not a Ramsar protected area/was neither a park not mangrove/was not a UNESCO recognised space/As well as specific rules like Rule 2(g) that does not include paddy fields mentioned therein, etc.] were deployed to sanction the conversion of a vast tract of wetland (nearly 25 hectares) to dry solid ground. The rules and formalities of the system had an extremely compartmentalised view of ecology that did not see the relationalities involves. They went by binary-disconnected classifications. The huge walls of the metro yard (that sliced the Rockwell fields into pieces), were not the only blocks for the arterial networks of the river that once flowed from Kizhakkambalam and Pallikkara and even transported laterite to markets towards the west during early 1900s (Varghese 2013). There were other ground fills and waste dumps that have either killed or sieved the remaining channels. Duck farmers could be seen near some of the water bodies that remained. These bodies, like the fields mentioned before was spared unintentionally because of the presence of a military depot on the edges. The restrictions in place in effect sustained patches of wetland, where duck farmers who purchased chicks from the farms and nurseries in Mannuthi could take them to forage. Migrant labourers from the northern Indian states, north east as well as Bangladesh have almost become the labour majorities in all these places, from arms depot, industrial zones, road building sites, hotels, the IT Park building sites, and in most other small-scale industries. The water bodies had also become their regular haunts for daily ablutions. One rarely sees local residents around most of these channels. There were novel animal formations that may be seen flocking round the river, even in the most toxic zones. There are the buffaloes that converge towards the bogs that

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were once free flowing rivers. There are the kites and egrets mentioned that have new foraging grounds. Though fishing has substantially come down, there are other actors in the shape of migrant labourers, from northern Indian states, who are both attracted by networks to the new labouring sites (real estate) as well as driven away from the socio-political conditions in their home states. With my informant we went further west towards Elookkara. Here there was a temple. He told me that this was once their family temple and they had a system that was unlike the dominant brahminical (in the control of the priestly community who are considered higher within caste rankings) temple. The temple was run by people from his own community, viz. the Pulayas. There were their personal goddesses (Devis), and his grandfather once settled nearby. But life then revolved much round the seasonal floods and most of the family, except his father’s brother, moved to Elookkara. The temple itself changed hands and with its economic growth and further years, came under the management of Nair communities (dominant in caste hierarchy), and hence acquired the modern temple form with the Devi possibly becoming just one of the versions or avataras. There was only existence as versions of a certain mainstream. Here one could recall reversals in orders and organisational codes. In the pre-state times possibly, it followed a heterogenous format possibly controlled by predecessors of wetland agricultural labourer like the grandfather of my informant in coordination with the non-human ecologies and fluvial patterns. A feudal caste-based order was hegemonic on the social geographies and was maintained by surplus expropriations by temples and feudatories. During the modern state some of the spaces exempt from total overtaking like that of my informant’s grandparent still maintained a seasonal association that was more entangled. This worked alongside fluvial topographies. But with consumerism and big capital setting the tone and tenor of present once again class and caste hybridities come to exercise their hegemonies. As temples are once again appropriated by dominant castes and done so with consent, so are the hydrologies shaped by the force and power of capital. Except now, they are ever more out of sight and with greater impacts.

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Coda: Floods as ‘Events’ Across Rivers One cannot miss the exaggerated effects of hydropower projects and dams as one of the predominant anthropogenic interventions in the unravelling of floods. Though there have been intermittent floods during Monsoons in Kerala the one in 1924 (the great 99 flood as per Malayalam Calendar the year was 1099) and the most recent flood of July–August 2019 stand out in scale as well as effect. These floods practically changed the whole social geographies of inundated places, changed trajectories of life, deleted the taken for granted reference points, and pushed in permanent markers that separated ante and post diluvium. Apart from the population increases, the exponential increase in inhabitation within the flood plains as well as deforestations, and climate changes, the spread and mediation of dams need to be factored in to understand the continuities and significant divergences between the great floods separated by almost a century. Clearly, we can say they were pre-dam and post-dam in certain senses. Most of the 53 small to large dams with a collective capacity of nearly 7 trillion litres were not there in 1924. Between the colonial and princely orders of early 1900s and the modern state order of present, there are significant changes in governmentality issues as well. The disciplinarian forms have since transformed to rules by consent. In Kerala these were also mediated by relatively participatory state orders invested with welfarist expectations especially after the social reforms in the 1920s, incidentally coinciding with the post diluvium era! Both the 1924 flood as well as that of 2018 were damaging in its effects on life and non-life. In other words it permanently altered the coordinated of life and non-life. While the first flood lasted with rainfalls over three weeks the recent one was dominated by three days of massive rain. In 1924 the then town of colonial Munnar as well as the massive rail projects like the Kundala Valley Light Railway and roadways were wiped off (Fig. 7.5); along with life and material both in the upper and lower reaches of the river Periyar in Travancore and Kochi states. Topologies changed with washing away of banks, hillocks, and even bigger geological structures like the Karinthiri hill that was almost washed away. People lost most of their markers were completely washed away and along with it life and rhythms were reshuffled to unprecedented degrees. Until the 1960s, people paid heed to the markers of water levels reached in 1924. These markers began to vanish along with the gulf migrations, migrant economy, and more so with the post 90s neoliberal

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reforms, that drove capital in troves through the flood plains once again and novel instruments of wealth absorption started taking roots along the flood plains. Memories of the first great flood vanished from public sphere, and settlements started to spread along newer coordinates and priorities.

Fig. 7.5 1924 Flooding of Munnar Town/The Kundala Valley Light Railway to Munnar, before 1924 destruction (Source Blog-Pazhayathu)14

14 (Photos Munnar Rail): Historic photograph taken before the track was destroyed by flooding in 1924 (http://pazhayathu.blogspot.com/2014/03/blog-post_23.html)

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The spontaneous coordination during the floods of 2018, when the state machineries were yet to take effect, reduced the loss of life to around 500. This was phenomenal considering the fact that in huge contrast to 1924 floods the 2018 floods affected almost 5.4 million people across the state. The massive response through state, private sector, fishermen, and civil societies evacuated more than 2 lakh people and more than a million were provided with shelters in thousands of relief camps. The immediate flood response and state coordination extrapolate on a welfarist order that has been in place in Kerala. But at the same time the mediation of dams, which are widely seen to be controllers of flood (like the 1924 one, during which there were no major dams), became significant in throwing up newer challenges and anthropogenic issues. The Central Water Commission (CWC) reports (See Graph 7.1 and Map 7.1) as well as the UN reports (UNDP, 2018, the Post Disaster Needs Assessment [PDNA]) substantiates the scale of impact and the mediation of dams with respect to throwing in challenges in terms of new modes of risk assessment, and factoring in of anthropogenic aspects. This is on top of the fact that Kerala is one of the few states where there is already a Dam Safety Act, in response to the dangers posed by the political conflict with the neighbouring state over the more than one hundredyear-old Mullaperiyar Dam. The UN report is the first report of its kind prepared for a state in India and the report was based on ten flood affected districts (only 4 of the total of 14 districts were not significantly affected). The impact on life and everyday rhythms that has been structured over the past few decades got affected to unprecedented degrees also because of the obstructions that have come up during this time across the flood plains, mostly in the shape of newer interests of capital (as encroachments, resorts, and real estate). After the arrival of a string of dams there has been alteration in the course and fluvial rhythms downstream, facilitating the belief that much of the flood plains are not riparian. Thus dwellings and agriculture downstream Cheruthoni dam for instance have evolved over a period of three decades of no normal fluvial movement downstream. Many such entrenched beliefs and habits got shattered in the context of the filling of dams and the massive release of flood water. The vast tracks and arterial expanses of the rivers, blocked away for many years suddenly found them filled with gushes of flood water. Some of Wikipedia/Kundala Valley Railway: High range light railway before flooding in 1924. G. S. Gilles, engineer at Munnar Blairgowrie Halt.

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Graph 7.1 Maps showing the High Flood Level (HFL) crossing days coinciding with increased rainfall (Source Central Water Commission)

the extremely pertinent observations made by the Gadgil Committee on ecologically sensitive zones became visible as the floods progressed downstream (Fig. 7.6), enhanced by dams and climatic variations; shattering the everyday rhythms and routines, exaggerated by accumulated anthropogenic interventions. The mediation of dams during flood is not unique to Kerala and in the recent history itself there have been cases like Uttarakhand (June 2013), Tehri (Sept 2010), Hirakud (2009, 2011, 2014), Damodar or Chennai floods (Dec 2015) that point at anthropogenic mediators. But the whole of Kerala forms part of a major ecologically fragile zone with 44 medium to small sized rain fed rivers, interspersed by nearly sixty dams or reservoirs. In the most densely and urbanised part of the country, with welfarist expectations, this created novel political ecologies. This is a region with immense flood plains along which life is checkered, that are not used to floods for a long time and hence replete with a sense of ecological security and well-being enhanced by consumerist dreams and futuristic hopes.

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Map 7.1 CWC Hydrograph for Vandiperiyar site during 14–16 August, 2018 (Source CWC Report, Sept 2018)

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Fig. 7.6 Flood Damages Correlated with Ecologically Sensitive Zones in Gadgil Report (Source Indian Meteorological Department, Gadgil Committee Report)

The relationship between memories and the reality is significant for the formation of topological association. Not only people who inhabit most parts of Kerala, but also the non-human life that has established themselves alongside have made such associations over time. Only rupture events like the deluge of 1924 shatters such associations. But then they also work as liminal periods followed by renegotiations and new associations. Memories formed during the liminal periods of rupture stay on and exert a determinative influence but eventually get superseded. So there have been long standing correspondences between materialities and life inaugurated post dams, post-developmental state, post migrations, and post neoliberal capital intervention. Floods may be conceptualised as ‘events’ that shatter correspondences. Knowledge that has been accumulated over time about the place and associated rhythms is about repetitions on the one hand and truth values on the other. Rupture events like the flood are liminal as well as moments of recognitions that Ghosh (2016) talks about. They are about the becoming alert of anthropocene ecologies and life worlds that have been hidden away in the prevailing hegemonic narrative of the system. They remain in hiding until rupture events expose these when routines break and regularities of the everyday can no longer hold.

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Because what you get is not at all what you expect there is an impending challenge to think anew. And it is even difficult to think, plan, or change so easily because the event only reminds one of a ‘possibility’. It is just that the existing forms of knowledge and the normative institutional orders created out of it turn utterly inadequate. The flood as an event is a climatic warning that anthropocene processes are about the complex entanglements of life and non-life that through time get structured into normalised ways of being. It is in the unravelling through unprecedented happenings of truths that seldom emerge unless these relationships and dialectical dependencies are exposed. The riparian narratives that have been in place are to be read as relationships that weave over time through larger contexts of rivers, rice, labour, rains, specific contexts of rivers in terms of industrialisation or piscine and piscatorial life. The ecological events like flood often propose a new logic of understanding. It could generate a new theory of relationships in anthropocene contexts and their political ecologies along hydrological emergences. The new possibility is opened by the event by the configurations of consequences.

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Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Random House: Penguin. Gould, S.J., and R.C. Lewontin. 1979. Th. Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Program. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Ser B 205: 581–598. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hendlin, Yogi Hale. 2014. From Terra Nullius to Terra Communis: Reconsidering Wild Land in an Era of Conservation and Indigenous Rights. Environmental Philosophy 11 (2): 141–174. Holmes, Bob. 2004. Linnean Naming System Faces Challengers. Daily News, New Scientist, September 12. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6 369-linnean-naming-system-faces-challengers/. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2008. Bindings Against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World. Environment and Planning A 40: 1796–1810. Joy, C.M. 1992. River Periyar and Pollution Problems. In Environmental Hazards in Kerala-Problems and Remedies, ed. P. Michael. Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. New Formations of Power, the Oligarchic-Corporate State, and Anthropological Discource. Anthropological Theory 5 (3): 285–299. Kurup, Madhusoodana B., et al. 2006. Fish and Fisheries of Periyar Lake, Kerala. Indian Journal of Fisheries 53 (2): 153–166, April–June Iarossi, Giuseppe. 2009. The Investment Climate in 16 Indian States: Policy Research Working Paper 4817 . The World Bank/Africa Region-Finance and Private Sector Development Group. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Menon, C. Achyuta. 1911. The Cochin State Manual. Govt. of Kerala. NEERI. 1992. Water Quality in Periyar River Basin. Report. Paul, A.C., and K.C. Pillai. 1976. Studies on Pollution Aspects of Periyar River. Project Report. Sandilyan, S., Meenakumari, B., Biju Kumar, A., and Rupam Mandal. 2018. A Review on Impacts of Invasive Alien Species on Indian Inland Aquatic Ecosystems. Chennai: National Biodiversity Authority.

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Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: The Anarcist History of South East Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Valath, V.V.K. 1991. Keralathile Sthala Charithrangal: Ernakulam Jilla (in Malayalam). Kerala Sahitya Academy. Varghese, Mathew A. 2013. Spatial Reconfigurations and New Social Formations: The Contemporary Urban Context of Kerala. PhD Dissertation. Published by University of Bergen, Norway. Velupillai, T.K. 1940. Travancore State Manual. Government of Travancore: Trivandrum. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

The ‘Wild’ Among ‘Us’ or the Non-human Other

Two hundred years before present, a major part of what has now become part or periphery of a Special Economic zone towards central Kerala within the Ernakulam District had topography that could never be imagined from what we get now. Yet the region was part of major urban networks and nodes of mercantile systems for centuries preceding the early 1800s. So, the difference cannot be accounted for by the presence or absence of human beings. On the contrary there were continuous human interactions with all the other actants in the vast network of processes. Yet at present there might be a paradigm shift in the scale and impact of such processes with specific reasons. This chapter goes through the animal– human interactions, through parts of geographies, that have undergone major transformations in the last two centuries in the region stretching from the Ghats in the east to the coasts within the central part of present Kerala and which then spread across the states of Travancore and Kochi. Shakthan Thampuran (1790–1805), ascended to power within a few decades after a heterarchical order with dispersed revenue system controlled by chieftains was superseded by the Kochi state. Treaties with the colonial British companies like the East Indian Company (e.g., like the Treaty of Travancore in 1805), made the princely states subsidiaries and more efficient state interventions ensued. But in early modern princely states like Kochi there were people still out of state bounds and who could evade the revenue system (Varghese 2013). This remained so even © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_8

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during the reorganisation of revenue system under Munro (1814) or even after the more extensive cadastral surveys (1800s end). This is testified if one takes a review of regimes that imposed controls on salt production as well as the dominant monetary means. We see many bypassing the controls on production as well as alternate forms of inland commerce with the mercantile zones towards the west. The former was discussed with respect to the local production of salt by other means and which remained outside state purviews. With respect to the control over cultivated land by 1800s only half of this came under states (Pandaravaka) or after John Munro’s land reforms a little more followed suit (Varghese 1970). There were several tenure systems (Aiya 1906) in place (e.g., Pattom, Otti, Viruthi), in addition to land controlled by temples (Devaswams ) and those high in caste order (Brahmaswams ). There were state proclamations for converting land classified as ‘waste’ that followed. This resulted in extension of homogenous systems elsewhere. What we see in all of this is the fact that there were many other systems of land usage and production that coexisted during the early modern states and colonial impositions. This has had implications for the heterogeneity in the ecologies of human inhabitations. The exceptions from power also resonated in the topography and animal–human interactions. Thus, during Tipu’s attack people are known to have run away to the forests. The forests in reference are part of the vast urban networks that stretched from west coasts to the midlands and further towards the Ghat region (Valath 1991; Ward and Conner 1893; Stewart 1928). There are no clear-cut divisions into the wild and domestic during this time as per the modern logic of boundaries and designated zones. The spaces people depended on for wood and subsistence overlapped with the habitats of animals that occupied these fuzzy buffers (Kunhikrishnan 1991, 1995). A person who plied the rivulets in country boats and transacted with laterite still had every chance of confronting crocodiles (Crocodilus Palustris —Mugger) along the banks of Periyar or if unlucky, floating dangerously near to his boat in the 1900s beginning (Aiya 1906; Ward and Connor 1893; Achuta Menon 1911; Valath 1991). The kind of biodiversity around and the characteristic relationships with humans opens up the socio-natural terrain. It makes the anthropocene complicated with the changing scale, and tenor of effects. The early mercantile ecosystems were urban. But these coexisted with foxes, snakes, and huge trees, nearer to major habitations, and the crocodiles in

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the arteries of commerce. Even the domestic terrains were unrecognisable with different types of animals and birds. The dwarf breeds of cattle which was most common to Kerala (Ward and Connor 1893) have faded away from memories. The enquiries thus move through ever shifting actors and mutuality. These enquiries move much along the same lines as do other sections viz. from heterarchical forms of organisation to the context of modern states that become nation states, and into the neoliberal global state. This is in no way particular to Kerala region. But there are certain specificities facilitated by the particular geographies like the relatively contiguous stretch of mountains in the east and the long coast line replete with backwater buffers and the forty-four rivers that divide the whole region into to water bound micro-scapes. The reptilians, like the Mugger crocodile, that are viewed with an alien sensibility at present in zoos actually coexisted and even became markers of everyday outdoor life. The acoustic geography was punctuated by calls of jackals and owls even towards the 1960s as narrated by people of older generation. One of the major transformations in Aluva region was with respect to the new found evaluation of the riparian ecology as ‘fine sanatoriums’ (Aiya 1906; Menon 1911) during the 1900s. Seasonal floods that determined inhabitation along the rivers became a thing of the past with the arrival of dams. Large swatches of land were soon dissociated from such seasonal cosmologies, though the controlled dam releases did cause infrequent floods. Soon human habitations permanently colonised floodplains of yesteryear. The clearance of riparian vegetations and settlements deprived the crocodiles of their basking grounds and hatcheries in the lowlands.

