Resurrection of an Erstwhile Landscape

The most vivid records of the natural beauty of the Nilgiris biosphere date back to the British era, since about 1840 onwards, with various writers, officials, scientists and travellers penning down what enthralled them and made them come back over and over again, if not make them settle down permanently.

Lithographic plates and water-colour renditions depict rolling downs of grasses that didn’t need mowing, and clumps of dense thickets in the combes 1 and recesses of the slopes, populated with endemic deciduous trees.

Tea was imported from Ceylon [for the uninitiated, Sri Lanka was called Ceylon during colonial times], assuming that the highlands of Munnar and the Nilgiris had ideal weather for the now global beverage, whose demands just kept rising. The rolling slopes were replaced with tea on commercial scales, with the likes of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation and other British-era ventures taking over large swathes. Did this change the landscape? One may say it didn’t drastically degrade the existing ecology. Supposedly, very few trees were felled to plant tea. As a matter of fact, tea was invariably planted in the erstwhile grasslands, felling very few trees, if at all. Since tea requires some shade, there would have now been more trees than before, compared to the near-bald erstwhile landscape before tea. And so a century and a half passed.

After independence, most of the large estates of tea and coffee were passed on to Indian masters. Some of them expanded, and others let some of their estates go fallow. And then, towards the later part of Independent India in the 20th Century, the Tamil Nadu Forest Department decided to go commercial. From the drawing board emerged the plans to “forest” large tracts of land not under agricultural use, and not under direct control of the Revenue department. This led to a two-fold activity:

– Eucalyptus plantations, and the consequent designation of these plantations as reserved forests.

– The establishment of Tamil Nadu Tea Board’s own TanTea 2. This venture provided for commercialization of forest lands to grow tea.

Both activities have very little to do with afforestation, though that is a debatable fallout. It is debatable, because eucalyptus (eucalyptus Globulus) is arguably not a very good forest tree. It has commercial value for pulp, timber, and essential oil. Tea, conversely, is good for soil retention where run-off during torrential rains can destabilize soil to cause mud-slides; but tea tends to draw on a lot of water for survival as against endemic plant species, and provides little, if any, roosting or resting places for avians and small mammals/reptiles/amphibians.

In a few places, horticulture farms have been established to help forest-dwelling peoples to earn a livelihood. Such farms tend to upset the ecology in as much as tea and eucalyptus do – they are along the borders of forest and agricultural lands, and therefore, affect the migration of forest animals; they are also mostly alien species (pommes primarily (apples, peaches, pears), sour-sop, persimmon, mangosteen – all of them non-natives (though non-invasives), and don’t provide as much fruit on the table as they take from the environment only to survive.

Whether or not these actions were ecologically thought up, they certainly provided livelihood to a lot of Tamil migrants and repatriates from the Jaffna peninsula during the years of strife and civil war with the Sri Lankan Government.

The local land-owners, the Badaga, have been agriculturists by specialization with millet farming being a mainstay till the middle of the 20th century, but towards 1960 and onwards, they switched to potato and carrot farming in their village lands. Credit goes to ICAR’s CPRI (Central Potato Research Institute) for sparking off the plantation of the tuber. But potato farms draw hogs and boars, and they create havoc with the produce. This led to the Badagas changing over to tea plantations almost en-masse towards the turn of the century. Again, it was the Tea Board that facilitated free tea saplings to the small farmers, which helped trigger the switch. The result is now tea, tea everywhere, and no grasslands in sight. Some of the sights are pretty; the land is mostly green, with patches of brown or crag, but the ecology has been modified.

Not only have we tampered with the plant life, but our desire to control the landscape has also affected the fauna equally drastically. The result is increased human-wildlife conflict. Gudalur, on the western reaches of the biosphere, is notorious for elephants trampling into human habitation, because their abodes have been denuded and food sources depleted. Mammals now feed on garbage in villages and towns; bears roam around human habitation rummaging for scraps because the forests provide them with little for survival; unlike the Australian Koala, the Indian Sloth bear cannot survive on eucalyptus leaves.

The process of resurrection is a slow one, and cannot belong to one or two individuals.

The individuals can provide a spark, the Government should provide the wherewithal, and the community should participate as a whole to revert what nature provides us with. The Nilgiris got a UNESCO and a Biosphere tag in 1986. That recognition should have been a basis for retaining the biosphere in at least the state it was in when tagged. But commercialization and tourism have overtaken any desire to retain nature in a pristine state.

We litter, we modify, we change, we destroy; personal goals outweigh community goals, except for a few good men and women. In them we repose faith to help resurrect and revive nature; restore flora, and fauna will follow on its own.

1 A combe (/kuːm/; also spelled coombe or coomb and, in place names, comb) can refer either to a steep, narrow valley, or to a small valley or large hollow on the side of a hill. There is no evidence to this statement, but it is a personal conjecture that the ‘kombai’ suffix for some of the hamlets in the Nilgiris are probably originally combe, given a Tamil flavour for the pronunciation.

2 TANTEA is one of the biggest Black Tea producers in India, with high quality clonal tea plantations spread over almost 4000 hectares in the district. It took vision in 1968.

3 ebr.org.in/

4 era-india.org

5 theweek.in

6 era-india.org