The Organisms and Environment There has been much work done on the codetermination of different species and the environment. There are even works on the interplay at the genetic level and the environment (Levontin and Levins 2009). The regular occurrences in the ecologies in which organisms live become part of the developmental processes. There are certain expectations from the responses of seed coats to rain and the seasons to the responses to light or temperature. But there is also the reciprocation that organisms have on the environment. There is no fixed pre-existing environmental backdrop in front of which animals play their roles unlike what ecological determinants imagine. There is mutuality in the production and restructuring

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of environments and animal beings. The physical world out there is from where these reciprocities emerge. So, the environment is whatever ensued from the myriad interactions with organisms. The niche environments of birds in the town are wonderful cases in point. The classic example would be that of the House Sparrows (Passer domesticus ), studied across places (Laet and Summers 2007; Crick et al. 2002; Everaert and Bauwens 2007; Sudhira and Gururaja 2013; Unnikrishnan 2017). Sparrows are indicator species and paradigmatic cases for the relationships animals have with the anthropogenic environment. The boundaries often made between wild and domestic can also be problematised and the bird is an indicator species for the scale and effects of transformations. Despite the decline of agriculture in pronounced degrees especially across Kerala as well as the urban scenarios across India the birds clung on to habitations ranging from markets, road side shop verandas, and house frontage or nested in the smallest of rolling shutters. But studies show the impact of new ways of hygiene and aesthetics, from the pesticide use around storages to the plastic packaging of grains and grams (that were instantly wrapped in paper before) as reducing the absolute availability of food in adapter environments. Another major effect in the past decade has been the intensity of electromagnetic radiations around, from the density of mobile towers as well as phones. The long-term exposure to low-intensity electromagnetic radiation from mobile phone (GSM) stations was understood to have effect on the birds especially in the breeding season that was studied in six residential districts of Belgium (Everaert and Bauwens 2007). The sparrow, ‘Angadi Kuruvi’ as they are called in Malayalam language gets that local name from its adaptation to angadis (local markets). The ‘pest insects’ that flocked around the grain stores were a major source of food. The changing architecture of stores has made them bounded enclosures, added on by the changing ways of packing food mentioned before. There were surveys conducted at the once favourite haunts of these birds in Trivandrum like Chalai, Attakulangara, Valiyathura, Connemara market, Vallakadavu, Bheema Palli, Vellayambalam, Sasthamangalam, Peroorkada, and Mannanthala (Unnikrishnan 2017). The Travancore Natural History Society (TNHS) that conducted this survey found only a handful of birds in many spots. It appears that the habitus of human beings in the contemporary urban world of consumption has negated the shared habitus with birds like the House Sparrow.

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The dispositions that the birds once acquired in interaction with the environment become negated at present. With respect to many house frontages there is hardly any grass that grows on the paved and sealed yards and non-human life hardly steps on it. The chances of husk, grain, or debris to fall on such surfaces are also reduced. This keeps away not only the house sparrows, but also a myriad other variety of birds from house frontages as well across Kerala which otherwise hosted a string of interconnected avian ecologies. The shared human–non-human environments that evolved into modernising times, get fragmented. It parallels the exceptional living spaces in the neoliberal context. The exclusive human living spaces in the making are accompanied by particular aesthetics. This aesthetics is part of new regimes of control over people and environment as well as the facilitation of capital, as in the real estate business. There are codes and legalities invoked to keep certain people out of the living spaces and commercial zones, to make them appealing and friendly for investment. The house sparrows are the non-human equivalents and indicators of the effects of newer boundaries in the making. Take another animal, the river otters. The Smooth-coated otters (Lutra perspicillata) were common along river banks of Periyar until recent times. Decades ago they along with the mugger crocodiles were the apex predators in river systems (of course apart from aquatic beings). The latter vanished from riparian ecologies especially with the unavailability of banks, the changes brought about by damming upriver and the changing patterns of settlement. The former continued to coexist with the town life by the banks. Some years back there was news in the print media that people clubbed to death a ‘devil like’ creature that sucked blood from domestic goats. From the photograph it turned out that this was the otter, still not so rare upriver! The portrayal of an animal that coexists with human habitation not by its common name ‘neernai’, but by an alienating and demonising logic talks in volumes about what happens to the ‘wild’ among us. Even the naming of something as ‘wild’ carries with it the alienating gesture. There is another interesting dimension to the presence of otters in riparian ecologies of Periyar. Studies (Anoop and Hussain 2005) have dwelt on the feeding habits of otters elsewhere in the upper reaches of Periyar. Accordingly, though these mammals generally thrive on frogs, crabs, birds, and insects, they have been found to eat many of the exoticintroduced fish species that predate on many of the native fishes. They

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are particularly known to be fond of catfishes and in Periyar the African catfish is a major threat for many of the local species. But otter ecologies were steadily transforming. Their numbers dwindled because of the aforementioned transformation in fish cycles linked to wetland transformations, and sand mining. Further the extensive pollution of river banks and the deposit of consumer waste and the resort to total fishing methods like explosion of dynamites in addition to depleting the fish left in the rivers also had a compound consequence for otter populations.1 Similar has been the story of ‘Kurukkan’ or the Jackal. The Jackals cohabited with human ecologies for a long time. In fact, my informants who are also wildlife experts and trackers told me that this animal shows more affinity towards the buffer zones and the wild growth within human habitats. The pattern is much like that of the foxes in Europe. In 2014 a Kurukkan was caught with much effort as it intruded into the Cochin International Airport runway.2 The airport itself was made over one of the most extensive wetlands of Kerala and was criss-crossed by channels that connected ponds and rivulets to Periyar. Kurukkan habitats were asphalted over with run ways and now the animal gets portrayed as the wild intruder. The calls of this animal were very common in the twilight hours even in thickly populated towns and stories of Kurukkan abound. I have also come across references of Kurukkan in old college magazines.3 But this animal as many others like otters or black napped hare that were once in every backyard, have gradually ceased to be the wild among us. The undomesticated non-human animals have gradually gone out into oblivion. The jackal or the otter have always been cohabitants but were never domesticated and thus never been controlled. With the new price tags on land and the strict classification of domestic and wild, they end up as devils, intruders, or road-kills. Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) has extensively dealt with the ‘states of exception’ that life gets designated to. He employs exception (suspension of law) as a means of encompassing life. States of exception become ‘the 1 S. Gopikrishna Warrier. Otters Return to a Revitalised Kerala River. The Wire. 28

March 2016 [https://thewire.in/environment/otters-return-to-a-revitalised-kerala-river] 2 Unnikrishnan, Hiran. 2014. Jackal trapped at Kochi airport. October 31, The Hindu [http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/jackal-trapped-atkochi-airport/article6550831.ece]. 3 From a 1920s student magazine of one hundred-year-old college called, Union Christian College, in the locality.

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preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law’ (Agamben 2005: 23). The state of exception is more like a liminal zone between politics and law. Contrary to conditions opposite to ‘the normal’ that invoked states of exception, contemporary states, he says, institute permanent states of emergency, and thereby abolishes the traditional distinctions. Instead, a ‘legal mythologeme analogous to the state of nature’ becomes the rule. The wild unless conceptualised as an idea animated by anthropocene possibilities, by which I mean the non-pristine nature of the wild, can revert to states of exception. Take the provision in Roman legal order that declares an offender as sacred whereby anybody could kill the person as an act of sacrifice without the taint of murder. There can likewise be the case of the ‘wild’ in traditional conservation parlance or in contexts of many of the conflicts and this extends to the treatment of human beings ‘perceived’ to be out of the normal bounds of rights and privileges. For Agamben the camp is a paradigm, an example par excellence, for the order in the making. The camp (from Nazi camps to the kind of camps set up at Guantanamo for ‘terrorists’ outside the mainland United States) is a space where the state of exception becomes the rule. Here there are no normal restraints and any inclusion can take place only through exclusion. So, the wild can either become domestic or cease to be. A ‘pristine wild’ in their states of exception can be depraved of all status and reduced to bare life where power confronts life with no mediation. The representation of apes in human history is a good way to explain this. Apes are recognised mostly for their similarities. But they are always recognised as inferior versions of Homo sapiens. This follows the premises of diffusionist theories (Blaut 1993) that presupposed an ‘ideal’ European man. Here there is never a scope for historical relationalities between the animal and human. The exclusive imagination deletes all the tenuous relationships that inform the wild and the non-wild. Bereft of relationships the wild only had an alienated terra nullius kind of an existence. The state of nature is null and hence void of controls. Any ‘mass’ or ‘mob’ or ‘horde’ could confront the wild. The mob who deliberately put fires in the forests of Wayanad or the complicit who stood mute when the fire raged across the forest (Anwar 2014), all operate on similar assumptions. Those who confronted the tiger who ‘crossed boundaries’ as well as the otter that ‘dared’ to remain wild within boundaries were security threats. This is aggravated by the binary logic perpetuated also by the institutional perceptions and bureaucratic logic of state or religions. In addition,

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there is also the idea of exclusivity held by philosophies of conservation. This makes anything non-human potential bare lives that could be intervened upon without any democratic considerations. Mob becomes the new normal sociality for homo sapiens. It runs more armies to perpetuate the hegemony of nation states.

Relationships in Context What one gathers from the animal histories and relationships are stories of the roles allowed by successive orders as well as the organisation of spaces through time. This determines the way animals near and around human settlements or urban contexts are related to. There are distinct animal histories to socio-spatial orderings or power structuration. There is a work that knits together natives, settlers, and animals in the context of fur trade in United States (Brown 2016). Thereby what is proper or improper, what is domestic or wild gets inculcated in places. In the resorting and transmutation of relationships between animals and humans and between humans, there were decimations of certain species (cougar or wolf) as well as consequences for the moral engagements with domestic animals around. In the twentieth century, the aversion to killing of animals like geese and rabbit coexisted with parallel developments of consumerism that started affecting the animal abodes far from home. Further the distinctions between wild and domestic also became formalised and value laden because the evaluations of animal world became the basis of differentiating the civil and savage in human societies as well. In the current world the mob justice meted out on people or regulations on habits that are not permissible, whether in rural or urban life worlds in India, gets reflected also in the mob justice perpetrated on wild animals (and vice versa). Urban transformations, environment, geography, and animal associations are never mutually exclusive. What is often understood as bare biological phenomena often has sociobiological premises and notions of boundaries as many cases suggest. Field work in the Periyar tiger reserve brought in stories of how animal rhythms have altered during the Sabarimala pilgrimage seasons. As the frequency of pilgrimage increased with a massive influx of human beings every month through animal corridors, a whole gamut of mobilities have changed or had to adapt. People from the tribal groups who work with in the Vana Samrakshana Samiti (VSS) shared their experiences of being there during these mass influxes of human beings into the biomes. The

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VSS was a consequence of the several initiatives that followed the National Forest Policies after 1980s. The Joint Forest Management (JFM) was a novel method of incorporating forest dwellers and members from tribes (Adivasi groups) in forest management. The non-wood products too may be managed with their help. The VSS itself is a village level unit and the personnel therein are one rare instance of policies factoring in the entangled ecologies. Among the experiences were those of the increased intake of plastic waste by ungulates and herbivores of the Periyar Tiger Reserve that surrounds the pilgrim space during the pilgrimage and the days that follow. Members of the tribes make attempts to collect the ever-increasing quantities of such waste but the scale is beyond their capacity. One of the VSS members was part of a veterinary team that did most mortems on deer and gaur. The operations revealed regular intake of indigestible material by animals. Attitudes towards wild animals too have changed a lot in recent times. A rare sighting of a big cat in the reserve area during pilgrimage is a ‘news’ as if the animal is an alien intruder! Often the seemingly natural causes like draughts are produced as a result of bureaucratic and administrative procedures. State policies like de-silting, intrusions like pilgrimage, the scale of infrastructure and urbanisations for such human mobilities (which is also about the circulation of capital in a capitalist order), and domestic–wild interactions exaggerate effects in increasingly bounded, fragmented, and more-over endemic zones. Like the deaths of animals due to plastic ingestion the more natural sounding diseases too have anthropogenic causalities. I have read that the Canine Distemper Virus that spread among the Asiatic Lions in the Gir forests of Gujarat state had hybrid causality. Broken habitat and intrusions from domestic animals who are carriers are part of the causes. Climatic conditions and draughts only aided the spread (Langa 2018). There are stories from the foothills of Himalayas (east and west— Pauri Garhwal in Uttarakhand), where human–animal relationships have become increasingly conflictual post 2000. There are causalities on both sides, but between 2006 and 2016 alone around one hundred leopards were killed, many of them subjected to mob control. The structuring of different forms of boundaries or enclosures redrew relationships with animal life around. Animals from time to time have also transgressed such boundaries and associated with human life as pets, domestic lives, pests, fringe inhabitants, or the wild. Because of the transgressions and continuous relationships in changing orders some say

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(Shaw 2013) there is never a pure-human agency vis-à-vis others but only inter-agencies. The human–non-human interactions are always significant. According to Tim Ingold (1988) human plans are always dependent on non-human actions like in the case of the Salmons. These anadromous migrants return to the streams and fresh water upriver to breed and return back to the oceans. Human and other animal rhythms around happen in conjunction. The prey that is willing to be hunted or the work animals whose routines in turn determine human temporalities and expressions (horse power as the once equivalent to the work steam engine did) gain significant as co-determinants. Further the classification or sorting of animals have always intertwined inextricably with that of humans to the extent that strict separations are impossible. Any supposedly human place throughout time and space have always been more than human (Brown 2016). Many a times a particular association with an animal is also determined by a network of relationships with different places. The languages in the coastal villages in Morobe province of Papua New Guinea have different words for frog across a small geographical range. One of these words (Polopuak) differs significantly among the rest (Dingole/Zingole/Zungole/Zingole). But it turns out that the Polopuak is unlike the other frogs from the region in that it is small and lives in or near swamps. The environment of the place and the local knowledge was embedded in the name. There is a major scope for environmental encyclopedias with the focus on niche environments across regions, with the language bringing out the diverse associations and distinct basis for classifications of the non-human environment (Schreyer 2019). Similar is the story with the plough animals that became predominant in the role towards 1800s in Kerala during the time rice was also becoming an export commodity as well as the staple diet for more populations. The case of new attention the Salish Hunters gave to beaver was determined by their value as commodity in distant places. The European viruses were beings that preceded real European presence in many parts of the Americas and they had pernicious effects. During the western contacts towns have been overrun with alien weeds in 1700s and because of the transmission of disease causing organisms in networks with regions, between 1774 and 1874 human population in northwest coast fell by 80 per cent (Brown 2016). The people of the Eastern Caribbean have had long connections with fauna like armadillos (tatou), opossums (manikou) as well as the domesticated life (Kephart 2019). The proverbs they use is also a lot about life lessons and more than

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mere names that these beings have. The grass snake (genus mastigodryas), Tree Boa (Genus Corallus) is locally known as Tet-chen. The French creole name in fact refers to the way the head resembles that of a dog. The animal is part of the many stories. The flying stories also refer to the movement of gliding across branches. But the snake is also accused of stealing milk from nursing mothers by sliding and slipping in! Stories, fantasies, movements, and environments come together in nomenclature. The distinctions that one often makes between wild and domestic need to be problematised, because of the inadequate attention of anthropocene processes from time to time. In Native American habitats with distinct habits of sustenance like clearing of grass with fire, the arrival of Europeans and decimation of native populations through disease causing organisms had distinct consequences. When the grass grew unchecked, deer started grazing the meadows in unprecedented scales. There was the production of wild and this was shaped by human intervention. The separation of wild and non-wild is not as absolute as it looks. There are always entanglements. There are usually marks left by animal life like the grazers who leave the tracks which become visual presence. These could be anything from the river banks grazed over by cattle that keeps a distinct vegetation, that later becomes leisure spots for humans as well as the favourite trek paths people use that are carved out by elephants on their trails. There are interesting ways in which human patterns and movements are also domesticated by animals. This is what the puritan notions of separation miss out. The puritan idea of separation has resonance from the New England puritan portrayal of the wild. The wild, accordingly, is a threat and are about places abandoned by God. The puritans through history appreciated tameness and interestingly even the zoologists were influenced by the conception (Leclerc de Buffon—the eighteenth-century French naturalist and mathematician—classified domestic animals as lying between human and wild in the hierarchy of life). Animals and the relationships people make with them have often become symbolic associations of power as well. This may be evident in the attacks natives made on the animals domesticated by the settlers. The attacks for natives were also a symbolic gesture and for the settler these were inevitably ‘acts of intrusion’. When the Hudson Bay Company in the United States portrayed animals as property the Salish attacks became intrusions or theft (Brown 2016). This, despite the fact that the domestic enclaves were carved out of native lands and that in the initial phases of

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contact such conflictual portrayals were not as pronounced. There were more inter connectivities and symbolic relationships between the natives and newly settled or tradespeople during the fur trade era that preceded in Americas. One can also see the entanglement of formal acts and decrees with animal associations and the changing bio-geographies. In the expansions of domestic spaces with which the settlers were preoccupied, acts like the Land Act (1812) formalised settler rights and confined the natives to reserves. The idea of reserve that are prevalent at present has this power laden genealogy. The relationships to non-humans changes in responses to order and powers that inhabit places. There are also overlays of floral varieties for lumber or food that in effect ‘invade’ native life. Consequently, through time some of these get naturalised or weave symbiotic orders with what is around. The domestic animals can eventually become another choice of prey for the wild animals. The relationship with animals also has a gendered angle to it in the sense that they are determined by the new forms of labour that come up and the gender differentiated requirements at work. Men who until then were more involved in the domestic space of house got displaced to work spaces and women formed new patterns of relationships with birds and animals. In the nineteenth-century America, the conceptions and moralities that portrayed men in charge changed. The formation of humane societies and antivivisection groups were under the initiative of women in these parts as women became the predominant caretakers of animals. The idea of roads and public spaces had the taken for granted presence of animals either as means of transport or cohabitants that lazed around. Until the middle of 1900s automobiles were not predominant sights on the roads. The rhythms and pace of roads were far different from what it has become in Kerala with even the human pedestrians finding it difficult to negotiate asphalt terrains. Spaces like the local streets transformed from a diverse space with occasional transportation, play, interaction, small trade, and grazing to an exclusive vehicular zone. Animals in their productive role as providers of milk, manure, or egg became less a part of the urban rhythms through the 1900s and into 2000s in Kerala and with the reduction in the size of continuous fields, agriculture, or paddy cultivation, the number of domestic animals dwindled in great numbers or vanished from visibility in the daily life. With them those animals that

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once became fringe inhabitants, like the foxes or rabbits, too faded from view. Land reorganisations that followed new assignments and tenancies in the early 1900s and the land reforms towards the 1960s resulted in the parcelling out of property with physical fences. This had initial effects on the mobilities of foxes and hares. The arrival of concrete walls made things tougher for the mammalians. A lot of changes to this animalterrain happen in the paradigm shifts in human perceptions of land. Anthropogenic shifts in the relationships with life accompany such perceptual changes. The binary separation of people and the non-human life forms, especially that is termed wild takes an absolute turn only after the institutionalisation of modern forestry. There were increased settlements from main land to forests both from Tamil Nadu state as well as Kerala after the establishment of states (Sankar et al. 1992) as part of the respective political processes. There were regularisations of settlements in 1958, 1960, and 1968 as a result of land reforms and political assurances that followed.4 The introduction of cotton, sugarcane, or chillies into the erstwhile wild terrains from Tamil Nadu as well as plantation from Kerala destroyed the remaining shifting agrarian practices in the hills (ibid.). Tribal populations too had no option other than resorting to more settled forms of farming as a result of soil and watershed degradation. The Government of Kerala survey report (1982, Survey of Attappady) shows large-scale land alienations. With the differing human impacts on the more hybrid zones, there were marked separations between, settled agrarian practices, plantation zones, state forests, and marginalising tribal settlements. In the main land to the animal life was fast changing with the fragmentations of land, changes in occupations as well as means of acquiring wealth. The rise of a middle order consuming class as well as gulf-based financialisation created a massive consuming class and the overshadowing of primary sector by a tertiary sector. There were massive transformations in the relationship to land and the effect was felt on wetlands, ponds, and side growth in settled areas. This removed the last remaining niches where the domestic overlapped with the wild in the mainland. 4 Election Manifesto of the State Council of the Communist Party of India, 1959/ Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill 1957: Report of the Select Committee, Government Press, 1959/ Ordinance No.7 of 1972, The Kerala Preservation of Private Forest”s Ordinance 1968.

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In contemporary life there are newer codes and categories of pet, livestock, and wild animals. To be in the city the animal needs to be a kind of pet. The wild was one that is seen in the National Geographic channels. Even when snakes have become too scarce in living spaces, people still talk in terms of the threat posed by an unavailable snake, when the real threats to life are buzzing around in the shape of automobiles that have invaded every small street. The animals from which one gets meat or milk too have by now become transformed through the veterinary sciences to beings with lesser live span but faster growth. On the other hand, the pets got extended life. There is a changing biopolitics at work with reference to animals around. The growth of real estate increasingly carved exclusive domains with alien Mexican grass and tiled court yards from middle to upper middleclass spaces. The lawns became related to conceived ideas of status within emergent neighbourhoods. Plus, the manicured lawns and tiling became avenues for new business in a place with huge uncertainties in employment. The lawns and tiles also inculcated an aesthetics of separation as well as reinsertion. The separation was from the unclean old ecologies and the reinsertions were to imagined communities of gated homogenised or residential dwelling. The pesticides and weedicides that maintained such greeneries manufactures green exclusivities and tiled yards became stark landscapes that did not even leave space to bury the organic wastes from such homesteads. The new landscapes grew in proportion to the garbage strewn along roadside. The new living spaces divided into ‘residential associations’ registered under societies act with a memorandum of association made. These associations are increasingly envisaged as parallel federated order by the state and the legal apparatus. Beside they have security functions. Residents’ associations have proliferated across Kerala and they have become exclusivist arbiters with elected local bodies. Decades back there used to be neighbourhood dependencies and trusts. These were based on reciprocities. Some were based on the exchange of domestic items like animal products (egg or milk). There were also the parallel functioning of cooperative societies for vegetables, milk, etc., later during the meetings at cooperative diaries and markets. With the reduction of domestic animal life neighbourhood dependencies took a beating. This got reinforced as new quality indices provided shops, advertisements, or market in general (milk or animal products) catered to the tiled-homestead mentalities mentioned before. With the diminishing relationships with domestic

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animals as well as people to people contacts mediated by animals, new aesthetics of cleanliness also took root. A wild hedge near the road, grass in the field, or leaves on the floor became the paramount problems unlike the burgeoning consumer waste ejected to the few remaining public spaces. New boundaries had such exclusionary logic. The alienation from animal life with which humans have always been entangled becomes reminders only when there are ruptures to routines. These could be in the shape of outbreaks, spilling overs from normalised ecologies during natural disasters, etc. Take the mundane cases of consumption of contaminated food. This is an instance when humans who are supreme ‘alienated consumers’ get to understand the hybrid ecologies and forms of entanglements. The occasional e-coli cases as well as the rarer Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE-mad cow disease) are examples. The changing ways of domestication like in the case of cattle fed on antibiotics make their stomachs more acidic and allowed acid pathogens to evolve and survive better in the human stomach. All attention was turned towards zoonotic diseases wherein pathogens jumped from non-human hosts to humans. The anthropocene stresses in ecology, hegemonic human intrusions, stresses from patterns of consumption, in addition to human managed ecosystems keep the possibility of zoonotic diseases alive. Covid 19 pandemic was only the recent instance. There are expressions like ‘land-use-induced spillover’, ‘landscape immunity’, or ‘pathogen shedding’ that refer to what happens in such instances at a landscape point of view (Plowright et al. 2021). The shed-spillspread cascades incorporate a hybrid string of landscape, wild animals, and people as ecologies and mediums through which the pathogen passes. Often anthropocene intrusions are anthropocentric, hegemonic and affects the species heterogeneity/diversity and thereby landscape immunity. Degraded and disturbed landscapes are proliferating in newly urbanising spaces as well as the urban becoming planetary. So non-human species, their group sizes, and resources available are unequally affected. There is environmental pressure and more exposure to pathogens amidst the wild species. Increased pathogen shedding was observed in animals like bats because of their compromised immunity which in turn is related to hegemonic intrusions and homogenisation of ecology to serve the needs of capital. The 72,000 crore behemothic infrastructural project from the govt. of India in Great Nicobar Island can soon be a paradigm of such ecological stress. It involved axing more than 9 lakh trees and diverting 130 square kilometres of biodiverse forest. The endemic life and

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heterogenous co-evolutions that also include indigenous communities like Shompen and Nicobarese are to give way for neoliberal state designs. The developmental projects including a transshipment terminal, townships, and airports therein may get formal clearance after environmental impact assessments. All through history animals and humans have coevolved and inhabited streets, river banks, and backyards, near and inside forests, and around houses. The non-humans as much as humans have looked for opportunities to thrive. Animals have carved some of the niche spaces otherwise colonised by humans. Through time the sorting of non-human world has become significant in order to define what it means to be human and what is otherwise. In Kerala the chaotic transformation of a geo ecological order otherwise mediated by rainy seasons brings in large-scale human interventions. They include dams, migrations and settlements, monocultures (starting from colonial times), roads, electricity transport, etc. Some of these reach heightened proportions post nineties with real estate, and resort business catering predominantly to the youngsters who have liquidity after the IT employment booms. There is further fractioning through irrigation dams. The rivers like Meenachil, Manimala, Moovaattupuzha, Pamba, and Periyar all have origins in the rolling grass lands and shola forests. The release of land as repositories of power and wealth from the erstwhile feudal bounds to larger representations of the population along with the post 1950s migrations to the gulf resulted in major transformations in social perceptions and values (Gardner and Osella 2004). A new cynical public domain arose from the once politicised public spaces. During the ecological movements to protect the evergreen forests of the Silent Valley from the proposed hydroelectric project in Kerala they asked ‘whether for Lion Tailed Macaque or man’ and ‘why rain falls over the sea despite lack of trees’. Such fragmented and binary visions of ecology was all pervasive also as a consequence of the consumerist modernity that ushered in from the shoulders of political movements and social reforms. The cynicism reaches ominous proportions in the more recent handling of tigers and forest fires. In the Wayanad sanctuary where the pressure is predominantly from interspersed settlements and the massive influx of real estate into the forests there is fragmentation of forest and shrinkage of water table. Monoculture cropping and plantation in the fringe areas had already produced clear binaries between wild and domestic and thus increased

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perceptions of the animal as intruder. Presently there is a massive influx of holiday makers from the information technology and special economic zones of Bangalore to Wayanad region which is not far away by road. The concentration of animals that one sees there at present is precisely a product of such intrusions and changes in climatic conditions. Interspecies conflicts and intraspecies conflicts like that between tiger and elephants or in between elephants which do not occur otherwise have been reported (Babu 2017). To be precise the inter/intra species conflict involving tigers and elephants cannot be understood if disconnected from the IT Zones in Bangalore. Without making the necessary connections and without factoring in the networks only symptomatic controls at best and mob interventions at worst could ensue. Blindness towards networks and constitutive relationships between species that changes in tandem is perpetuated in the kind of exceptional associations of conservation and protection. The wild nature is a fixed category and animals move about like in a ‘national geographic’ landscape deleted off the tourist infrastructure, cameras, and alienations of the local populations from the land. Enclosures protect the prehistoric serenity where animals thrive even when surrounded by the aforementioned scenes and actors. This romantic iconography and the binary of nature and human ecology is portrayed clearly the 2016 big budget Malayalam movie, Pulimurugan. Pulimuriugan builds the whole drama on the boundaries created by the binaries. There is the protagonist Murugan, who grows near the ‘wild’. He acquires the name (Puli-Tiger + Murugan) by taking vengeance on a tiger who intrudes and kills his dear ones. Later he becomes the protector of Puliyur whenever an animal (tiger), crosses the boundary. There are philosophies he espouses that say that he acts only when boundaries are crossed and that an animal who crosses the boundary has to be killed in its ‘mada’ (abode). Even though the tiger does not have an imagined permanent ‘mada’ as abode the animal becomes a known decrepit (KD). The anthropocentric tiger can be only in the wild and not anywhere else not even in that fuzzy zone where the wild and domestic merge or even where settlers have intruded into the forests. The paradigms of the vana and aranya (Gadgil and Thapar 1990; Thapar 2001) are good tropes to think about how binaries started off historically in regions across India. Historically there has been a demonising of those outside settled life and the fuzziness over classifying the less classifiable who were called in the epics as Yakshas and Gandharvas.

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The establishment of domesticated abodes inside the wild was often called asramas. Though celebrated as meditative spiritual spaces of self-negating rishis, these were more about extension of controls into the forests. There were even norms imposed on the wild if they ever crossed the asramas. The wrath of the rishis was immense. The hermitage unlike some popular associations to idylls were political and power impositions. The asramas of history even enjoyed state patronage. Historically the relationships with less domesticated ecologies spaces like forests were intense. Devastations and conservation were often intertwined historically as with the intrusions into the forest following which aranyas which are more anthropocentric representations take root. The paradigms of vana and aranya continue onto the popular cultures as in movies. Pulimurugan with strict injunctions for the wild animal to stay put on its abode and never to cross the human spaces idyllically portrayed as under benevolent bosses like in aranyas. The movie could be contextualised with a string of ‘handling of stray tigers and leopards’ by mobs across India (Chattisgargh 2011, Peerumadara 2016, Wayanad 2015, Bajpur 2017). In all these cases there was an uncontrollable ‘mob’ that took things to their hand and even started directing the forest officials. The Normal provisions that are deployed to handle mobs were exempted in such situations. Wild animal in all these instances was supposed to be inside boundaries and any crossing or any intrusion by the ‘alien’ animal can be handled by switching off all the normal provisions. It was not only about spontaneous public rage but it was about the structured reaction of a mob that can turn against human others as well with the same logic. The reference is to the Adivasi youth murdered in Kerala by his captors over alleged theft or the mob frenzy at beef traders or eaters across northern parts of India.5 Further there are the new compensatory provisions introduced to make any intrusion or intervention on forest pardonable. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 or the Forest Rights Act (FRA) as this is shortened into, gave certain autonomous rights to those who live in the fuzzy zones between the domestic and wild. The FRA had provisions that bring envisage broad 5 Kerala: Adivasi man dies after mob beats him up for allegedly stealing food, two arrested. February 23, 2018, Scroll.in/Vatsa, Aditi. 2015. Dadri: Mob kills man, injures son over ‘rumours’ that they ate beef. December 25. The Indian Express./ Biswas, Soutik. 2017. Is India descending into mob rule? June 26. BBC News.

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relationalities between forest dwellers and their landscaped not based on the otherwise binary logic of policies. On the other hand Compensatory Afforestation and Fund Management Planning Authority (CAMPA) Act passed in 2016 largely perceived ecology as services or resources that could be converted into abstract monetary units. The CAMPA in effect liquidates the FRA provisions.6 Compensatory funds and afforestation provision take more strides to upgrade the earlier binaries created in Wild Life Act (1972) or Forest Conservation Act (1980) into the neoliberal contexts. They follow the global provisions of finance capital that makes any hybrid entity easily divisible, classifiable, convertible, and transferrable. The CAMPA fund comes to nearly Rupees 41,000 crore and this fund will facilitate the massive diversions of forest land across India. The compensation amount is calculated on the Net Present Value (NPV) of the diverted forest and the cost of afforestation. The false idea of wild and non-wild binaries or such romantic notions of the wild as pristine is further problematised by making the wild easily quantifiable and made amenable. This is the malleable logic of capital designing ecologies. The drive for profit in a capitalist order, now mediated by the flexible protocols of finance capital (be they exceptionalities, foreign direct investment into once controlled sectors, land ceiling relaxation, special zones for production) creates a gap between human and non-human nature. The gap becomes wider due to the uncontrolled exploitation of whatever is extra-human. In the process the metabolic relationships are broken. The point where this ‘rift’ as some call it (Foster 2013; Moore 2015) starts varies from place to place and this is also related to the inherent power structures. But the rift widens in the contexts where depletion of one resource (viz. sand in the rivers) merely drives capital to another location where another resource is envisioned instead (the M Sand in the proliferating quarries). Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) has identified more than a thousand functioning stone quarries as a consequence of capital seeking other spaces. Most of these quarries continue to function illegally and others find legitimacy within legal provisions. Despite the Western Ghats Ecology Panel Reports and studies like that of the KFRI and even the state assembly’s panel on environmental affairs pointing out that most of the more than 100 landslides between 1983 and 2015 occurred in quarry rich areas exceptional provisions work for

6 Rajalakshmi, T.K. 2016. Forest rights under siege. Frontline (June 24).

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capital in ecologies. Allowing individuals in agricultural lands to operate such quarries and the proliferation of quarries even after the massive flood of 2018 demonstrates capital inevitably finding its way.7 The changes in the means and sources of production widen the rift irreparably, at times creating unintended effects. This is exactly what happens when quantified portrayal of forest as resources completely deletes the numerous relationships life makes through forests. The neoliberal CAMPA provisions or global carbon fetishisms like offsetting provisions, cap and trade, carbon credits, and carbon points trading. All these provisions are mostly about responding with quantifiable targets and measures within sustainability discourses while not having to do real clean ups or systems change.

Exaggerated Urban Effects The effects of the contemporary scales of human interventions, in the broad frame of urban assemblages from the exaggerated effects on river flows through sand dredging, claiming of riversides for construction, depletion of commons, as well as increasing dependencies on flowing water in the shapes of mineral water companies to migrant labour; varies from place to place (de Jesús-Crespo and Ramírez 2011). In a tropical region like Kerala responses and their effects vary significantly vis-à-vis a temperate region. The existing biological diversity, as well as species density play their part apart from climatic conditions and the varying effects of climate changes. Rivers have special connections with the terrestrial life and any activity on the watershed will have ramifications for the life around as well (Meador and Goldstein 2003). The exaggerated effects of contemporary urbanisation prompted research in phenomena like ‘Urban Stream Syndrome’ (Walsh et al. 2005; Meyer et al. 2005) that specifically focus on the accumulated effects on ecologies. There are the increased run offs because of the impervious surfaces and the lesser time available for water to soak in before running off. There are flash floods and bank erosions, all of which have become common across Kerala in rainy seasons. Though the river flows wide and looks healthy there is neither a sand base nor an ecosystem that facilitates groundwater replenishments in the surrounding places. Add on to this, the deep pilings for the apartments that chequer the banks, one confronts 7 The trend continued into 2019 with a landslide burying 59 human beings in Kavalappara, the western ghats zone in North Kerala

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water shortages even in between two main branches of Periyar. Impervious surfaces reduce water infiltration, lower water tables, and reduce base flow (Walsh et al. 2005). The contamination of the region around Eloor can reach concentrated proportions in the above situation and results in stream ecosystem degradation (Schueler and Holland 2000). The two great floods connected the highlands, midlands, and coastal plains of Kerala in the span of a century (1924 and 2018). Life and non-life crashed and broke at the anthropogenic boundaries and negotiated new geographies. With almost all existing districts having heavy rainfall the 2018 flood affected 54 lakh people out of the total estimated population of 3.5 crore. The 42 per cent extra rainfalls in itself appear exceptional, but such environmental events are fast becoming recurring non-linear events that increasingly strain developmental imaginations and existing infrastructural orders. With land and life isolated into fragments or islands, mountain sides became unstable rubble, midlands checkered, and coastal wetlands swampy. Despite spontaneous and best of the rescue operations, decentred coordination, and unprecedented resort to communication technology domestic life as one knew it turned turtle, animal, and plant life ruptured and even redistributed as the presence of new animals, plants or invasives demonstrate. The 2018 flooding in Kerala was an ecosystem event in the sense of exaggerating all the existing conditions and thus having its effect on ecosystem relationships on anthropocene scales. Water that made abrupt connections across niche orders created unprecedented situations for all kinds of living organisms. On the other hand, the non-living anthropogenic actors and their effects made newer configurations—from the flooring of yards and bank walling on riversides to the factory discharges into riparian systems. During flood, rivers that overflew confronted barriers in the shape of built forms across river basins unlike during the great floods a century ago in 1924. Decades after the 1924 floods human beings put markers across the river basins and floodplains that became a check on building activities. All these markers dissolved especially after the increasing circulation of remittance capital post massive outmigration to gulf and other places. Capital seeks new avenues also according to the place and its proclivities. In Kerala this was the retail and construction sectors. The river basins and banks became prime ‘sites’ for investment after liberalisation post 90s. And in more recent times speculative sales and credit releases concretised even the immediate riparian ecologies. During 2018 floods water gushed

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over these man-made infrastructures and found new courses wherever the boundaries did not dissolve. In many parts walls were broken by people to let water flow. The tiled over ground bereft of local vegetation did not soak in water or hold back the pace of flow. On the other hand, there was exaggerated absorption and inundations in more open fields and spaces that stayed out of land developments. The exaggerated flow also resulted in capillary action. The phenomenon saw water pushing up through the columns on the ground reaching the floor of many buildings but also with characteristic effect on top soil dwelling life. There are certain dependencies on chemical and biological environments, the transformations of which have massive consequences. Organisms cannot survive outside their physiological tolerance. The distribution of Earthworms is related to tolerance of soil acidity (pH). There are abiotic factors as well as biotic factors (interspecific interactions) that set boundaries and after flood people observed earthworms wriggling out of the grounds and lying dead. We also see the appearance of heterotrophic ecosystems that accompany. These are normally ecosystems with very few producers (or Autotrophs). The heterotrophs depend on sources of energy in distinct ways. For instance, where there is no light (caves and deep waters) or in very fast-moving streams with not many plants these heterotrophic ecosystems take root. Here animal life depends on things like dead matter that flow downstream. In the context of massive floods as well as face changing processes and overlays during urban processes and related tendencies like tiling away of earth as well as top soil depletion, heterotrophs could come as a byproduct of anthropogenic processes. Ecosystemic relationships can be of great range and are inextricably linked to anthropocene processes. The effects on energy systems that encompass living and the non-living often take novel configurations (anabolic and catabolic processes). It is interesting to understand what happens during an all-prevalent process like respiration and metabolic processes in times of major reversals and ruptures like flood. During metabolism carbohydrates are formed and transformed during the course of life and in death; laws of thermodynamics determine most reactions. Energy thereby is transformed from one form to another but cannot be created or destroyed. Photosynthesis as well as decomposition follows the logic and there are differences across ecosystems and organisms involved. In the case of decomposition, photosynthetic tissues of leaves in plants are high in produced carbohydrates and less in fibres and attract decomposers more. Consequently, leaves

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decompose faster. Since decomposers have higher nitrogen content they go more for the leaves. The organic faecal material of animals, especially herbivores gets faster than the plant content especially in dry seasons. There is a major alteration in the pattern in times of high inundations as well as transfer of dead and decaying matter across fields and mixture with inorganic matter (man-made material as well as waste). One can see post-event accumulations of like hundreds of species attracted to corpses and decaying matter (Deshmukh 1997: 40). These are all indications of highly related orders and assemblages of species and energy (anabolic and catabolic) systems, ranging from suns energy, organic dead matter, waste, decomposers, animals and plants; confronting ecosystem events. Macroinvertebrates species in freshwater ecosystems are often indicators of anthropogenic effects. These are organisms that have spine, live in the river bases, and could be seen with our eyes. Such organisms as well as fishes confront with above-tolerance ecologies with concentrated urban effects. Studies in Kochi region has already confirmed the degradation of the complex interdependent estuarine order, post anthropogenic effects including; developmental activities, dredging, waste disposal, metal pollution, or unscientific land usage (Chithra et al. 2013). Detailed study of the crustacean life with respect to temperature variations and effects of PH levels have also been made (ibid.). The political, economic, and social conditions make certain spaces biodiverse and others less so. A landscape which was once wetland rice now becomes uncultivated wetland. What implications does this have on the life forms and the interactions in between? Most wetlands remain receptacles of water and in addition they have got rewilded. These are unintended effects of laying uncultivated but at the same time warding off conversions to real estate because of new laws. So with the waste dump ecosystems straddling new and old town where new kinds of adaptations like that of Brahminy Kites and Herons may be seen. This is not to suggest that ecologies are processes that happen from time to time and that animals just adapt to the new situations. There are extinctions in ecosystems, impossible situations for any adaptations, decimation of the ‘commons’. The commons here include those that have become commons by usage as playfields, evening haunts, or absentee owners—as well as those which are public land. Plantations are a signature ecology in Kerala. They have been a supreme modern intervention. First strides into formal plantations start

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with the comprehensive geographical surveys in 1800s beginning initiated during Sir George Everest. Yes, the great mountain later bore this surveyor’s name—surveys after all are not just about maps and statistics but also control by nomenclature! The great trigonometrical surveys were discussed before. Soon the hills of the ghats became assigned plantations. 1800s was also a time when the scientific forestry developed in Germany found moorings through colonial policies in Kerala. The metabolic relationships in ecology are exemplified in the operationalising of policies initiated by Dietrich Brandis. Forests soon became part of modern capital. Reserve forests are the exemplars of insular ecologies that cater to homogenous extractions (e.g., Teak forests). The taungya system (Lang and Pye 2000) was literally imposition of a field crop logic onto the wild hills of Western Ghats. Meanwhile rubber plantations in Kerala speak the story of the modern state plantations migrating downhill8 and soon becoming a more comprehensive ecologic in the decades that followed. Though ordered ecologies with predominant monocrops, the plantations that patchily punctuate urban sprawls now become islands of greenery. During even more comprehensive neoliberal designs life forms, bereft of their previous ecological niches, adapt, into such patchy plantations. Invasive species too follow suit into such unintentional ecosystems. They make a better adaptation in such circumstances.

Invasion as a Paradigm to Think With Invasion by plants or animals is in every respect a result of hybrid sociobiological processes and it proceeds likewise. Often the socio-cultural invasions homogenising religions, aesthetics, or consumerism and the socio-economic invasions like neoliberal economies resonate with biological invasions. They are also mutually enhancing. Historically, the entanglements of human and animal life have often had significant parallels in cultural assertions, ritual priorities, and changing topographies of power as may be gathered from the cases of Kota bio-social milieus in the 1930s of Nilgiris. 1930s was time when many social practices changed and this had an ecological precedence. The whole decimation of Kota villages through lice borne diseases parallels the incursions of new traditions and annihilations of the existing ones 8 JJ Murphy who initiated these plantations incidentally worked for a company that specialised in hill plantations named Finlay Muir and Co.

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(Wolf 2006). The surrounding Hindu-norms swept in. Ways of worship changed with newer deities and modernisation (also mediated by British ideas) ushered in a drive against what all was deemed un-Hindu. Slaughtering of bovines and males donning long hair were some of the practices that were discontinued alongside. With this the presence of animals, several allied dependencies, and attitudes towards them changed. The invasions cannot be separated from the larger human mobilities across the world either. There is a dialectical process that precedes invasion viz. the interaction between a species that is capable of invasion with an invadable landscape. Modernist methods of understanding invasion were premised on the artificial separation into natural and social phenomena. There are the hybrid processes (Latour 1993) and multiple causalities (Pysek et al. 2005). But this often misses the patterned setting of an invadable stage as well as the more processual ecological conditionalities involved. The work on the actual invasion as with the Mimosa invasions in Asia or Latin America (We may also include Acacia like plants) demonstrates the effect of sociobiological networks. Accordingly, it is often those species that occupy a more diverse and larger geographical habitat that invade more successfully. Likewise climatic conditions work together with transformations and landscape fragmentation facilitate invasions. The new roads that have been built, the changing riparian habitats alongside banks, the new ecologies that emerge during large-scale constructions and conversions of fields and agriculture, etc., increase what is called the ‘invadability’. There is also the very important aspect as to when the bureaucracies and formalities officially recognise invasions. It is only when authorities officially recognise the reasons and the complex processes involved that something becomes ‘invasion’. Otherwise, it passes off unrecognised and routine. Measures that do not take into account the networks of sociobiological relations often end up like seasonal and ritualistic ‘mosquito control measures’. These are common during monsoon outbreaks in Kerala. As with invasions the ecosystems of mosquitoes too are not spontaneous or random pop ups during monsoon. Rather there are complex processes involved ranging from the generation of new ecosystems that facilitate the colonisation by mosquitoes or the new possibilities opened up by the human impacts on natural controls. Take the case of dragon fly larvae that require relatively cleaner waters or the tadpoles, both of which predate on mosquito larvae and these used to have overlapping ecologies. Not anymore. Because of increased pollution of stagnant pools

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during rains the dragon fly larvae rarely survive. One can see concomitant changes in the profiles of skies otherwise filled like mosaic with different kinds of these winged helicopters. On the other hand, we get the proliferating construction site ecologies. The temperature and hydrological conditions are well adapted to by mosquitoes. They proliferate in these new ecologies. If the authorities understand mosquitoes as standalone biological phenomena rather than a continuously evolving and ever adapting phenomena that form newer networks of proliferation every day. If they do not connect mosquitoes with the concomitant changes in other living forms, if they do not relate the mosquitoes to the construction sites and the credit relaxations that facilitate real estate, they will only design ritualistic controls that recur and fail. Only an entangled perception with politically informed ecological analysis will understand the complex hybridities the new vector mosquitoes are becoming. Similarly, the phenomenon of invasion involving African catfish (Clarias gariepinus ), Muthukku (Pueraria javanica), Dritharashtrapacha (Mikania macarantha), Giant African Snails (Achatina fulica), or Morning Glory (Ipomea) are all intertwined with other species and the conditions of invadability. They cannot be understood if they are dissociated from all those human interventions: be they colonial introductions, military introductions, roads built at different times, global timber trade, global real estate processes, or tourism aesthetics. Before any politically loaded categorisation of exotic or foreign gets coupled with that of invasion there is a necessity to understand those myriad processes that prepare the ground for invasion. Laura Schneiders’s work on Bracken Fern (2006) shows that invasion in Calakmul region of Mexico is dependent not only on the clearances of canopy but also on pressures from commercial cultivation. The fern proliferates mostly in disturbance ecologies. Fires, agricultural activities, or clearances of forests set an invadable environ. The fern is more resistant to pests and the rhizomes of this fern run deep into soil. Its success is dependent on biology, human designs on landscapes, and methods of dispersion. The shifting to pasture over expectations of market profit resulted in terrains idea for the fern. With no competition for light or secondary vegetation and the dry biomass susceptible to fire, the invasive patched keep increasing. The possibility of off farm employments and high labour costs in controlling invasion resulted in many, especially the bigger land holders not to take up control.

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There are interesting parallels to the classification of what is wild and alien and what is aesthetically appealing to human in settler zones in Western Ghat and the case of Kudzu spread in the United States during depression years. Settler farmers often speak of deer and elephant that invade into their domestic spaces that in fact are intended and unintended invasions into long lasting animal corridors. Unintended invasions are when marginalised populations and tribes are relocated to animal corridors when the land entitled to them is still controlled by tourism lobbies and big plantations like Harrisons and Tatas in the Ghats. Intended invasions are more common as with tourism projects and roads that break continuous ecosystems. The consumer aesthetics spread far and wide in the relatively egalitarian Kerala where manicured living spaces may be seen standing stark with their tiled yards and esoteric architecture. The Kudzu plant was once introduced during the depression and they almost evangelically populated the native habitats (Finch 2015), as a ‘live again’ solution in farms. The social preparation of landscape becomes a sine qua non of invasions like these. There were changes in the pattern of invasion by creepers by the roads and in the open fields related to the changing patterns of grazing i.e., when people started to have fewer domestic animals in central Kerala. All of these instances assert that invasions happen on terrains animated by hybrid processes. Landscape modification is not a specifically human activity as can be gathered from the animal effects. There have been many unintended consequences from landscape modifications. Even during the pre-paddy based-agrarian orders selections have happened within the wild nature. The modifications through selective weeding, trimmings, transplanting, weeding, or burning practised by gatherers or hunters, the selective promotion of life cycles that facilitated fishing/hunting, management of water bodies as well as transplanting eggs and young of fish (Scott 2017: 70)—all manipulate ecosystems. The reshaping of ecosystems predate organised or large-scale agriculture and has been a result of symbiotic activities with animals. With forms of domestication, these landscape modifications took a qualitative turn. As indicated in the case of water birds that move back and forth according to the agricultural cycles, commensals congregated around the settlements, including rodents, crows, sparrows, and dogs. With them came specific parasites and other forms of micro lives as well (tick, lice, leeches, and mosquitoes). Boundary making eventually became a practice to demarcate domestic and wild, though this never became as absolute in Kerala as most

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modernised places (Scott 2017). But the new modes of lives thrived through increasingly exclusive zones and these exclusions also paralleled the feudal caste orders that took shape with land based class differentiations. Thriving through exclusions these environments depended on human supervision. The controls became extreme towards the end of nineteenth century in Kerala. Adaptive abilities have been observed among animals like cow and goat, like adaptability to crowding, ability to breed under confinement, herd behaviour, and social hierarchy, that predispose some for domestic life (ibid). The degree of adaptability changes as one moves to the fringe inhabitants to the wilder ones. The human settlements and the animal life that evolved eventually created a microclimatic environment, with fields, crops, shelters, and animals (and even bacteria). Both human and non-human animals were reciprocally shaping each other. Studies have shown interesting physiological changes as well like the reduction in brain size of non-human animals. In sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs the parts of the brain that shrunk most were amygdala, limbic systems, and hippocampus. All these are related to external stimuli and reaction. On the other hand, over crowding resulted in proneness to diseases through repeated infection, inactivity (Scott 2017: 81), and less variety in diet. There were reciprocal effects on human beings as well as in the case of women who spent larger time kneeling and rocking back and forth grinding grain. The bone structure changed under repetitive stress (as it does now in information technology age!). There was also larger sharing of parasites and pathogens with increased sedentism. Along with the social, political, biological, or economic backdrop to ecologies in the making there is also the aesthetic element. A significant instance is that of the eucalyptus plantations (Eucalyptus regnans ) that came up near the tea estates and colonial settlements in the Ghats. Such plantation apart from guzzling in water also opened up the terrains for other kinds of invasions and vulnerabilities. There is the interesting work on the relationship between smell and plantations of Eucalyptus done by Rune Flikke (2014), in the context of colonial South Africa. These plantations were made to ward off the native sights, smells and also to produce landscapes of hygiene. Plantations like these were also a way humans imposed themselves on the world they confronted in this case the colonised world. Smell thus becomes what Flikke calls a ‘human affordance’ which is the way people join the ecology around—in this case with the mediating presence of colonial rule.

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Despite the ecosystemic disturbances, colonisations, and effects on biodiversity the idea of Invasive Alien Species (IAS) does have to be used with a certain amount of social-sensitivity as well. Otherwise, this will not be a good paradigm to understand ecologies in the making and designs imposed. The prime sensitivity should be with respect to the non-factoring in of human agency in the processes of invasion. There is also a need to understand the alliance ecologies that come up between several non-human actors and the invasive agent (Robbins 2004). The alliances become important in the context of uninformed efforts to ‘restore’ nature. Invasions happen in steps and drawing from the conducive terrains humans intentionally or unintentionally set for this. But at the same time invasions do have devastating effects on ecologies like the case of Mikania or with the case of certain types of fishes like Giant Gourami (Osphronemus Gorami) in Periyar, Guppies in Chalakudy River, or the widely invasive American (Loricariidae) and African Catfishes. The Gourami for instance adapts well to polluted waters and can even be a carrier of pathogens to native fishes, while the American Catfishes or Suckers as they are called for their voracious appetite depletes the vegetation in the spawning grounds (Singh 2018). Further many of these fishes have come in as part of global trade in ornamental fishes, much of which happens online. And many of these arrive through modern airports and ports. The point is, if we do not factor in the multimillion trade in ornamental fishes, consumerism, virtual trade (with material effects in the form of fish!) as well as the modern forms of transport invasion becomes an ungrounded process. This is where parallels to Xenophobia and alienated value attributions come in. Invasion prompts us more to see ecologies as being continuously acted upon and made. There cannot be a conception of stagnancy. The phenomena of invasion have to be understood in all its relationalities everything from the first human invasions as alien species into non-human terrains with the aid of fire, the colonial introductions for capital and aesthetics, the state mediated commerce and trade, social forestry as well as the setting of invadable terrains by real estate and construction has to come in. We often fail to understand the new ecologies because we resort to the mechanical binaries between human and non-human, physical and cultural geography, as well as living and non-living. The networking of species, ways of land management as well as the bureaucracies (Robbins 2004) are ways through which we make the necessary connections. It

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is only as part of the network of relationalities, that we can understand the role and capability of each and every actant (Latour 2004). Understanding disturbance ecologies is one way we can proceed. The preoccupation with inherent equilibriums in nature, associated with urban ecological models like Garden Cities, to be suddenly tampered upon by a certain species or an invasion sometimes becomes appealing. But it misses out the continuous remaking of ecologies as well as the processual role of actants. Disturbed ecologies like a new construction site or a patch of land ‘developed’ for real estate can throw insights as such sites often give rise to novel species assemblages. One of the new assemblages is the ecology of mosquitoes and it is particularly interesting because this is a perceived threat to human well-being. It is a common observation that culex and anopheles proliferate in huge number especially post monsoon. Stories of mosquito borne diseases and their evolving versions abound in news and discussions. Ecologies of fear take shape seasonally. Control measures are undertaken by the municipalities and corporations. Volunteers visit houses and give routine advices on open coconut shells, cans, and containers. Municipal vans come and fog the zones. Medical notices are circulated, with details of control, symptoms as well as advices on treatment in case of disease. Dengue and chikungunya have become household names and there is also the threat of Malaria returning also by way of the increasingly number of migrant labourers arriving from other states that never got rid of the menace, into construction sites. Mosquito control strategies also happen at geohistorical junctures, with ecological, ideological, sociological, and technical issues assemble in Shaw et al. (2010). A particular method often evolved in connection with the kinds of perspectives that are dominant. Thus the aerial perspectivism that came into use during Fred Sopers total fogging was also thanks to the flights, whereas this was not an option for William Gorgas method of finding out niches and controlling it. The problem with the seasonal strategies as they happen in Kerala is that they do not factor in the networks of relationships in which mosquito and its behavioural unravelling is just one actant, which cannot be seen in isolation. Extensive research done in Ghanaian capital Accra on Culex Aedes and Anopheles brought out the need to factor in rapid urbanisation, high population as well as globalisation in the proliferation of mosquito habitats as well as the density (Brown et al. 2014). The have been work on the relationship

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between construction sites and the conducive ecologies created for larval breeding (ibid.). The burgeoning construction sites of Kerala are not limited to a metropolitan centre or a special economic zone because of the peculiar socio-economic algorithm in the state. The sites became conducive ecosystems with replete with the right amount of sunlight penetrating water bodies, suspended particles, temperature, as well as pH level, for the mosquito larvae. The mosquitoes once they fly out of these spawning grounds alight wherever they find the right mooring. Often the green patches, wet wood, and undersides of leaves become favourite spots. But if people start associating these green patches as generative zones of mosquitoes, they seriously miss the new ecosystems like the construction sites and rubble blocked water channels. In effect they make a logic of immunological response based on ready visuals. This adds more rationale to target the vegetation and tree covers from private and public surroundings. A new aesthetics starts seeing tiles and pesticide supported imported grass as appealing to the securitised living spaces. Such an aesthetics leaves us with urban ecological orders that are pervasive, clogged away most of the running water bodies, polluted fresh water ponds, and filled up the wetlands. Dragon fly nymph and tadpoles that live in cleaner waters can no longer predate on the better adapted mosquito larvae. Their adult versions (Dragon Flies and Frogs) no more feed on the adult Mosquitoes. Both these natural predators have dwindled with the pollution and filling ups. Mosquito controls only address the event of outbreaks, puts the organism in isolation, and misses out most of these disturbed ecologies with emergent interconnections. The proliferation of mosquitoes and mosquito borne diseases are metaphorical of the finance capital finding its way through all the niche spaces with no sovereign check on the flows. The mitigative measures for mosquitoes also resonate fixes in times of economic crisis in the sense and to the effect that both resuscitate the existing order. The mismatch between the ecological phenomenon of mosquitoes and the institutional response is also because much of the institutional machinery does not factor in the changing circumstances in which mosquitoes prevail and adapt. Such a context either has not existed so far and cannot be imagined using the existing mechanisms or the disjunctive enquiries misses all the emergent connectivity. Further the ecosystems of mosquitoes have an impact of the human sociality. Ethnographic work shows that in most places where the

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mosquitoes come out in hoards, people prefer to stay indoors and device newer strategies to seal the private spaces ever more. Contemporary mosquitoes are also the ‘urban-wild’ in the sense that they are supreme adaptors to human environs and they are seldom been tamed/controlled. Rather they are among the numerous wilds that have adapted and thrived in anthropogenic spaces. On the other hand, these well adapted insects have ‘domesticating’ effects on Homo sapiens by determining the presence and absence in places not by choice but by compulsion. Mosquitoes in this way demonstrate the processual, dynamic, and dialectic nature of domestic and the wild (the wild can domesticate as well). There are other aspects like labour costs that are indirectly linked to ecosystems. Decades ago, the agrarian order was maintained in the plains by the caste order and bonded labour in the plantations (especially colonial times). We speak decades since social, land, and labour reforms during the 1920s, 1960s, and 1970s. There are less and less people at present willing to employ expensive labour. The labour migration to gulf and cultural capital associated with service sectors (as against Jati associations with agrarian system) also increased wage expectation (not that service sector jobs are well paid-far from this) coupled with the rise of the costs of living. The rural health care, basic education, and labour mobilities played their part. All these feed into the growth of the remaining options like the real estate that were laid open across the country into 2000s. The effect on the environment and geographies across Kerala is a self-evident story. Kerala’s anthropocene starts with the scalar increase in real estate, retail, and service economies and associated metabolic relationships with environment. Ever more people depend on these avenues and associated informal arrangements like brokerage for income. What is potentially good for labour does not often translate into more space for non-human life. Most of the cultivated spaces have already become built spaces or potential ‘sites’ of development. Interim laws incidentally maintained uncultivated wetlands as wild ecologies amidst commoditised land parcels. Tourism being a prominent service sector has literally carved up the western ghat highlands into resorts and replicas of towns in the plains.

Animal Interaction with Certain Kerala Specifics There are increasing reports of human–animal interactions which have acquired the status of conflicts, threats, and intrusions by the latter. The 1993-Wildlife Census Kerala (A Report by KFRI) is among the proofs

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cited for the numbers of several species as increasing. More reports are of course on the way. They are portrayed as problematic intruders into human habitations. Often selective readings of reports are made. There are also the larger politicised contexts of resistance pumped up by entrenched interests by community leaders, church groups, and resort lobbies to holistic reports on ecology like the Western Ghats Ecology Panel Report. Large-scale conversions of forests to monoculture plantations, ecotourism, organised encroachments as well as manufactured forest fires are not taken into account in most of such (news) reports and rhetoric. It is also in the context of the gross reduction in the quality and heterogeneity of habitats when animals resort to crops, coconut palm, plantains, areca nut, coffee, oil palm, pepper, jackfruit trees, or mango. Suddenly elephants, gaur, sambar, wild boar, bonnet macaque, common langur, black-naped hare, and peafowl become rogues/nuisance/intruders. This is not entirely unfounded as the crop loss is real. But the mass mobilisations and symbolic attacks on some of the few remaining biomes (like in the man-made fires of Wayanad) or the paranoia inflamed against the Gadgil report which never even saw the light of the day (and even towards the much-watered down Kasturirangan report) reasserts a binary logic of wild and domestic. It comfortably leaves the drivers of the intrusions, threats, and conflicts, out. The rapid effects on climate change on global ecosystems of every kind has had biotic as well as abiotic transformations. There have been increasing vulnerabilities to forms of invasion due to fragmentation and decreasing diversity. All these have been closely followed (McEldowney et al. 2022; Catford et al. 2013; Robbins 2001, 2004). What we understand from all this is that it is impossible to make artificial separations within the parliaments of socio-geo-biological effects. We must not have an inert understanding of certain external transformations having ‘mere’ reflections or reactions in a given ecosystem or its actors—like the ‘effect of climatic change’. Rather there should be an understanding of the ecosystem’s situatedness and the actor’s active perceptual apparatus with which they engage with changes. Specific ecosystems comprised of interconnected actors become ‘island of senses’ (Uexküll 2001). Though the changes like climate change could be felt on larger scales of geography situated organisms and local environments could be islands comprised of characteristic pairings of organisms and environment. The idea of umwelten (ibid.) conveys better the inseparability of the actors and the

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ecosystems as it transacts with changes. The usual rhetoric of we all live under the same sun and that we all are one during environmental catastrophes might have to be rethought in a nuanced way. Yes, we all do confront many general transformations but with varied effects as a result of the unique entanglements in the umwelten. Topography, land use, the changing flow of water in the Periyar has had exaggerated effects. It has varied effects on indigenous and nonindigenous species. There are complex feedback loops that take shape. They determine how vulnerable ecosystems become and how varied these vulnerabilities are to major transformations. A focus on one particular animal for instance might not convey the changing assemblages in the making. This is because initially many species make adaptations to changing ecosystemic conditions. Butterflies have often adapted to new invasive plants and made them hosts. These adaptations result in newer umwelten that confront further transformations. Some elements, both living and non-living, that adapt least do fade away. The persistence of anthropocenic changes often reaches tipping points. This is evident in scenarios like increasing patchiness of ecosystems, with least connectivity across, reduction in flows (as with rivulets and minor arteries that dry up in Periyar), or fragmentations of major biotic zones like the Western Ghats. A recent study (Sony et al. 2018) shows that most of the habitats of the western ghats mountain goat called the Nilgiri Tahr could become unsuitable with climatic shifts. This includes core areas within the ‘protected zones’ of Western Ghats. Even those stable habitats possibly cannot withstand the impending shifts. Large-scale local extinctions are predicted. This study has factored in many of the uncertainties in climatic shifts in a non-linear way. Add on to that the aforesaid political ecological scenarios like piecemeal and alienated designs of protected zones we make better understandings. The national parks and their species cannot exist as fragmented imaginations. The Thar is not only spatially located in the park and neither does the park exist as a patch. The wider impacts on western ghats pointed out in the Gadgil report. The report brands the regions outside the protected zones in the Ghats also as part of Ecologically Sensitive Zones (ESZ). The idea of ESZ was to see ecosystems beyond the cartesian binaries and as complexly interconnected processes with no artificial boundaries. The report said models of development and conservation to take into account an encompassing perspective of the Ghats biome. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEP) report

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though was effectively misrepresented by a consortium of system conservative interests as projects for evicting people from habitats. We see the neoliberal discourse seeping into localised evaluations of nature and associated paranoia, and the increasing fragmentation of the protected zones as patchwork solutions. Crossing the highlands, as one move towards the midlands and plains of central Kerala around Ernakulam, it is probably the fish ecologies that become metaphors of the changing order. Fish ecologies of course were once structured by human interventions. There is no suggestion of a pristine ecology suddenly getting tampered with. Rather the anthropocene effects undergo changes in scale and scope, especially in times of neoliberal capitalism. The transformation in land use, chemical pollution of fluvial orders, and the changing nature of consumption and waste generation has produced characteristic effects. Private industries have created a kaleidoscopic chemical ecology in the lower course of Periyar where the river flows wide and often feeds the arteries that traverse lands before rejoining the main course at a different point. These arteries were once major sources of fish and spring water for the wells. Industries like Biocon Organics that produce gelatin, Periyar Chemicals, Sud Chemie, Ceejee Lubricants, Binani Zinc, and Active Char on one side and the Travancore Cochin Chemical and FACT on the other—all in the Eloor region of Periyar has created a space which has been growing in impact since the 1940s. Issues like pollution, labour rights, privatisations, and public protests often did not reach common grounds. This transformed Eloor into ecologies of fragmentation and friction. Regulator shutters that were built to prevent salt water incursion (Fig. 8.1) during high tides and to prevent the industrial waste from entering upstream created catchments of chemicals where dead fish regularly surface. The problems that are burgeoning in the industrial zones are now inviting certain other forms of solutions, none of which are concerned with labour rights, ecology, migrant labour, the frequently surfacing dead fish and birds or buffaloes that adapt to the polluted river banks. Rather these are solutions that have emerged alongside the priorities of capital after the 2000s. The national emphasis on fiscal deficit reductions, coupled with comparatively better labour regimes in industrial sector and fragmented and labour short agrarian regimes made the tertiary and service sector the choice fields for capital to move in.

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Fig. 8.1 Regulator Shutters: Eloor region/Periyar (Source Own)

The information technology-based services ward themselves off from the otherwise political public spheres of Kerala in the special economic zones. The real estate and tourism privatised and informalised the expectations of labour but with greater investments both by way of hope and more fluid finance. This gets add on support from an aesthetic that values manicured spaces that appear clean vis-à-vis the Eloor industries. The pollution free development imagined around special economic zones based on information technology or tourism transacts the region to global capitalist order ever more. New roads and corridors built from the airport into the economic zones or the assignment of the erstwhile green buffers of secondary sector industries as waste are precisely about capital finding new ways into ecologies. Ironically issues of pollution, disturbance of riparian ecosystems, or labour rights provide more rationale to the new conduits of capital. The ecological disturbances though continue in greater dimensions and with transcendental origins. The successive anthropocenic effects have generated disturbance ecologies. The reference is not to any human effect and this has been on for about two lakh years and it is just like the effect of beavers making dams. Here we are concerned about the ‘threat’ to or even an ‘evisceration’ of multispecies interactions. They come in as extinctions or through

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eutrophication or pollutions. What is more important are the scalar transformations in techno-managerial modes of operationalising landscapes. Globalising and neoliberalising states become powerfully designed orders with total effects. Such tools and continuous interference using them can also prevent any scope of ‘resurgent’ ecologies.9 One can cite resurgences in ecologies long abandoned after human disturbances like in tea plantations of Munnar in western ghats that are long abandoned (Fig. 8.2). Of course, one should be constantly reminded that these are not those plantations run by huge corporations which still thrive. One may also find circumstantial images of the wild on the public roads like those that proliferated during covid pandemic in media (Searle and Turnbull 2020). The news of rare Malabar Large Spotted Civet from Kozhikode city, Sambhars in Chandigarh, Mountain Goats on Welsch cities, Jackals in Tel Aviv, Racoons in New York or even the Sea Lion spotted on Argentinian street were all instances10 . But none of these should lead to false imaginations that nature pure and simple just rebounds when abandoned. There is both the error of puritan priors and abandonment. Further there is the neoliberal celebration of human interest stories and resilient episodes that glorify resurgence no matter what. Real resurgences can occur as amply illustrated with anything else in ecologies, through connectivities and relationships across species. For example, when marking out animals that appeared in Kerala like the pythons, jackals, the lone Malabar civet, or otters by the rivers what is grossly missed is the fact that their absence otherwise was because of the invisibility of connectivities. They appear only during ruptures because many hindrances are removed, not because they suddenly present themselves everywhere. There is also no discussion of the fact that many of these non-human resurgent (s) appeared tires thin and emaciated (like the case of the civet in Kozhikode or the injured wild cats I located in central Kerala). In most instances resurgences are limited and never automatic. This is where Anna Tsing points at difficult negotiations and multispecies liability that is threatened in unprecedented way by Anthropocene proliferations (Tsing 2017). There is ever less scope of self-healing neoliberal capital that proliferates without exception. Like we saw they

9 Anna Tsing. Suomen Antropologi | volume 42 issue 1 spring 2017. 10 The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April, 2020.

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Fig. 8.2 At Pakshipaathalam: Old Tea Plantation taken over by local vegetation (Source Own)

block the running water, they render the land waste, and they put money tags on nature—all of which facilitate flexible modes of making profit. The real estate, tourism, and special economic zones have had such total effect on micro-ecologies in places. Those who were predominantly part of labour class and often caste during the preceding feudal caste order, while elaborating on the nature of their work often narrate the hybrid inextricably linked life of the agrarian system and water scapes. Their liminal positionality and precarious existence with no absolute ownership of land or resources unintentionally gave them certain vantage perspectives on co-species. In the context of paddy cultivation there is no clear division or boundary in between. Driving birds away from fields, running errands for the feudal land holder, cutting channels in the field, the domestic and the nondomestic, fishing, fishing labour, as well as the everyday interactions with

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other forms of life (from the crustaceans to myriad insects) provided them with non-binary perspectives. In Kerala, in most places, they resorted to elaborate system of fish life that flourished in the vast network of small to medium ponds, wetlands, and channels that linked up with rivers. Much of this piscine life coevolved with human intervention on the riparian order, the rice cultivation, as well as the characteristic networking that happened in between waterways. Take the case of the Myaal fields and the adjoining ponds that are fast drying up at present because of the disruption of natural springs due to denudation of hills and the pilings for large apartments in Kakkanad. The ponds and fields held Paral fishes. They all had their vernacular names (given for Puntius Vitattus in estuary or Filamentus Barb or Dawkinsea Filamentosa). Until a decade back these fishes were common in the interconnected hydrological systems. Paral has been the poor man’s fish for many years. This fish was a ready source of necessary calcium, minerals, and proteins even in times of scarcity. Scarcities of course differ in accordance with the order of the day. They were less about sheer unavailability and more about controls, inaccessibility, and distribution. Myaal ecosystem became a refuge for many in times of crisis and price rises because of the presence of small fishes. Whether one had the money to go to the market or not paral fish ecologies like this myaal and ponds could be depended upon for food. The Myaal itself was once created as part of making paddy lands extensive in the buffer areas of the central Keralan districts. There were rechannelisation from the adjoining rivulets like Edachira thodu or Kadambrayaar. At present with the growing ‘smart city’ of Kakkanad there is a deluge of construction work all across (Varghese 2017). Ponds and lakes became prime sites for real estate and the hillocks that kept the water table and spring intact got unearthed for landfills. The paral ecosystem went extinct within the span of five years of the smart city work. If decades back the fish ecologies were metaphorical of people getting smart over the system, now it has become the other way around. One has to take the plastic carry bags and purse and walk all the way to the supermarkets, fish markets, and increasingly the big malls in order to savour the once local varieties of fishes. There are marked changes in the behaviour of birds as well. Water birds like Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibis ), Pond Heron (Ardeola grayii), Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea), and even migrants to Kakkanad region like Asian openbill stork (Anastomus oscitans ), instead of depending on

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the ecosystem around also fly towards the city waste dumbs and have practically turned to scavenging. They fly back to roost in the evening. The site fidelity to urban environment among birds are also a result of certain adaptations but more than this it becomes an indication from ecology. It has been understood that birds that spread out in inland freshwater habitats congregate in numbers in urban spaces (Martin et al. 2011) and waste dumps in order to maintain breeding populations. Waste dumps provide some nutrients though the negative effects of birds that resort to such new found ecologies can also accompany. Recollections by inhabitants who once resorted to fishing during schooldays in the 1990s are still replete with a range of fresh water fishes that populated the rivulets, fields, and ponds. The river floor dwelling Chempalli (Lutjanus Argentimaculatus ) was common more towards the estuarine regions and it depended much on the underwater root structures. With depletion of mangrove ecologies around Ernakulum, Chempalli populations have dwindled. People who caught Chempalli, Paral, or Shrimp, in order to subsist or to have the necessary liquidity no longer have the option. There were others like Pallathi (Orange Chromid—Pseudo Etroplus Maculatus ) that pregnant women ate as the necessary vitamin supplements and the Mudskipper (Periophthalmidae) that climbed branches. These fishes even acoustically punctuated the wetlands by evening with a characteristic sound. The fish gets an onomatopoeic Malayalam name Kukkuman in some regions according to Pokkudan (2010) who has been planting mangrove trees most of his life and has an embodied understanding of ecology. The Kukkuman also vanished in contemporary times from most of the ecologies that have hence transformed into lake-view and river-view ‘sites’ around new urban spaces, with hardly any mangrove enveloping. The fresh water networks that depended on the Kadambrayar River that flow into the Edachira Thodu were once mediated by paddy fields. When the paddy fields became sites for gated living spaces around the upcoming special economic zones of Kakkanad by mid by 2004–2006 (Varghese 2013), these water networks were reduced to trickle in many places. That which was left out was heavily depended upon by thousands of migrant construction labourers from the northern states in India and even Bangladesh with inadequate living conditions. Presently the same water bodies are getting revived as waterscapes for the new living spaces. In such intrusions significant steps involved in fish cycles were deleted.

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People here still recall the fishing experience as well as the expertise and value attributed to certain fishermen. One of my informant’s father was once a prominent fisherman. He narrated names like Muthi (whose mouth shape changes), Aaron (eellike fish), Vanklanji (whiskered fish in catfish family) as well as several kinds of small Paral (Vayamban[striped]/Poovali [Red Spot]/Karua [bigger]. All these fishes inhabited the waterlogged puncha fields, ponds, and connecting networks. Then there were the delicacies like braals, vakas, (snakeheads) mushis (local catfishes), kallemuttis , kooris , etc. The broken marshlands that one still finds across these regions are both the facades of the once fish rich ecology as well as the present ‘wastelands’ waiting their fate. Marshlands for James Scott (2009) have always been the fuzzy ecologies that precede the clear separation into cultivated and wild. Such fuzzy zones are always targets for control. In contemporary times marshes are also vestiges and wastes produced by changing modes of appropriating land and resources by new urban processes. Classification into waste and subsequent control was a logical course of action from times of early colonial capitalism (Gilmartin 2006) and such perceptions have only exaggerated in neoliberal present (Baviskar 2008). Unlike during the early modernising state or even the time of developmental state in the post-colonial context, the present sovereign process facilitates technologies of brute efficiency. The best visualisations and exemplars are perhaps best gathered from the airplanes as they land Kerala. The planes make a decent towards Kochi flying over the lower ghats. One starts seeing all the huge quarries that dot the midlands of Kerala (Kanjoor/Malayattoor).11 The Manufactured Sand or M-Sand extractions that have become the new source of sand after the almost total depletion of river sand across Kerala, depend on these granite hillocks. The depletion of aquifers has created water scarcities in regions that still look green from above. Quarries and crusher units have proliferated across Kerala in the last two decades. These started operating in government owned public land in hilly terrains and also on land originally designated for Tribal groups and indigenous communities. After the relaxation of controls on foreign capital in the early 2000s easy money flowed into real estate. Banks also 11 In Malayalam: Thomas, K.M. Kalanjooril Janakeeya Uyirthezhunnelppu: Pashchimaghatta samrakshanavum kalanjoorile quarry samaravum. Paristhiti Samrakshana Aikradhardhya samithi: Pathanamthilla.

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created a credit-based regime (Ghosh and Chandrasekhar 2017). Private land designated and classified for agriculture was made to look unviable for farming and turned over to such units. The waste generated by the units got dumped all around and in faraway places also as landfills. Gram Sabhas, or the local bodies, are effectively silenced by tacit agreements, non-entries in minutes, as well as through the arrangements of formal clearances/sanctions, thus gaining legal grounds (Nabeel 2014). The institution of corporate sovereign order operates through the algorithms of the most localised bureaucracies. New technology and machinery, mentioned before become the tools that preclude any chance of resurgent ecologies. Meanwhile, there are the ammonium nitrate explosives, jack hammers, and instant mixers attached to rock movers that make quarrying much more efficient and larger in scale. In the case of Muthalamada and Malayattoor, one sees people getting co-opted as middle men in different stages of this activity (ibid.), thus helping the order to become hegemonic also with tacit approvals by political orders and trade unions. The 1952 Mines Act that came into being in order to address metal mining. This act is now being used to consolidate royalties for granite and red stone mining. Many regulations in the 1967 Mine and Mineral Act, Govt. of Kerala, are thereby scuttled by state orders. On top of this consolidated royalties and give the lobbies right to extract almost 20 times more with the same amount! There are in addition the health hazards on all forms of life around. Asthma, pneumonia, skin diseases in human beings, and different kinds of cancers due to exposure to radioactive materials have been reported in addition to the yet lesser known impact on other living forms. If people once started their redistributed life in parts of Kerala because of a relatively redistributed welfare regime and egalitarian reforms, now they are expelled from the lifeworld through designs. These expulsions proceed parallel to the extinctions and evictions of all the other forms of life, be that fish ecologies or the different types of plants. The bloated prices of land are a reflection of capital parking itself in such spaces. This effectively wards most of buying unless on credit and interest. We need to understand that all such processes happen in the facilitative gaze of state on a global order that has already constructed 11 lakh apartment units with around 6 lakh unoccupied houses (ibid.). The Census report available for year 2011 point at about 11 per cent unoccupied houses. This is rising further because of outward migration of youngsters. The bubble is ever larger because this is about rising price on a commodity that is available

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in excess. The imaginations of smart cities in the making, the imagined gated life, and the imagined good life in green apartments are about the virtual gaining real and manifest effects on the ecologies—with the drying up of waterbodies, proliferation of invasives, reduction of fish catch, we also see human being finding it difficult to find any space to buffer them off from the designs of neoliberal capital. This chapter proceeded to think with animals in their relationships with humans and the changing orders they are mutually embedded in. It is a lot about spaces where human–animal interactions have evolved through time as well as changed their courses and connotations with respect to the changing orders. These spaces range from the wild regions to the domestic spaces. But any assumed dichotomy of wild and domestic also gets problematise because we see the domestic as less tamed than imagined and the wild finding its way into the domestic. Such overlaps are not new. They only suggest that they have always been there but the forces of modernity and the metamorphosis of capital has shrouded our vision of relationalities. Only ruptures and breaks become temporary reminders. The wild among us, the invasions, the entanglements, the resurgences that surface during episodes of rupture all point at the reality of hybrid terrains. This does not necessarily mean hybridity means idyll, far from it! What we get are terrains replete with power struggles that continuously keep us blind to the reality of connections across the imagined boundaries.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. Agamben, Georgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aiya, Nagam. 1906. The Travancore State Manual I, II, III . Trivandrum: Travancore Government Press. Anoop, K.R., and S.A. Hussain. 2005. Food and Feeding Habits of SmoothCoated Otters (Lutra Perspicillata) and Their Significance to the Fish Population of Kerala, India. Journal of Zoology London 266: 15–23. Anwar, S. 2014. Kaadu Kathunnathu Aaalkoottam Nokki Ninnu. Mathrubhoomi Azhchapathippu 5 (92): 30–43, April 20–26. Babu, Ramesh. 2017. Tigers Kill Six Elephants in Kerala’s Wayanad as Drought Triggers Fierce Water War. Hindustan Times, June 6.

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CHAPTER 9

Concluding Chapter: Unravelling Entanglements in Ecology

Often the calls for environmental protection or ecological consciousness do not proceed much further because there is no understanding of coevolutions and relationships. These relationships are often very dynamic and have a bearing on the orders in perspective. This work and the vignettes on entangled ecologies throw some light of the orders, represented contemporaneously by neoliberal state designs. It is significant to note that in ecosystems, most acts of production are simultaneously variant acts of consumption as well. Much of what appears as random are stable conditions that become random only due to specific causalities. The causalities, themselves are systemic in nature in ways following from the structure of a given system and thus are not random per se. The causality and randomness, as well as the production and consumption coexist. In the case of living organisms, the required minimum amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is also the result of the cumulative production of oxygen from a carbon dioxide rich environment through time (literally epochs). The environment which is often portrayed as mere stable outsides or inert backdrops thus coevolved with human beings. The point each vignette and thematic in chapters tries to bring out is this dialectic of relationalities between organisms and their environments. Ecologists often have had a craving to talk about their subject matter in a strict Hamiltonian mode borrowed from certain methods in physical science. This is a method that tries to understand the energy totalities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5_9

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by a mere summing of the kinetic and potential energies in the physical models. More significant is the non-factoring in of time or velocity in such understandings. But as unintended designs in the hydrological orders through changing times, relationships in ecology, dimensions of invasiveness, animal–human relationships, etc., exemplify the non-linear realities. Patterns of change and unpredictability in populations or ecosystemic processes will have to be brushed over and presented as neatly compartmentalised and amenable to dissociated planning. But it is next to impossible to study complex processes in isolation. The subsequent summing up like that of the comfortable avoidance of the phenotypic processes that matter during developmental time in evolutionary biology becomes problematical in ecological evaluations (Levontin and Levins 2009). In nuanced interdisciplinary understanding or readings of socio-natures the learnings, interactions, and developments through environmental interactions are to be accounted for. The lack of understanding of ecological processes in terms of relationships even in the very self-evident terrain of the anthropocene often hampers understandings. One understands from literature (ibid.) that parasites, fungi, viruses, or bacteria—microorganisms that often escape our eyes are seldom functional as isolates. In the case of microorganisms, the complex and conflictual relationships within the host environment, themselves constitutive of a wider set of relationships the hosts themselves are part of is significant. This is often missed in policies and public health intervention which instead uses language and metaphors of control and attack (war language). They literally take action on, ‘war footing’ (e.g., in the face of outbreak/disaster)! Similar tendencies could be seen in the totalising perspectives of urban ecologies or self-contained smart cities. The totalised rhetoric of postdevelopmental regimes of living misses the variations on ‘populations’ imagined therein. People are pre-conceived as discreet entities all vying for production (GDP) indices. On top of this a language of competition is used between urban regions and between developing and developed states (India Competing with China, Catching up with United States…etc.). Such discourses permeate all the way into the everyday ecological imaginations. The binary logics imposed through domestic and wild, human and non-human, intruder and intruded, all cater to this conflictual discourse. There are structural parallels between the many facets of ecology, economy, and policy. The celebration of homo economicus and competitive species (and of course their resilience—in turn applied across

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species and ecologies that confront development and changing climatic conditions), are all part of a meta-perspective that takes for granted capitalism and a Spenserian aberration imposed on complex evolutions. Both in developmental programmes and ecological interventions, the imagined dichotomies (rather than relationships and dependencies) work through, organism and environment, nature and nurture, as well as society and individual. They are either deterministic or random events and invest much on averages (with only tolerable deviations allowed for). Variance, feral lives, and entanglements are pre-empted. Twenty-first-century developmentalist frames have urban overtones with the leading motifs of special economic zones, urban renewals as well as methods of transaction like containerisation. Containerisation is not just about globalisation, but about the cheap circulation of goods around the world, which gives unprecedented power capital. Here capital flows loose while labour can be controlled and put in place. Special economic zones optimise space for capital by instituting an order of exception to any norm outside. Eventually the urban renewal programmes normalise exception outside as well. This leads to increase in futuristic hopes but simultaneous disempowerment of labour especially in cities across the world. The urban models are paradigmatic of globalising states in the making. They proceed as accumulations by dispossession of everything from ecological niches like the lake systems, wider hydrological circuits as well as existing human ecologies. It changes geographies, accumulates land, and accelerates associated rise in land values. There is a lot that can be gathered about ecological imaginations in the making from projects and strategic water front plans across the world. The PlaNYC in New York is a classic case. It portrays New York city’s waterfront as largely empty, terra nullius, as with most such developmental plans that portray spaces as empty without specific associations, histories, and forms of life relating and inhabiting (Dawson 2017). The language of sustainability is followed up by the language of ‘resilience’. Resilience is deployed in city planning in times of disaster but it is also comprehensively applied to ecosystems. The reading of imposed adjustments and adaptations, in terms of resilience often takes a celebratory and system conservative stance. Resurgence ecologies discussed in the book also follow similar tenor with self-healing homeostatic imaginations imposed on ecologies. All the while the spaces in question continue to work through modes of capital accumulation and speculative urban development. This creates milieus which even neglects the sustainability

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arguments on global warming, etc. and proceeds by strategic creations of conducive zones for investment and profit. As much as existing ways of finance and profit militate against real resurgences. As for the resilience discourse that refers to the capacity of absorbing recurrent disturbances. Very often this gets deployed in the Foucauldian sense of governing life through celebrating survivals in a neoliberal order. There is no political question as to what created the need for many communities to be resilient in the first place. David Harvey says that ‘ecological arguments are never socially neutral any more than socio-political arguments are ecologically neutral. Looking more closely at the way ecology and politics interrelate then becomes imperative if we are to get a better handle on how to approach environmental/ecological questions’ (Harvey 1993: 25). Luxury spaces and phantasmagoria are marketed in Dubai, New York, Jakarta, or in Indian urban spaces, by a compartmentalised vision that does not see the fact that elite spaces are often sustained by outlying zones of deprivation that services the former. The marketing of green living spaces with beautiful waterscapes portrayed also occludes the fact that it is literally through the destruction and evisceration of life and relationships that such spaces come up. We see urban ecologies of deprivation in developments around Special Economic Zones in India (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012) as well as in many developmental zones of fast developing African states like Nigeria (Eko Etlantic in Lagos/Garuda project in Indonesia). The logic of ‘climate adaptation’ becomes a way to structure a system of conservative order that can neglect or even justify, violent land. Ecologies here will always be near ‘disaster’ or at ‘risk’. The top-down impositions of atomistic outlook and non-factoring in local ecologies inform contemporary developments. As may be seen in cases around Periyar so can be seen on larger scales around ecological zones like Mekong, Ganges, or Amazon, where the land literally sinks and rivers/ oceans surge (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012; Dawson 2017). The developmental processes along global neoliberal trajectory, the urban processes, and ecological transformations in exemplar places suggest that nature is anything but external to capital formation. Nature, projected pure and wild, have been integral to capitalist interests and conceals within itself the metabolic relationships between life and non-life that Marx aptly called the metabolic rifts. These metabolic rifts deprived certain country sides in Europe of nutrients and led the expansive drive elsewhere like the imperial drive for Peruvian Guano. The introduction of

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nineteenth-century hydrological systems and centralised water management for cities (Gandy 2002) inaugurated a new set of relationships to the environment and perception of waste. The sanitary arrangements and dependencies on human waste as agricultural manure ceased to exist. Simultaneously there was the growth of a distinct fertiliser industry that signifies the market establishing new connections with sectors of economy. In the American contexts the new hydrological systems symbolised the growth of a metropolitan nature that replaced organicist conceptions that preceded. The cyclical interactions of existing economic sectors and urban spaces with rural hinterlands got replaced. Rurality and nature soon started gaining newer evaluations: idyll, leisure, etc. The binaries of culture/society and nature are extremely deceptive in the Keralan contexts as well. Often the solutions that are put forward to address a problem created during a preceding plan, like walling off or bunding off rivers/sea, bring in a set of new problems, like that of eutrophication or inundation. The imagination that a rivulet is a standalone, water capillary with no relation to the ecology around is what made the developers observe (and a tribunal to accept) that ‘the channels were left alone’ as mitigative measures during the metro rail constructions and the work for a Special Economic Zone in Kakkanad. Though a rivulet cannot continue without the necessary ecological conditions this was never a factor in bureaucratic perspectives of a river. For all practical purposes the river was the ‘natural’ version of the artificial pipe through which water flowed. Certain methods of protecting the river banks, that cordon off the surrounding areas from the seasonal freshwater incursions, as well as the denial of the deltaic action through shutters (like in Periyar or Chalakkudy in Kerala), will ward off freshwater, fine sand, and silt. Without these the organic matter on the land around may soon decompose and ultimately result in land subsidence. This is what happened during the levee and urban drainages constructed out of the riparian systems elsewhere. Systemic corruptions exaggerate the effects, as in the case of the oil industry’s effects in some regions. All make their inroads with a promise of jobs to come though no one usually bothers to ask further as to which sector and with what kind of qualification and under which legally binding agreement (as they continue to do in the contemporary SEZ talks). Of course, what inevitably materialises are the corporate takeover of spaces across and influence on subsequent legislations. There are the examples of ExxonMobil Oil Company and GM in the US and that of corporate houses in India (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012). States,

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through history, have had facilitative relationships to capital. But presently corporations are displaying state like potencies and states are becoming giant corporations (Kapferer 2005). There are political ecological settings in the making in which events unfurl, they are seldom holy births. There is a set of relationships that cut across, life and non-life, biological relationships and adaptation, political choices of technological deployments, and historical processes. What is most significant about the anthropocene epoch is the unprecedented intertwining of politics and geology. Another significant aspect is the emplacement of every socio-ecological process in a deeper historical frame of analysis. The patterns and effects of the two floods that occurred in Kerala within a span of a century (1924 and 2018) is enmeshed in successive state morphologies (colonial to modern), priorities (agrarian, hydrological, or consumerist), or mediations of capital (colonial, developmental, neoliberal finance capital). Routine responses and solutions by way of designs are immunological in nature. The rivers that breach boundaries, the invasives that take over ecologies, the wild animal that intrudes from outside—all of these bespeak a violent natural outside. Take the media mythologies and narratives around a certain elephant was seemingly after public distribution shops that stock rice and on another after jackfruit. The names they acquire locally (Arikkomban—the tusker who raids rice shops, Chakkakombam— the one that has a penchant for jackfruit) subsequent to mediation attain a hyperreal quality through private media. The more alienated one is from ecological entanglements the more real the hyperreal becomes. Disconnected stories, media creations, and advertisement revenue turn the narrative of raider elephant into full-fledged soap opera. The biopower on the animal other ultimately leads to the translocations to alien reserves. All other possibilities or explanations (like the need to review private tourist resorts in the hill town) are pre-empted. Strings of scare mongering in media continue even after ‘final solutions’ on animal others. After the translocation of a raider elephant in Kerala there was a build up around rogue tigers and leopards. The feline presence is deemed sinister even in a pilgrim route or a road cut through a riparian forest! The animals herein transform in no time to anthropogenic non-human burglars or terrorists. Everything becomes a security threat, a forte of neoliberal state rationale. The binary logic also comes alive for microorganisms—as with the Covid virus suddenly appearing at one’s doorstep knocking down lives. Here as well, as amply elaborated by many (Swyngedouw and Ernstson

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2018), we see a cartesian split between nature and the social. Immunological responses by any existing system often fail to put in the enmeshment of any event in myriad strands in the web of connectivities. Outbreaks, whether that is the recent pandemic or recurring ones like Cholera are examples. The outbreaks could solely be attributed to the bacteria. But there are processes that happen when there is no event of ‘outbreak’ which might have cocreated a host space. When the outbreak is yet to happen, it thrives in plankton blooms that happen in warmer seas, run offs, and where fertilisers move in along the coasts (ibid.). The freighters of free trade carry sea water ballast that is discharged before entry to ports. The crustaceans that eat these algae are in turn eaten by the fish. Animals, including humans eat this fish. The point here is, any explanation of cholera that does not bring together the political economy of ‘World Bank’ and structural adjustments will be partial at best. Vibrio Cholera does not come out of the blue from outside, rather their genesis is facilitated by a gamut of provisions where microorganisms can thrive and become outbreaks. And in order to understand the aforesaid, one needs to observe those time and spaces, when ‘nothing is on’ and no ‘event’ takes place. In other words the normal everyday is where relationships and entanglements spawn events. Similarly, other viruses (e.g., that which causes measles) depend of host proteins. In many instances the effect varies from population to population. The effect on a severely malnourished population will be distinct. Malnourishment is produced in political volatile regions and oppressive orders. The microorganisms could be obligate parasites, which means that these organisms can complete life cycles only through host species. The complex metabolic and biological infrastructure as well as the intertwining political and demographically conducive terrain problematises the imaginations of immunological state designs of an outsider trying to knock down boundaries. The current concerns with seasonal dengue outbreaks during rains in Kerala and the associated measures to contain the Aedes was another scenario discussed. Mosquitoes, we saw, are never connected with the broader urban ecologies. It is specifically not read alongside the epidemiological side of these ecologies. Such side effects are often hidden (Gandy 2002, 2022) from policy prescriptions and systemic remedies. There have been studies that connect urban developments and insect proliferation. Recent phenomena in real estate like foreclosures have often peppered places with abandoned swimming pools, clogged gutters and

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sewers, discarded tires. Further there are components in the urban warehouses and after effects from consumption that have created new spaces for the colonisation of mosquitoes like Aedes. There are relationships to the spaces newly created in urban ecological zones, that produce mosquito vectors. It is the sheer lack of such intertwined perspectives that leaves the mosquitoes uncontained (Shaw et al. 2010; Robbins 2004). There is a need to be sensitive to the local entrenchments of global economic orders—like tourism, real estate, and SEZ ecologies in Kerala. The epidemiological dimension has to enmesh with the ways capital circulates through localised circuits of private real estate. Out of the box enquiries are only initiated or prompted by rupture events. One can comfortably live the normality that is often propped upon the mythology of disconnectedness and logic of binaries. States with the prerogative to rule by consent may only design policies and prescribe solutions investing in such normalities. This is precisely why rupture events become Brechtian reminders that we are living a myth and that self-asserting designs fail. This is where the entanglements, relationalities, and unintentional designs we have been following with ecologies matter. Marx (1844) once pointed at a time when large-scale industries were on the rise. The stress was on the need to see a process beyond the piecemeal. The ruination that industrial capitalism wrecks on labour cannot be dissociated from the depletion of the vitality of soil by agriculture. The metabolic connectivity is what he stressed. The impact of a system on humans went together with a technology that drew from and exhausted nature, imagined into resources. The river in our stories is seldom understood as an anthropogenic ecosystem and the histories of human expansions into floodplains and further intrusions of finance capital as real estate is overlooked. The invasives mostly proliferate in political ecologies of invadability. These disturbance ecologies are productions of the same capitalist designs and interventions. The tiger and the elephant that appear at domestic arenas are never imagined as feral animals whose habitats are rendered patchy by tourism intrusions. The immunological responses seal the imagined outsiders off while forgetting cocreated reasons for such intrusions and imposed binary logic of such perceptions. The anthropocene unravelling in Kerala as well as the parallel readings point at a more multidimensional scenario with many more hybrid and multispecies engagements than what was there for Marx a century and a half ago. The locally shifting landscape disturbances are concomitant

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with global capitalist processes. These disturbances are intensified to such an extent that it is no more possible to invest any more trust in binary designs. The designs we see are a result of capitalocene (Moore 2015) without exception. State designs have to translate heterogeneities to homogenous modalities that facilitate reproduction of capital. This we have now become global and more alienated for any expectation for quick analysis and judgement. The animated metaphors from wetlands, the riparian narratives, the non-human entanglements, and the spill overs unintentionally challenge insular designs during floods or pandemics. They also point at the contextually rooted anthropocene. The invasions we follow in Kerala proliferate only in the peculiar environs and its conducive materialities: the dams, the consumerist societies, the real-estate, the rivers, and the floods. But the proliferations can have feral qualities (Tsing et al. 2019) and ripple and rupture from the Ghats in the east towards the coasts. The patchy-evental redressals often miss the feral potencies of invasives, pathogens, floods, or capital. The fish ecologies, adaptation ecologies, rivers that run over pavements or the wild among us, demonstrate the multiple entanglements in ecologies between humans and non-humans and the effect of the entanglement with politics and policies. The management of life or biopolitics that follows from the optimisation and control of land by networks of capital with sovereign sanction makes biopolitical impact on ecologies. There is a gamut of effects on life in its different forms of relationships as a result of subjection to changing regimes. The symptoms of such ecologies, subjected to the logic and priorities of capital in all its abstractions, become metaphors of the changing designs of power. The circumstantial appearance of wild among the domestic during pandemics or any celebration of resilience and resurgence must not be oblivious to the encompassing designs of emergent state orders. These celebrations exemplify on the other hand the malleability to encompass finance capital, security logic, disconnected explanations, and responsibilitisations. Through the truths of (Badiou 2006) these ruptures, outbreaks, or floods, we understand or notice the underlying relationships. Climatic occurrences can always recur or repeat as are the ecological disasters. This is subject to chances and cannot be linearly accessed. The designs and orders of the day and their dominant discourse render relationships invisible. They also overlook the heterogeneities and multiplicities we have been considering whether that is from wetlands, rivers, or urban spaces.

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But ruptures bring the excluded connectivities to the foreground. They gain visibility: as floods over the familiar. The event interrupts repetition (ibid.) and that is how rivers flood and possibly inaugurate new truths in the social geographies of Kerala. The impact made by human being at unprecedented scales (anthropocene) is facilitated by the all-encompassing and malleable effects of capital especially in its finance capital form. Ecologies as unintentional and entangled are mediated by the many subjects introduced throughout this work. Subjects are also subjections to designs and hence what ensues out of it is political. Ecological questions as highlighted by the system are opium of the people. To reiterate, the book dwells on different facets of ecological phenomena, through the complex relationships, variability, and hybridities, rather than straightjackets of system generated nature and culture.

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Index

A Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), 64 Aaron, 143, 205 Acacia mearnsii (Black wattle), 92 Actants, 2, 12, 15, 17, 134, 146, 165, 194 Actor Network Theory, 14, 94 Adivasi, 173, 182 Aesthetic, 33, 88, 89, 91, 98, 100, 141, 168, 169, 178, 179, 188, 190–193, 195, 200 African catfish (Clarias gariepinus ), 170, 190, 193 Agamben, Giorgio, 170 Alleppey, 44–46, 60 Aluva, 38, 77, 127–130, 134, 148, 167 Amazon, 13, 43, 216 Ambio, 7 Ankh, 5 Anthropocene, 5–7, 9, 12, 13, 15–17, 34, 39, 41, 43–45, 47, 63, 64, 67, 71, 73, 77, 78, 88, 90, 91,

93, 100, 122, 123, 127, 128, 140, 141, 143, 146, 160, 161, 166, 171, 175, 179, 185, 186, 196, 199, 214, 218, 220–222 Anthropocene Working Group, 7 Antigonon leptopus (Mountain rose), 92 Arikkomban, 218 Arundo donax (Giant reed), 92 Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), 107, 123, 126

B Bare life, 18, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 58 Bharathapuzha, 45 Bhoomipooja, 74, 75 Binary, 14, 34, 37, 47, 139, 142, 143, 146, 152, 171, 177, 180, 181, 183, 197, 214, 218, 220, 221 Black Headed Ibis , 45

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Varghese, Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46518-5

243

244

INDEX

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), 179 Brahminy kite, 151, 187 C Capital, 2, 22–24, 26, 34, 40, 42, 46, 54, 60–62, 66, 67, 70, 80, 85, 88–90, 103–105, 107, 108, 120, 123, 131, 136, 137, 145, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 169, 173, 179, 183–185, 188, 193–196, 199–201, 205–207, 215, 216, 218, 220–222 Capitalist, 25, 26, 28–30, 44, 61, 66, 74, 89, 94, 107, 126, 140, 152, 173, 183, 200, 216, 220, 221 Capitalocene, 64, 79, 221 Carson, Rachel, 139 Cartesian, 71, 79, 198, 219 Caste, 44, 46, 51, 154, 166, 192, 196, 202 Central Water Commission (CWC), 157 Chakkakombam, 218 Chalakudy River, 131, 133, 142, 193 Chempalli (Lutjanus Argentimaculatus ), 204 Chennai, 33, 34, 79 Chennai floods, 158 Cheroola (Aerva lanata), 99 Chicago school, 4, 28, 93, 96 Chromolaena odorata (Communist Pacha), 86, 92, 99 Chthulucene, 64, 79 Cinerous Vulture, 45 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 28, 29 Climate, 5, 15, 24, 32, 34, 69, 72, 90, 95, 120, 155 Climate change, 15, 28, 30, 31, 155, 184, 197 CO2, 7, 9, 43, 87, 151

Cochin, 60, 112, 122, 127, 129, 132, 135, 140, 170, 199 Cochin Natural History Society (CNHS), 136 Colonial, 5, 16, 21, 25, 26, 33, 39, 42, 47–49, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 80, 88, 91, 97, 100, 105, 106, 108, 115, 122, 123, 127, 128, 140, 152, 155, 165, 166, 180, 188, 190, 192, 193, 196, 205, 218 Columbian Exchange, 7 Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority Act (CAMPA), 29, 72, 183, 184 Conflict, 24, 25, 32, 40, 41, 47, 48, 67, 98, 104, 157, 171, 196 Conflictual discourse, 214 Conflictual relation, 214 Corporate, 12, 23, 57, 75, 76, 104–106, 126, 133, 138, 153, 206, 217 Covid 19, 179 Crocodilus Palustris , 166 Cronon, William, 16, 40 Crutzen, Paul, 6, 63 Cyborg metaphor, 40

D Descent of Man, 27 Descola, Philippe, 14 Design, 12, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26–28, 30, 33, 34, 64, 65, 67, 73, 74, 77, 94, 95, 108, 120, 125, 180, 188, 190, 193, 198, 206, 207, 214, 218–222 Dialectical, 26, 32, 46, 50, 58–60, 63, 93, 113, 145, 161, 189

INDEX

E Ecologies, 1, 3–5, 12, 13, 16–18, 23, 26, 28, 29, 34, 40–42, 45–48, 51–54, 58–65, 68, 70–72, 77, 80, 86, 89–99, 101, 104–108, 112, 113, 115, 119–122, 124, 126, 128, 132, 134–136, 138–140, 142, 144–148, 150, 152–154, 158, 160, 161, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173, 178, 179, 182–185, 187–190, 192–196, 199–207, 214–216, 218–221 Eco-sensitive zones (ESZs), 68–70 Ecosystemic, 4, 12, 34, 39, 71, 93, 142, 186, 193, 198, 214 Edapally thodu, 151 Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, 32 Eera, 42 Eko Etlantic in Lagos, 216 Eloor, 133, 135, 138, 140, 142, 143, 150, 185, 199, 200 Enclosure, 13, 25, 26, 75, 87, 168, 173, 181 Entangled, 9, 18, 43, 44, 61, 64, 88, 89, 99, 108, 125, 126, 138, 139, 150, 154, 179, 222 Entangled ecologies, 34, 103, 106, 112, 135, 140, 152, 173 Environmental impact assessments, 3, 53, 142, 146, 180 Equilibrium, 4, 28, 47, 81, 93, 94, 96, 194 Event, 30, 33, 34, 39, 79, 99, 123, 152, 161, 185, 187, 195, 219, 222

F Fix, 12, 24, 80 Flikke, Rune, 192 Floods, 31, 33, 37, 38, 76–80, 105, 114, 115, 120, 137, 146,

245

153–155, 157, 158, 167, 184, 186, 218, 221, 222 1924 flood, 155, 157, 183 2018 flood, 152, 157, 183 Forest Rights Act (FRA), 72, 182 Fosters, Bellamy, 139 G Gandy, Matthew, 139 Garuda project in Indonesia, 216 Ghat, 37, 45, 47–50, 64, 65, 67, 76, 81, 114, 138, 165, 191, 196, 198, 205, 221 Ghosh, Amitav, 30, 87 Giant African Snails (Achatina fulica), 190 Giant Gourami (Osphronemus Gorami), 193 Globalisation, 2, 21–23, 75, 106, 137, 194, 215 Gould, Stephen Jay, 32, 145 Great Derangement, 31 Great flood, 77, 78, 155, 156, 185 Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS), 47 Greenpeace, 139, 142 H Haraway, Donna, 40 Harvey, David, 216 Heron, 110, 151, 187 Heterarchical, 37, 41, 44, 50, 61, 165, 167 Hobbesian, 41, 145 Holocene, 6, 63 House Sparrows (Passer domesticus ), 168, 169 Hydrological, 4, 38, 39, 41, 61, 64, 65, 80, 106, 110, 115, 124, 141, 161, 190, 203, 214, 215, 217, 218

246

INDEX

Hydrosocial, 44 Hyperobjects, 34

I Idukki, 65, 98 Immunological, 98, 195, 218–220 Indian subcontinent, 5, 105 Ingold, Tim, 13, 125 Interagentive, 15, 17 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 28 International Commission on Stratigraphy, 6, 63 International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), 7 Interspecies conflict, 181 Invadability, 97, 189, 190, 220 Invasive, 12, 17, 60, 63, 65, 86, 89, 90, 92, 94, 97, 133, 138, 185, 188, 190, 193, 198, 221 Invasive Alien Species (IAS), 87, 121, 193 Ipomoea cairica (Kolambipoo), 92

J Jacobs, Jane, 4, 93 Jati, 38, 46, 47, 196 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), 107 John, C., 5 Joint Forest Management (JFM), 173

K kachil , 42 Kachil Uppu, 42 Kadambra, 42 Kakka, 1 kallemuttis (climbing perch), 144, 205

Karnataka, 48, 90 Karthika Thirunal Rama Varma, 60 Karua, 144, 205 Karuvannur, 45 Kasturirangan Committee, 70 Kathikudam, 133 Kayal rajakkanmaar, 44, 45 Kechery, 45 Kerala, 3, 5, 12, 22, 33, 37, 41–53, 57–62, 64, 65, 68, 72–78, 80, 85, 86, 88–90, 92, 96–100, 104–106, 109–113, 119, 121–129, 131–133, 138, 142, 146, 147, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 160, 165, 167–170, 174, 176–178, 180, 182–185, 187–189, 191, 194–196, 199–201, 203, 205, 206, 217–222 Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI), 183, 196 Kerala Shastra Saahitya Parishad (KSSP), 142 Keraliyam, 5 Kizharnelli (Phyllanthus niruri), 99 Kochi, 38, 41, 46, 58, 79, 122, 127, 128, 131, 135, 151, 152, 155, 165, 187, 205 Kole lands, 44, 45 kooris (Mystus), 144, 205 Kudzu, 88, 191 Kukkuman, 204 Kurukkan, 170 Kurunthotti (Sida rhombifolia), 99, 114 kuzhiyaana, 1 Kyoto summit, 28

L Landscape, 9, 13, 17, 31, 48, 62, 71, 73, 77, 89, 93, 94, 97–99, 134,

INDEX

139, 178, 179, 181, 183, 189–192, 201, 220 Lantana camera (kongini poovu), 92 Latour, Bruno, 14, 34, 40, 58, 63, 94

M Malthusian, 25, 27 Manalppuram, 129, 148, 150 Manathukanni (Rasbora), 144 Marx, Karl, 26, 27, 216, 220 Mathrubhoomi, 5 Metabolic, 27, 95, 183, 188, 216, 219, 220 Metabolic rift, 26, 139, 216 Metaphor, 3, 12, 27, 28, 47, 78, 86, 199, 214, 221 Mikania Micranthia (Dritharashtra pacha), 86 Mimosa diplotricha var. diplotricha (Anathottavadi), 92 Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), 68, 143 Monoculture, 180, 197 Mudskipper (Periophthalmidae), 204 Mullaperiyaar, 76, 106 Multispecies, 17, 64, 73, 96, 97, 200, 201, 220 Mumbai, 33, 79 Munnar, 76, 155, 156, 201 Munro, John, 166 mushis (catfishes), 144, 205 Muthi, 143, 205 Muthukku (Pueraria javanica), 190 Muttar, 151 Myaal , 110, 111, 203

N Narratives, 4, 42, 49, 50, 60, 76, 80, 89, 121, 128, 131, 132, 151, 161, 218, 221

247

National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), 9, 139 Nature, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12–16, 26, 27, 34, 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 50, 57, 59, 63, 64, 71–73, 75, 78, 81, 86, 89, 91, 104, 125, 126, 136, 139, 152, 171, 181, 183, 191, 193, 194, 196, 199, 201, 202, 213, 215–220, 222 Navigational, 39 Nazeer, N.A., 5 Neoliberal, 4, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 40, 42, 52, 62, 70, 71, 77, 94, 99, 104, 105, 107, 120, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 145, 152, 167, 169, 180, 183, 184, 188, 199, 201, 205, 207, 216, 218 Net Present Value (NPV), 29, 183 Nilgiris, 48, 49, 188 NITI Aayog, 107 Nitta Gelatin Company, 133 Non-human, 2, 13, 14, 16, 22, 26, 28, 31, 32, 37, 40, 42–44, 52, 58, 59, 63, 64, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 86, 89, 91, 94, 95, 98, 100, 111, 119, 125, 126, 128, 132, 142, 152, 154, 160, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 183, 192, 193, 196, 201, 214, 218, 221

O Oligarchic, 22, 23 Onam, 97, 110 Onjithodu, 137, 139 Orovella kayattam, 42

248

INDEX

P Paddy field, 43–45, 51, 59, 60, 64, 67, 109, 112, 124, 134, 143, 147, 148, 153, 204 Painted Stork, 45 Pallathi (Orange Chromid-Pseudo Etroplus Maculatus ), 204 Pallikkara, 42, 153 Pandemic, 105, 179, 201, 219, 221 Pannamaravaazha (Pholidota imbricata), 99 Paral , 143, 144, 205 Patch, 150, 194 Patchiness, 198 Pattanam, 39, 41, 131 Periyar, 37–39, 42, 76, 106, 119, 120, 124, 125, 127–131, 133–140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 155, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 180, 185, 193, 198–200, 216, 217 Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samiti, 135, 139, 142 Peruvian Guano, 216 Plaavu, 1 Plantation, 29, 48, 51, 61, 64, 65, 99, 111, 177, 180, 187, 188, 191, 192, 197, 201, 202 Plantationocene, 64, 65, 79 PlaNYC, 215 Pleistocene, 6, 63 Pokkudan (Kandal Pokkudan), 110, 204 Poovali, 144, 205 Processual, 30, 79, 95, 139, 189, 194, 196 Prosopis juliflora (Sali), 92 Public Private Partnership (PPP), 142, 145 Pulimurugan (2016 movie), 181, 182 Puncha, 110, 111, 113, 144

Q Quaternary, 6, 63

R Raja Kesavadas, 60 Real estate, 33, 39, 52, 64, 69–71, 77, 78, 89, 94, 98, 99, 105, 109, 112, 113, 115, 120, 123, 128, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 150, 154, 157, 169, 180, 190, 193, 194, 196, 202, 203, 205, 219, 220 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), 29 Reform, 24, 57, 69, 74, 104, 105, 108, 123, 155, 166, 177, 180, 206 Regulator shutters, 135, 199, 200 Relationship, 12, 14, 26, 33, 39, 41, 53, 60, 71, 113, 125, 137, 158, 176, 177, 192, 194 Resilience, 215, 216, 221 Riparian, 3–5, 12, 17, 18, 37, 38, 50, 65, 69, 104, 108, 114, 120, 121, 128, 130, 131, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 151, 161, 167, 169, 185, 189, 203, 218, 221 River, 1, 13, 18, 29–31, 37, 39, 42, 45, 65, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113–115, 119–122, 124–142, 146, 150, 151, 153, 155, 169, 170, 175, 180, 184, 185, 187, 199, 204, 205, 217, 220 Rupture, 34, 65, 139, 160, 179, 186, 201, 207, 220–222

S Sajeev, T.V., 92

INDEX

Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 182 Shakthan Thampuran, 165 Silent Spring, 139 Slate Flash (Rapala Manea), 92 Smart city, 203 Smart city guidelines, 126 Soochimukhi, 5 Sovereign, 2, 3, 18, 21, 41, 48, 59, 87, 96, 103, 108, 195, 205, 206, 221 Special Economic Zones (SEZs), 23, 33, 79, 107, 120, 217, 220 Spectacular, 57, 58, 77, 78 Sphagneticola trilobata (Singapore daisy), 92 Spot-Billed Pelican, 45 Sree Narayana Dharma Paraipalana (SNDP), 108 States, 2, 12, 21–23, 26, 29, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 59–61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 77, 89, 99, 103–107, 111, 123, 127, 133, 136, 137, 140, 145, 153–155, 157, 165–167, 170–172, 177, 194, 201, 204, 214–216, 218 Steffen, Will, 7 Stoermer, Eugene, 6, 63 Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy, 7 Sujith, M.G., 136 Sustainability, 28, 29, 72, 73, 81, 103, 104, 138, 184, 215 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), 72 Swyngedouw, Eric, 39 T Tamil Nadu, 48, 68, 106, 177 terra preta do Indio, 67

249

Thachushastram, 74, 75 The Anthropocene Review, 7, 10 the flood of 99 (In Malayalam: tonnoottombathile vellapokkam), 76 The Gadgil committee, 68, 125, 158 The Great Acceleration, 10 The Hungry Tide, 31 The Selfish Gene, 27 Thottavaadi (Mimosa pudica), 99 Tiny Grass Blue (Zizula Hylax), 92 Topography, 46–48, 81, 105, 106, 109, 123, 128, 165, 166, 198 Travancore, 38, 46, 60–62, 106, 129, 130, 135, 155, 165, 199 Travancore Natural History Society (TNHS), 168 Trissur, 44, 45, 76, 99, 111, 114 Tsing, Anna, 9, 12, 201 Tuppal kothi (Spittle- biter), 144

U Ulladan, 98, 114 Unintentional, 12, 28, 46, 88, 100, 119, 120, 125, 147, 188, 222 Unintentional design, 12, 13, 17, 67, 96, 119, 120, 220 United Nations, 28, 86 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, 28 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 29 Urban, 2–5, 12, 24, 28, 33, 34, 41, 44, 47, 50, 52, 57–60, 65, 73–76, 78, 79, 81, 85, 90, 93–96, 98, 105, 113, 119–124, 126, 131, 136, 138, 139, 141, 165, 166, 168, 172, 176, 179, 184, 186–188, 194, 195, 204, 205, 214–217, 219–221

250

INDEX

Urban Canopy (Nagagathile IthiriPacha), 136 Urban design, 34, 79, 103 Urbanisation, 4, 30, 40, 120, 128, 173, 194 Urban Stream Syndrome, 184 V Vaasthuvidya, 75 Vakas (channa marulis ), 144 Valanthakkad, 52, 54 Vana Samrakshana Samiti (VSS), 172 Vanklanji, 143, 144, 205 Varaals/braals (channa striata), 144 Vayamban, 144, 205 Verandah, 1 Vikasanam, 54, 77, 104, 142 W Water Hyacinth, 60, 61 Wayanad, 67, 68, 112, 171, 180–182, 197 Western ghats, 48, 49, 65, 67–71, 91, 110, 115, 119, 125, 127, 148, 183, 188, 198, 201

Western Ghats Ecology Authority (WGEA), 69, 70 Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), 125, 143 Wetlands, 12, 18, 37, 45, 46, 51, 52, 67, 109, 111, 113, 124, 136, 145, 147, 151–153, 177, 185, 187, 195, 196, 203, 204, 221 Wild, 2, 5, 18, 26, 38, 46, 52, 59, 65–68, 72, 73, 76, 77, 89, 98, 113, 120, 126, 138, 148, 152, 166, 168–173, 175–183, 188, 191, 196, 197, 201, 205, 207, 214, 216, 218, 221 Wildlife, 3, 11, 17, 67, 73, 90, 170, 196 Williams, Raymond, 6 Wolf, Eric, 15, 73, 120 X Xenophobia, 87, 89, 193 Z Zoogeography, 3, 7 Zoonotic diseases, 179